Yesterday another RPG campaign ended – this time it was our Changeling: The Lost game that we’ve been struggling with all summer (scheduling is hell).

Changeling is a game of “beautiful madness” according to the official tagline – Our version was about walking the thin line between the beautiful madness and the harsh reality. The fantastic elements of the game were surreal, mythical, fairy tale-like and quite separate from the real life elements of the game, only clashing in few occasions, when outsiders (such as the police) got involved in the mythical situations. The best game moments for me rose from this contrast – when the Changelings of the Miami Courts were preparing for war in a grand, supernatural, glamorous gesture, one of the player characters needed to restore some of her Glamour (best done by going to humans with strong emotions and soaking those), so she went to a nearby meeting of breast cancer patients, and listened to their stories for a while to do that. The reality of that moment really sunk in because there was absolutely nothing fantastic about it, as opposed to the scene just moment before.

The Changeling setting provides a good solid story for the players to walk through. Just by going through the motions that are provided in the basic book, you can get an interesting story where you pretty much know where you’re going all the time. The escape from your captors, the return to a world no-longer your own, realization that it has managed quite well without you, the meeting of those who were a part of your life before, the meeting of those who are like you and so on. It’s a very good, wide path that borderlines on railroading the story. But even with the clear steps you take, there is enough leeway to make those scenes original for each character.

Another thing learned from the game was that the system needs to be understood by the players before the game starts fully. I’ve been so spoiled by the freeform games I’ve been running to think that the system is a secondary thing, but it’s critical to make sure the players understand what they’re getting into and what their choices mean. Spikey’s character ended up really odd on the technical side because his interaction with the system was done partly uninformed.

And then of course there were the scheduling problems that led to the campaign ending quite fast as people (mostly me) were tearing their hair out as we never got to play the game. Changeling would benefit from more games, each one focusing on one single thing and theme, explored from both the fairy tale and the real world perspective. Not games where you have to rush through two or three big things in one session so you can finally end the game at some point.

The downside of Changeling is that because of the damn good path for the story, I don’t feel like running it again. With the old Vampire: The Masquerade, there wasn’t that clear a way it works well, so there was a lot of replay value – Lots of things you’d like to do and try with it. While I could run a chronicle about Court intrigue or hunting in the Hedge, it wouldn’t be the thing I found cool about Changeling in the first place. A shame really. I could run another chronicle at some point to different people and go through the same motions in a different light, but that’s unlikely as well.

All in all, it’s a good game. It’s a great setting. Possibly the favorite one from World of Darkness stuff for me. Fond memories came from it.

Also, as a bonus, the spotify playlists we used for the game:

• Neon Lights and Car Sounds
• Fairy Tales
• Normality
• Arcadia
• Semiautomagic
• Court – Winter
• Court – Spring
• Court – Autumn
• Court – Summer
• Darkest Days (Penultimate game soundtrack)
• Finale (Not actually used in the Finale, but played before the last game session began)

We also used Chris Vrenna’s American McGee’s Alice soundtrack in the finale, but that’s not available on spotify in Finland, so had to use the CD.

Transhumanism popped up a couple of times in front of me today. First of all, been looking into Eclipse Phase, which looks like a nice game. You can read a nice interview about it over at hp+.

And then there’s Aimee Mullins @ TED, which is about the same thing, but skipping the scifi part and bringing it to our time and day.

If nothing fails, the website for the next big RPG campaign of mine will be up in 10 days.

Yesterday was one of those days when our Changeling game got canceled at last minute and we all wanted to kill Spikey for it. But nothing really new there, really. So, me, Taija and Mikko were grumpy for a while, pondering what to do next. Then Mikko came up with the idea that I should demo how the 4th Edition D&D system worked, since I had been talking a lot about it to him. Taija didn’t object, so we called Petsku, an almost-neighbor, made D&D characters and I ran a couple of encounters for them to show various aspects of the system.

After the demo, we talked about it for a while and the players were “Ooh, I want to play more with my fun character!”

And I was feeling really negative about it for some reason. Something about continuing the demo game further wasn’t “doing it for me”, but I couldn’t really name what was wrong, so I said a lot of “maybe”s and kept on smiling/nodding.

This morning, after spending good time wondering about it, it hit me. I want to get something out of a game I’m running. I want to challenge myself when I’m running games. I don’t want to get stuck on the same old, same old. I want to look back at a game and say that I did something new there.

The Summer DnD (I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog) is probably the last DnD campaign I’ll run using the 4th edition straight from the books – In it, I’m exploring the system, I’m trying to push it a bit each time we play, see how it works for what, all while having a fun game with it. But like with all the other gaming systems, I will want to move away from what’s been given to me. The next time I’ll start a campaign with the 4th Edition, it will be full of house rules, have a world that doesn’t look like the one given in the books on any level and will feel like my game from the start.

Starting a game based on random characters, made straight from the book, for a demo, just doesn’t qualify. It feels like doing the same thing over again, being bound by the same restrictions.

So, sorry guys, it won’t continue.

I sort of swore I wouldn’t go into my personal life in this new incarnation of the-cow.net blog, but I guess I’m just weak. The actual gaming-related whining is somewhere down a few paragraphs.

The original the-cow.net’s (back in 2002, yikes, that’s 7 years ago) first post read “Well, I’m single again” and it was posted on the day a relationship that had tried to turn me into a “normal person” had ended.

During the time I spent living in it, I did my best to focus on the things that aren’t frowned upon by the mainstream society – I worked hard, I did what I could to be a good boyfriend, and kept a very presentable self-image so that we wouldn’t be marked as “strange people”. For a while we lived in what was probably closest thing to a gated community there was in Turku. So I cut back on my habits of watching strange Science Fiction television series, focusing on on “funny” family friendly comedies. I didn’t have any time for RPGing, but instead exercised at the gym. I didn’t hang out with the LARPers on my free time as I was befriending the neighbors and had barbecue with them.

In general I was being the guy that I could see the girl wanting to spend her life with. Sad thing was that I wasn’t really that guy at all. I’m a geek, through and true. So eventually there was bad blood, there were tears and there was the end of the relationship.

After that I spent time finding a balance to the question of what I wanted to be in a relationship, something that led me to avoid them for a long time. Either I saw a “critical flaw” in the other party, one that made me think I’d have to compromise myself to be with them, so I didn’t even bother. Or I’d again found myself drifting into the role of that “normal guy” to impress them, and then, disgusted at myself, would back off before things got serious.

So yesterday, the topic of “Do you cut your game sessions short so you can see me sooner?” came up when talking with my girlfriend. It’s one of those questions that have no good answer, really – either I’m placing more value on the gaming than on the relationship or it’s an indication that I’m once again slipping to the “compromising who I am just to be with you” pattern I had fallen prey to all those years earlier.

Like I’ve mentioned before in the blog, our gaming group’s sessions have been going through a scheduling crisis the past year or two. We’re in a situation where even a simple game can get delayed for months because people don’t manage to fit their timetables together. On one hand this is because we’re busy with our lives and jobs, but on the other it’s become an issue of prioritizing. Everything goes before the games. But then, why would you want to spend the evening pretending to be in a fantasy world killing goblins when you can go see a great gig at the local nightclub? If it was just that sort of things that can be easily justified, I think there wouldn’t be a problem. Sadly, before gaming also comes watching some movie alone in your room, washing your hair or ordering your sock drawer. Games feel like a very low priority hobby sometimes.

And as it feels that much a prioritizing issue, I tend to ask those of my players who have problems with their schedules if they really want to continue playing. And let them know it’s not a bad thing to quit if they don’t feel like carrying on. But it seems that the issue really is about time just being a rare commodity and people not being available on the same days. Player A has choir practice on Monday and Thursday, and Player B could only play on those days. Finding a day that fits everyone is painful, and everyone wants to play.

So, cutting the game short once we’ve managed to get the session ready would be a bit unprofessional. And I told her the truth – I haven’t been cutting the sessions short to get to her earlier. But the rarity of the games is not the only reason why I answered so.

It’s been a way of gaming for us to keep game sessions short. 3-5 hours. This might seem counterproductive since we’re having such long breaks between sessions, but there are good reasons for it. With such busy schedules, investing 3-5 hours every now and then to a game is trivial – You can still get back home after it and prepare the presentation for the bank merger you need to have ready by the morning. It won’t ruin your life to commit to play in such a game. And also, you don’t really need more time to have a good game session. A lot can be accomplished in for example 4 hours. Everyone gets to play their bits and the attention spans stay solid (unless you give the players lots and lots of sugar to eat, but that’s besides the subject).

Doubling the time of the game to 8 hours would never double the time of productive play. Extra hours add up to exhaustion and eventual silliness that follows. And people would be tired as they’ve just come from work and will need to be up again in 4 hours when the game is over. And as a lot of our games rely on improvisation more than tedious pre-planning, exhaustion of the GM will hit at some point and start weighing down the game.

If I need to mention a major downside of the short games, it is that we’re friends, and friends need to gossip and be social when they meet each other. So if some people haven’t talked in a while, they will want time to do that before we start the game. So sometimes the planned 5 hours turns into 3 as everyone has to catch up on what’s been happening. But like said, you can accomplish a lot of gaming even if the time is limited. As long as everyone is into what’s happening and willing to contribute.

So if it takes 1.5 months to organize a 3 hour game session, it would be a bit wrong towards everyone for me to cut that to 2 hours because I wanted to be with my girlfriend just a bit earlier. But even if I said I haven’t cut a session short to get to her sooner, there is a “but”. Just like there always is. If it would happen that she’d ask me to cut a session short, I would.

So, nothing’s different from before? I’m still willing to make compromises to be something my girlfriend wants? Bad Alvan? Well, let’s compare… I’m working hard (well, been on a vacation, but theoretically), I’m trying my best to be a good boyfriend. I’m not watching that many odd SciFi shows (more to do with there being not that many good SciFi shows airing), but even fewer family comedies. I’m using some of my free time playing RPGs and some going to the gym. I’m hanging out with LARPers (if Karaoke with them counts) and barbecuing with friends when I have the opportunity. And if my girlfriend asks, I’m willing to cut down on my personal time… So nuances have changed, but it doesn’t really look that different.

The beauty of it all is in the why. I’m being myself. So when I say that I would cut a session short if my girlfriend asked, it’s because there is no ambiguity about all the trouble we go through to get the games arranged. It’s easy to trust her with the power when she’s seen  me curse all my players to the depths of hell when yet another game falls through.

And like I trust her with knowing what things mean, I do trust my players to eventually get their schedules sorted. We managed to complete one campaign (even if it took time), we’ll manage the others. As long as they’re being truthful to me when they say they want to continue playing RPGs, it will be possible to find a date that fits all the players. And then we’ll play for a few hours, kill some goblins, fight off dragons and then spend ages wondering when on Earth do we have time for that short burst of fun again.

Just deleted four very good, very long, half-finished blog-posts because they were going nowhere and have been keeping me from starting any new ones for something like a month or two now.

Since we’re half-way into the year, I thought to look back a bit and write about how things have been progressing and what my feelings about them are.

First of all, the good news. We managed to complete the Henryn viimeinen iso keikka -campaign. There was a lot of things in it that didn’t work out the way I had planned, but that’s what always happens when you’re creating a new RPG system and put it to playtest. Things need fine-tuning, a lot of it. But the basic idea works, and that’s the important bit. The campaign turned out to be a petty bet between two old criminal masterminds where people’s lives were put into stake for a single dollar and ended on a cliffhanger with all characters on their way to a possible trap. The great thing was that we actually managed to complete a full campaign run even if it was only 7 games + character creation. Our games have had a problem that they have slid to oblivion instead of actually reaching a conclusion. A way to restore faith on gaming.

Secondly, peoples’ timetables are a total pain. Both the Changeling and the Summer D&D games have suffered from this and even Henry had slight problems. Month or two long breaks aren’t unheard of because people aren’t around at the same time. But that’s life. I’m quite pessimistic with Changeling, since it’s 3 people who all need to be there for the game to work, and we can’t manage to get a time for the game together. And it’s one of those games that really suffer from long breaks as the mood of the fairytale needs to be recaptured and the not-fully-human characters re-immersed into. Game-wise it’s been a fun experience when we’ve been able to play – surreal landscapes are fun and the rules don’t come to the way too much. The Summer D&D on the other hand can surprisingly live even with the breaks. While I’m not fully happy with what D&D wants to be as a game, I am slowly seeing the potential in it. Lots of neat moving parts that are fun to twiddle.

About future plans regarding gaming – There will be a round two of Henry in the near future with the tweaked system. Also I might have gotten slightly inspired again to go try running larps after the Knutepunkt trip a couple of months ago.

I’ll hopefully get some more inspiration / time to write some actual stuff in the blog in the near future.

On my neverending quest of figuring out immersion in all kinds of surrogate realities we like to dabble in, some interesting observations came from completely surprising direction: Extras of Police Squad! DVD. Actually, Leslie Nielsen’s interview in there. 

He discussed the reasons behind the cancellation of the show after only 6 episodes, major reason being how it was a show you had to watch. No, yes, really. A television show that was meant to be watched, failed for that reason. Thing is, average Joe and average Mary come home from work, relax on the couch, turn on the telly and zone out. They don’t zone into television or the surrounding social situation around them, but somewhere in the middle.

Police Squad! being a show where you had to pay attention to both see the hidden jokes and often see where the spoken humour comes from, you’d have to avoid blinking to get it all in the way its creators intended in good faith. No, average Joe and average Mary only pay half attention and need the cued audience laugh backgrounds to remind them to be amused while watching their fave sitcom while chatting on the phone. They need to be told the general gist of things without having to look actively, because they’re talking about how that wallpaper should be painted over. It’s all about not paying attention, as they sit down to be entertained after coming home from work, where they had to pay attention all day. Major point there. It’s a situation they dictate in their own terms, in their own personal surroundings, at their own pace.

Leslie Nielsen also mentioned the size of TV screens, and it’s worth mentioning here even when the home TV sets are growing larger each year. Small screen simply does not support background action. The visual jokes and semi-hidden slapstick moments in Police Squad failed to work on limited screenspace, but those same jokes shot Naked Gun movies into successful franchise. When they were blown up into the size of a damned wall, audience really did see. 

Of course, since The-Cow.net is about games as well, we all should now sit down and confer about the relationship of said observations towards games. On a high level, it’s about immersion. On low level, we’re dabbling with everything that delivers and communicates context and story to the player. It could be those soundscapes filling the room during tabletop RPG session, or carefully chosen backgrounds during dynamic camera edit on console action games, keeping the focus on foreground, or whatever. So, how to know what tricks to use? 

I’m so waddling into Alvanspace here, and it’s creepy in here with all the flotsam eyeballing me up. But here goes..

Let’s take regular tabletop RPG. Players know each other and there’s always off-game chitchat and generally arsing about, unless they’re hardcore system nitpickers everyone hates, but for that same reason, those spoilsports never get to play the really cool games with the really fun people, so we’ll just skip them. Anyways, all that reads as social situation during the play. On the other hand, the players arrived there specifically for the game, so that reads as paying attention since they’re so motivated to bother traveling a bit, et cetera. However, there’s very little for the senses – no visuality, no directly in-situ informative sound cues, no hints of an angry orc through bad smell, or so everyone hopes. All that is delivered to players through spoken narrative, with music etc providing mood in very broad and unintrusive way. Besides the differences in delivery, it’s very much like the average Joe/Mary mindset in front of television. Casual entertainment, if you may.

Console games? More in the cinema end of the spectrum. You go to movies, you end up sitting in darkness with all your attention focused, directed and guided towards the massive silver screen. You won’t miss a beat, and social situation happens before and after the flick. At home, you grab a game pad, holding it in your hands. It becomes a focusing element that keeps reminding you how you’re in control of something, so you concentrate. You use your hands, and that clicks lots of switches in your brain. Your reflexes kick into high gear, adrenaline pumps up and oh boy, your attention is in firm hold. You wiggle your fingers and it all translates directly into visual and aural situation that progresses on and on. That’s the key. You concentrate because you use your hands, the most used tools ever. They’ve been around as long as your brain, and they were the very first thing you ever figured out about yourself. So, in a way, the game connects with you in some scarily direct ways. 

Even if your buddies are there playing with you, social interaction (laughter, remarks, etc) all circle around the game and ongoing events in there. It’s a personal or shared zone, but zone nevertheless. You’re all connected to the game through tactile communication, for lack of better words.

Maybe that’s a big item in the list of questions on how to get tabletop RPGs more immersive. No draconian rules about not SOCIALIZING but PLAYING are needed, but maybe give the players outside influence to steer them into the wanted mindset. Immersion through surroundings is kind of out of question – I can’t imagine getting immersed into the game if there’s a big projector screen with some eerie symbolism flowing around, not to mention wizardly scenes from Harry Potter or whatever. No, RPGs are around the table, and that’s the visual context. Then again, handing the players some orc and elf figurines to fiddle with isn’t going to cut it either. I’m intrigued about involving some tactile immersion here, connecting the certain synapses like the game pad does. Some minimal physical involvement that doesn’t look or feel too out of place around the table. 

However, more I try to come up with something physical, I keep coming short-handed.

Given the realworld situation and surroundings where the game is played, there’s really no extra gadgetry that would help the players to dive into deeper end of world pool. And more I think about it while writing this, more I keep going towards the sounds used in conjunction with stuff happening around the table. Again. But alas, this time it’s much simpler and it will have tactile experience involved in a very important way!

Scenario-time! 

GM lets Joebob know he has a good chance to make a bloody good show with his next attack – but only if the dice rolls for his favour big time. It’s a potential show-off ending to a fierce battle, and even the music is off. Tense silence fills ears. Joebob takes the dice in his hand, aware of everyone watching, and Joebob ..

[GM hits a button hidden under the table, and slow heartbeat-like rumble that goes du-dum, du-DUM, DU-DUM begins to rise up into existence, dominating everything. Lights dim slightly, except the one that is pointed at Joebob and his dice]

.. stops for a second, hair standing up in his neck and wondering how the hell his teeth are clattering, and with a short sweep of his hand, he lets the dice fly. Dice hits the tabletop — and rumble stops right there, as if cut by knife. Dice number is checked, situation releases and then those lights return to normal, too. Game goes on, regardless of outcome. It wasn’t about the outcome in the end – it was the anticipation everyone wanted to play.

So, perhaps we can make the most basic gameplay controller, the humble dice more tactile to us, if we tie different elements to it. It requires some setting up, but hardly impossible for any GM with some dedication and sense of live dramaturgy. Include an event at the begin to set the players into game, and work the arc as you feel, as long as you give the players something to really feel about in the end. Even if one event clicks big time for players, they remember the whole game as very memorable. 

Tie it all together. I dare you.

I just need to get this damn post written before I head to Norway, so here goes, boring or not. Blogging from the Helsinki airport, connected to what is possibly the worst WLAN I’ve met in a while.

I’m known for how I like to run games that aren’t based on the world of any known system. Preferring to draw stuff purely from my own imagination, or at least dilute and remix the original source so much that the result is something that no longer resembles it. When I was asked to run a game for a group of mostly first-timers (including Spikey, who hasn’t played a single honest RPG in his life, just things like College of War run by me), the first natural instinct was to run something home-brew. But for some reason, I ended up running a game of Changeling: The Lost to them. And most surprisingly, it was more or less by-the-book.

The player characters were a group of people abducted to serve as pets and playthings of a couple of insane faerie sisters. Mikko played a burglar who had stolen a ring from the White Sister and because of this, spent 10 years as a pet of some sort to the pair of Gentry. Desperate to hide from the wicked one of the sisters, he hid in the trees, and eventually developed squirrel-like traits in the process. Taija played a emo/goth chick who ended up as a dancing marionette for the sisters for what felt like an eternity and then discarded like an old toy. When she returned to the human world 5 years after her disappearance, she was partly doll, unable to close her eyes and having hinges in her joints. Spikey’s character disappeared from the real world in 1973, and returned to a new, completely alien surroundings after being something of a Mr. Potato Head for the twins, who cut off his nose, ears, chin and whatever and replaced them with others so many times that holding on to what he was might have been difficult. The end result of all this was a man made of mirror able to switch his appearance on a whim to pretty much anything he wants to.

The two games we’ve run so-far has sparked a renewed enthusiasm in me to get first-timers to game with me. They aren’t burdened by years of action and adventure by Dungeons and Dragons, and things that might be “old” to the mainstream RPG crowd still provide endless amounts of entertainment for them. The game has gone into fantastically dark places and feels like what Vampire: The Masquerade should have felt like back in the day when we were playing it. We’ve so-far focused on the little and personal aspects of the characters as they’ve moved back to the real world. Mikko’s character has been replaced by a fetch made out of sticks and stones, who is now the father for his child and a husband for his wife. Spikey’s replacement is a shrewd bastard like the original, and seems like it’s taken an active role in finding Spikey. Something that is only made worse by the fact that he’s in the State Senate. And Taija’s character found out that her replacement had died, and its death had driven her family apart. And as said, I’ve been playing the game by the book, without the need to come up with something even more fantastic, because the players don’t know what to expect from the actual game. This is something that bothered me about Vampire: The Masquerade back in the day – EVERYONE knew the big secrets, and the little secrets.

It’s noticable how the players’ play styles differ. Spikey’s been mostly playing in over-the-top freeform high fantasy games GM’d by yours truly, so the notion of rules sometimes baffles him, he’s mostly a player who pokes at the game world to see if he can break it from within somehow and then laugh at the result. Manatic’s an old fox and it’s easy to see when he wants something to happen – he steers the situation towards it and makes it happen (which is ok, of course). He’s the closest to a story-focused player we have, and even he’s quite character-centric. And Taija is really immersing into the character. Pure character all the way. So a nice mix.

When I get back to Helsinki, I have to run some more first-timer games. So much fun. Now, I’ll be heading to the airport bar.

So, remember back in the day when everything was simple. Evil was Evil and Good was Good. Or at least it was easier to tell who was backstabbing you because they weren’t a part of whatever side you were on. And this gave you more than enough excuse to stab them in the eye first. Because, you know. They were the enemy.

The older I get, the more I seem to appreciate the simple things like that. When you can simplify a large group of something in a game to just a large group of something and be happy about it. While games full of individuals are fun, it’s nice to be able to identify groups as well. And in a large scale games, even better so.

When people ask what my favorite video game of all times was, I answer Star Control 2 without hesitation (unless I’m feeling exceptionally nostalgic about some other game that very moment). A big great part of the affection has to do with the amazing job the designers did with the various races in it. The basic setup of the game is that there are these big evil Ur-Quan things that have pretty much subjugated the whole galaxy under their rule (read: They’re The Evil). Including the human race, who are now living under a slave shield, stranded on Earth. The only beacon of hope is the player’s Captain and his super-ship, who goes around the star-systems, meeting old alien allies who have turned hostile or gone into hiding, trying to convert them back to the good fight. And maybe make some new allies in the process.

The races (read: factions) in the game are wonderfully unique when compared to each others. They are made quite simplistic, so that they don’t have a huge number of defining characteristics. A big part is of course the speech-patterns and the way they look, but they also have quite a personality. Each race is like an extension of a very solid, vivid, coherent personality. There is the sycophant, the coward, the honor-obsessed, the angsty, etc. race. The race as a collective share the traits, but there might be individuals who are individuals, while still being part of the race. Each of the races have a couple of these character traits that they embody, and each have a very strongly defined society. They have their superiors and they have their political systems. They have their passions and they have their quirks. But, all in all, they can be discussed with caricatures. “Those hippie birds”, “The honor-obsessed kamikaze/samurai rodents”, “The communication impaired great old one fish” and so on.

And they have a wonderfully complex relationship with each other. No man is an island, so to speak. Even if in this case the men are alien beings that aren’t even remotely human. To quote something from the game:

“This may come as a shock, but the Shofixti are reborn. We have a Shofixti Captain here with us. Now do you believe?”

If this is being a true thing, there will be many changes.

But we are a species long wise in the ways of deceit.

Ye must be proving these words ye say, Captain.

Send the Shofixti to us as a way of proof.

Those were the words of the Yehat, a funny-looking bird-like race who lived and died by their code of honor. When they failed to protect their marsupial allies, the Shofixti, the whole race fell into despair, and only through the leadership of their queen, they managed to stay even semi-coherrent, and joined the Evil Side to forget the tragedy.

I’ll switch to tabletop roleplaying for a moment – You might have heard of a game called Vampire: the Masquerade, where they came up with a great mechanic that has been later dubbed the clubhouse system amongst friends. Every character belongs to a club. Membership is mandatory. A character can belong to a single club. And can’t change their colors. The vampires’ clubs in Vampire: The Masquerade were their clans. You get bitten by a vampire who belongs to a clan and you belong to that clan as well. There was an artist clan, there was a businessman clan, there was a rebel clan, there was a clan of ugly vampires. And that worked damn well. It was easy to connect with, easy to vary, twist, mirror and all that. You could make a vampire character that was a part of the businessman clan, who was a brute. You could make him as much of a brute as you wanted. But he was still initiated into the vampires through the a part of a proud and long tradition of businessmen. He was chosen by the businessmen to become a vampire, and thus he is defined by the clan even if he wanted to be defined by it or not. If he had been a part of the artist clan, the fact that the artists had chosen to turn the brute into a vampire would have mattered as much, or even more, than the fact that he’s a brute.

And it was easy to build political structures for the vampires. Every relationship was in the end defined by the clans – even if some vampire boss managed to rule his city so that all the different vampires from different clans were one big shiny happy family, if one of the clans’ big names arrived to the city, the clan members were more than likely to flock under his wing. And usually even this wasn’t needed for the players to talk about things like “Wonder what the Tremere (the magician clan of the vampires) are up to, we haven’t heard anything of them lately” or “If we want to go to the woods, we may need some help from the Gangrel (the half-animal vampire clan)”. Even if the whole local Gangrel population was a group of former zookeepers and biology professors, the instinct would be to run to them when planning a woodland trip, because “The Gangrel, they know the woods.”

Besides the clans, there was the division between “us and them”, the Camarilla and the Sabbat. In the early works, Sabbat was pretty much an undefined terror that was only very loosely described in the source books. Camarilla was the group where the clans belonged to and that had all the player characters in it. Later, Sabbat got some clans as well, making it equal to Camarilla and as playable. But before that, while there might have been political squabbles and backstabbing between the Camarilla clans, when it came to Sabbat, there was a nice solid threat that everyone hated equally.

White Wolf released several games in their game line after Vampire: The Masquerade, that tried to follow the same mold, but only Mage: The Ascension came close to managing a good, pure mandatory clubhouse system. With games like Werewolf: The Apocalypse, where the clubhouse you belonged to was determined by birth (thus there being no “why is this character part of our club” thing) or Wraith: The Oblivion, where the clubhouses were kind of odd and hard to point out, it didn’t just work. In Mage, the character gravitated towards one of the clubs because of the similarities in their worldviews, which made the club something that could be more easily thought through.

Now, exit the old White Wolf games and enter the next generation. The clubhouse system evolved there. Each strain of bogeymen (vampires, werewolves, whatnot) have not one, but two clubs they belong to. The club they are born into (this might be the vampire’s clan, or the fairie’s type) and the club they join (the vampire’s ideology, much like Camarilla or Sabbat in the old days, or the court of faeries the critter belongs to, or something like that). This creates a far more complex network of relationships between various factions, as each character is usually loyal to at least two external bodies. And as they say on the internet, “OMFG TEH DRAMA” when these two come to clashes.

But it’s taken something away from it all. Without the clear-cut clubhouses, the factions have become blurred, and it’s no-longer a question of wondering what the Tremere are up to, it’s a question of the individuals in that particular city. It takes away from the grandeur of it all to know that you’re most likely just involved in local politics than to be, through the clans, actually affecting something greater. To return to the earlier example of Star Control 2 – the fact that you were dealing with a real faction allowed something like the following to happen:

“All right, I’ll send over the Shofixti.”

We are scanning the separation of a vessel from yer fleet, Captain and indeed, its configuration matches that of a Shofixti Scout vessel.

This had better not be a trick, Captain!

We are knowing the power of a Glory Device, and if you detonate the weapon near us the price for you shall be dear, very dear.

The Scout has docked, and we await the pilot’s appearance at the airlock.

The atmosphere cycle is complete… the door slides open… and

AWK!! BRAAK!! YEEP!! IT IS TRUE!!! THE SHOFIXTI ARE ALIVE!!!

Look at that furred muzzle, those shining black eyes, the sweet claws!

Our children have returned from oblivion!!

But now we are faced with the cruellest truth!…

…We who have sacrificed our honor! We who have lain with our enemy!

WE ARE NOT WORTHY! WE ARE NOTHING!…We are less than nothing.

But wait! We are not Spathi. We are Yehat… OF THE STARSHIP CLANS!

We will NOT live this lie any longer!

Listen as I speak these words! If our Queen makes the dishonorable command

then it is THE QUEEN WHO HAS NO HONOR!

And a dishonorable Queen is NO QUEEN AT ALL!

We, the Zeep-Zeep, are the only Clan who remember the TRUE MEANING of honor we shall TEAR THE QUEEN FROM HER THRONE!

The two-thousand year reign of the Veep-Neep Queens IS OVER!

THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!

Sorry. A bit carried away there. But if you’ve played the game, you know how much pathos that bit of text contains. I mean tha because it’s clear that the Yehat are a honorable race, and that they mourn over the loss of the Shofixti, it’s possible, that when the race (as an entity) is presented with a Shofixti captain, they will actually rebel against their queen. Not just go “oh well, me and Bob agree with this and think the system’s a bit bad now”, but have a revolution.

In old Vampire The Masquerade this sort of wholesome clan-movement happened a lot. One of the Camarilla’s clans actually got fed up with Camarilla and left. The Gangrel got fed up at some point with the system and decided they could leave it behind. Of couse a few individuals here and there stayed behind, but the Clan, the Club, as a faction, decided to call it quits. And when I spoke of how the clan defined a lot about the character, it came quite obvious at that point. If you were playing a Gangrel, you would be defined as “a Gangrel who stayed as a part of Camarilla” if you were one of those who didn’t want to leave.

While any game benefits from strong characters and individualism, I love to think that there is a huge benefit in being able to lump these individuals into generic boxes. Be it as simple as race “He’s a bugbear”, or profession “he’s an adventurer”, or something a bit more complex “He’s one of the people from the Northern Mountains”, it still makes cataloging the person when big wheels turn on the world. If you know the people from Northern Mountains have declared war, you have to make judgements about the people frrom NM whom you know.