What's New Is Old Again-Looking Back At Vampire: The Requiem

Alright, today we're going back to the Bush years, those halcyon days of watching the first Naruto anime on Cartoon Network and playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on your Playstation 2 while listening to the entirety of Big & Rich's "Horse of a Different Color" album on repeat.

Time to put on your black jeans and studded leather belt you got at Hot Topic because for this blog post, we're going to party like it's 2005 and look back on the earliest days of Vampire: The Requiem and the New World of Darkness (or Chronicles of Darkness, as it is now called) and why I sort of want to go back to those days even more than I want to revisit the roots of Vampire: The Masquerade and the Classic World of Darkness.

I was a twelve-year old edgy weeaboo kid back in 2005 who stayed up way too late, watched too much anime, and  drank way too much caffeine. I didn't start playing role-playing games until I was thirteen years old, when my Dad bought us a copy of the Player's Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and we started playing heavily house-ruled and imaginative campaigns.

Had I known about Vampire: The Requiem and the New World of Darkness at the time, I would have probably played those games also, as I was in search of a system for modern settings for a while following my introduction to the RPG hobby. Dad had told me about Vampire: The Masquerade and I had played the Hunter: The Reckoning video game for PS2, so I had a vague passing familiarity with White Wolf, but living in a rural area at the time and not having regular access to any gaming news or gossip, I didn't know that Masquerade was out of print at the time and that Requiem was the name of the game back then. So I eventually went back to D&D and forgot about White Wolf for the time being.

It wasn't until I was in my junior year of high school, back in October of 2009, following my paternal grandmother's unfortunate suicide and a deep slide into horrifying depression as a result that I even reconsidered going back into trying the darker and more Gothic White Wolf settings. By January 2010, I was still depressed but had recovered just enough to want to get back into gaming and other interests of mine, even if only as a brief escape from how sad and miserable my life was at the time.

This was the time of D&D Fourth Edition, considered by many to be the game's lowest point (and while Pathfinder was out at the time, I was unaware of it) and so I knew I did not want to play Dungeons & Dragons, at least not in the form it had at the time and that was when I remembered my brief interest in White Wolf and Vampire: The Masquerade. So, I did a quick Google search and went to Wikipedia to learn more about Masquerade, and it was there that I learned that the game was out of print at the time and had since been replaced by Vampire: The Requiem, which was released in August of 2004.

By the beginning of February 2010, I had done extensive Wikipedia research into the World of Darkness franchise (both Classic and New) and I had convinced my Dad to buy me the two main core books for World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem and I immediately began reading the fuck out of them both. I loved the idea of a dark Modern Gothic world and I was totally hooked.

This was before I was made aware of the rivalry between the old fans of Masquerade and the few who supported Requiem, or how toxic White Wolf's online fandom could get at times with their thematic purism and obsession with lore and metaplot. And due to being a broke teenager at the time, I had none of the Requiem supplements or any of the other gameline core books (though I was aware of the other New World of Darkness gamelines at the time), and so it seemed that my earliest one-shots of Requiem that I played with my father and brothers more likely resembled the earliest Vampire: The Requiem games from 2004-2005, only a little more action-oriented (we never really could get into personal horror) and not living in the shadow of Vampire: The Masquerade and its success

I mean, my Dad did play Masquerade during the days of First Edition, but that was years ago and he had forgotten most of it by the time we started Requiem and it wasn't until I started to play the LARP version Masquerade following a really awesome Vampire LARP I took part in at a convention in late February 2010 (SheVaCon 2010, if you are curious) that I got into Classic World of Darkness.

From there, I learned of the split in the fandoms and I realized how petty and ridiculous it all was because I loved both Requiem and Masquerade equally, and in all honesty, most of the bitching that was directed at Requiem came from metaplot purists whose complaints always boiled down to "it wasn't Masquerade!", and as someone who has detested the metaplot from the get-go, I tended to find a lot of the stuff that people hated about Requiem to be things that I liked about it.

In my previous blog post, I mentioned why I loved the early material for Vampire: The Masquerade because it predated the metaplot and was more vague. Therefore you could more easily make the game your own. The same is true of Requiem, only more so because the game was initially designed to be a toolkit from the beginning so as to avoid the excesses of Masquerade's later years. While Justin Achilli did fuck up some things in Requiem (such as his insistence on personal horror and the whole "emotionally dead vampires" fluff), the New World of Darkness material overall emphasized the games were a sandbox and a toolkit and not a railroad and that if you didn't like something, you could always change it, such as the aforementioned fluff about emotional deadness, which was quietly dropped from the game after the initial core book.

The simplicity and mystery of early Masquerade is deliberately dialed up to the max in the early materials for Requiem and that is why I love it. It's more localized and looking back on those days, I am saddened that Requiem and the New World of Darkness didn't take off and instead got mangled by CCP and later on, Paradox Interactive (who forced Onyx Path to rename the franchise "Chronicles of Darkness" and make radical alterations to the settings and mechanics) and while I am finally willing to give the new Chronicles of Darkness material a second chance after years of resisting it, I still miss the magic of playing those early Requiem games when all I literally had was the two base core books and we just made shit up and did crossovers with different anime and video game materials and the like.

Now that I look back on those days, I would love to write a campaign or a fan fiction based on Vampire: The Requiem as it existed back in 2004-2005 and the New World of Darkness was still in its infancy. I'd probably enjoy working on that more than I would working on Masquerade stuff.