Hi, folks. Rose here with a report from the Vampire office.
Things have been quiet on the blog front as I’ve been getting upcoming books in order. My responsibilities at Onyx Path are pretty heavy (everything from production to CofD oversight to Kickstarters), so I’ve brought on co-developer Danielle Lauzon for our next book: A Thousand Years of Night.
This is an important book for the new edition — one thing we’re doing with the game now is staking out the different scopes you can tell stories at, and a big part of that is the elder game. One of the cool things about Requiem is that the highest “power level” isn’t an endgame — it’s just the beginning. With elders, we can tell stories of grand dynasties, of great loves, and of bitter rivalries… and then ground them all with the candor and humanity that characterizes Second Edition.
To that end, Danielle and I would like to present the full outline for A Thousand Years of Night. Enjoy!
P.S. I’m also looking over your pitches from Rich’s Monday blog. Neat stuff!
Are you guys in need of a writer to round out Wolves at the Gate?
I felt that the youth and vitality of characters in Requiem was something that helped set the game apart from Masquerade in the first edition. Getting old meant losing everything. I suppose with the demise of the Fog of Ages it was only inevitable that this would come up.
What, if anything, is being done to maintain that sense of youthful vitality in Requiem? What makes elders more vulnerable or weaker, aside from losing the truly superhuman abilities after torpor? What keeps Requiem distinct from the truly ancients of Masquerade using the young as puppets from the shadows?
The fact that Elders, upon waking up from torpor, are effectively young again, for one (they have to be, on the basis that they need to relearn how to survive in a modern world).
Another is the simple fact that the All-Night Society is fundamentally chaotic; an elder in torpor is one who literally cannot manage their schemes, and shouldn’t expect to be able to. There’s a reason the Invictus don’t bother with much of a mission statement beyond Maintain the Masquerade; it’s stupid to expect the young to march in lockstep.
Third and finally-no such thing as Generation. Today’s young and weak are tomorrow’s old and strong-and they’re always on the lookout for ways to become stronger, every bit the equal of any true elder. And there’s nothing stopping them
Also the fact that there’s no fog of ages, but vampires don’t necessarily have perfect memories. I mean what do you remember about last week? accurate? now how bout 5 years ago? 10? now imagine a vampire’s memory is able to become 100 times better than yours even 100 times better than what’s probably a fleeting emotion and images etc, is still like a couple of days in 10 years. Basically you don’t need fog of ages (causing you to go mad) to enact imperfect recall (and hopefully the book mentions this). (what leliel said is also true)
I think that Requiem’s catch was that it made things personal again. No more generations upon generations of vampires being told to follow the party line down to the detail, because of Caine and stuff.
Masquerade wasn’t Masquerade because it played with the theme of “vampires transcend history”. Masquerade was Masquerade because of Gehenna, because of Caine, because of the Jyhad, because of two global sects mirroring the Cold War of mortals.
The “transcend history” theme is well established in the Vampire genre and to forsake it would be anticlimatic due to its potential for horror material (not to mention that it would be picked up by another splat, even if it didn’t make as much sense).
Agreed. Masquerade’s elders were chess players who often didn’t realize that they themselves were pieces. I’m very glad that Requiem 2e is emphasizing that Requiem’s elders are still sharks cruising the sea, not old geezers sitting around in their mansions.
This looks really exciting.
Here’s hoping one of those [REDACTED] is Belial’s Brood!
+1 Brood. This will be in my mailbox like tomorrow right? very exciting
Would be nice for the Brood to make a comeback. But at this point, I’m just too excited to even mind if it’s something else entirely.
It’s mind-boggingly exciting. Did I already mention I’m super excited?
P.S. I’m insanely excited!!
You know, Rose herself kinda reminds me of a Methuselah: quiet for ages and then BAM! She shows up out of the blue and shakes the game up big time.
In all seriousness, I’ve been eagerly awaiting a Requiem update. So glad to hear a little bit more about the long-anticipated Elders book. The second I read that you were using Miriam Blaylock, Lestat, and Spike as models for new elders, I knew I was going to love this book. I was actually planning on using the book to design a Miriam-style character for an elders game some friends have been discussing!
You don’t think that first [REDACTED] could refer to members of a certain dead Roman clan, do you?
Is this going to explore bloodlines at all? I am interested in a formal write up of bloodlines in 2e.
Has it ever been explicitly stated why the Fog of Ages is no longer a thing in 2e?
This book looks like a absolute treasure trove of good stuff. Vampire is a consistently great line, and I think we’re all excited to see more of it. There’s a lot here that I’m sure will see heavy use in other games, too; I’m sure some of these mechanics will see new life in Mummy.
I hope that you do more than just a few example methuselah. The main thing I’ve wanted for requiem for years has been a Methuselah template, even if it is a small addon.
No Fog of Ages?
That’s a massive shift in tone.
Can’t say that I’m a fan of it.
To be honest I haven’t been a fan of anything Onyx Path has done with Requiem since I bought Blood Sorcery.
Hell the only reason I’m here is because a friend was so annoyed by this he took a screen shot and sent it to me, so embittered by the changes.
Can you elaborate? Most of the people I’ve talked to were either excited or indifferent.
Onyx Path is not a substantially different entity. Many of us are the same people who were working on projects in the White Wolf era. Rose has been the developer for Vampire: The Requiem since about 2008, around the time of the Daeva clanbook. Any changes she made with the second edition are changes she felt the line needed after having been at the helm for several years, long before Onyx Path came into being.
How does any of that invalidate 1e material though? Sometimes my players and me even go back to 1e Requiem vanilla for the fun of it. The 2nd edition is some of the best material published by WW/OPP ever.
I don’t think you can’t find something in new and upcoming books to use in your chronicles. How about the localised covenants, which do Requiem’s local feel so much justice (when compared to 1e)?
For table top totally.
I should have added in my original message that I’m part of the large LARP group that plays VtR.
I think a lot of Onyx and Rose’s work has gone towards making the game far more accessible for tabletop.
Giving the Covenants clearer practical goals not simply ideological ones was a great thing for the table top scene.
I’m just not part of that scene.
Making Touchstones is great for a tabletop game for giving storytellers a system to ensure that the psychological journey is taken by the characters. That players feel more invested in the character.
Saying that I haven’t been a fan of anything was hyperbole. Sorry about that.
But I guess I’m not a fan of the move away from the kind of Noir fiction that 2004-2007/8 VtR had towards a kind of Gothic Romanticism fiction.
Put it down to personal taste.
If I was going to do MET Requiem 2e, I’d go a very different direction from the tabletop version. Tabletop is the license we have, though…
Fog of Ages is still a thing, it’s just not universal. It’s closer to Alzheimer’s, or a degenerative disease: not something everybody gets, but common enough that people know about it and hope that they don’t get it.
As long as it isn’t contradicted by rules or fluff in 2e, it’s still applicable. The clan books are recommended because the fluff and lore of the clans in 2e is based off of the fluff and lore in the clan books.
Looks good. Regarding the wolves chapter, I can’t wait for interesting ideas for juxtaposing between a Mummy that, while ostensibly older has really only lived out an additional mortal life time in fragments vs. a Vampire elder that while only a millennium old has actually lived through those thousand years. Which is the more alienating?
edit: sorry I realize most Mummies have lived a couple of equivalent mortal lifespans, but that’s still Ancilla in terms of active years.
I would like to know the narrative effects of Elders Curse, specifically, blood in… blood out.
In Requiem 2nd Edition, there’s seveal paragraphs that describe how Kindred effect and corrupt the world around them through their Curse (usually through feeding).
It’a not on the scale of Prometheans or their Wasteland but it is a corruptive narrative point that shows Kindred are a blight. A community fed on by a Gangrel slowly becomes more prone to frenzy and violence, a Deva from Paris now living in New York becomes more like her food, forgetting parts of her past and taking on more of her present while her food does the reverse, blood in, blood out.
My question is how does this work with Elders? Could it shape communities? Cities? Countries?
Maybe the blood becomes a Bloodline but one communicated through the Elders Kindred prey.
Maybe Elders become more like their Kindred prey, slowly metamorphosizing into something truly unique, a blood covered collage of immortal lives that espouses a common motif among them.
Blood in, blood out, what does it mean for those who have survived for entire ages?
Looks awesome, I’m really excited for this. The only thing I’m slightly disappointed about is that we aren’t getting a couple more cities to focus on that have to deal with Elders because of their history. It would be really cool to showcase how everything introduced in this book actually works in setting by giving a city like Istanbul, Kiev or Rome as an example.
Although honestly, I wouldn’t have noticed it a couple weeks ago, but then Stew let slip that we’re getting new Hunting Grounds in the The Pack and I’d love to see the additional cities carry over to other gamelines too.
Our group loves Requiem 2nd Edition and we are really looking forward to what you come up with for elders. The player of one Gangrel PC in particular, who has roamed the world since the Fall of Rome. It’s nice she fits in well with neonate PCs under Requiem rules, as she had slept for a long time and her blood potency was just 1 when she entered the chronicle. She has a few dots more than the others, but nobody complains. But her player has kept an eye on the development of A Thousand Years of Night ever since it was announced. Hope it gets released soon!
A suggestion – since you no longer have Fog of Ages, you may consider nostalgia as a major theme. An elder may have adapted to modern times and established her power, but she feels increasingly detached and alien. She desperately tries to recreate an era long gone, but everyone around her doesn’t understand what it meant to live back then. It’s not that much about technology or language, but rather state of mind that feels increasingly foreign.
This could open a lot of possibilities, including Humanity checks and derangements. How an elder copes with nostalgia? Does she try to recreate a time long passed or does she pretend it’s all better now? Is she angry that she cannot recover what she has lost?
A blessing often may turn out to be a curse, so I’ll be very excited to see what you have in this book.
Late comment (I know, I know). Having read the outline, there’s one tingling point of concern. I notice mention of things like the dynasties in the Invictus Book, not wanting to repeat things from Ancient Mysteries, etc… but I was under the impression that those books were dead and buried with 2nd Edition. Did I misread something here?
Hi,
I know it’s one hell of a hot topic, but since the post mentionned : “This needs to be? ?awesome?, and not just a bunch of “6+” or other gratuitous stuff.”, I was wondering if there will be mechanics for 6+ levels.
I’ve read it all, the pros and the cons, the way people say its “lazy” development (don’t remember which post on the forums but it’s there somewhere).
I’m not asking for it specifically ; just curious to know if there will be mechanics since the post mentionned “not just 6+” as I wonder how far removed from humanity this will be.
Personnaly, I don’t allow my players to have them and they don’t really bug me with this.