Using Kumu for World of Darkness Relationship Maps

Relationships and Characters are the critical data for a World of Darkness Chronicle. They are the engine that makes the story run. But they are hard to keep track of at scale - Chronicles rapidly grow to dozens of SPCs when you've got a whole city to run. 

I am a big proponent of Storyteller tools - I have a whole article on what I use. I started my most recent Chronicle with World Anvil, but I found keeping Storyteller Player Characters (SPCs) in World Anvil very difficult. The thing that matters most is the relationships between characters and that was hard to do in World Anvil, so I had to go looking for a new option.

Populating a City with Kindred

When building a Chronicle, unless you are setting it in a City created by someone else, one of the first major jobs a Storyteller has before them is to populate that city with Storyteller Player Characters (SPCs). SPCs are the key mortals, with Kindred, with ghouls, with other supernaturals. Depending on the city size, there could be hundreds of potential Kindred - a ridiculous number. We deal with this by focussing on the characters that matter and leave others for later creation.

"Splitting the Party"

In a lot of game systems, "splitting the party" is considered a bad thing, setting the group up for a painful encounter. In Vampire - and most other WoD games - it is just how the game is played, given the nature of the world. Let's talk about why that is and how to handle the challenges inherent in doing so frequently. I'm concentrating on Vampire here as far as flavour, but the techniques here should work with any game.

Advice for New Storytellers

I answer quite a few Reddit posts about how to get started in Storytelling in the World of Darkness. Here's some advice that may help new Storytellers in general. This advice is biased towards Vampire, biased towards V5, but is largely version agnostic or even system agnostic. It is a list of 15 things. They could probably each be an article by themselves, but I tried to keep things short and sweet.

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.

Learning Vampire The Masquerade V5 - Resources

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.