I'm going to run Vampire.



*pauses for the gasps to die*



Yes, it's true. While I was never a fan of V:tM, V:tR really managed to enchant me. Perhaps I was at a place in my life where I could finally understand vampires, or maybe the book simply explained the plight and majesty of vampires better to me. Or maybe it was just a better game that didn't make me want to tear my hear out. That's the theory I generally go with. However, when my group decided that we needed to play something dark and horrific and I looked at all my players' needs, Vampire became the only, obvious choice: A game with combat and mystery, a big cast of NPCs to play with, and a dose of "survival horror," Vampire really fits the bill on all counts. Which tended to surprise some of my players (who have opinions on Vampire, which tend to start with "Twilight sucks!" or "Vampires are of the Wyrm!!").



So we're going to give it a try.



On a related note, I generally hate "player-driven play." I hate it because it's generally code for "I didn't have time to come up with anything, so you players have to entertain me and yourselves." When it isn't, too often I've found myself plopped into a huge, confusing world and asked "What do you want to do?" To which I always respond "I dunno, what can I do?" which is answered with "Anything you want!" and then my brain sort of shuts down and I say something like "My character watches TV." I have haunted memories of Morrowind, where I was kicked off a ship, told I could do anything I wanted, meandered around the countryside for a bit, then got bored and turned off the game.



When I played Oblivion, on the other hand, the game very carefully handed me a quest, pointed me in a direction, told me what I could do, and added "And you can do whatever you want," and that was far more pleasing. Suddenly, I had the freedom to tear off and explore distant locations, but if I grew bored, I could always make my way back to the main plot. And thus, I was enlightened.



So while I prefer "GM driven" gameplay, where I can drag uncertain, confused players through enough interesting plot that some of it sticks to them and they begin to see the possibilities and start to play back, I've decided I want to experiment with sandbox play in my vampire game. Vampire (and urban fantasy in general) seems ideally suited to it, as its set in a single city, and detailing a single city is much easier than detailing an entire world.



And, now that I've set the stage, we move from the introduction to my main point:



I think Vampire isn't really about vampires. Oh, sure, you play as vampires, but that's not really what it's about. I think it's about people. I think bad vampire games often forget this, and tend to turn into "Vampire: the Tea Party" as a result. You used to be a person. You get your blood from people. Vampires get into fights over people. It all boils down to people. Blood. Lonliness. Being an outsider, looking in at the warm glow of ordinary mortals living their ordinary lives while you linger on the outside, in the shadows, hungering. Mortals in a good vampire game sort of feel like an aquarium filled with delicious fish, flitting about in their mundane little soap-operas, their lives fated to ruin as soon as a vampire stretches out his dead hands to grasp the target of his desire, and so, a good vampire game needs a considerable cast of characters (doubly so, given that your players will start killing them even if they don't mean to)



I've been known for my expansive cast of NPCs. My WotG had over fifty fully statted NPCs by the end of the campaign. These, however, evolved organically. If I needed a new NPC, I added him, and he soon resonated with the players, and so stuck around. After enough sessions of this, it's only natural that you have a huge cast.



My big experiment, though, is to start with fifty or so statted NPCs. My mind rebels at the notion, laughing at the foolhardiness of my ambition. "FIFTY NPCS?" it smirks "How can you possibly come up with fifty NPCs before the first player has put pen to paper?"



I'll tell you: Families.



Damnation City, which is simply the most indispensable masterpiece of the WoD line, and a must for any collection, suggests that you design a city by dividing it into districts, and thereafter populating the districts with sites. As I began to do this, I wondered "Why can't I do this with people too?" And so I came up with the idea of families. Odd that it took me so many years to ponder the unit of society that all of us are so familiar with. Perhaps it's because in the modern world, last names don't mean as much as they used to. Even so, I've found that if you study a community long enough, certain patterns of who controls what, and who tends to do what, starts to emerge.



So, you divide the city into a number of families (say, 10), and populate each family with 5 interconnected individuals. It might Mom, Dad, sister, brother and gramps, or it could be a loose affiliation of distant cousins that barely know one another's name and might not even share a last name, even if they do share DNA. You could note the character and nature of the family (I like to note a shared Virtue or Vice, and a merit or two that many of the family members might have: This family with Greed and Resources, that family with Fortitude and Common Sense), and start to design the characters accordingly. You could then populate the sites and organizations of your city with the people drawn from your families, and start to see how they're all interconnected in this vast web: Detective Liu and Detective Devlin are partners, but Liu's niece might be a student at the university, and Devlin's brother might be working for the Irish Mafia, and the Clark boy might also be working his way into the Irish Mafia, and he's related to this Guitarist who...



And so a vast web of tangled relationships begins to blanket my city, a soap opera just waiting for the players to step in, to tangle the strands, to slay nexuses and watch the entire tapestry fray spectacularly.



I've detailed almost 20 NPCs, and have 50 sketched out already (and I've begun to wonder if I'll need even more).



What's that you ask? Why bother with all this stuff? Well, the first and most important reason is "obsession." I'm not kidding myself here: when I want to run a game, I can't help but think of a gazillion ideas for it, and it helps me to put those ideas down on paper. Often, other people want those resources, and when it's all saved on my computer, I can easily offer them to others. But I also need material that will help inspire me later down the line. In my last WoD game, I had to struggle every few sessions to come up with some grand new story to entertain my players with. With a huge cast of 50 characters with deep backstories and interesting hooks just sitting there, waiting to be used, designing an engrossing new session will be as easy as saying "Hey, we need to see more of these guys," or, better, "Wow, you know, after the player brutally slew this NPC/sweetly confessed her love for that NPC, we should really dig deeper into that part of town and explore some of that NPCs relationships." Plus, working on these NPCs has forced me to consider my setting on levels I've never considered before, and a living city with a rich history begins to emerge.



I think my players will enjoy knowing that there's a landscape of NPCs out there, just like it is pleasant knowing that if you turn left rather than right in a dungeon, you could explore an entirely different wing, I think players will appreciate knowing that even if they don't bother to explore a particular NPCs past, they could, if they so chose.