Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

The complete series

Vampire: The Masquerade - Dark Alleys

Vampire: The Masquerade. Four new players, one not new. So, modern setting. Camarilla nobodies, a mystery to solve...

Thanks to Juan Ordonez on Unsplash

1. Lineage

11/10

A city somewhere in America, maybe even a real one.

A Gangrel vagabond

A Hecata medical student

A Toreador who never lived to be a star

A Tremere researcher

A Ventrue thug

Someone that one of the older vampires cares about is missing. She would like him found, ideally without learning about the Kindred.

--

RPGaDAY 2026 overview

RPGaDAY 2026

These are always fun, seeing responses far and wide, especially on Bluesky this year. Got some inevitable New Bremen nostalgia in with the Vampire talk, also a fair bit of Mage as is active and long-running and a few others like supers and Star Wars. What will I be doing and talking about next year? We shall see!

New Bremen venues, what if

I was briefly imagining what a game chat like New Bremen would have looked like if we had players self-select into soft play and hard play characters, but stayed within the same setting. We had "unmoderated" chats where people went off and did whatever, but some of those folks might have stayed in the main community if they could soft play. I think the tag would need to be a clearly marked longterm choice, meaning no convenient ripcording out of hard play the moment something went wrong. Probably the Storytellers could have focused mostly on the hard play parts of the game if only because those required the most adjudication. Anyway, just idle thoughts about what could have been. Maybe subconsciously prompted because I ended up wearing an old Vampire T-shirt today.

Conrad Hubbard

And yes, I know some players effectively already did this by holing up in locked chat rooms.

--

RC

I feel like this would have addressed some issues.

One of the things I wonder about was also just a significant ratio of players to STs - where I wonder if there were enough people offering content to satisfy the intense demand. For some of the most popular venues - it would seem there was players present to consume content all hours of the day and no way to be able to reasonably have content ready to go for enough of them. As a consequence - for idle people who aren't against stirring the pot, they'd go off and cause a ruckus

Vampire: The Masquerade V6 alpha

If that's what it comes out like then it will be okay after we houserule out about half the new ideas.

Lore from a certain point of view

One of the great joys of running a Vampire chronicle for people who have never played Vampire before is tossing them into a stew of contradictory conspiracies. Vampires love to present themselves as erudite and sophisticated, but they have very little evidence about their own supernatural world.

So far my group has heard...

* Three different creation myths about vampires

* Two different theoretical ways out of the curse

* About the existence of bloodlines, but not specifics

* About the existence of the Sabbat, with some (useless) history

* About werewolves and ghosts

They also heard about wizards ("they died out in the Middle Ages") shortly before meeting a mage, and about unaligned clans ("mostly weirdos who have very limited power") before running afoul of a Follower of Set/Ministry vampire.

They met a vampire who can survive sunlight at dawn

They met a mortal who can just see through Obfuscate. No idea why

They ran away from mortal hunters wearing FBI jackets, who were obviously not real agents

They have failed several gambits to get blood, and are coming to grips with the fact that they will have to do some questionable things

They discovered that animal blood is not very satisfying, then met a Kindred who feeds on animals exclusively

They heard that the Prince is Malkavian, then met her and the coterie's Malkavian immediately clocked that she is not

The Malkavian learned to aura read and has no idea how to interpret it

Everyone seems to be having a great time. It's a World of Darkness where there is lore, there is history, there are societies, but a rule is only a rule until it's broken. Supernatural things work the way they do because of magic, and symbols, and metaphors, not because of science.

Soon they'll get introduced to Gehenna, the End Times, Gehenna cults, and the mythology of the turning of the age. Probably hand-in-hand with crossing paths with actual Sabbat, an Anarch Revolt in their city, and thin-bloods looking for a place to survive.

The huge, sprawling metaplot of the World of Darkness causes some players to pursue setting mastery, to have full fundamental knowledge of the "truth" of the world, so I've made it pretty clear through events that "truth" is highly subjective and context-driven.

Everyone's got goals and agendas, but at the end of the night, it really comes down to, what will you do to survive? How are you going to make it happen? Where are you going to get blood? And who's going to pay the price for your sins?

Jesse Heinig

RPGaDAY 2026

#RPGaDAY2026

31 prompts for TTRPG writing in August.

Introduction, explanation and prompts from founder David F. Chapman.

Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

The further adventures of a circle of mages in San Francisco

Sunset City 1 (not yet called that)

Sunset City 2

Sunset City 3

Sunset City 4

Cara Lawson, Akashayana

In every generation there is a chosen one

Simon Donovan, Hermetic

May have consulted on the new season of The Librarians

Alissa Kwan, Ecstatic

All the pretty girls and all the pretty boys they get dressed up and go out dancing

Michael Lang, Verbena

Cowboy Druid

And last but definitely least:

Didi Duvall, Hollow One

Wants to be Agatha Harkness when she grows up

4A.01: Into The Portal

26/07

Our heroes (and Didi) have been enjoying relative peace and quiet - cut to Cara kicking a ghoul in the face and Simon casting out a demon - when Martin, the master of Time magic who pressed them into rewriting history to save his wife a while back, approaches them seeming tense.

Someone is planning to launch an attack on the city's Tradition Library, the base of the mages on the west coast.

When it was built.

Over a century ago.

It's been well enough concealed that he just detected it.

We go to try and stop the time warping ritual before it activates.

But it's too late.

Whiteout, hard to look at.

So Martin throws us back in time to stop it.

At least this time he tells us that's all he can do and gives us a moment to nod before he widens the portal and in we go.

Promising a soft landing.

--

Didi wakes to find herself in a nice bed. In a nice room.

With a couple of women in old-fashioned maid uniforms coming to help her get ready for the day.

II's 1883.

Surprise! Mage: The Ascension - Victorian Age

Didi tries not to look too stoked about getting a wardrobe full of Victorian dresses in mourning colours.

Miss Didi Duvall

Anne Rice's Immortal Universe RPG

Anne Rice's Immortal Universe RPG coming soon from Renegade Game Studios

Interesting. Especially coming from the main recent licensed publishers for World Of Darkness.

Vampire: The Masquerade V?

Vampire: The Masquerade 5.5 or maybe 6 on the way, depending how playtests go.

Panel video, wobbly camera, timestamped at The Question

Cue the fandom panic!

J: I really liked V5, but I'm sure it'll go the way of Requiem

My favourite TTRPG classes

My favourite TTRPG classes:

1: Angsty Vampire

2: Princess

3: Protective Hero

4: Spooky

5: Comedy Sidekick

New Bremen

20/4/2000

When I was

a young geek

White Wolf dot com

took me into the city

to see Godzilla fight

Bloodlines 2

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

It's real. It's happening.

I've been playing Bloodlines 2 for a couple hours now and I like the flip from starting as a nobody. I got to punch a guy across a room, wrench a padlock off a door instead of the bit where you have to pick locks, make other vampires nervous just by existing (while also being kind if I want) and the writing and options let me feel like I'm going along with quests and plots for my own reasons instead of having to. Now if I can dance without looking like Kermit the Frog...

Month Of Darkness 2025

#MonthOfDarkness 2025 prompts just in time.

Very Vampire coded so some Tanith IC but mostly went OOC

1. When I Changed

It was agony, but afterwards it seemed so wonderful... at first.

Vampire: Lonely City

Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition

Lonely City

New York, and the Camarilla cracking down on Anarchs

0: New Players

0 part 2

28/9

Alice, Thin-blood runaway

Marla, Gangrel street defender

Steven, Brujah student activist

Swan, Ravnos courier

1: Fall

28/9

At a raucous meeting of the anarchs of Brooklyn, the borough's elder Stirling confirms that Callihan, the Baron of the Bronx and liaison with the Queen of Manhattan, is dead. Nobody knows how or why, yet, but he had a long list of enemies across the city.

Chronicles Of Darkness

Happy 21st anniversary to Chronicles Of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem!

We may not see more for them but they gave us a lot and more fun can still be had with them.

MarkK: VtR gave me Requiem for Rome, my favourite vampire rpg thing in the ever of ever. I still go back and re-read it.

RPGaDay 2025

#RPGaDAY2025

A prompt a day through August to talk about RPGs

1) PATRON

Who gives the PCs directions or orders to their next adventure? This can very much affect how they feel about it.

ICONS: Unity

ICONS

Unity

The big superhero team of their setting, sorta-grounded like the MCU

Guardian

Laura Kincaid

Superhumanly strong and tough granddaughter of a legendary supersoldier, team leader and brick

Lancelot, power armour

Mist, phasing and invisibility

Clarity, sonic stun singer

Black Angel, all-weapon martial artist

Vampire: The Last City

Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition

The Last City

Los Angeles, held by the Anarchs against all enemies, now in need of new leaders. Is there a better way to do this?

Session 0: too early to say.

Matt: MacNeil get the final death?

Nobody much canon around... or are they

J: Claudia and Tanith just dancing at goth clubs?

Me: "I consider it my duty to the Kindred of the city that there's a decent goth night at least every other week." One of the NPCs

1: Nightfall

11/5

September, and LA's vampires have time to do more than hunt again after the short nights of summer. The guiding council of the Free States want to investigate San Diego having gone dark. The Rack clubs are in a currently good-natured feud looking for ways to lure in students as the academic year starts. There are rumours of agents for the Camarilla - or someone else - in the city.

And someone's preying on street kids, in a way that will leave someone dead soon if nobody stops them.

Martin, Ravnos, community activist

Rake, Caitiff, tagger

St. Clair, Brujah, former detective

Snow, Caitiff, runaway

Willa, Toreador, history student

Fear Itself

Fear Itself

A Gumshoe system modern horror RPG.

Gumshoe characters always get the core clues and have lots of ways to get more information. But not much in general skills...

Session zero: Character Creation.

26/1

College kids in an isolated campus.

More to follow hopefully.