VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE 5TH EDITION: A REVIEW

PAST IS PRELUDE

2000 zero zero party over oops outta time

So tonight I'm gonna party like its 1999 

THE YEAR WAS NINETEEN-NINETY-ONE and the world was coming to an end.  Millennialism hadn't reached a fever pitch yet, but it was there in the air, like the smell of ozone before the storm.  Computer geeks were on about something called Y2K, and it was going to throw us all back into the Dark Ages. The fundamentalists--who were seeing vast Satanic conspiracies and blood-thirsty cults pulling global strings behind every scene--were talking more and more about Rapture and writing books like Left Behind.  The Red Scare was over, but fear of the New World Order was replacing it.  Ruby Ridge and Waco encouraged armed militia groups to multiply.  And AIDS?  AIDS was still making sex as scary as hell, and blood-borne disease was in everyone's mind.  So we knew the world was ending.  Prince knew the world was ending.  Even the vampires knew the world was ending.

Enter Vampire: The Masquerade.

Seldom has a game been such a product of its times.  Introspective bloodsuckers were in, put on the map by Anne Rice in her 1985 The Vampire Lestat and 88's The Queen of the Damned.  In gaming circles, "cyberpunk" was the It Genre, either in pure form or mixed with other flavors like "fantasy-punk" or "steampunk."  In the midst of all this Mark Rein-Hagen's Vampire was the perfect storm, tapping into the Millennialism, the vampires, and the punk to create an explosive cocktail.  It entered the scene as a commentary or meditation on the times, but ended up shaping and defining them.  It was the closest to mainstream the hobby had gotten since D&D appeared in Spielberg's E.T.  Hell, even Aaron Spelling wanted a piece of it.

But because zeitgeist was the rocket fuel launching VtM into the stratosphere, no one really expected it to last.  2000 came and went not with a bang but a whimper, Rice had gotten bored writing about her Brat Prince, and D&D 3e was sucking up all the oxygen in the gaming room.  The things that had made VtM hot were now irrelevant, yesterday's pathos.  White Wolf had the good sense to recognize this and so they shut the whole circus down--not just Vampire: The Masquerade, but her sister games as well.  Their setting, "The World of Darkness," had always been about the coming of the end of the world, so in 2004 they let that end arrive in an epic storyline.  The original World of Darkness was dead, and they replaced it with a new one, and with new games rewritten with a lot less zeitgeist dependency.  

So if you had told me awhile back that Vampire: The Masquerade was due for a 2018 comeback (a new edition we'll be calling V5), I would have laughed in your face.  That ship had sailed.  Who the heck did they have who could pull off a VtM Second Coming?

Then I heard it was Ken Hite.

RISEN FROM TORPOR

Cold and black inside this coffin

'Cause you all try to keep me down

How it feels to be forgotten

But you'll never forget me now

   

Though the man has worked on all sorts of games over his storied career, Ken Hite is probably best known for exquisitely crafted modern horror, particularly horror with a conspiracy twist.  He worked on Nephilim and authored both GURPS Horror and GURPS Cabal, he wrote Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade for White Wolf and The Cainite Heresy for Vampire: The Dark Ages.  Later he was responsible for Pelgrane Press's Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents, a game about modern spies hunting vampires.  For NBA he was part of the team that gave us the masterpiece The Dracula Dossier.  If anyone was going to have a chance at pumping fresh new blood into the sleeping remains of Masquerade, this was the guy to do it.  

Leading a team of writers including Martin Ericsson, Matthew Dawkins, Karim Muammar, and Juhanna Pettersson (the writing credits also include Mark Rein-Hagen and Neil Gaiman), Hite redefines VtM by seeming to ask a simple question; what is the zeitgeist of the current decade?  V5 isn't giving us a new World of Darkness, nor is it a successor game like Vampire: The Requiem.  V5 is the same setting, the same vampires, picking up fourteen years after the story left off.  But it recognizes that our world has changed, and by extension, the World of Darkness has changed as well.  VtM knew what scared you in 1991.  V5 is asking; "what is it that keeps you up at night in 2018?" 

Maybe the answer lies in the increasingly divisive politics of out time; we all seem to be at each other's throats.  Maybe, if you are lucky enough to be on the "better off" side of things, you fear the growing threat posed by young and hungry millennials flirting with socialism and change.  On the other hand, if you are one of those millennials, maybe the stranglehold of the "haves" over the "have nots" keeps you awake, the fascist jackboot on your throat.  Or maybe climate change concerns you...the fact that Mother Nature herself seems to be rising against us.  No?  How about the constant threats to your privacy posed by cameras located everywhere, or increased spying online?  If you are in the States, maybe the horror of the opioid crisis, the ravages of addiction, trouble you.  If you live anywhere in the West, it is possible the nearly endless War on Terror, dragging on year after year in the Middle East worries you.  

Hell, maybe all of these things plague you.

Well guess what, dear reader.  In 2018, all these things plague the Kindred too.  Because Hite and his team understand something that Rein-Hagen knew; this game was never about vampires...it was about us.

RUNNING WITH THE DEAD

Driven by the strangle of vein
Showing no mercy I'd do it again

Open up your eyes

You keep on crying

Baby I'll bleed you dry

Let's start at the beginning.

The vampires in V5 call themselves the Kindred.  Many believe they are the children of Caine.  Some 14,000 years ago, as the hunter-gatherer Eden-like age of innocence drew to a close, Caine murdered his brother and was cursed by his god.  Marked to wander for all eternity, repeating his sin of bloodshed, he was eternally damned to struggle with the Beast in his soul.  Some say in the wilderness, the witch Lilith taught him to harness his powers.  Regardless, he learned how to "sire" more of his kind--a process that requires draining a human of blood and then giving the dying mortal your own.  However, any vampire you sire is one generation "down" from you.  The vampires Caine sired where Second Generation, the ones they sired Third Generation, and so on.  Each step down the chain means a decrease in power, as moving away from Caine the blood thins and grows weak.  The highest generation vampires have blood so thin they are practically still human, and are incapable of creating any more of their kind.

Vampires did more than create new vampires.  Caine and his brood were behind the spread of agriculture and the first cities.  These population centers were for the Kindred feeding pens, and the humans in them were their "kine" or "cattle."  In this way the vampires guided and shaped human civilization, reigning over it as ancient god-kings.  The ancient city-state of Enoch was their capital, and from here Caine ruled.  At some point in the ancient past, however, the 13 members of the 3rd Generation rose up against their sires and slaughtered them, stealing their precious blood for themselves.  Caine himself went into hiding.  These 13 usurpers--born before the Flood and therefore called the Antediluvians--sired 13 unique bloodlines in their own images, each with slightly different powers and weaknesses.  In time, the weight of age and constant gnawing hunger drove them into the earth, into a deathless sleep the Kindred call torpor.  

Millennia passed and humanity expanded well beyond vampire control.  The Kindred slowly began to fear the vastly superior numbers of their prey, instituting something called the Masquerade, a formal policy of remaining hidden.  Feeding in secret, protected by the shadows, the centuries ticked by and their hidden society grew ever more labyrinthine and complex.

On the eve of the 21st century--the setting of the original game--two major factions of Kindred, the Camarilla and the Sabbat, held sway.  The Camarilla preferred to remain hidden amongst humanity, ruling over them, while the Sabbat rejected everything human from their natures.  Both lived with the threats posed by the Anarchs, younger Kindred seeking to overthrow ancient power structures, and the looming threat of the Antediluvians themselves.  For it was whispered in Kindred prophecy that these Antediluvians would awake en masse, initiating a vampire apocalypse in which the only thing that would slake their hellish hunger was the blood of their own kind...

2004's Vampire: Gehenna provided four alternate versions of this apocalypse.  V5 gives you a fifth.  It's End of Days is less Revelations and more Ragnarok.  

In this unfolding, the Sabbat--always the enemies of the Antediluvians and their "Jyhad," the manipulative game of chess played with vampires as pawns--have abandoned their cities and hunting grounds to descend upon the ancient strongholds of the Middle East.  Tired of waiting for the Antediluvians, the Sabbat took the Gehenna War to them.

The Antediluvians responded with the Beckoning, a powerful summons that drew the Elders of their bloodlines to them.  Higher generation vampires, rulers of Kindred communities, answered the call and left the younger vampires holding the reigns.    

Thus the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, the so-called "War on Terror," conceals a more terrifying truth; Enoch and its masters have awoken.  

As the Sabbat and the Elders wage this vicious conflict, the Camarilla--deprived of its senior leadership--has been unable to hold back the Anarchs, the rebellious young vampires now rising up in revolution.  The only thing that keeps these two factions from open war is a a greater threat.

The Masquerade has been broken.

While the public doesn't yet know about the existence of vampires, many western intelligence agencies do.  The War on Terror has exposed the Kindred at last.  The FBI, Homeland Security, and the CIA; MI5 and MI6; France's DGSI and Germany's BND, are all among those now coordinating with the Vatican in a sort of "Second Inquisition." Thousands of vampires around the globe have been exterminated in the hunt.

In response, the Camarilla has forbidden any of its members to communicate via the Internet.  NOTHING vampire can be on the Web.  The Masquerade must be tighter than ever.  Even the Anarchs, who reject the rest of the Camarilla's traditions, recognize this.  In a world where everyone has a camera, it is harder (and more important) for vampires to hide than ever.  

WHAT HAVE I BECOME?

Don't be afraid

I didn't mean to scare you

So help me, Jesus

I can promise you

You'll stay as beautiful

With dark hair

And soft skin, forever

Forever   

Entering the world of the Kindred means becoming part of a specific bloodline or Clan.  Each has its own powers (in the form of supernatural abilities called Disciplines) and weakness.  Fans of vampire film and fiction can easily trace the Clans to their sources: the rebellious Brujah are reminiscent of the vampires from Near Dark; the elegant and aloof Toreador recall Miriam and John Blaylock from The Hunger; the hideous Nosferatu echo Count Orlock from...er...Nosferatu.  There are shapeshifting Gangrel, the aristocratic Ventrue, the sorcerous Tremere, the insane Malkavians, and the clanless Caitiffs.  Adding to these are the Thin-Blooded, not really a Clan, but 14th or 15th generation vampires barely vampire at all.  There are six other Clans, but these were not present in the first two editions of VtM and have been excluded (like the Sabbat) from V5.

Aside from reshaping the world the vampires live in, V5 has reshaped the systems governing the vampires as well.  

The core mechanics remain the same.  To attempt an action, players build dice pools of ten-siders.  This is usually a characters core Trait (something like Charisma, Dexterity, or Strength) plus a Skill (perhaps Athletics, Etiquette, or Persuasion).  Such attributes are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, so your dice pool is generally one to ten dice.

In V5, however, the object is to score a 6 or higher on each die.  Those count as successes.  If you roll a natural 10, it counts as two successes.  You are rolling against a difficulty assigned by the Storyteller (GM).  A routine action requires one success, a challenging action requires four.  A nearly impossible action will need seven.  If you score the number of successes you need, you succeed.  Otherwise you fail.  Any additional successes make your success even sweeter.

This is all considerably more streamlined than previous editions of Masquerade, but where V5 really demonstrates innovation is in the new Hunger mechanics.

Vampires drink blood; this is the core of the concept.  Traditionally Masquerade tracked this with the concept of a "Blood Pool."  Like a tank of gas, feeding "filled you up."  Rising each evening, or calling upon your blood to fuel vampiric powers, burned points from your Blood Pool up.  As the Pool got lower you got hungrier, and needed to fill up again.  The system worked fine, but it focused more on the Blood as a resource than on the actual Hunger which drives vampiric existence.

V5 tosses the idea of Blood Pools and replaces it with Hunger, which like all attributes is on a scale of 0 to 5.  At zero you are sated.  At five, the lust for blood is overpowering.  Rising each night, or using your vampiric powers, triggers a "Rouse" check.  This is the roll of a single die; succeed, and your Hunger remains at present levels.  Fail, and your Hunger increases by one.  More powerful vampiric abilities might require multiple Rouse checks.  The lower your vampire's Generation (the closer he is to Caine), the greater your chance of being able to re-roll Rouse checks (compensating for the fact that in previous editions these characters had larger Blood Pools).

Now, to show the overpowering force of the Hunger on vampires, every dice pool you build (with the exception of things like Willpower or Humanity checks) must contain Hunger dice.  These are dice of a different color.  If, for example, you are making a Charisma + Persuasion roll and have a dice pool of six, and your Hunger is currently three, then half of your dice will be Hunger dice.  Hunger dice work normally...unless they come up 1s or 10s.

If they come up tens, they still act as double successes, but the Beast--the monstrous vampire nature all characters wrestle with--emerges and colors the result.  A vampire trying to pick a lock might lose control and just rip it off its hinges.  A vampire trying to intimidate a mortal might suddenly show his fangs and vampiric features.  You still achieve your goal, roughly, but the Beast emerges and taints your victory.  

If you scored any 1s on your Hunger dice, AND failed the roll as well, your character must act out a Compulsion.  There are standard ones--Hunger, Dominance, Harm, and Paranoia--and there are clan specific ones.  The bestial Gangrel are overcome by animalistic behaviors, the rebellious Brujah pick a fight with authority.  Basically a Compulsion is the Beast taking over and driving the character awhile.  The player is still in control, but must act out the character's darker impulses.

Obviously you want to keep your Hunger under control, and that means feeding.  Completely killing and draining a victim will remove all your Hunger dice...but there are happy mediums like taking a pint or two (slaking 2 Hunger dice) or lunching on an animal (removing 1).  The lower your generation, and the more potent your blood, the more difficult these half measures become.  The stronger you are, the more likely you are to need to kill to keep your Hunger under control.

If you have played Masquerade before everything you remember is still here.  You can still call upon your vampiric blood to fuel feats of physical strength and speed, heal damage, etc.  You are still vulnerable to the Blood Bond (drinking too much blood from another vampire can form an emotional attachment that makes you essentially "fang whipped").  Sunlight is still the enemy, and Humanity is something you will struggle with.

In fact, "Humanity" is front and center again.  Rated on a scale of 10 to 0, Humanity measures how strong the "human" half of you is, as opposed to the vampiric Beast.  With Humanity 10 you feel relatively warm to the touch, have an essentially healthy human appearance, and can even eat and drink food (though not live on it).  The lower you drop from this, the more corpse-like and cold you appear, the harder it is to pass as living.  It becomes increasingly harder to interact with living mortals.  At zero, your character is gone, completely consumed by the Beast within.

Humanity is lost by committing acts of brutality or cruelty.  It is lost by giving in to the Beast.  Thus the vampire in V5 is constantly struggling with Hunger and Humanity, trying to find the balance between the two.

Another interesting mechanic is "Memoriam."  Vampires are ageless, and even the younger ones can have decades of life behind them.  However, the mind cannot hold all that memory all of the time.  It would drive you mad.  Vampires tend to exist frozen in the moment then, but can dive into their past when necessary with Memoriam.  This involves stopping the main story and entering a flashback, something that was a common trick back on TV shows like Forever Knight or Angel.  Memoriam can give you bonuses to dice tests ("Wait, I remember, I have done this before..."), answers to problems ("There is an old secret tunnel dating back to Prohibition that will give us access to that building") or even resources ("As I recall I still have a safety deposit box in that bank from my early years, stealing jewels").  It can only be done once a story, but fleshes out the vampire's long unlife in a satisfying and relevant way.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY

On candy stripe legs the Spiderman comes

Softly through the shadow of the evening sun

Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead

Looking for the victim shivering in bed...

...And there is nothing I can do

When I realize with fright

That the Spiderman is having me for dinner tonight

Ah Vampire, how I missed you.

In the summer of 1991 was back from college, running a RuneQuest campaign. We were only about four sessions in when a trip to my local game store changed everything.

On the new arrivals shelf was a strange softcover book with a marbled green cover and a rose on it. The game was called Vampire: The Masquerade. I liked horror games; Call of Cthulhu was an old favorite, and I had been running the new Mayfair version of Chill at university. A game about hunting vampires was intriguing. Reaching out to flip through it, it took a few moments to realize the mistake in my casual assumption. With something akin to mild shock, I realized that in this game, you weren't hunting monsters. You were the monsters.

I bought it immediately.

Understand, there had never been anything like this. I'd been game mastering for over a decade, and games were all pretty much the same; you played heroes, and heroes fought the bad guys. These might be James Bond megalomaniacs or Lovecraftian horrors, they might be orcs, scorpion men, or Stormtroopers...but they were all the villains. Yet here was this weird game, and the damn thing was about being the villain. It was about exploring the nature of evil and essential humanity. I stayed up half the night reading it. It was like discovering role-playing all over again.

The next day I called my players to tell them we had to drop RuneQuest and play this game.  They probably thought I was nuts, but it ended up leading to one of my most memorable campaigns in nearly forty years.  

All good things come to an end, though.  As much as I loved the first and second editions, in the years leading up to the revised edition the game rapidly mutated.  The addition of the Sabbat--originally just a shadowy nemesis--shifted the focus from personal horror to being a sort of amoral, blood-sucking badass.  It was less a game of personal horror and more one of acquiring as many dots as possible.

White Wolf understood this and tried to recapture the initial voice of Vampire when they drove the stake through the heart of Masquerade and let Requiem take its place.  Ken Hite and his team also understand this, and have returned to the original ethos of the game.

V5 is far, far closer to the first edition of Masquerade than any of the subsequent iterations.  This is both a selling point, and to many I suspect, a flaw.  If you came on board with the first edition, V5 will speak to you.  It has the same Clans, the same power levels, the same sharp focus on feeding and clinging to your waning humanity.  On the other hand, if you came to Vampire later in the game, when there were tons of Clans, bloodlines, power levels, and backstory (and a lot less pathos), the stripped down nature of V5 is likely to turn you off.  

Weirdly, a turn-off for me was the production design of the book.  Don't get me wrong, White Wolf has turned out a superior product here, glossy, eye-catching, and worth every penny of the price tag.  But the full-color art, a lot of it quite bright and flashy, often made me feel like I was flipping through a fashion magazine.  This wasn't helped by the fact that much of the art is actual photography, with live models playing the Un-Dead.  I guess I remain nostalgic for Tim Bradstreet, but none of this was to my taste.  It's a minor bitch; the book is a fine piece of publishing.

That covers the good and the bad, now the ugly.  And again, this is a personal bitch.

As a writer, as a college professor, as a HORROR fan, I grow increasingly alarmed with the need for trigger warnings and safe spaces.  This version of Vampire is littered with them.  From the Mature Content Warning on the first page to the Appendix in the back devoted entirely to "considerate play," V5 feels the constant need to remind us to use the "safeword."  It cannot seem to make up its mind if it wants to confront personal horror or turn away from it.  In 1991 I was shaken to my core by a roleplaying game willing to go to the dark places.  That is what horror, at its black heart, was all about.  That is what Vampire was about.  In 2018, we all seem to have gone timid. But in tapping into the zeitgeist of its times, V5 had to embrace this bit as well.  Apparently this is something the newest generation of gamers wants and needs.  So be it.

Neither of my little rants takes away from a game that deserves your attention, gentle reader.  V5 has everything I loved about the original game, and manages to drag Vampire into the 21st century, safe spaces and all.  

It gets a definite four out of five stars...or stakes...or whatever.

            

THE DRACULA DOSSIER: DAYS OF DISHONORABLE PEACE, SESSION 5

The records of sessions 1-3 are here.

The record of session 4 is here.

If you are totally new here, read the review first.

WITH THE POLICE CLOSING IN on the shooting, Reid and Richter attempt to flee the scene, wary of London's ubiquitous CCTV cameras.  No sooner do they begin to escape than they realize the assassins had back-up.  After a brief running gun fight, the pair lose their pursuers and looking like nothing more than a grandfather and granddaughter, slip on to a bus.

When the pair fails to check in, McPherson follows protocol and begins breaking everything down to change safe houses.  He is almost through when he gets confirmation from Reid that things went south.  Lacey is still stunned from her ordeal in the Faraday cage and the severing of her connection to Dracula (?), but he pushes her to revive herself so they can clear out and meet the others at a new location.  In mid-transit, he receives another message from Hopkins; "That didn't go so well."  Whoever Hopkins is, he is tracking their every move.

The gunfight is all over the news, and while the police are seeking a man and a little girl for questioning, it doesn't seem the CCTVs got a good shot of their faces.  The team regroups at a new safe house in Slough, where McPherson rebuilds his Faraday cage, in case Lacey falls under the influence again.  In case anyone else is under the influence, they decide to each take turns in it.

When Luna Richter goes inside, there is a flash of electrical discharge and the powerful smell of ozone.  The little girl collapses, and when she comes to, all the memories and abilities of her sister Saskia are gone.  Whatever the girl's psychic abilities are, they seem to operate along the same lines as the opposition.  Stranger still, as she comes out of the cage, Saskia's memories and abilities come flooding back.  This raises a shocking suspicion...Luna didn't receive her sister's memories, she is receiving them.  Saskia Richter may not be dead, despite what they saw in Berlin.

They decide to take a page from the dossier and hypnotize Luna just before dawn.  She is able to contact Saskia...who is being held in a makeshift clinic in a warehouse somewhere.  She is in a hospital bed with an IV drip in her arm.  The doctors speak English and German.  Once every few months, though, a woman comes to see her.  A pretty woman who smells of lilacs and speaks German in a soft, musical voice, the phrasing from a century ago.  Luna pushes for more and the connection begins to change...

...suddenly she is pulling memories from Douglas, who is the one hypnotizing her.  Painfully memories of he and his wife.  She starts taking his abilities, speaking Greek, when he attempts to sever the connection.  She comes out of the trance.  For a moment there, she seemed to lose control of her talents.

McPherson and Lacey go into research mode...anything they can track down on mythology and telluric iron.  They find a book by a Rosicrucian eccentric alleging that telluric iron is the only thing that can kill dragons, or as he terms them, the "wyrms of the earth."  He suggests that the nails used to fix Jesus Christ to the cross were telluric iron, as was Excalibur and the lance St. George used to kill the dragon.  He also claims that the Catholic Church hordes telluric iron as a precious resource.

They begin to wonder about the dossier.  Was Quincey's knife "meteor" iron as the text suggests, or was that a blind for "telluric?"  And what of the khukri knife Harder cut the Count's head off with?  Is telluric iron what Vambrey and the Church was providing Van Helsing with?  It makes sense given the traces they found in Lucy's bones and in the "red liquid" used to seal her tomb.

Douglas, meanwhile, becomes suspicious of Luna and Saskia.  He starts digging.  He discovers that both were adopted from a Romanian orphanage, one with ties to an orphanage nearby in Exeter.  Digging deeper, he discovers there birth parents died of AIDS, though neither of the girls was infected.

Having previous located "Seward's" asylum in Plaistow (now an NHS Hematology Research Center), the team regroups and decides penetrating it must be the next order of business.  They hack into its systems first.

The security level is high, under MI5 jurisdiction.  Clearly this is more than a clinic.  There are no records of the institution before when Seward ran it.  However they do manage to break into encrypted floor plans, including tunnels running from under the place to the basements of neighboring Carfax.  Dracula's old London house is long gone, but the basements remain, including something the floor plans label as "the Red Room."  It further appears that the people who work at the clinic know there is more to it than what it appears to be, but seem to think it is HIV research of perhaps biological warfare research.

They decide to physically go in.

They mount an operation and under the cover of darkness break in through an alleyway door.  The security system is impressive.  Inside, they head for the research division and break into the computers there (these are on a local network not connected to the internet).

"Hopkins" seems nervous, immediately texting McPherson to "get out now."  They ignore their mysterious contact.  

In a high security room (101) there is a "Patient Zero."   Digging deeper, they find out his name is William Wynn Wescott, and that apparently he has been held in this facility since at least before the Second World War.  McPherson recognizes the name from his research, however.  Wescott was one of the founders of the Victorian "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," a society founded the same year as the Ripper killings (1888).  He has to be 170 years old.  His file labels him a "zoophagus," with a mania for ingesting living things.  This must be the dossier's "Renfield." His room, it seems, is sheathed in "t. iron," and the only man with full access to it is "Dr. Dee."

Is this "Dee" the same "D" that runs Edom?  And is there a connection to the Elizabethan magus Dr. John Dee?

As they continue to probe messages from "Hopkins" keep coming, warnings to "get out" and "they are tracking you."  "You are exposed."  "Cut and run."  They dig just a little more, coming across records of some experimental drug called the "Seward Serum."  "GO NOW.  GET OUT OR I AM BURNING YOU."  Hopkins warns.  They ignore the warnings an hit pay dirt.

The main project here is over something called "Dust."  Wescott is "Dust Infected #1."  There are records of nearly a century of Dust experiments at orphanages, including the one in Romania where Saskia and Luna came from, and from a "St George's" in Exeter.  

As they make their escape, Hopkins reaches out.  "Conditions have changed.  They will be hunting you now.  We need to meet."  A meeting is set up the next day near the British Museum.

Lacey and Douglas hang back, providing cover and keeping an eye out.  Luna and McPherson go into the cafe where the meeting is planned.  A woman signals them, and Luna recognizes her from Saskia's memories.  This is the "lilac" woman who has been visiting Saskia in her hospital.  She tries to reach out with her abilities only to be slapped down, hard, by a much more powerful talent.

"You almost got yourselves killed last night, and the dogs will now be in pursuit.  I have been watching you for a long time," she tells them, "and I feel protective.  My name is Genevieve Harper."  

As the pair recognize the name as "Mina Harker" from the dossier she nods.  "Yes.  I am 148 years old." 

      

'SALEM'S LOT IN THE TRUMP ERA

Baby mama drama's screamin' on and too much for me to wanna

Stay in one spot, another day of monotony's

Gotten me to the point I'm like a snail

I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot

Success is my only mothaf****n' option, failure's not

Mom, I love you, but this trailer's got to go

I cannot grow old in Salem's lot

- Eminem, Lose Yourself

I grew up in 'Salem's Lot. Many Americans did. The town that is the titular character in Stephen King's second published novel is instantly recognizable to millions of us. It's a dead little place. Nothing ever happens there. Everyone knows everyone, and it is so safe you can leave the keys in the ignition of your pick-up truck at night. If you live there, you probably don't even have a lock on your front door. After all, the crime rate is just about zero. Because 'Salem's Lot doesn't know the inflated and grotesque evils of the big city; its evils are all the small and whimpering kind. The neighbor's wife cheating with the postman. The guy who smacks his girlfriend around. The kids who shoplift at the dime store.  The alcoholism and addiction that springs from despair, from knowing the jobs have all gone and you can't feed your family.  These are the small town evils, evil with a small "e," the monotonous and banal evils that slowly bleed you dry like a million paper cuts.  Everyone knows the really big "E" Evils could never happen here.

Until, of course, Big "E" Evil waltzes--by your invitation--into town.

...Tourists and through-travelers still passed by on Route-12, seeing nothing of the Lot but an Elks billboard and a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed sign. Outside of town they went back up to sixty and perhaps dismissed it with a single thought: Christ, what a dead little place...

  
In terms of plot, 'Salem's Lot is essentially Dracula; an ancient European vampire relocates from East to West and begins vampirizing the populace.  But the book is actually far more than that.  In his introduction to the 2005 Illustrated Edition, King talks about the naive arrogance of a 23-year-old writer thinking he could rewrite Bram Stoker's Dracula as "the great American novel."  Maybe it would be a stretch to bestow that title on 'Salem's Lot, but what amazes is how close King actually came. Forty-two years after its publication, the novel rings true more than ever.  This is the story of a rural American town well past its glory days; no jobs, no hope, no future.  In their despair the townspeople make a Faustian bargain with a stranger, a man who comes into their lives with empty promises of great things.  Submit to him, put your faith in him, and he will make you great again.  Out of quiet desperation they turn their backs on the light and lose their souls in the process.

In the wake of the 2016 election and the more recent events in Charlottesville, 'Salem's Lot seems very relevant.  

When horror works, and it works extraordinarily well in 'Salem's Lot, it does so because it makes us uncomfortable with ourselves.  Vampires don't cast reflections, but 'Salem's Lot makes us squirm because it turns the mirror on us.  Dracula was a very 19th century novel, in which the liberal and democratic British easily put down the threat of foreign imperialism.  But 'Salem's Lot emerged at the tail end of the 20th, and just a generation removed from the people who fought World War II, King understands fascism far better than Stoker ever could have.  Fascism, whether it happens in Germany or Italy or middle America, is always the willing submission of the populace, the surrender of morals and freedoms, born out of despair.  Fascism is something that must be invited, like the vampire, into your home.

Like Eminem says in the song, he can't bear the idea of growing old in 'Salem's Lot. He's desperate to escape and become something more. And that is what the vampires in King's novel feed on, far more than blood. They drink up that quiet desperation, that ennui. With their cold dead smiles they seem to say "don't you worry about a thing, close your eyes and I will make everything go away."

King makes several references in 'Salem's Lot to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a book that deeply influenced him. No where is that more clear than in the way he characterizes Small Town, USA. 'Salem's Lot is the geographic incarnation of Jackson's protagonist, Eleanor Vance, a deeply conservative and self-obsessed woman who secretly longs for something, anything, to "happen" to her. It finally does; she encounters Hill House and allows it to seduce her. The small Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot just about does the same with its vampires...creatures that of course have to be invited in. There is a grim undercurrent running through the novel that the town is pleased something interesting is finally happening to them.  For once they are not being ignored or dismissed.  Someone is listening to them.  Someone cares.  And if the price for that is vampirism, or racism, or anti-semiticism, why not? 

...The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. These are the town's secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face...

I reread 'Salem's Lot biennially.  It was one of the novels I read in my childhood that made me want to write.  There are a thousand reasons for this.  I could talk about the stealthy and devious way King creeps up on you and makes you believe in vampires.  I could talk about the memorable characters.  I could talk about King's easy, almost folksy prose.  I could praise his intimate understanding of small town people and small town life.  But I think it rises to the level of a great novel because it has a warning for us.  It understands the narcissism that is ultimately at the heart of the vampire tale, the poisonous notion of Prince Charmings and politicians and saviors who we think will sweep in and make all the pain just magically go away.  And maybe above all, it understands the necessity of fighting this in whatever form it takes.

THE DRACULA DOSSIER: DAYS OF DISHONORABLE PEACE, SESSION FOUR

For a full summary of sessions one to three, see here.

WE ARE USED TO GENRE MIXING, we role players.  Shadowrun has been mixing cyberpunk and high fantasy for nearly thirty years.  We've seen steampunk fantasy (Castle Falkenstein), horror westerns (Deadlands), superhero war dramas (Godlike), and multi-genre free-for-alls (TORG, Rifts).  Even the original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons was a bit of a gumbo, a mix of weird fiction, high fantasy, and sci fi.  Yet despite having run horror espionage before (Delta Green and Conspiracy X), something about The Dracula Dossier daunted me when I first sat down to sketch out the campaign.  As an obsessive fan of the novel, it was essential to me that the game feel "Stoker," but I didn't want to neglect the crucial other half of it.  I feel that four sessions in, my gaming group and I finally got the balance right.

Session four of Days of Dishonorable Peace opens with a bang.  Well.  Almost.

Having broken into the tomb of Laura Wexford (our Lucy Westenra) to examine her remains (or to see if the casket is empty), the team instead discovers the opposition has left a nasty surprise for them.  The coffin contains neither a vampire nor human remains but a bomb, a combination of ball-bearings and C-4.  Fortunately for the team, CIA operative William McPherson has eight points in Explosive Devices, saving their lives in a daring rapid defusing.

These leaves questions; who was behind this?  Edom?  Dracula?  How did the opposition know the team was coming?  The agents suspect their Internet searches for the identities of the 1894 network must have triggered red flags, while the players know Dracula has nightly been interrogating CIA agent Lacey Mickelson.  Lacey's player has decided to keep these nightmares to herself, and to play the slow erosion of the character's stability.  This was completely true to the spirit of Stoker, giving us a "Mina" in the group.

While McPherson and Mickelson investigate the bomb design, Douglas Reid and Luna Richter scout the grounds outside the Highgate tomb, and there discover the remains of Laura Wexford.  Whoever planted the bomb simply dumped her skeleton, still in the decayed wedding gown, in the underbrush.  Mickelson, an expert in forensic pathology, decides she needs to examine the remains.  McPherson examines the door, taking samples in the hopes of figuring out exactly what the "red liquid" Van Helsing used a century earlier to seal it.  In claiming the remains, the group finds something else pinned to the decaying gown...the silver and jet "Westenra Brooch."

Lacey has a London contact, a coroner named Parsev Singh.  She convinces him to let her use an examining room and takes the remains there with McPherson.  Reid and Richter head back to their London base of operations to catch up on some rest and pursue another lead; they have managed to make initial contact with Oliver Prenger, the husband of the dossier's last custodian, "Hopkins."  They came across each other as both parties were investigating the same leads.  Reid and Richter decide to set up a meeting.

In the lab, parallel discoveries are made.  The stake driven through Laura's chest was not wood, but iron.  The red liquid used to seal the tomb was also iron.  Further analysis shows this isn't just any iron, this is extremely rare telluric iron.  Given the weird electrical phenomena the team saw in Berlin, it gets them thinking about Faraday cages.

Reid and Richter, meanwhile, meet with Prenger at a cafe near the British Museum.  Prenger is a special secretary to House of Lords MP Philip Douglas, descendent of "Arthur Holmwood" and the current Lord Drumlanrig.  "Hopkins" was really Andrew Miller, an MI6 analyst and Russia specialist.  Prenger is convinced the Russians have something to do with his husband's disappearance.

The conversation opens all sorts of questions; how did "Hopkins" get the dossier?  What is the Russian connection?  Is this recent, or does it go back to "Cushing" and the 1977 fiasco?  More to the point...which came first; did "Hopkins" get the dossier first and then seek out and seduce a man who just happened to be secretary to one of the 1894 legacies, or was it an innocent coincidence?  They discretely don't share this later bit with Prenger.

After regrouping, the team splits again.  The two CIA agents decide to construct a Faraday cage while Reid and Richter set up a second meeting with Prenger, this time at a pub.  While Mickelson and McPherson construct the cage, Lacey starts to confide in him her disturbing dreams and the growing fear she has that Dracula is invading her mind.  When the cage is finished, they try an experiment and put Lacey inside it.  After a flash of blinding headache pain, her connection with Dracula is severed by the cage and complete free of influence, gushes out all that has been happening to her and pleads for help.

Across town at the pub, a second meeting with Prenger is cut short when Reid and Richter realize Prenger has been followed.  In the middle of the bar one of the suspects slides a knife into Prenger's side to silence him.  Richter opens fire and takes down both, but before the surviving assailant can be questioned he kills himself with cyanide.  As they fled the club, they notice a black limousine parked across the street.  Watching them from the back is a beautiful blonde woman in white, wearing dark sunglasses.  The car drives off as things heat up...

THE DRACULA DOSSIER: DAYS OF DISHONORABLE PEACE

The following is a summary of sessions one to three of an ongoing Dracula Dossier campaign.  While this is my individual campaign, with my own take on vampires, Dracula, and the events of the Stoker novel, it does draw heavily on Kenneth Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's excellent game.  If you have not bought and read these books, do.  Possible spoilers ahead.

BERLIN, 2016 (Episode 1)

In Kreuzberg, a joint operations team consisting of CIA agent William McPherson, MI6 operative Douglas Reid, and BND officer Saskia Richter have set up an observation post to monitor a suspected ISIS terrorist cell.  Hiding among Syrian refugees, there is mounting evidence that the cell has managed to smuggle sarin gas into the nation, and that an attack may me imminent.  The agents are working to verify this before sending in a strike team to shut the cell down.

The problem is, the intelligence doesn't add up.

The Cyprus-based shipping company used to bring in the sarin, for example, has ties to Bashar al-Assad's government, which itself has been known to use sarin gas.  Why would an ISIS cell be working with the Assad government?  There are other irregularities, suggesting another faction--an outside player--might be involved.

Once the presence of the gas is positively confirmed, the team decides it cannot delay any longer.  A strike team is assembled, and under the cover of darkness, prepares to go in.

Things immediately begin to go pear-shaped.  An unseasonal fog comes out of nowhere, obscuring vision.  One by one, electronic monitoring systems start to malfunction and go down.  And someone--or something--starts picking off the strike team with ease.

The operatives themselves go in.  In the darkness and the fog, they encounter a black-clad paramilitary force, soldiers that display uncanny strength and speed.  The one in the lead is unmasked, a pale man with thick, unruly hair and a thick mustache.  He attacks with a knife.  Bullets do not seem to affect him.   Agent Richter is killed, while McPherson and Reid barely manage to escape the scene with their lives.

In the wake of this, the sarin gas is released, killing more than seventy people in neighborhood and causing an international scandal when CIA and MI6 involvement is leaked.  The surviving agents are burned; McPherson goes underground and Reid goes back to his cabin in the Scottish Highlands.

But the events of Berlin reach out to them both.

EIGHT MONTHS LATER...

McPherson finds himself receiving encrypted emails, both to his burner phone and his laptop.  A figure calling himself "Hopkins" claims to know the truth of what went down in Berlin, and hints at a conspiracy far bigger than ISIS or Assad.  The emails direct McPherson to a bus station locker, where inside is a century-old dossier, along with information gathered by Hopkins, suggesting a link between the events in this dossier and an 1888 group of Masonic occultists calling themselves the Golden Dawn.  Hopkins jokingly refers to McPherson as "Jackman" now, and suggests that while he has been forced into hiding for fear for his life, he will do what he can to aid Jackman and his team from the shadows now.  The Dracula Dossier--and the terrible burden that comes with it--is theirs, now.

Meanwhile, at his cabin in the Highlands, Douglas Reid receives a visit from a strange eight-year-old girl.  She is Luna Richter, Saskia's little sister.  While Saskia had made a passing reference to her sister possessing strange "abilities" back in Berlin, Reid didn't pay much attention.  He is forced to now.  The girl, a psychic, seems to have all of the memories--even skills--of her older sister.  It is as if Saskia's brutal murder transferred the whole of her knowledge to her telepathic sibling.  When McPherson shows soon after, and brings the dossier with him, the Berlin team is re-assembled.  They decide to pursue the conspiracy hinted at in the dossier, and find the truth of what happened to them in Berlin.

WHITBY, 2017 (Session 2)

The trio decide to drive south to Whitby, where Dracula made his landing in Britain.  This was his starting point, and thus they decide to make it theirs.  Along the way, McPherson is tracked down by his old CIA partner, Lacey Mickelson.  Taking a leave of absence, she has pursued McPherson to find out the truth behind the Agency burning him.  As the trio arrive in Whitby, Lacey confronts them, and McPherson decides to bring her in.

Though she is skeptical, she agrees to help.  After taking in the "Dracula Experience," an obvious tourist trap, they explore the old town, focusing on the locations described in the dossier.  Hoping to discover the actual names and identities of the 1894 primaries, they track down the tax and residential records for the Crescent in the 1890s.  This is where Lucy Westenra and her mother had their Whitby summer home.  They come across one Amelia Wexford, and her daughter Laura.  The background information suggests Laura Wexford is almost certainly the real life "Lucy Westenra."

With this name secure, the team begins a massive Internet search or any and all available records, slowly piecing together the identities of the 1894 network.

Lucy Westenra/Laura Wexford: A nineteen-year old socialite who died of "heart failure" shortly after her engagement.  There isn't much remarkable about Laura, but the discovery of her name and identity leads the team to the rest of the network.

Arthur Holmwood/Alexander Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig: In 1894 Laura was engaged to Alexander Douglas, the son of Viscount Drumlanrig (a business partner of Laura'a father, Chester).  When Laura died, Douglas inherited her estate (including her home in Hampstead, Wallingham) just as the dossier describes. Shortly thereafter, Alexander's father died in a mysterious hunting accident and Douglas inherited his title.

Mina Harker/Genevieve "Gina" Harper, née Malcolm: Tracking down the famous "Mina Harker" is achieved by searching for Laura Wexford's school records.  Genevieve Malcolm leaves London in 1894 for the continent, and returns Genevieve Harper (providing the next link in the chain).

Jonathan Harker/James Harper:  From his marriage to Genevieve Malcolm, and his passing of the bar exam just a year earlier, tracking down "Harker" presents little difficulty. There is not much on the young solicitor, however, especially after 1894.  More disconcerting is the fact that he was employed by one Peter Hawkins...the same name used by Stoker (who changed all the others).  This suggests that "Peter Hawkins" was itself a cover identity, and that Stoker may not have known his genuine name.

Kate Reed/Catherine Cook: Laura's school records turn up the other classmate as well, Catherine Cook, daughter of Westminster Gazette founder and editor Edward Cook.  A journalist, she fits the description in the dossier.  Tracking down the society page articles she herself wrote (and mentioned in the dossier) leads to both Seward and Morris...

Quincey P Morris/Quincey Adams: The colorful "Texan" of the novel was nothing of the sort.  The son of John Quincey Adams II and great grandson of President John Quincey Adams, Quincey Adams was a close friend of the young Viscount Drumlanrig.  His assignment as an "attache" of the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James is concealed in the dossier, and suggests a connection to American intelligence.

Jack Seward/Dr Jonathan Sievers: Sievers and the Viscount Drumlanrig apparently met in the British Army in Suakin, 1885.  Douglas was 20, Sievers was 24.  Sievers returned from duty "shell shocked," and took up work as a police coroner in London.  In 1890, his father passed away, leaving his son a private mental hospital in Plaistow.  Sievers changes his practice to psychiatric medicine.

Abraham Van Helsing/Albert Wilhelm Van Renterghem:  This Dutch spiritualist, psychiatrist, and hypnotist was an associate and friend of Sievers's father, and took the younger doctor under his wing.  A highly respected physician, he took a sabbatical from his work in Amsterdam in 1894, possibly placing him in London.  

(Note: As of this writing, the team has yet to ascertain the identities of Renfield, Aytown, or Cotford)

With these leads, the team decides to make their next stop London, to track down key sites connected to the disastrous 1894 operation. 

LONDON, 2017 (Session 3)

Concerned that their research may have sent up red flags with the opposition--whomever and whatever that might be--the quartet rents a car and travels to London by circuitous routes, using AirBNB to rent a home in Plaistow, near Plaistow Park.  Their research indicates that Siever's asylum, and Carfax, were once located here.

They settle into the small home and set up operations there.  In the beginning they have no greater difficulty than an over solicitous neighbor across the street.  McPherson scouts the neighborhood and discovers a large Eastern European community a few blocks away, including a Romanian father and his London-born daughter running a convenience store.  McPherson uses his impersonation skills to blend in and pass himself off as a fellow immigrant.

But there is a growing sense of being watched as the team further investigates the London locations and draws plans to investigate them.  McPherson--perhaps paranoid--has the sense of being followed and turns to see rats in the street.  Lacey, meanwhile, begins to experience disturbing dreams in which a dark figure comes into her room and interrogates her.  Luna, the psychic, spends the night monitoring her and indeed confronts a dark presence.  

There are other signs as well, but the team presses on.  They pinpoint the location of Laura Wexford's home, Wallingham, in Hampstead, as well as her burial place in nearby Highgate Cemetery (the dossier fictionalizes this as "Kingstead," but records show this is where Laura was buried).  They also locate Siever's former asylum...now an NHS Hematology Treatment and Research Center.  McPherson asks around and discovers the place has a shadowy reputation; heavily policed, there are rumors of people disappearing.

The team decides to stick with Laura.  Under the cover of darkness, they penetrate Highgate and locate the Wexford tomb.  There are signs of recent entry.  

Inside, it is much as the dossier describes, including the sarcophagus of Laura Wexford itself.  As they begin to open this, Luna Richter begins having enigmatic visions; clocks, the sea, the number four.  Only once they have opened the casket does she understand; someone has placed an explosive device her with a timer and C-4.  They have seconds before it explodes...