Tools for Storytelling Vampire The Masquerade V5

I have run a lot of games over the years, in person and online, for many systems and versions of systems. Right now, I'm obsessed with Storytelling Vampire the Masquerade V5. I have put together a toolkit for my Storytelling. It works for me, I'm sharing it with you.

Almost all of my games are online now. This toolkit is tuned for that. I use three monitors when Storytelling and am pleased to have all three, though I could get by with less if I had to. Easy access to information is my goal. When I'm playing, Foundry takes up one full monitor, Discord takes my smaller monitor, and everything else is in tabs on a full screen web browser on the third monitor. I get easily distracted, so every bit of screen real estate is filled with things relevant to the game - no Reddit or other distractions.

Learning Vampire The Masquerade V5

I love Vampire the Masquerade V5. I love its flavour, I love its focus on low-level, personal horror stories. I am, however, happy to concede that the rules for Vampire the Masquerade are opaque. The rulebooks are a mix of lore and rules and neither the order nor the layout is conducive to learning the game from scratch. Frankly, they are a mess. So new players generally need some help, either from experienced players or Storytellers or from some internet resource.

Introducing a Chronicle

When you are looking for players, you'll often write up a Chronicle Introduction, laying out what the chronicle will be about, what it will focus on, what you're looking for in players, and the sort of game you're expecting it to be. Having a match of expectations makes a big difference in the success of an TTRPG campaign or chronicle. In this post, we'll dissect my introduction for my most recent Chronicle. I'll comment why I included specific parts and how that's done with the current game "Fangs in the Fog" (as time of writing, around half a year into nearly every week play). "Fangs in the Fog" takes place in the seaside city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Hopefully, this document will help you get your Chronicle off the ground with players that are excited about the game you want to run.

Introduction to the Mechanics of Vampire the Masquerade V5

This document is intended to be a quick summary of the biggest mechanics involved in Vampire: The Masquerade. The mechanics are intended to mesh with and enhance the lore and flavour of the Vampire's existence. Notably, other systems in the same world (currently Hunter: The Reckoning and Werewolf: The Apocalypse) use a customized version of this system to enhance their own lore and flavour. The World of Darkness is not balanced and that's by intent - there are many entities in the world that even a neonate Kindred can overwhelm easily and others that are far more powerful.

The books can be difficult to learn to play from. Hopefully, this document will be helpful - it'll give you the idea of the terminology so you can find more details in the books or in Paradox's official wiki : https://vtm.paradoxwikis.com/VTM_Wiki

Introduction to the world of Vampire the Masquerade V5

 Note: This post is a modified version of a document written to introduce players new to the Vampire V5 game in my current Chronicle. Changes are primarily around removing references specific to that specific Chronicle. I strongly feel that all players should be able to separate what they know vs what their characters know, so I feel that this document should be fine for players and prospective players to read.

Why Talk about Storytelling?

Why do it at all?

I want to encourage people to play games in the World of Darkness. In specific, I want to encourage people to play games in the World of Darkness V5 system - currently Vampire the Masquerade V5, Hunter the Reckoning V5, and Werewolf The Apocalypse V5. These are hard games to start for beginners - both because the books are quite opaque as far as rules and lore and because there is literally decades of lore at this point. Yeah, V5 reset some stuff, but man, there's still a lot to know.