March 16, 2008 Archives

Up until yesterday we hadn't had a game on Saturday for almost a month due to the Lord of the Rings marathon, the 24 hour sponsored event and a party. John had been running Vampire nWoD prior to our break to test it ready for running it at the 24 hour and wasn't willing to continue running. Paul wasn't ready to continue his Horse Lords / Horde D&D game because he was still trying to convert to 3rd ed, Colin had offered to run Hunter but had said he really needed a couple of more weeks to prep but could go if necessary. So I offered to run either Werewolf Dark Ages or Vampire Dark Ages. The majority decision was to give Colin some more time and play Vampire Dark Ages.

I haven't run a Vampire game before, let alone Dark Ages, and was really interested in testing a setting I had plans for. I've played plenty of Vampire and Werewolf in the past and do run Ratkin on a regular basis. These are all Storyteller based systems and the mechanics of the system works across them all; albeit with some subtle differences between them.

Anyway, the setting I've placed them all in is the Holy Land in 1195; right between the 3rd and 4th crusades; during the 5 year period of peace accorded to the region by the Treaty of Jaffa. One of the interesting side effects of the setting is that there are significant amounts of holy ground in the area which can affect their abilities, or in some cases their willingness to even enter an area. I'd originally planned for them to be based in Jerusalem and gave them the choice of playing either nominally Christian or Saracen characters and they've chosen Christians. Now, since Jerusalem was under Saracen control in 1195, although individual pilgrims were free to come and go, I've relocated them slightly further north in Tyre.

Colin's playing a Lombardy Nosferatu, Paul is playing a Burgundy Salubri Healer, John's playing a Swedish Gangrel, Scoot's playing a Slav Tzimisce and Ginger Paul is playing a Basque Malkavian. Thankfully, they have all managed, among some rather interesting language choices, to select Latin, which was the main tongue spoken in the period.

There's been a few severely mutilated corpses discovered both on the road south to Jerusalem and the road north to Damascus and after looking at the latest corpse they've had a foray out into the wilderness to see what they could discover. They've done some research and they think, thanks to reports that they've received, that they've figured out a pattern for the attacks and plan to lay an ambush for the next attack.