the nine circles of Vampire Lore Hell

04 Feb, 2025

last modified 3 months, 1 week ago

for the past two or three weeks¹ I have been trying to draft a particular post.

y'see, when I started this blog I wanted to post about my role-playing games.

I thought, oh that's easy, I've basically already written all the stuff I've GMed, I just have to retell it in a way that's fun. I thought, I really like RPG write-ups, so I might as well throw my hat into the ring. I thought, fate-temptingly, how hard could it possibly be?²

I want you to know: I haven't even fucking gotten to retelling the actual events of the godforsaken sessions yet. I have not even gotten that far. I am, like Sisyphus, perpetually stuck beginning a post that does not want to be written, and french people aren't even allowed to imagine me happy

and all of this drama and nonsense is because the system I've been running for the past two years is a title by the name of Vampire: the Masquerade, and it's kept me perpetually stuck in the ninth circle of Lore Hell.

Let Me Tell You A Story.

the first thing I fucked up, and the origin of all evil - the veritable apple of eden in this whole scenario, really - was my extremely ambitious projected audience.

I wanted to make my "tabletop rpg log" accessible to as many people as possible.

I thought it'd be a fun challenge, and anyway, less people are familiar with Vampire: the Masquerade nowadays than they used to be - and I'd have to explain the lore of the campaign, too, anyway, which (as you might imagine) involves a lot of ridiculous, soap-operatic vampire politicking. so I might as well just try to get everyone caught up to speed, right?

needless to say, this is easier half-thought than done. my first attempt at this post - and, embarrassingly, my second and third as well - had something I regularly kick fiction authors for even looking at, much less daring to try. it was my second mistake: the world-infamous and much-reviled upfront lore-dump.

it was bad. it was really, very bad. I would share an excerpt, but that's... a self-evidently unwise course of action? just trust me ok. there was one try I gave it where I did footnotes and it was a nightmare. do not recommend

god, just a few months ago I was yelling at Snow Crash for taking like eight chapters to cram into my mouth an entire academic paper's worth of gonzo biblical conspiracy, and now look at me, doing the very same thing and not even realizing for three weeks. shame on my house, shame on my family, shame on my non-existant horse. shaaaaaaaaaaaaaame, Charlie...

anyways - Vampire: the Masquerade is, for those unfamiliar, a tabletop roleplaying system that has a shit-ton of Lore that is hard-baked into its mechanics.

of course, "lore is baked into the mechanics" is, to some extent, true of all role-playing games. playing as an elven wizard implies both elves and wizards, after all. but VtM requires... let's say, a bit more understanding than is average? it's probably best if I show you

to compare: if someone's only ever played one tabletop RPG, let's say a totally random name like Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, then you'd be unfamiliar with the mechanics of, for example, an OSR-type game. but you'd still get the gist if I told you that in an OSR game my human fighter survived an honor duel with an orc, right?

like, you might not grasp the epic highs and lows of the Number To Hit Matrix, nor how ridiculously looney-tunes-y the so-called gritty mechanics rendered the fight; perhaps not even how close characters in this game regularly come to immediately dying to level ¼ centipedes, on the first round of their first-ever combat³. but you would understand the idea of a fantasy setting, with dungeons and orcs in it, where being a human is notable and being a fighter is a job

however, imagine I present this same 5e player with the following sentence:

in our Camarilla campaign, he's playing as a Tremere neonate, whose Domitor and Sire has put him up to babysitting the city's Toreador Primogen's Grandchilde. in exchange for this job, the Primogen will put in a good word for him and the other PCs with the Council, which will accelerate the Prince's legal formalization of their Coterie!

this is a statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged⁴. there is an insurmountable amount of Lore Jargon in this sentence that it is critically necessary to understand so you can even know what the hell I just told you was going on. this is a crime, possibly, somewhere, or at least I would call it cruel and unusual

you might glean things from the terms used. you know, surely, what a council is. you know what a prince is. you know what a city is. but what the hell is a toreador?

but the problem isn't even solved with "gleaning", because the problem is not the confusion, it's the exhaustion. I believe that jargon is off-putting because it's overwhelming. it would grind the pace of my work to a halt. even if I did this well enough for it to be a feature of the text and not a flaw, most people would need to read the article real slow, and while for some people that's fun, for other people that's a total turnoff - and honestly, I'd like to choose when I'm doing terminology overload in my writing!

but there's still too much information to explain on the fly and as I've already mentioned, the upfront lore-dump doesn't work. so now what?

...what about just linking the wiki?

twists. movies have them, video essayists imitate them, they're just like us.

here's the twist of this post: I said "wanting to write for everyone" had been my first mistake. and this was a lie. I had made one mistake before - from the very moment I picked up the game system, before the player characters were gleams in my friends' eyes...

and no the mistake wasn't picking up Vampire: the Masquerade in the first place⁵

my mistake was the edition of Vampire: the Masquerade that I picked up.

because what we have been playing all along has not been the fan-preferred edition, Onyx Path's 20th Anniversary Edition. it has been V5, the 2018 edition owned by Paradox Interactive.

...if you hear slams, that's every actual VtM fan leaving the post and blocking me on social media. please, come back. don't throw the organic, grass-fed tomatoes at me, finnish LARPers - I know I fucked up, and I am unrepentant in my fuckup, also,

listen, I know it's a crime I'm not playing 20th Anniversary Edition - but I hope it's an understandable one. I will endeavour to explain, and then you will judge me, and I will accept the verdict you cast on whether I am a true nerd or a poser - but let me get my defense straight first, and then the Ren Faire pillory, OK?

because, like everything else, it all goes back to Lore Hell.

I mean, okay.

it doesn't entirely back to Lore Hell - I am also intimidated by any tabletop roleplaying game older than I am, as is most of my gaming group of fellow zoomers⁶. and like, I think 20th Anniversary released well into my own lifespan, but it's still scary just for being a purported continuation of a 20-year-old game, as stated in the edition's title⁷.

at the end of the day, though, the Lore Hell situation does not help: 20th Anni⁸, as far as I'm aware, keeps its two decades of FromSoft Nonsense mostly in continuity, and as a GM, that's a lot to juggle. even without mentioning the Biblical Vampire Apocalypses, tell me: do I look like I know what a Kuei-Jin is? I barely known Siddharta Gautama from the manga where he goes to Japan with Jesus. there's a morfuckingbillion random vampiric bloodlines without enough specimens to become full clans in the white wolf wiki, bloodlines whose Antediluvians must've been randomly-generated townies in Caine's very own Sims game. Beckett's Jyhad Diary⁹ is a random string of words, to me

and, like... V5 cleans things up, a little bit? I would not go as far as to praise it too much for it, but the fact of the matter is that it does attempt to soft-reboot the two-odd decades of lore (I have no opinion on the rule changes). I appreciate that 20th Anniversary exists as a way to keep the game people love alive, but I think there is room for something like V5, to keep the game and its stories simpler for newbs like me¹⁰. perhaps... we might even coexist?

and Paradox wouldn't even like us coexisting, which I think should motivate you further to consider. like, isn't it beautiful? nature has the capacity to heal. we can hang out and play together, you and me, frolicking in the beautiful fields of our minds. lalalala...

there is a slight problem with the "rebooting things" thing, though.

...aaaaaand it might maaaaybe, possibly, invalidate my whole argument about V5 if I explain it?

obviously, anybody still reading this far into this nonsense-post is statistically likely to be a perfectly reasonable individual (so please be niceys to me), one who understands that my reasons to pick V5 over 20th Anni are multifaceted and complex (so please be niceys to me), and that I didn't necessarily intend to blog to strangers about my GMing when I started this game, instead picking "the edition I thought fit my needs best¹¹", as is perennial advice for tabletop roleplaying games (so please be niceys to me).

nonetheless, it is a problem that I think should be pointed out. and a good reason to point it out is to continue our case study of Lore Hell. this is the last problem I'm facing (so far), and maybe if I explain it, I will be freed from Lore Hell's thorny maze, Satan will spit me out, and I'll ice-skate away and into Vergil's waiting arms, etc¹²

here is Lore Hell's Final Trick: V5 doesn't just soft-reboot the Vampire: the Masquerade lore. it also writes entirely new lore, because the last time lore was written about the setting, it was 2004 and the franchise was dying (I think??), so they literally just kicked off the in-universe apocalypse - and V5, set 15 years later, had to pick up the pieces and decommission the end of times. and it did that while canonizing that Theo Bell went Anarch and blew Hardestadt's Mads Mikkelsen-looking mug clean off with a shotgun.

so I still have to communicate this goddamn new lore, even to veteran Vampire: the Masquerade players, because they might not have played V5 yet

...and it also means I can't just link to a wiki for the lore, because the old wiki isn't canon to this edition, and the new wiki is empty.

Sisyphus, I told you I was Sisyphus...

...and yet, you know what? I'm gonna persevere.

I'm going to write the damn article. as soon as this ignoble rant is posted - whenever it's posted - I'm going to start writing about these damn vampires. you will meet them. I will do my level best, as GM and blog-author, to make you care for and cherish them, and root for them, in all their evil schemes to suck vlood, eeeeugh, and we will have a proper Los Feratu¹³ of a time. I will do my damn best to make this happen

and the ultimate moral I've learnt today is thus: writing is hard.

writing is really hard. and it gets harder the better you want the finished product to be. and I am a horrid little perfectionist, completely incurable because I don't want to be cured, so it's extra hard for me and my sorts.

but you can always redo imperfect things from the top. you can always start again, and in fact you have to. the only way to get better is to do more of it. you absolutely must start again, and again, and again, because writing, rewriting, editing, polishing, putting things out there, organizing whatever the hell is going on, all of that are skills taught only, and exclusively, at the University of Hard Knocks...

...and I'm [JOKE EXPUNGED FOR BEING DETRIMENTAL TO MY DIGITAL FOOTPRINT] lmaooooo

okay, I should be wrapping this monster up soon. I'll see what I can do

I have tried to not adopt this type of tone for most of my (short) Bear posting history. you'll notice a lot of my previous posts are written without as much sarcasm and exhasperation, pretty sincerely, only with the occasional digression or aside. you might think that those are lower effort for me, and that I've pulled out some kind of additional comedic stops today.

I want you to know that the opposite is true: this post is true blue venting, this is how I talk all the time, and my previous posts were carefully written to be less unfunny¹⁴. it takes genuine effort for me to maintain a coherent tone and not constantly interject with memes and footnotes

this post is kind of an experiment, which I figure is normal for a sixth-ever post (or thereabouts - I'm not keeping strict track). I'm curious if it'll be received any differently from my usual, less overly-expressive posts - though the reception most likely won't stand out in any way, because I'm a pretty small and new blog and it's normal that I don't have a lot of people looking at it yet, I have to stick with this for a minute to develop any kind of audience...

I'm also curious if I will like this post once it's done - I hear the most important audience when you're writing is yourself, and that rings true to me, so I'm hesitant to post things I don't like. this beast might remain in my drafts for all eternity, like the urban legends about the Disney vaults. and y'know, this is all normal and fine¹⁵.

I'll be re-starting the Hell Post from scratch again next time I give it a shot. you can look forward to it sometime after I'm done writing it and have read through it a few times to catch typos and other things. I might sandwich some other things between this post and the Post from Hell, depending on what I'm feeling like writing - I don't really have a plan going into this "blog" thing, lol

and when I do restart the Post from Hell, I think my next draft will jump right into the action. the lorespeak will be treated in a Dune-type of way. that'll be fun, right?

so that's the post. now I go eat dinner.

...oh and yeah I am aware that I shouldn't say "campaign I'm GMing" and "NPCs", and instead I should be saying "Chronicle I'm STing" and "STCs". I didn't do this, and won't be doing this, because having game-specific terms is confusing and I will cull any unnecessary ones. but also I think this acknowledgement is a funny note to end the post on, because there's a nonzero chance that, if more than one person reads this post, a VtM fan will have noticed my vocabulary and have been wondering the entire post what's up with that. I hope this satisfies you, bestie

and like I guess VtM vampires also call themselves Kindred too but you understand how this is silly at this point right

anyway, thank you so much if you've actually read this post holy fuck. I already usually put a "thank you" at the end of my posts, because I treasure any readers¹⁶, but today I will make it special:

thank you, from the bottom of my heart, so much for reading!

#longform #metablogging #ttrpgs #✨ #🌕