OSSR: GURPS: Vampire: The Masquerade

[Ancient History]

The power is in the colons.

But I would go beyond even what AncientHistory said about book quality. It isn't that the books are individually "not bad", they are individually great. Steve Jackson brought in consultants, experts, and focus groups for these books. If there was a GURPS Asparagus, it would be written by someone who knew Asparagus backwards and forwards and not only liked Asparagus, but really cared about Asparagus and "doing it right". The irony of course, is that these people often don't know GURPS from a hole in the ground, so the presented GURPS mechanics are generally much clunkier and less lovingly crafted than the setting information. GURPS Asparagus is probably one of, if not the best Asparagus sourcebooks for Dungeons and Dragons. Or any other Asparagus related campaign you intended to run with any system.

-Username17

In 1993, GURPS designer Jeff Koke took a go at adapting Vampire: the Masquerade and Mage: the Ascension as GURPS sourcebooks. GURPS was on its 3rd edition, Vampire on its 2nd. It was a real odd couple.


Now, which one is stupid?

Vampire is known for its moody, atmospheric storytelling and worldbuilding, and its occasionally innovative but normally confused and egregiously bad mechanics, and for the tendency of writers and fans alike to sometimes get lost in the twisting pathways in the forbidden depths of their own well-traveled asses.

GURPS is known for lovingly-crafted, well-researched sourcebooks with mechanics that look simple, but tend to get fairly complicated. Any given GURPS sourcebook is a microcosm of greatness, and only gets truly insane when you consider it in the greater context of all other GURPS books. GURPS is, as some people have said, the kind of RPG where first you design the game. Before 4th edition, setting and metaplot were nearly nonexistent, consisting mostly of suggestions and pointers between books.

So this could be a match made in your celestial afterlife of choice, or this could be a trainwreck.

Let's talk about the good stuff first. Vampire had already been published for two years, put out a bunch of splatbooks - and the GURPS guys were free to go through all of them and pick out the very best art. So while there is a bit of GURPS-ish filler art in here, most of this stuff is Tim Bradstreet and contemporaries. GURPS actually playtests their stuff, so the list of playtesters is longer than the list of playtesters for every book in the first edition of Vampire combined.



Jeff Koke, as far as I know, has never written anything for White Wolf. This is a good thing. He's an outsider. He could see possibilities that Mark-dot-Hagen and crew would never realize, and he would approach this book with stoic GURPS determinatorism.

The first thing you see when you open the book is a card cut-out for subscribing to Pyramid magazine.


There's an OSSR that needs to happen.

The TOC is two pages, going into a level of detail that White Wolf wouldn't go into until autogenerated TOCs became ricockulously easy with desktop publishing some twenty years later. It's a 192 page softcover that covers...well, the main rulebook for V:tM is 270 pages, and this covers more ground than that. So it's typical GURPS terseness.

But then we get to the Prologue, which is atypical for GURPS, and it's 16 pages. And this prologue consists entirely of in-universe found documents - a 1993 letter from a history professor on stationary from a Romanian hotel, a 3-page letter from an Inquisitor from 1481, a 6-page letter from a vampire to their childe from 1904, and - I love this - a printer paper (with the little feeder strips down the side!) of a Kindred BBS c.1993.


The lulz, they overwhelm me.

And the prologue is basically an in-character explanation of what vampires are, and the basics of being a vampire, from different perspectives. The GURPS guys are trying, bless their little pumpers, and the laugh of it is that that collection of simple, rather straightforward documents...is better than anything Vampire ever did. It's better than anything they've ever tried to do along that line. Seriously, when Frank and I did Ghouls: Fatal Addiction they tried it, and when we did Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom they were still trying to do it, but it was always terrible. White Wolf has never mastered the interior-document thing. But GURPS, on their first try, does a good job. A better job than White Wolf ever did. A better job than they did on Vampire Revised!

The Introduction is one page. There's a quote from William Blake on the top of the page, and a "About GURPS" sidebar pointing to other GURPS books.

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. - William Blake

The intro is mostly Jeff Koke's mini-essay on vampires, and why they deserve this book. It's unpretentious and sincere, but it's also written as if Vampire: the Masquerade didn't exist. Seriously, White Wolf isn't mentioned once. Jeff Koke did not sit down to write this book to be a licensed product like Hellboy, where you're playing in somebody else's world using GURPS as an RPG engine. No, Jeff Koke wrote this as Vampire: the Masquerade if a GURPS guy wrote it. It's staggering in its simplicity.

Vampires are the symbols of this struggle. These darkly beautiful beasts attract us like a murder scene. They feed our morbid curiosity and trick us into thinking that we are observing something alien, when we are truly watching ourselves. Vampires mirror the state of humanity. They are at once beautiful and hideous, vibrant and unliving, powerful and dependent. They are cursed to stare their own evil in the face every single day, despising their thirst for blood, begging for the freedom of death, until the sheer weight of their immortality forces them to rise above their darkness and reach a state of humanity that is more than we can possibly hope to achieve. This is why we both love and fear vampires.

Basically, vampires are cool.

There's a brief note on the author. I will quote this in full:

About the Author
Jeff Koke is a graduate of Southwest Texas State University in English and philosophy. He works and writes for Steve Jackson Games, and his previous writing credits include "Jupiter Blues," from GURPS Supers Adventures, and "A Nile Elation," from GURPS Time Travel Adventures. He had edited too many books to count.

Besides being a frequent player and a long-time fan of GURPS, Jeff likes to write short stories and poetry; he also plays guitar for a lock rock 'n' roll band called Love Blender[/i. He lives in Austin with his wife Angela and his dark-souled cat Sheba.

This book was dedicated to Angela. I can only presume Sheba planned and carried out some meticulous revenge.

Next up: Chapter 1: A World of Darkness

[Lago PARANOIA]

There are not enough , , , and emotions in the world to describe my reaction to the very idea of a GURPs/VtM mashup.

Hell, why do we even have TTRPGs anymore? The hobby reached peak batshit 20 years ago with this nonsense. Show's over, folks; go play some videro james.

[fectin]

I once owned a copy of GURPS: Werewolf. I wasn't familiar with the WW game at the time, but the sheer number of character creation points it recommended was staggering (high 600s, if I remember right, but it's been a long time).

[Silent Wayfarer]

Oh boyoboyoboy

*popcorn*

[Username17]

Peak nonsense was when Monte Cook did a d20 World of Darkness book that he let SKR write the rules for mages in. And the actual moment of shark jumping was when I saw that ridiculous paint by numbers cash-in for sale in a game store in Prague.

GURPS Masquerade was necessarily going to happen if White Wolf was willing to take the licensing fees. And in 1993 they were.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Plus the whole thing about GURPS creating better splatbooks than other systems is pretty much spot on. When we were into Traveler (which SJ is apparently a nut for, or was a nut for), we'd hand the core rulebook to a new player for the rules and GURPS Traveler for the entire setting, which was a better introduction/explanation/encyclopedia of the Third Imperium than the core Traveler rulebook was.

I still use GURPS Space to roll randomly generated planets and shit. GURPS books are awesome. I just wish their mechanics were equally as awesome.

[talozin]

The very existence of GURPS White Wolf occasioned a massive catfight between SJG and White Wolf that eventually spilled over onto the internet when Steve Jackson either (depending on who you believe) got sick of getting screwed by Stewart Wieck and company, or couldn't meet the high standards demanded of WW before they'd approve product for publication. You can probably tell which of the two I believed at the time by my choice of phrase, and time has not notably softened my opinion on one of those two parties.

You can read about it here, including the SJ post to Usenet (giving you an idea of how long ago this happened) that got things out into the public eye. To the surprise of no one, the GURPS White Wolf line collapsed into nothingness shortly thereafter.

[Ancient History]

McCubbin - and how I want a fake ID with that name - also provided additional material for this book.

Before the chapter proper, there's a full-page black-and-white illustration and, opposite it, a very short piece of short fiction in italics. Unlike later editions of vampire, this is black text on a clear white background, double spaced, in a readable font, and it less than 500 words. It's just a bit of mood writing about the feelings of the Embrace.

His mouth on my kneck is hot and tender, the gentle motion of his lips sends electric shivers through my body, warming me in unusual places.

That's not bad. Yes, it's expressly on the verge of the erotic, but that's the point. That's what the players WANT. This is Vampire, and it's supposed to be sensual as all-git-out. Well done, pervy GURPS writer. You have risen to the challenge.

Chapter 1: A World of Darkness
This chapter is 26 pages. It is basically a better introduction to the World of Darkness and Vampire: the Masquerade than any actual V:tM product. I'd like to say that it's because Jeff Koke already had a good amount of material to work with, and he just distilled it, but that's a lie. We all know that White Wolf books of every generation tended to be bloated, ill-organized, poorly thought-out messes, while GURPS books are sleek and concise.

They start out describing the Gothic-Punk world. Not the geography, but the attitude. They approach this like they would describing a cyberpunk setting, or a viking setting, or any other GURPS setting. This is establishing the parameters of the game. And there are sidebars.

The sidebars are actually terrific, because they describe things just enough so you know what they are and how to use them, but not enough to be boring or long-winded or to talk themselves into corners. And a lot of the attitudes and interpretations from the game are from before the metaplot really set in to the World of Darkness, and are refreshingly...free of bullshit. Look at this bit from the sidebar marked as "Intrigue."

Most anarchs do not believe that the Gehenna is a threat, and many doubt that the original vampire was Caine. They simply do not believe these legends, and treat them as they do the stories of a Garden of Eden or a Tower of Babel. They suspect that the elders use such stories to put fear into ancillae and thereby control them all the better. Among the anarchs, it is considered bad form to admit to any faith in such myths. They chafe against the restrictions placed by the elders, and have not yet learned the wisdom of age. The fledglings are largely powerless within vampire society, so it is no great surprise that they rebel.

...it is so easy, in these latter days with nWoD and the soulless pap churned out by Onyx Path, to forget the essential conflicts that defined the original game. The War of Ages, with elder vampires holding onto their positions of power for centuries against rebellious younger vampires; immortals playing politics; the very real concerns of overpopulation and maintaining the Masquerade. Before the Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, before the umpteen million bloodlines and Disciplines, it was...a simpler, more elegant time. Even if it keeps all the bloody White Wolf weird terminology (there's a glossary in the back), it really does boil down into something easy to digest and playable. And it's nice that they emphasize that the whole Biblical myth of the Kindred is...well, often considered just a myth. It's not written down as the truth, or even a truth; it's a medieval legend passed down to the modern day. That's incredibly refreshing.



Of course, this is GURPS. So they put their own spin on it. So social distinctions have mechanics. If you're a Caitiff, that's Kindred Status -2. Prince is Kindred Status 2. Methusaleh is Kindred Status 6; Antediluvians is Kindred Status 7. Keep in mind, this is not an indication of power, as suck - it's just social status. That's GURPS thinking. If you want to be president of the anime club, then by God you'll pay for it...that'll be twenty character points, have fun.

A lot of pagespace is given over to the Six Traditions, which are the informal laws of the Kindred. A lot of wordcount is given over to how all the traditions and formalities of the Kindred are just that - traditions. They vary from place to place, they're mostly the laws of the elders, and aren't always observed by anarchs or expressed the same way by younger vampires. It underlines the whole War of the Ages thing, it gives players and gamemasters room and encouragement to innovate and finagle.



Frank and I talked a little in Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom how the Camarilla and Sabbat sort of grew from their original conception - and here is how they were at the beginning. There are two major sects, the Camarilla and the Sabbat. And the Sabbat is smaller. And there's the Inconnu, which are a kind of sect that claims to be neutral, but they only merit a short sidebar. The thing is, it's not like the Camarilla are the good guys and the Sabbat are the bad guys - although remember this is the old Sabbat, so they're not nice either.

Known to many as the Black Hand, the Sabbat is rumored to have evolved from a medieval death cult. Little of its nature has changed since then. It is the largest sect next to the Camarilla, and is aggressively attempting to increase its domain.

This being GURPS, rules tend to get shoehorned into odd sidebars (but don't worry, there IS an index.) So for example, the mechanics of the Embrace are covered in a three-paragraph sidebar, and involve things like HT (GURPS hit points). No muss, no fuss.

This being prior to proper bloodline bloat, there's not a lot of distinction between Clans and bloodlines.

Represented within the Camarilla are seven major clans, though Kindred of any bloodline are welcome. There are allegedly 13 distinct clans, as well as innumerable minor bloodlines. Two of the clans are said to be of the Sabbat, while the remaining four clans owe allegiance to neither sect. There are likely many more unknown bloodlines, especially when one considers the mysterious eastern Kindred, who undoubtedly have their own unique divisions.

Okay, it's not progressive, but it's a fuck load more inclusive than what V:tM became in it's third edition. It leaves the door open for the Laibon and vampires in Asia and South America and other places. The only clans that get much written about them are the seven Camarilla clans - with longer writeups later. You can sort of feel the V:tM formatting clashing with the GURPS desire to, y'know, just get everything down in the correct order here, but this is mostly discussing the clans are social/political entities with long histories.

It's not all good. The write-up for the Gangrel is based on some early fluff where...ah...I'll just copy it out:

Clan Gangrel is one of the few clans whose founder is still involved in or concerned with the welfare of her progeny. her concern for them is matched only by her concern for her mortal descendants - the Gypsies. Though many Antediluvians use their progeny as pawns in the Jyhad, the Gangrel pride themselves on their freedom from such manipulation. There is a close bond between the clan and the Gypsies. In recent years, as Gehenna approaches, their interaction has been considerable.

Okay, explanation: this was 1 year before the abominable World of Darkness: Gypsies and 3 years before Clanbook Ravnos. I vaguely recall early Gangrel might have had some connection with gypsies, but they're better known for their connection with werewolves - there are (very) brief sidebars on the Lupines and the Magi, but no stats are given.)

The Arcanum gets a sidebar, and there's a section on different sorts of mortal hunters that the Kindred have to deal with, such as government agencies (including an old KGB remnant), witch hunters and the Inquisition.

Ghouls get a sidebar. They don't get the customary dot of Potence; they get +2 on Strength and the ability to pop some claws that cause aggravated wounds on vampires, as well as a blood addiction and the Berserk disadvantage. All together, being a ghoul is a 45-point template. Not too shabby. They also give rules for ghouled dogs, called hellhounds. Haven't heard of those in a few days.



The next two pages talk about the generations, from the mythical Caine to the rare thinblooded 14th and 15th generations. And that's the chapter.



Next chapter: Chapter 2: Characters

[Ancient History]

Chapter 2: Characters

Your typical GURPS character generation process basically boils down to "Here's a big pile of points, figure out what you want to do and go spend it. Have fun." There are templates and suggestions and advantages and attributes and skills and a lot of math, but it's very freeform. WoD chargen is...much more structured, and full of wank. We've gone over it before; they give you different piles of points for different things, you divvy them up, and then there is a step that involves picking your tribe or clan or bloodline, which determines how you can spend certain points, and then an indeterminate number of steps about picking your nature or demeanor or parents or favorite color or some shit.

So, for the basic number-crunching aspect, GURPS has the advantage, and they know it. You want to be a vampire? Awesome. Here's the template, spend 55 points and you're a vampire. Secret decoder ring and all. Unfortunately, GURPS is also trying to adapt itself to some of Vampire's game mechanics and...uh...that's not so good.

So instead of Nature and Demeanor, you have Character Types. These are basic suggestions of kinds of player characters your vampire might be, including suggested advantages, disadvantages, skills, and clans. Now, Jeff Koke puts a lot of thought into these things, but it's obviously a square peg/round hole/HAMMER TIME scenario. For fuck's sake, one of the character types is "Kid."



And this is GURPS Vampire in a nutshell. The child vampire is a classic of the gothic punk genre - Interview with a Vampire, After Dark, Lost Boys, Let the Right One In (shut up, it's an awesome movie) - and Koke addresses the concept well, looking at the realistic advantages and disadvantages of looking like a 10-year-old, like having a hard time getting into nightclubs to prey on hotties. The kick of it is...GURPS Vampire handles this better than White Wolf ever did. For V:tM, being a child vampire is a 3 point flaw that requires you to buy another 1 point flaw (Short). In GURPS, it's just an option. They don't penalize you for that.


Bloody drool? 0-point Quirk.

The template for vampires is 55 points, with a recommendation that characters be given 200-300 points to play with in an average game (and further recommending capping disciplines at 60 points). That's well into superhuman levels. "High-powered roleplaying" is suggested at 500-600 points and waving the discipline spending cap. Which is fairly tough - but keep in mind, this is GURPS, and power levels tend to be relative. The exceptional BPRD agent is 300 points, and they probably won't be able to go toe-to-toe with a Kindred.

The breakdown for the vampire template is it's a bundle of advantages and disadvantages. So you get Unaging (15), Blood Healing (25), Doesn't Breathe (30), Vampiric Invulnerability (100), Rotschreck/profound phobia of fire (-10), Sundeath (-40), The Draining (-10), Unhealing (-20), Frenzy/Beserk (-15) and Secret (-20). Some of those are basic GURPS disadvantages, but they've been tweaked, and the rest are unique abilities described in this book - along with suggestions fo rusing a bunch of other typical GURPS advantages. Most of the vampire backgrounds like Herd and Generation are replaced by GURPS advantages.

Oh, you want to be 3rd generation? 200 points.

This is GURPS, and not only does everything have a mechanic, but they're usually more detailed mechanics. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. For example, blood points and the GURPS HT system interaction is just clunky, mainly because people in GURPS can have a lot more hit points. "Vampiric Invincibility" sort of covers going into torpor and aggravated damage, because in GURPS there is no aggravated damage - the punchline is that it's that rare GURPS advantage that lets you fall to -HT without dying. "The Draining" is the thing where you lose a blood point on waking up every morning...but with the clever GURPS addition that if you're running on empty, you just lose 2 hit points instead. Sundeath covers taking damage from sunlight. It seems like the sort of thing you'd just lump together in a single trait, but THAT IS NOT THE GURPS WAY.

And there are the parts that GURPS does better. Remember that thing where Vampires go insane with fear when they see fire, which basically made the Dark Ages un-fucking-playable? Well, GURPS gives you a table of reasonable modifiers so that you don't go insane whenever someone holds a candle within 10 yards of you.

On the other hand, there are new skills. Well, "new." Intimidation seems like it could/should/may have been around somewhere before. Appreciate Beauty is a bullshit skill for Toreador. But that's it; they kept it to a page.


I don't throw stones.

Disciplines, the mystical magical blood powers of vampires, have both the most and the least change. It's probably a dealbreaker for the diehards, while the munchkins are wondering what the fuck the fuss was about.

Long story short: all the basic disciplines from V:tM are represented, in levels 1-5. Each power in a discipline is treated as a separate skill, with the exact same cost as regular skills, but you also have to but a level which determines the highest power you can try to use. So for example, "Abandon the Earthly Form" (astral projection) is the level 5 power of Auspex. You can have the highest Auspex skill on the planet, but if you have only bought Auspex Level 4, you're never going to astral project. Fortunately, levels are fairly cheap. For most disciplines, it's 2 points/level (i.e. 2 points for level 1, 4 points for level 2, 6 points for level 3, etc.)

For the "Augmenting disciplines" of Celerity, Potence, and Fortitude, the costs is geometric rather than linear. (4 points for level 1, 8 points for level 2, 16 points for level 3, etc.), the reason being that they give rather direct boosts to primary or secondary stats for lengthy periods. So at Potence 5, you're getting +10 Strength for 6 hours. For unarmed or melee, that's...well, you can punch through walls and shit. Out-of-clan disciplines cost double.

Also, you don't have to spend blood points to power disciplines. You can use Fatigue. Or blood points. If you want. Either works.



Okay, so, high points and low points. Well, you've still got a shitload of fucking powers, which takes pages of mechanics and description, because they insisted on keeping five different powers for each Discipline (seriously, it's own entire separate fucking chapter). AND it's been married to the GURPS skill system, which both complicates things and is notably broken with regards to high attributes - because the final rating of a skill is a measure of both the base attribute and how many points you've thrown at the skill, characters with higher base attributes can spend less points and still get the same skill rating. Expanding this system is actually more complicated than just throwing some more dot-powers in Vampire, which is something of an achievement.

But it does look like a fairly typical GURPS system. So, that's a plus. Plus-ish.

Thaumaturgy is where Jeff Koke gave White Wolf the finger. It's nominally a discipline, but they come out and admit that it's just GURPS sorcery - which means that each spell is its own separate skill (and which basically jives with each power in a Discipline being a separate skill anyway). So vampire sorcerers in GURPS don't have to fuck with buying levels in Thaumaturgy, they have to fuck with buying at least Magical Aptitude level 1 (that's an advantage); the Tremere get Magical Aptitude 1 automatically (or Magical Aptitude +1 if they had it before the Embrace).

So, rounding out the chapter, they have the bits about choosing a clan, calculating your Humanity (which starts at 12 and can go from 3 to 20; I suspect Jeff was drinking at this point) and your Blood Pool. The end of the chapter is a sample character (a drug-dealing 13th Generation Malkavian called "Glider") and some rules on True Faith and a Resistance to Disciplines advantage for hunters.


Any object can be sacred.

There's little references throughout this book to Texas, because the GURPS guys were planning on doing a Texas setting book for GURPS Vampire, but White Wolf poo-poo'd it. Because they're assholes.

Anyway, next up is Chapter 3: Permutations.

[Username17]

15 points for agelessness is a microcosm of GURPS. It is, to be honest, quite a lot of points. Five percent of the total budget of a quite powerful character is rather a lot. And in a game that doesn't use multi-decade time skips, it doesn't do anything. This book came out in 1993, and Gehenna came out in 2003, the entire game only went 10 years, during which no one's ability to not age meant jack diddly.

On the flip side, if you did do a one century time skip then every character who didn't have immunity to aging would simply be removed from the game without a die roll. It's like "personal immunity: atomic weapons" or something. The GM almost certainly isn't going to throw that attack at the party, and if they did everyone without the immunity is automatically killed without being allowed to roll dice.

Agelessness meets every criteria you could have for something that shouldn't cost points. But it costs points anyway, because it's GURPS and everything has to cost points. And it costs kind of a lot of points, because it's the kind of thing that's really important in the world. But points are a game thing, and it means pretty much nothing in the game. It's a piece of perspective that GURPS never really managed.

-Username17

[zugschef]

Best part of that particular issue with GURPS is the disadvantages which give you a lot of points such as being hunted by the government or a large organization. Every fucking player character is supposed to face challenges all the time, so it's basically free points or an excuse for the GM to just fuckin' kill you anytime s/he feels like it.

[Omegonthesane]

Best part of that particular issue with GURPS is the disadvantages which give you a lot of points such as being hunted by the government or a large organization. Every fucking player character is supposed to face challenges all the time, so it's basically free points or an excuse for the GM to just fuckin' kill you anytime s/he feels like it.

If I had to defend that I'd call it "a reward for giving the GM ideas about the specific challenges you wish to face".

I doubt that's what GURPS were actually thinking however.

[Koumei]

To be fair, that kind of thing shows up all over the place in WoD too. Indeed just about any Merit/Flaw system has that kind of thing, and we all just sigh, accept it as a fact of life, then abuse the everliving fuck out it. What's that? Being infertile in a White Wolf game is a 1-point flaw? As a vampire, making fires go out near you is a significant flaw? And of course the 7-point "You will die".

[TheFlatline]

Best part of that particular issue with GURPS is the disadvantages which give you a lot of points such as being hunted by the government or a large organization. Every fucking player character is supposed to face challenges all the time, so it's basically free points or an excuse for the GM to just fuckin' kill you anytime s/he feels like it.

Without the flaw you're nameless Al Qaeda fighter #34876 and as long as you're not like actively shooting at soldiers or civilians you probably can move about unhindered.

With the flaw you're Osama Bin Laden and the government has a significant portion of it's resources looking for *you*. Anyone within the blast radius of you is considered acceptable collateral damage.

That hunted max flaw shit probably should be a team flaw, as it has basically the same impact as whatever assmonkey takes it, but nobody else gets any points.

[hyzmarca]

At that level its essentially free, because the GM isn't going to ruin his game by having the party taken out by a random drone strike.

And if he's in the mood to kill everyone he doesn't need an excuse.

[Eikre]

Agelessness meets every criteria you could have for something that shouldn't cost points. But it costs points anyway, because it's GURPS and everything has to cost points.

I appreciate what you're saying, but maybe in the context of a game where everyone is expected to be immortal, having an inviolate line on all the character sheets that says "You're cool, and here is a perfunctory numerical value to reassure you that this is true!" is a non-issue that mostly lets everyone feel a little bit more the part. At worst, you might let a mere mortal into the game but dock them fifteen points. Yes, you're a 285 point character in the game of 300 point characters. Check out your underdog status.

Tangential to Vampire is the game where immortality isn't the expectation, and we could discuss how that ends up going down, but I think you're right that the trait "I might grow to be really really old, but that hasn't happened yet" isn't very impressive, but the trait "I AM really, really old, and I have the vulgar Latin to prove it" is actually a really cool dig that is going to come up sometimes when you happen to know how to read legal documents from before the implementation of the Chancery script, or whatever. So the trait should probably be modeled on those lines.

[Omegonthesane]

Agelessness meets every criteria you could have for something that shouldn't cost points. But it costs points anyway, because it's GURPS and everything has to cost points.

I appreciate what you're saying, but maybe in the context of a game where everyone is expected to be immortal, having an inviolate line on all the character sheets that says "You're cool, and here is a perfunctory numerical value to reassure you that this is true!" is a non-issue that mostly lets everyone feel a little bit more the part. At worst, you might let a mere mortal into the game but dock them fifteen points. Yes, you're a 285 point character in the game of 300 point characters. Check out your underdog status.

Tangential to Vampire is the game where immortality isn't the expectation, and we could discuss how that ends up going down, but I think you're right that the trait "I might grow to be really really old, but that hasn't happened yet" isn't very impressive, but the trait "I AM really, really old, and I have the vulgar Latin to prove it" is actually a really cool dig that is going to come up sometimes when you happen to know how to read legal documents from before the implementation of the Chancery script, or whatever. So the trait should probably be modeled on those lines.

That's called "buying a bunch of skills that you got from being really old".

"Is already older than any mortal" is flavour text at the end of the day.

[angelfromanotherpin]

GURPS 3e had a rule where you couldn't spend more points on skills than 2x your character's age, and Unaging was a way to get around that (as well as effective immunity to effects that aged you). It wasn't much more than nothing, especially since you generally preferred to have high attributes and low skill expenditures, but it was more.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 3: Permutations


Gratuitous nudity! Not in a GURPS product.

Chapter 3 is essentially "miscellaneous Vampire rules that aren't character creation or Disciplines." Wills rolls, Humanity, Blood Pool and Blood Points and how to spend them, Frenzy, injury, torpor, Final Death, the Blood Bond, etc. It's handled in a detailed but businesslike manner, more concise but also a bit more fiddly than the WoD versions of the same rules, because this is GURPS and they like to nail things down.

I suppose this is as good a point as any to discuss what's not in this book so far: a lot of the product identity setting. Aside from Caine and the Antediluvians, there's no reference to any of the established NPCs in use at White Wolf '93. The fiction is all completely original and while there are quotations and an emo-porn feel designed after typical White Wolf products, it's obviously not done by a Vampire house writer. It's hard to put my finger on what's missing - I want to say the pretentiousness, but I think it's more accurate to say that the book simply lacks the feel of a White Wolf product, even an early White Wolf product. The layout of the book is largely a GURPS style, the presentation is a GURPS style, the introductory fiction for the chapters is minimal, the quotes tend to be more...educated than Gothic Punk. I'm not saying it's better or worse, it just...all the ingredients are there but it doesn't have the feel of a Vampire book.


Lacks something essential.

On second thought, I know what's missing besides the wangst - which they at least go through the motions of - it's the sex. Vampire has, in every incarnation, been all about pushing the buttons on traditional Protestant Christian taboos. Sex, devil worship, blood play, a bit of the ultraviolence, implicit rape, having fun, being a blasphemous creature in the eyes of God - when you read a White Wolf product, you really get the sense that the people are getting off on the little taboos that they set up and break. It's a Christian Horror game in many respects, where True Faith works and the Caine myth is essentially correct, and even though playing pagan and dipping into New Age stuff and Satanism is fun, they're all fucking Southern Baptists at heart. But the GURPS guys are, if not atheists, then completely NPOV. They don't have the Christian hangups, so they don't play to the Christian hang-ups, and I think that's part of why the book is so dry and "off" in comparison.

The discussion of Character Goals is interesting, because it goes back to the original motivations of "Okay, so I'm a vampire. Now what?" This has always been the essential problem with White Wolf games. For Dungeons & Dragons, you play an adventurer and go adventuring. For Shadowrun, you play a shadowrunner and go on shadowruns. For Star Trek the RPG, your five session mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before, exploring brave new worlds, encountering new life forms and civilizations (and then run into a Klingon Bird-of-Prey and the game grinds to a fucking halt and dies.)


Klingon vampire?

But vampires...what the fuck is the point? I mean, the whole schtick of Anne Rice's Vampire novels basically broke down to a) mortal, b) becomes vampire, c) party. There's not a lot of conflict once you cross over from fangbanger to fanger (that sounded better in my head). It's no surprise that the vast majority of vampire movies are about the vampire hunters and the vampires themselves just want to drink the blood of the world.

So, GURPS gets the first three classic V:tM motivations out of the way: Rebirth (i.e. game until you can quit playing), Diablerie (i.e. complete power trip), and Golconda (little of each, but with overtones of a Hero's Journey). And GURPS does a solid job of presenting these, but they're still not terribly good. I mean, even the fucking Twilight series ran into the problem of creating conflict, especially once Bella and Edward finally wrecked the bed.


Dude, just let her be on top.

Which might be why the chapter ends with The Prelude. It's a one-on-one short roleplaying scenario designed to cover the player's life up until their Embrace. It's basically the 20 Questions from Vampire, but it's designed as a cooperative storytelling surgery thingy where the PC is the patient, and the player and GM cooperate in filling out their past and explaining the numbers on their character sheet. It's not a typical GURPS thing at all - it's GURPS trying to assimilate White Wolf's storytelling principles and choking on it.

Xander is sick of the UST and is just going to stare at the apple while Giles and Buffy play the choking game.

Look, we all know how this works, right? The Storyteller system is terrible, it's designed to be ignored because you can't play it as written. The dice pools are out of whack, every Discipline is unbalanced, and if you actually roll for Rotschreck you're screwed. The only thing that makes a Vampire game work is all the players and the Storyteller collaborating on the infinite shades of night and the pangs of the Thirst and all that - it's designed for hamming it up. That's why it translates to LARP so well. It's all the amateur dramatics of D&D with none of the simulationist leanings. GURPS never got the memo. The ultimate simulationists are trying to comprehend not just the willing suspension of disbelief, but the innate Rule of Cool contract that is the real appeal of Vampire for most White Wolf fans, and while they do as good a job as they can, they might as well be translating this game from cuneiform tablets.

Anyway, next chapter is Disciplines.

[Lago PARANOIA]

For Star Trek the RPG, your five session mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before, exploring brave new worlds, encountering new life forms and civilizations (and then run into a Klingon Bird-of-Prey and the game grinds to a fucking halt and dies.)

Hey, Ancient History, we got a new project lined up for you after this OSSR.

Vampire has, in every incarnation, been all about pushing the buttons on traditional Protestant Christian taboos. Sex, devil worship, blood play, a bit of the ultraviolence, implicit rape, having fun, being a blasphemous creature in the eyes of God - when you read a White Wolf product, you really get the sense that the people are getting off on the little taboos that they set up and break. It's a Christian Horror game in many respects, where True Faith works and the Caine myth is essentially correct, and even though playing pagan and dipping into New Age stuff and Satanism is fun, they're all fucking Southern Baptists at heart. But the GURPS guys are, if not atheists, then completely NPOV. They don't have the Christian hangups, so they don't play to the Christian hang-ups, and I think that's part of why the book is so dry and "off" in comparison.

Also, I think that you're the first person ever who has said that the vampire mythos' -- or at least World of Darkness's interpretation of it -- primary appeal is sublimated slave morality. And since WoD vampire culture is counterpoised to Christianity, that means the target of your ressentiment is a religion that was used by Nietzsche as the golden standard of slave morality. I feel that an image macro featuring that stupid Xzibit meme is appropriate here. But I can totally see it now that you pointed it out.

[Aryxbez]

I've enjoyed that original quote about GURPS products being detailed, and I sensed this review would be awesome. You seem to do a fairly good job of making GURPS seem awesome, and makes me wonder if I should pick up some GURPS products sometime.

...it's obviously not done by a Vampire house writer.

...all the ingredients are there but it doesn't have the feel of a Vampire book.

..They don't have the Christian hangups

The fact it apparently doesn't have White Wolf's baggage, I consider a GOOD thing, course, I'm also never been a fan of Vampire at all (especially since it was just a social convention to "get laid". Friend of mine first got into it, even tried Advertising it as such!) Personally, I've been far more interested in the Hunters (of Reckoning) of monsters, opposed to being the monster itself (ironically, I like Angel, but haven't really watched Buffy). Though I really blame the like of that line from the Kick-A Hack n Slash video games.

So GURPS company is apparently awesome, why aren't more RPG companies like these guys? I don't just mean lacking the capital to hire experts on a specific field, but professional typesetting, clear, concise and still interesting, and even better rules??

[TheFlatline]

WoD's entire basic concept of childer and masters and the war of ages is sort of rooted in the entire idea of slave morality and definately has overtones of battered spouse syndrome.

The act of embracing a human and making them a vampire means that they begin unlife at the very least 1 step blood bound to you. Which means that they're the loving, slightly obsessive girlfriend that you can beat the shit out of when the local sports team has a bad night and they will hate you for it but also love you more and try to please you more because of it.

We tried once to really get into the "themes" of Vampire as WW wrote them and they ended up being disturbingly squicky. We decided that less is more there with the master/child thing, and decided that Vampire made a better politics game than a social game. Sure there's still sex, kink, betrayal, and power in a master/slave sort of vibe, but that's all painted on to the cyclorama in the back to give the political intrigue and backstabbing more flavor.

[mlangsdorf]

Personally, I've been far more interested in the Hunters (of Reckoning) of monsters, opposed to being the monster itself (ironically, I like Angel, but haven't really watched Buffy). Though I really blame the like of that line from the Kick-A Hack n Slash video games.

You should take a look at GURPS Lite, the free introductory stripped down version of the game, and if you like it, maybe take a look at the Monster Hunter supplements.

Basically, SJGames realized that GURPS is too big and open ended as written, and wrote a couple of supplements to trim down all the options into a playable game. Monster Hunters is urban fantasy monster hunting. Of course, since it's GURPS, the supplements cover everything from Dresden Files to Buffy to Supernatural to Vampire$, so it's more an overview of the genre than a ready set campaign world. But it's reasonably playable and self-contained, and can mostly be played with GURPS Lite (I think).

So GURPS company is apparently awesome, why aren't more RPG companies like these guys? I don't just mean lacking the capital to hire experts on a specific field, but professional typesetting, clear, concise and still interesting, and even better rules??

I don't know. When I was playing WotC's latest version of Gamma World, I was amused and despairing that the GW book (~300 pages, hardbound, core rules for a new edition of the game) had a substantially sparser and shorter index than some random 50 page PDF rules supplement for GURPS.

[momothefiddler]

Personally, I've been far more interested in the Hunters (of Reckoning) of monsters, opposed to being the monster itself (ironically, I like Angel, but haven't really watched Buffy). Though I really blame the like of that line from the Kick-A Hack n Slash video games.

You should take a look at GURPS Lite, the free introductory stripped down version of the game, and if you like it, maybe take a look at the Monster Hunter supplements.

Basically, SJGames realized that GURPS is too big and open ended as written, and wrote a couple of supplements to trim down all the options into a playable game. Monster Hunters is urban fantasy monster hunting. Of course, since it's GURPS, the supplements cover everything from Dresden Files to Buffy to Supernatural to Vampire$, so it's more an overview of the genre than a ready set campaign world. But it's reasonably playable and self-contained, and can mostly be played with GURPS Lite (I think).

God I love MH. Let me warn you, though: there's a very narrow window in which its Ritual Path Magic is neither useless nor gamebreaking. And while the classes in MH tend to settle nicely into that window... it's worth paying attention to anyway.

[TheFlatline]

So GURPS company is apparently awesome, why aren't more RPG companies like these guys? I don't just mean lacking the capital to hire experts on a specific field, but professional typesetting, clear, concise and still interesting, and even better rules??

I don't know. When I was playing WotC's latest version of Gamma World, I was amused and despairing that the GW book (~300 pages, hardbound, core rules for a new edition of the game) had a substantially sparser and shorter index than some random 50 page PDF rules supplement for GURPS.

Steve Jackson is kind of a legend in the gaming community, and probably is arguably one of the more successful game "developers" these days (though he really doesn't develop much I think any more). He's still pretty passionately into the industry and genuinely likes it.

SJGames is responsible for a lot of classics. They publish Killer, which I think qualifies as one of the first LARPs written (though a normal game of killer isn't exactly an RPG). Munchkin is also an SJGame, and while I find it atrocious (the jokes wore thin on me 10 years ago) it's still what pulls a lot of people into gaming for some reason. Go figure. I know he did a MONSTER edition of Ogre recently, where basically they made no money off of the edition and the box was like 4 feet by 3 feet by 1 foot or something psychotic like that.

SJGames has a pretty good nose for talent and paid attention to the larger geek culture at a time when other companies had a more focused direction.

They're definitely an old school gaming company though. Munchkin aside (which is a spoof of old school gaming tropes anyway) it's hard to think of any current super successful games that they're publishing.