Vampire 5e

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Sep 12, 2018 6:09 am

A big problem that Vampire has is "that is not what words mean." Very obviously, "Jyhad" does not mean "generational conflict" and "Ancilla" does not mean "middle-tier of a hierarchy" that is simply not what those words mean. If you are going to draw a distinction between Clan and Bloodline, you would not have "Clan" be "an arbitrary fact about you fixed at birth" while "Bloodline" was "a social group you could join voluntarily" because that is not what those fucking words mean, you assholes!

Yes, an RPG will definitely need to make its own specialist terminology and lexicon, and that's fine for what it is. "Level" is a word with many meanings, but it has specific and defined meanings in D&D. But you don't go out of your way to be opaque and you don't go the full Humpty Dumpty and declare that words mean things totally different in your personal sandbox from their actual meanings. That is pointless obscurantism.

-Username17

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Wed Sep 12, 2018 11:31 am

Is it a good idea to have clans to begin with? Couldn't you have different defined types of vampires, and you are likely to be the same as your parent vampire, but you might end up one of the others for some reason? Thus giving players of all sorts of vampires a reason to work together, because they could all be related despite being radically different?

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Sep 12, 2018 12:49 pm

You could even have vampires grow into their powers from a common base of, uh, being strong humans that sleep late. More room for growth too.

But the best RPG stories of having big organisations with goals you can tell are not the ones where players are from those organisations, but rather where they are independent contractors who might work for any of them. Shadowrun, not Paranoia.

Like, obviously Vampions would play best as a Shadowrun game. You're doing missions, for someone, toward some ancient vampire story bullshit plot, and you're being very secret about it, and next week you do another job for a different guy and maybe against the previous plot, so you can double-succeed by going nowhere and changing nothing. Anyone gets in the way, use vampire powers on mortals, plus occasional opposing Vamp. And as much of the politics behind that in pre- and post-mission scenes as you like.

shinimasu · Post by **shinimasu** » Wed Sep 12, 2018 1:28 pm

I don't know that you need big organizations and goals in a vampire story though. There's conceptual space available for small scale personal settings that don't rely on a big conspiracy to work. If there's a masquerade it's not because of cover ups, it's because vampires are rare. An endangered species. And game play is centered on threat management. There's a notoriety bar that fills every time someone fucks something up and when it's full the Hunters appear and it's time to either flee to a new city or perish.

It's not the "better than you" vampire power fantasy but it's a kind of game I'm kind of surprised doesn't actually exist. One of the hallmarks of a good horror game is after all gradually increasing the tension about when the Very Bad Thing is going to happen, and the idea that the Very Bad Thing is in most ways kind of inevitable.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 12:28 am

Mord wrote: If feeding were declared as an absolute fact to require hurting or killing someone, I'm pretty sure the vampion gameplay style would evaporate, but WW very consistently continued to add alternate means of feeding that kept pushing their vampires further and further from actually draining the lifeblood from random schmucks.

I think you'd get Vampions where being a mundane street criminal occasionally has an extremely severe penalty.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 12:39 am

Chamomile wrote: I also question whether or not appealing to Twilight fans is a particularly good move for a vampire game made in 2018. The last movie came out in 2012 and the franchise was already seriously waning in relevance by then, people who like vampires in general are not generally fans of that series, so there's a significant chance you will alienate more potential players than you will engage with an option that makes clear callbacks to that franchise.

They sold 100 million books and sold over $3 billion in movie tickets. You don't need a very large amount of that to have a highly successful game. Now I wouldn't bet the farm on Twilight vampires, but I wouldn't exclude them as an option unless you had some really strong reason to say they won't work in the game world you are building.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 1:39 am

kzt wrote:They sold 100 million books and sold over $3 billion in movie tickets. You don't need a very large amount of that to have a highly successful game.

This is true. It is also true, however, that getting even a tiny fraction of that is not easy. Twilight has a lot of things going against it as fodder for future VtM fans. Firstly, it's a passed fad. A significant portion of those 100 million sales were to people who only read the book because they didn't want to be excluded from conversations about the popular thing that other people were talking about. Vampires are no longer the popular thing, so several tens of millions of those sales are an immediate non-starter on the basis of that alone. Second, Twilight is in a different medium. Getting people who read books to play TTRPGs (and vice-versa) typically sees a loss of at least an order of magnitude of people along the way. A loss of two or three orders of magnitude is not unreasonable. These two factors alone can drag any effort to capitalize on a currently popular thing by making a relevant TTRPG from a hundred million potential buyers to a few hundred thousand.

A few hundred thousand is still enough to call any non-D&D RPG a fantastic success, though, but we're not done yet. A significant chunk of Twilight's demographic back in 2008 were between the age of 13 and 25 and are now 23 to 35, and I would anticipate this demographic not to have any strong resistance to playing TTRPGs besides the aforementioned heavy attrition whenever you jump mediums. Another significant chunk of Twilight's target demographic were 35+ "Twimoms" who are now 45+. I anticipate that this demographic would be overwhelmingly unwilling to play TTRPGs. They didn't play them growing up, their peers are not watching Critical Role and getting into it now the way the 23-35 demographic is, and a significant portion of them are old enough to have once been bothered about Dungeons and Dragons.

But the deathblow is the massive divergence between what Twilight is about and what VtM is about. Sure, Twilight has discount Camarilla maintaining the Masquerade, but the actual story is about a mortal girl who is singled out by a beautiful, rich, immortal vampire boy who has eyes only for her. You could build your entire game around that concept, but you cannot design one clan of what is otherwise recognizable as a VtM reboot around it. Twilight makes occasional reference to something vaguely similar to Game of Fangs and Vampions, but these are sub-plots that expire within a single chapter when they're not background details that expire within a paragraph. The plot of the actual books is ended when the protagonist becomes a vampire.

The people who are left over in this scrap of a scrap of a scrap of a scrap of Twilight's original audience are not all in one place. You are advertising to 100 million people looking for, optimistically, the 50,000 of them who care about your product. 50,000 people would still be a pretty fantastic number if you could find them all, but I'm not sure what advertisement strategy would find Twilight fans who don't also happen to be pre-existing TTRPG or general purpose vampire fans (who will probably play the game or not on those grounds, without the presence or absence of Twilight influencing them much one way or another).

So, sure, 100 million people bought those books, but that doesn't mean they want to schedule a weekly game without anywhere near the cultural recognition Twilight had which is also in a different medium with a different premise with a different cast of characters and all over five years after the last time they thought about the franchise for more than thirty seconds, and even if they do there's probably not enough of them to justify the scale of the advertisement campaign it would take to find all of them.

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 4:01 am

Eh, surely you could come up with a clan that wasn't a direct expy of a popular work, but could be used by someone that wanted to play a member of that clan that was?

Though, in Twilight's case, apart from being able to walk around in sunlight while sparkling, and getting one and only one random magic power, there's not much going on there. Get rid of daywalking, change one random power to bloodlines power, pick a random bloodline and you're more or less there.

(Not having read the books or watched the movies in some time, might be wrong there)

ArmorClassZero · Post by **ArmorClassZero** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 4:34 am

Thaluikhain wrote:"Is it a good idea to have clans to begin with? Couldn't you have different defined types of vampires, and you are likely to be the same as your parent vampire, but you might end up one of the others for some reason? Thus giving players of all sorts of vampires a reason to work together, because they could all be related despite being radically different?"

I could get behind this idea, but it requires rethinking how vampires are created, right? I'm not a huge fan of the 'drink all your blood, give you some of mine,' form of making. I think I would prefer a more 'you got murdered, but you wake up the next day, you feel the hunger, and now people don't seem to notice you, you're like a ghost or a shadow to them' kind of rebirth. Odds of determining what kind of vampire you are, are: who was your killer (your maker), how did you die, where did you die, what was your personality like, etc.

If the nature of vamp creation were that it was a very slim chance of occurring and no one was sure what caused it, you could have the demographics of vampires be low enough to be believable. They wouldn't rely on turning useful people into vamps necessarily, because its unpredictable whether they'll be successfully turned, but vamps rely more on their mental domination powers and suggestion and seduction to manipulate people with skills useful to them.

tussock wrote:"Like, obviously Vampions would play best as a Shadowrun game."

Wasn't there a spinoff of Vampire that supposed a futuristic ShadowRun-esque dystopia as the setting? I know they went medieval with Vampire: Dark Ages and had Vampire: Victorian Era or w/e, but have they ever gone in the opposite direction on the timeline? I like the idea of Vampire taking place in a grungy cyberpunk noir megacity like in Bladerunner.

shinimasu wrote:"There's conceptual space available for small scale personal settings that don't rely on a big conspiracy to work. If there's a masquerade it's not because of cover ups, it's because vampires are rare. An endangered species. And game play is centered on threat management. [...]

It's not the "better than you" vampire power fantasy but it's a kind of game I'm kind of surprised doesn't actually exist. One of the hallmarks of a good horror game is after all gradually increasing the tension about when the Very Bad Thing is going to happen, and the idea that the Very Bad Thing is in most ways kind of inevitable."

I like this idea. Is it possible to reconcile a futuristic gothic-noir cyberpunk setting with small scale personal horror stories while still keeping a dash of vampire politics and ancient conspiracies? Like, assuming it's the future an there are 13 billion people on Earth and megacities and sprawls and megacorporations, what would be a reasonable enough number of vampires? (Ignore Masquerades 1 per 100,000 assumption.) I think the number should be ~1000-1500 world-wide.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 5:57 am

Is there a reason to have a masquerade then? If you do a shadowrun-like world, you wouldn't need to bother.

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 9:46 am

ArmorClassZero wrote:I could get behind this idea, but it requires rethinking how vampires are created, right?

I don't think it'd need a big rethink. You can become the vampire however your setting says you do, just if you've got a beast in your heart or whatever you don't end up looking like your sibling who has beauty in theirs, or something. Anyway, don't most VTM bloodlines come from ancient vampires who were quite different from each other, despite being only a few generations from Cain and thus closely related?

ArmorClassZero wrote:I'm not a huge fan of the 'drink all your blood, give you some of mine,' form of making. I think I would prefer a more 'you got murdered, but you wake up the next day, you feel the hunger, and now people don't seem to notice you, you're like a ghost or a shadow to them' kind of rebirth. Odds of determining what kind of vampire you are, are: who was your killer (your maker), how did you die, where did you die, what was your personality like, etc.

There's nothing wrong with that, but pop culture doesn't seem to be leaning that way at the mo', might have to go with the tide there.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 9:49 am

You'd probably want a Tradition of Misdirection like what's described in After Sundown's section about Mexico where the vampires try to ensure mortals don't get useful information about how to defeat vampires. Since the main reason for the masquerade is fear that mortals will meaningfully disrupt vampiric operations.

shinimasu · Post by **shinimasu** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 3:01 pm

ArmorClassZero wrote:I like this idea. Is it possible to reconcile a futuristic gothic-noir cyberpunk setting with small scale personal horror stories while still keeping a dash of vampire politics and ancient conspiracies? Like, assuming it's the future an there are 13 billion people on Earth and megacities and sprawls and megacorporations, what would be a reasonable enough number of vampires? (Ignore Masquerades 1 per 100,000 assumption.) I think the number should be ~1000-1500 world-wide.

A masquerade definitely gets easier the more transhumanism is a thing in the setting. After a certain point vampire super strength becomes indistinguishable from cyberhuman strength, and weird uncanny vampire traits become indistinguishable from regular body mods. The trade-off would be vampires are no longer apex predators. Everyone can be super strong or super fast or have super senses now, it's a lot harder to corner someone in an alleyway. If the blood isn't tainted by all those nanobots in it. Feeding is probably restricted to those demographics you can be reasonably certain can't afford substantial upgrades.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 3:35 pm

The cybervamps thing was a magazine-article thought-experiment crossover with Cyberpunk 2020. I found a copy, so I'm going to forward it to Frank & AH for an OSSR.

Honestly, I was disappointed how little the assumptions changed. My take would have been that the Masquerade was completely obsolete. Ubiquitous surveillance plus cheap exotic detection tech means that hiding vampirism is impossible, but at the same time vampirism is just less weird than the other future shocks that have upended societal assumptions, and people have days to get on with. Scorched skies (I forget if CP2020 had those) make sunlight less of an issue, so being a Kindred is just a biotech upgrade that comes with a chemical dependency, and you fit right in alongside the next freak.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 3:56 pm

angelfromanotherpin wrote:The cybervamps thing was a magazine-article thought-experiment crossover with Cyberpunk 2020. I found a copy, so I'm going to forward it to Frank & AH for an OSSR.

Honestly, I was disappointed how little the assumptions changed. My take would have been that the Masquerade was completely obsolete. Ubiquitous surveillance plus cheap exotic detection tech means that hiding vampirism is impossible, but at the same time vampirism is just less weird than the other future shocks that have upended societal assumptions, and people have days to get on with. Scorched skies (I forget if CP2020 had those) make sunlight less of an issue, so being a Kindred is just a biotech upgrade that comes with a chemical dependency, and you fit right in alongside the next freak.

The premise of V5 is that there's a "Second Inquisition" happening, which is all the world's secret agencies teaming up to secretly find and kill vampires. Why they do it secretly is a mystery. Why the police in places like Germany is perfectly willing to trample over all laws is also a mystery.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Sep 14, 2018 5:46 am

Wiseman wrote:Is there a reason to have a masquerade then? If you do a shadowrun-like world, you wouldn't need to bother.

The Masquerade is the single greatest setting conceit ever devised. Recognizable Earth is the easiest setting backdrop to write because it is already written for you. And the only drawback of Low Fantasy is that fantasy elements are obviously in tension with recognizable Earth because actual Earth by definition does not contain any fantastic elements.

If the supernatural characters are actively attempting to make the world look it does, your explanation for why Earth is remotely recognizable when fantasy elements are added becomes much much easier. Now you just have to explain why your fantasy elements are remotely compatible with an active conspiracy to hide them from general notice, rather than having to explain why fantasy elements haven't made everything from sportsball to world war II totally unrecognizable to the audience.

Let's consider Masquerade and Low Fantasy in terms of Will Smith movies. So in a no-masquerade low fantasy setting like Bright you have questions like "How does Shrek exist? Isn't that movie considered extremely racist if there are actual Orcs?" And questions like that go all the way down. For a Masqueraded setting like Men In Black, the only cognitive dissonance question ever is just "How does X not break the Masquerade?" repeated for each X and answered in all cases with the mind wipe sticks. Now Men in Black is a much better movie than Bright, but you can also see how much easier a task of world building that Men in Black made for itself.

The Masquerade enables Low Fantasy to largely ignore the effects of the Fantasy on Earth and instead spend the entire time talking about the effects of Earth on the Fantasy. Shadowrun did the other Low Fantasy setting design hack - the Fantasy Elements did not exist for most of recorded history. But of course, that precludes you from having Fantasy characters who are old, which I don't think is particularly acceptable if you want to tell stories about the immortal undead.

-Username17

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Sep 15, 2018 1:24 pm

I have two issues with this:
1. "Nosferatu" is an actual movie in WoD. The Second Inquisition should not be retarded and should realize what they misheard as "Nosferat"
2. Apparently the alphabet soup cares more for the poor people that hang out with the Nosferatu than for the rich people that hang out with Ventrue or social elites that hang out with Toreador. Wut.

Like that's blatantly an attempt to explain how the omniscient Second Inquisition hasn't genocided the Nosferatu yet. But it doesn't work.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sun Sep 16, 2018 1:42 am

Longes wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote:The cybervamps thing was a magazine-article thought-experiment crossover with Cyberpunk 2020. I found a copy, so I'm going to forward it to Frank & AH for an OSSR.

Honestly, I was disappointed how little the assumptions changed. My take would have been that the Masquerade was completely obsolete. Ubiquitous surveillance plus cheap exotic detection tech means that hiding vampirism is impossible, but at the same time vampirism is just less weird than the other future shocks that have upended societal assumptions, and people have days to get on with. Scorched skies (I forget if CP2020 had those) make sunlight less of an issue, so being a Kindred is just a biotech upgrade that comes with a chemical dependency, and you fit right in alongside the next freak.
The premise of V5 is that there's a "Second Inquisition" happening, which is all the world's secret agencies teaming up to secretly find and kill vampires. Why they do it secretly is a mystery.'

Oh, that one is easy. Because if the public knew that vampires existed, then most people would want to be vampires. In exchange for a sunlight allergy and a dietary requirement, you get to live forever plus super powers, that's cool. There's literally no reason why an elderly person, or someone who has a terminal illness, wouldn't want to be Embraced.

Why the police in places like Germany is perfectly willing to trample over all laws is also a mystery.

Isn't the default assumption that the police are always willing to trample over all laws? Systemic corruption is a pretty major genre trope.

ArmorClassZero · Post by **ArmorClassZero** » Sun Sep 16, 2018 4:58 am

hyzmarca wrote:"Oh, that one is easy. Because if the public knew that vampires existed, then most people would want to be vampires. In exchange for a sunlight allergy and a dietary requirement, you get to live forever plus super powers, that's cool. There's literally no reason why an elderly person, or someone who has a terminal illness, wouldn't want to be Embraced."

So how should a game focused on PCs as vampires counter this?

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sun Sep 16, 2018 5:50 am

ArmorClassZero wrote:Vampirism is suppose to be a curse, an affliction.

Except no one who played and enjoyed Vampire ever cared for Justin Achilli's pompous desk notes. No one ever cared for playing fanged emo hobos moping in a dark alley for being cursed with awesome. No one. The playerbase was divided in cloak&dagger politicos and vampions.

In addition, V5 removed a vast majority of elder vampires from the picture by the Beckoning, the glass ceiling is effectively gone because there aren't enough Camarilla vampires to enforce it anymore.

...now, if only the game wasn't hell-bent in keeping you in arrested development, things would be all sunshine and rainbows for me, but at least that problem is easily solved by increasing the XP per session (I insist, if Hite didn't want in-game character advancement, it would have been better to just stating it as such, because the way things are I feel half a century back in the past when your lady crush pretended to fall asleep on your shoulder so you took advantage of her because back then women taking the initiative was a crime against morals*).

* Yes, this was a thing in Mexico. Don't ask.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun Sep 16, 2018 6:50 am

Even the big punchline of Interview with the Vampire is that Louis fails to convince Molloy that immortality isn't worth the cost. At best we're shooting for a "How I Met Your Mother" gag where the young vampires high five and say "This will be great" and then Bob Saget says "It was not" as the game cuts to the next disaster. It's simply a lot easier to sell the idea that vampires suffer for their hubris than it is to sell the idea that a vampire looking for recruits would have much trouble finding takers.

Beyond that, rpgs involve cooperative storytelling so shit that affects the whole group tends to supersede personal and fundamentally unsolvable angst. If you want people to get their mope on it works a lot better if you provoke it through things like feuds, betrayals and awful curses that operate on a reasonable time frame instead of moaning about events that take place in the distant past or future.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Sep 16, 2018 8:30 am

The entire concept of the New Inquisition is perplexing on many levels. Bringing in the anti-Vampire spec ops antagonists from Ultraviolet is at stark odds with trying to pull a nostalgia play by bringing out the old clans from 1992. If we're dealing with Men In Black and super soldiers doing anti-vampire raids, the campaign setting is basically unrecognizable unless you were one of the five campaign groups that had the Technocracy be major players in their Vampire game.

Now having the New Inquisition wage a secret war against the Vampires is the only way to have the Masquerade thing still be a thing if there is a massive and well funded government anti-Vampire war going on. But since you haven't succeeded at making the setting be remotely recognizable, you might as well reboot everything while you're at it. If you're going to do Ultraviolet, you should also do True Blood and Vampire Academy, and Blade. You should radically rethink your clans, and decide what genre items you're going to reference to bring things up to speed. Once you've added a setting element as central and game changing as "now you are all revolutionaries against the dystopian cyberpunk secret world government" the argument "that's how the game did it in 1991"isn't a particularly strong one for the retention of any other setting element.

AC0 wrote:So how should a game focused on PCs as vampires counter this? Vampirism is suppose to be a curse, an affliction.

The way I handle this for After Sundown is that only a tiny minority of people are Luminaries, and only Luminaries get to stay named characters if they turn into Vampires or Zombies. And everybody else who gets turned just degenerates into a monster. That if you turn a non-Luminary into a zombie it just wanders around trying to eat brains and if you turn a non-Luminary into a vampire it turns into one of the nameless Dracula brides that you have to keep locked up in your sex dungeon because they'll eat a baby if one is provided.

And that threads the needle of having the dramatic necessity of having vampirism as a whole being bad, and people being able to shoot first and ask questions later because there's a vampire, and still have the sympathetic vampire protagonists that are absolutely indispensable for any media where the vampires are point of view characters. By changing the number of Luminaries you can take control of the growth of Vampires with agency and instantly settle any bullshit about the Sabbat making a vampire apocalypse to overthrow the elder leadership or whatever. You can also provide a definitive answer for why any particular character was chosen to be made into a vampire by calmly stating that actually vampire clans don't get to select from Olympic athletes, famous actors, and royalty.

But it's also important to note that while turning back into a human was the goal of Lost Boys and has been offered as a goal in V:tM since the accompanying comic of 1st edition back in 1991, fucking no one ever takes them up on that shit. No Vampire campaigns revolve around trying to not be Vampires anymore. And they never did. Similarly, no one ever played Promethean trying to become a real boy. Because the entire reason you're playing Vampire and not any other game is that for whatever reason you want to play a fucking vampire.

Which means that any and all attempts to make people not want to play the vampires in your setting just make people not want to play your game. There are zero people who want to play Vampire: the Masquerade who don't want to play Vampires. Because fucking obviously. Rampant misery tourism is just offputting to your player base.

And yes, making vampirism attractive is a problem for the setting because obviously the setting is unrecognizable if it turns into Day Breakers. But as I've shown, that is a solvable problem. And it's a problem that you can solve without making people dislike playing the characters that they are allowed to play in the game.

-Username17

PrometheanVigil · Post by **PrometheanVigil** » Mon Sep 17, 2018 8:46 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The way I handle this for After Sundown is that only a tiny minority of people are Luminaries, and only Luminaries get to stay named characters if they turn into Vampires or Zombies. And everybody else who gets turned just degenerates into a monster.

-Username17

This sounds like SLA Industries. 'Cept reverse the agent/killer ratio.

It works the first way 'round, not the other way. Otherwise, it just sounds like another name for PC vamps and saying all NPC vamps have 0/1/2 Humanity by default.

Unisystem tried this too, AFMBE comes to mind -- specifically, the Inspired (or whatever they were called) was ill-advised decision because everyone is going to want to be that if they can get any wiggle-room from the GM. That's exactly how it went down when I played at a table hosting it back in the day.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Tue Sep 18, 2018 12:26 am

PrometheanVigil wrote:Otherwise, it just sounds like another name for PC vamps and saying all NPC vamps have 0/1/2 Humanity by default.

Yes, that is how After Sundown works. Luminaries are PCs. NPC vampires are nuts.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Wed Sep 19, 2018 8:28 am

PrometheanVigil wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The way I handle this for After Sundown is that only a tiny minority of people are Luminaries, and only Luminaries get to stay named characters if they turn into Vampires or Zombies. And everybody else who gets turned just degenerates into a monster.

-Username17
This sounds like SLA Industries. 'Cept reverse the agent/killer ratio.

It works the first way 'round, not the other way. Otherwise, it just sounds like another name for PC vamps and saying all NPC vamps have 0/1/2 Humanity by default.

Unisystem tried this too, AFMBE comes to mind -- specifically, the Inspired (or whatever they were called) was ill-advised decision because everyone is going to want to be that if they can get any wiggle-room from the GM. That's exactly how it went down when I played at a table hosting it back in the day.

Named NPCs are allowed to be Luminaries. In fact there are whole categories of NPC-only monsters that are never Spawn and always Luminaries.

At no point is a PC meant to play not-a-Luminary, the intended play modes are "party of luminaries that become named monsters" or "party of named monsters", spawn just aren't meant to be playable.