In the last blog I wrote about my nostalgia for the 1990s iteration of Vampire: the Masquerade and how I was experimenting with using Matthew Skail's The Blood Hack to replicate V:tM's setting without its handfuls of d10s and burdensome lore. Then one thing led to another, as it does, and before I knew it, I seemed to have penned a new Hack-inspired RPG trans-cloning V:tM as an OSR project. Hello, The Vampyre Hack. Ducks in a row! Click images for links to drivethrurpg editions. Vampyre Hack cover art by Wouter Florusse. I've written a lot (like here and here) about my admiration for Matthew Skail's Blood Hack, so I had to think carefully about adapting it into a Hack of my own. Firstly, I don't want to cut into the chap's revenues or appropriate his ideas as my own. His innovation of the Morality Usage Die that gets bigger as it exhausts, meaning it grows quickly while it's a feeble little d6 or d8 but slows down as it turns into a monstrous d12 or d20 - that's just genius. His system for Blood Magic is very elegant and treating Blood as a usage die rather than a point pool, well that's inspired too. One point of view would be, given my love for the game and, in the words of Cogsworth: On the other hand, there are things Blood Hack is crying out for. Matthew Skail's game takes clear inspiration from V:tM but heads off in a different direction. It's not about angst and politics, it's about kicking supernatural ass in the middle of the night. There are only four clans and they are broad templates rather than factions or institutions. The setting imagines loose cabals of vampires scrapping with other denizens of the shadows rather than city-wide conspiracies. There are lots of typos and some of the rules Matthew has himself imported from other Hack rpgs are rather undigested. But the main reason is that I want to run a '90s-style Vampire campaign, but using a rules set inspired by the Blood Hack. So I want the classic array of Clans - ugly Nosferatu, aesthetic Toreador, lunatic Malkavians, wizardly Tremere, etc. - and I want Princes and Masquerade and Ghouls and Diablerie. This project started off as a Blood Hack expansion or supplement - just a few pages, really, saying "Here';s how you could port V:tM Clans into the Blood Hack." But once I started doing that all sorts of implications emerged and I found myself constructing something more like a brand new game. Let me take you through it ... Cloning or Contrasting? The first Hack RPG I designed was a root-and-branch rethink of Wraith: the Oblivion, one of White Wolf's horror RPGs from the same stable as Vampire: the Masquerade. I never made my peace with Wraith, so the Ghost Hack was an opportunity to do Wraith as (I felt) it should have been done. Shameless plugs. Among the new directions Ghost Hack took was making Wraiths vulnerable to iron and salt and I designed a scenario, Upon A Midnight Dreary, in which a team of ghost hunters secure a haunted house with strips of salt-encrusted tape along the walls and iron chains on doors. PC Ghosts find it difficult to move around unless they can influence the living to disrupt these barriers. Matthew Skail similarly departs from the White Wolf playbook in Blood Hack: his vampires cast no reflections and don't even register on film, photographs or over telephone communication - rather like the wonderfully elusive vampires in the intense '90s UK TV series Ultraviolet. Seriously, watch it. And yes, that's Idris Elba. Likewise, Skail's vampires are vulnerable to silver and holy symbols generally - the more so as their Morality Usage Die gets larger. Meanwhile, vampiric 'Disciplines' get dropped and, other than the starting build mandated by your Clan/Class, your vampire can be designed with any powers you want. Following this logic, I could have taken the Vampyre Hack down the same path, breaking away from the World of Darkness tropes and exploring vampires from a wider folkloric perspective. But on this occasion, I was more interested in creating an OSR analogue for Vampire: the Masquerade - in effect, a way of playing 90s-style V:tM with d20s, classic 6 stats and character classes. Like I said, it's a retro-trans-clone. What's in a Name? Mark Rein-Hagen, the creator of Vampire: the Masquerade, has many talents, but not the least is his flair for evocative naming conventions. His undead secret society is the Camarilla (meaning a political clique, but with connotations of medieval Spanish cloisters) and vampiric cannibalism is Diablerie (a French word for mischief with heavy hints of Satanism). The vampire Clans Brujah (inspired by the Spanish for 'witch'), Gangrel (a Scots word for a vagrant) and Nosferatu (German for vampire) along with the fear-frenzy of Rötschreck (complete with unnecessary 'metal umlaut') show off his linguistic range, while the vampire ancients are Antediluvians and Methuselahs, highlighting Biblical erudition. A clone RPG is going to feature 7 vampire lineages analogous to Rein-Hagen's Clans, vampiric cannibalism and an undead secret society. New names are important. No one wants "Generic Vampire Wizards" and "Arty Vampire Socialite Types." In Vampyre Hack, there are 7 Tribes or 'les Tribus Éternelles,' so the best name for their ruling coalition is the Heptarchy - a delightful Greek word more commonly used to describe the 7 Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Dark Ages Britain. Sticking with Greek, vampiric cannibalism is Necrophagy, which is both horribly on-the-nose and slightly Shakespearean for 'eaters of the dead.' Chorazin is a town cursed by Jesus in Matthew 11: 20-24. It's also referenced in M.R. James' unsettling vampire story Count Magnus (1904) where the Devil-worshipping Count makes a pilgrimage to the accursed town. It seems a fine name for a cabal of medieval wizards who have turned themselves into vampires, hence La Tribu Chorazin or the Chorazinites. Leave the big coffin ALONE. The BBC did a fine TV adaptation of Count Magnus in 2022. Rein-Hagen seems to have invented 'Malkavian' out of his own head, but I went to Celtic folklore to find the Dullahan. In Ireland, the Dubhlachan isn't so much a vampire as a headless horseman but it can be a goblin or evil spirit. It's hard to get anything to match, never mind replace, 'Nosferatu' as the name for a clan of hideous vampires. I drew on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), where Karnstein is the lineage of the titular vampiress. It's also the name given to a trilogy of Hammer Horror films (1970-71) so its vampire pedigree is impeccable. Pleasures? Guilty as charged! Valeria Messalina was the Emperor Claudius' 3rd wife. She had a reputation for promiscuity and cruelty and, after her grisly death, was sentenced to damnatio memoriae which means being erased from history. She is remembered today with notoriety: a 'Messalina' is a devious and sexually manipulative woman. La Tribu Messalina is my aesthetic sensualist vampyre lineage. The happy couple: Sheila White as Messalina and Derek Jacobi as Claudius in 'I, Claudius' (1976) Rein-Hagen seems to have invented 'Ventrue' for his undead aristocrats. It connotes 'vein' or perhaps 'vain' as well as 'true' - unless, of course, it's meant to refer to the 19th century Italian scientist Giovanni Ventruri. I'm going with the former, which is why I chose La Tribu Sangral for my lordly undead family. Yes, 'Sangral' means holy grail but 'Sang Real' means royal blood: I think self-absorbed vampire nobles would relish both meanings. Tokoloshe is a goblin or demon from Zulu folklore - I went looking for an African name for the Brujah-analogues precisely because that continent was so ill-served by White Wolf in the 1990s - the only explicitly African Clan developed for their game is one devoted to philosophical evil and corruption. La Tribu Tokoloshe has been recast from inveterate troublemakers to a lineage of undead warriors. Vukodlak is a Slavic vampire/werewolf hybrid, so that's an ideal name for the shapeshifting, wilderness-haunting and werewolf-inspired Tribe (never mind that it was also the name of the Final Boss in 2000's Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption). Vive les différences Vampyre Hack doesn't end up as an utter pastiche of V:tM, I'm glad to say. Some of the differences are the result of the Hack rules engine and a couple of Matthew Skail's distinctive innovations. For example, vampyres are made distinctive by their character class (i.e. Tribe) but after that they can learn any Blood Gifts they like and this includes Blood Gifts that qualify you to cast spells. Although Chorazin excels at Blood Magic, any vampyre can dabble in it. Similarly, all vampyres take damage from sunlight, but those with a small Corruption Usage Die (renamed from Morality Die) only take ordinary damage and can stay active a few hours after sunrise or before sunset. As the Die gets bigger, sunlight starts to deal Grave Damage and you fall asleep at sunrise and don't wake up until after sunset. Similarly, holy symbols and consecrated ground start becoming a problem, but don't bother you while you are virtuous. Likewise, virtuous vampyres only need to feed every two or three nights and just a drop of blood will do; more Corrupt vampires need to feed nightly. Other differences are my own. In Rein-Hagen's Vampire: the Masquerade, any vampire can create a new vamp by feeding their blood to a corpse or use their blood to turn humans into tough but addicted henchmen called Ghouls. I thought it would be more interesting if these techniques weren't widely understood and have to be purchased as Blood Gifts - and duplicated using Blood Magic - with only the Sangrali getting to do so as an innate ability. Other changes include making each vampyre Tribe have their own distinctive way of Frenzying, with the Messalines being enraptured by beauty whilst the Karnsteins are repulsed by their own reflections. I've also introduced a Security Usage Die that represents how much protection or tolerance you have from the wider undead community. As the Die shrinks, your enemies get bolder and hitherto-neutral vampyres start to see you as a threat or an irritant. When it shrinks to zero, a threat manifests. I've got a nice table to prompt ideas - friends and loved ones get menaced, your Lair gets compromised, mooks turn up to fight you, ultimately you get Witch-Hunters or werewolf Lycans on your tail. Yes, it's a Wandering Monster mechanic by another name, but it helps promote the edgy, paranoid feel of a good Vampire RPG, especially as the Die shrinks when you fail CHA or INT tests around mortals or higher level vampyres. If you've drained a mortal (rather than just feeding on a drop of blood) then you can be 'flushed' and appear fully human - and of course the Messalines are 'flushed' most of the time as their class perk. What's it all for? I created the game to run it myself - I was intending to do a straight V:tM chronicle and refer to everything by Rein-Hagen's names in play. But now that I've written it, I'm rather intrigued by the differences and want to GM this version of a vampire campaign, with Chorazin not Tremere and the Heptarchy not the Camarilla. I wonder how much interest there is out there to do the same? I do feel that Rein-Hagen's wonderful imaginative creation, which was so provocative and teasing when it was first introduced to us in 1991, became congested, codified and overburdened by lore as the Nineties wore on. I want to go back to playing the game the way it felt when I first encountered it. The renaming and the new-but-familiar Hack engine helps me see the old game in a fresh romantic light. Like when the nerdy girl takes off her spectacles. Laney was beautiful all along!!! Who could know??? The other benefit of the Hack approach is that the game becomes a bit more pick-up-and-play. It was never terribly time consuming to create V:tM characters, but treating Clans as actual character classes accelerates things further without distorting the concept. I've added a set of tables in the Appendix that enable you to roll up your own Vampyre Scenarios, complete with the inevitable twists, betrayals and last act reveals. These might help those of you who like roleplaying without a GM! Currently, you can find Vampyre Hack on drivethrurpg, but I struggle with that site's arrangements for creating and selling physical books, so for that you can get it on Amazon.
And yes, I'll soon support it with an expansion, revisiting all those other Clans which (to my mind) were rather less successful additions to Vampire: the Masquerade and might benefit from a bit of reinterpretation.
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I'm a teacher and a writer and I love board games and RPGs. I got into D&D back in the '70s with Eric Holmes' 'Blue Book' set and I've started writing my own OSR-inspired games - as well as fantasy and supernatural fiction.. Archives
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