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.

Foundry / Forge

I run by games on Foundry, hosted by Forge. You can self-host Foundry, but I find it easier to just let someone else do it. 

I use the unofficial World of Darkness 5e Foundry VTT system for almost everything - character sheets, rolls, etc. As far as I can see, there is not a publicly available Compendium with Disciplines, Merits, Flaws, etc. You do not need one - you and your players can enter the data manually on each character sheet - but I wrote up my own Compendium. It isn't clear to me whether I can share that compendium under the license agreements, so I will not do so at this time. This may change.

The only other module I use is the Special Dice Roller module. It allows me to make Vampire the Masquerade rolls, including Hunger dice and Willpower rerolls, quickly and easily without a character sheet. I don't fully stat my SPCs - there's less than a dozen with a character sheet right now - so I need a dice roller that lets me just roll an arbitrary pool. Special Dice Roller fits the bill.

Other than those, I just use standard Foundry tools for music playlists; scenes for images of places they go; and the journal to store images of SPCs, events, and items to share with the players. While I use scenes, I do not use any of the fancy lighting or fog of war effects - my scenes are a 'scene setting' image, not a map. I do almost exclusively theatre of the mind with Vampire.

FoundryVTT hosted on Forge

Epidemic Sound

I use Epidemic Sound for my sound tracks / playlists. I grab music that fits my theme, add it to media in Forge, then add it to playlists in Foundry. This is not the cheap way to do things, but I like the control I have with it.

Searching for music on Epidemic Sound

My "Ambient Sneak" Playlist on Foundry

Discord

I use Discord for the voice call (we don't do video calls) during the game and for player communication generally. I have Discord taking up my small laptop monitor when I'm playing, so I can (hopefully) see text chats with players that are keeping secrets. I have done video calls - I generally leave it up to the players and this group has chosen not to. 

I have a private channel with each player; a general chat channel; a "sessions" channel where I post the date of upcoming sessions and the Stars and Wishes from the previous session; and a game info channel where I post links to relevant docs and rules.

Discord's been fine. It is the default option nowadays, so it is easy to do.

Gemini

I am unapologetic about my use of AI for TTRPGs. It is controversial and I definitely see the point with regards to things I would otherwise buy, but I'm not commissioning artwork for 80+ SPCs. Before AI, we either went without art or we "borrowed" it from image searches on the internet, which is no more morally acceptable. My players have called out how helpful images can be. I am here to have fun with them, not argue on the internet. When I have had the opportunity, I have commissioned artwork from online artists to commemorate specific moments from my chronicles and campaigns.

I use Gemini, just because I've already sold my soul / given my data to Google. I didn't want to also do that with OpenAI. In my experience, OpenAI/ChatGPT is probably better. But Gemini is good enough for me.

I use Gemini as an assistant Storyteller - specifically for three things in my Chronicle. I start by loading in all my documents and relationship information into it. This is so I can:

1. Ask Gemini for a name. I HATE naming things on the fly. I can ask it for a name that does not appear in the Chronicle so far and that would be hard to confuse with existing SPCs. This is super handy. Or a quick description of a nobody that my players suddenly want to know about. If you are blanking in the moment, get your assistant to help
2. Ask Gemini to summarize Stars and Wishes. Or places in the session log that I made a note to revisit. Or ask it what might happen next. AI would make a terrible storyteller. But man, does it make it easier to get the process started. I never just go with what it says. But even in deciding not to go that way, it helps me realize what direction I do want to go in. I treat Gemini like a dim, not terribly creative assistant
3. Create images. The generalized ChatGPT/Gemini are fairly limited to what they will create for you (Vampire can demand scary images and they don't like to produce them), but when they can, it is (based on my own usage/licensing) cheaper for me to do it that way

Using Gemini to brainstorm some names

NightCafe

NightCafe is my image generator of choice. It has a plethora of AI models, it has a very usable interface (though it does get crowded if you generate hundreds of pictures). There's a free tier, though I pay. I like the Google Imagen model best. I use the Advanced AI, without Prompt Magic, and give very specific prompts. 

NightCafe will generate more disturbing scenes than Gemini will, though it certainly has its limits. I enjoy providing visuals for my players, whether that's Malkavian visions; a creepy abandoned building; or the disdainful Prince of the city.

 

Creating a vision for a Malkavian

Kumu

People and relationships are the heart of a Vampire game. Kumu lets me keep track of all of them. Kumu is a free mapping tool - nodes and connections between those nodes. At time of writing, there's 80 SPCs in the game, in a web of complicated relationships. Kumu has a great free tier that should be enough - you just can't have private maps (so name your maps things your players won't find). Kumu allows you to put in pictures for every person, tag them with relevant tags, give long descriptions, tag relationships, customize views, etc. You can go a long way if you dig into customization - I have custom templates set up that change the colours and shape of the person based on their tags. However, I based everything on the Stakeholder template and that should get you started.

The Relationship map (very zoomed out) from my Chronicle

A more zoomed in view of part of the map, plus details on a dead hunter

Google Docs

I have used tools like World Anvil in the past and found that Kumu + Google Docs + Google Maps beats World Anvil all to pieces for Vampire.

I have two private Storyteller docs that hold the keys to the game. The first is my Plot document - all my nefarious plots and plans, things that are happening or will happen in the game. These are just point-form and refer to characters in the relationship map. I talk a lot about intentions and motivations. I speculate as to what next steps will be. Everything is fluid, though, depending on what the characters do. I do try to keep things moving and ticking behind the scenes, trying to make natural reactions to the situations for the SPCs, so that when the PCs notice, things will have changed in a way that makes sense, even if it isn't how they would have predicted.

The second doc is my session notes - despite the fact that I don't provide session summaries, I keep fairly detailed notes to refer back to. I flag things that will come back to bite the PCs with BADTHING and things I want to revisit generally with TODO - I can search for these (or ask Gemini to) to make sure they don't get missed. 

I love when things come back around and the players realize it was all their fault. That's fun.

Google Maps

Since Vampire is played in the present day and since my Chronicle takes place in a real city, we use Google Maps extensively. I use a 'My Maps' map to put custom locations on that I can share with the players. We trade Google Map pins back and forth for where things are. We'll use Streetview occasionally, though since I'm making the city worse than it actually is, I will often just invent the view, either just with words or with AI image generation.

Google Maps plants our Chronicle in a physical space, which has been great. We just don't hold ourselves fully to it - if I need a gas station, there's a gas station. If I need a building burnt down, it is gone. This is our world, whatever Google has to say about it.

The Chronicle Map