Like all good romances, my love affair with Vampire: The
Masquerade began with forbidden longing.
It was back in 1991, or maybe 92. I had gone to the Mall
with my stepmother so she could do some shopping. As she went off to buy…whatever
it was that women buy (clothes? I assume it was clothes), I was left to wander
the mall on my own. I quickly made my way to a shop at the local Gamekeeper
outlet. I’m not sure about most of its other locations, but the Gamekeepers
near where I grew up had a nice variety of board and table top games, and were
the default “gaming” store. I guess they kept In business by selling one of
their incredibly expensive Chess sets once a month, since they were generally
pretty empty.
Anyway, they had one shelf/magazine like rack where they
kept the roleplaying books. I was checking out what new Dungeons and Dragons
stuff was out, when I noticed an odd green covered book on the very top, hidden
almost behind other books. I pulled it out, and was startled by what I saw—a beautiful
image of a rose on a green background, with the title “Vampire: The Masquerade.”
Now, way back then, Vampires weren't as cool or hip as they
are today. There certainly wasn’t anything like Twilight or the Vampire Diaries
to make Vampires “safe” or “family friendly”—they were horror monsters, through
and through. And definitely something that I, at that young age, should NOT be
reading about, let along playing a game about them.
I hurriedly put the book back, and glanced around the store
sheepishly to see if anyone had seen my “transgression” (hey, I was raised
devoutly Catholic—horrible guilt was my bread and butter!). The staff seemed to
not be paying me any attention, but still being afraid I had committed some transgression,
I picked up some D&D book, probably one of the “Complete” ones, but I don’t
really recall. After assuring myself that no one was watching me, I gently
lifted the Vampire book out, and as subtly as possible checked it out.
It was weird, and mature. They had some odd poetry on the
back that I had never heard of, and violent and sexy (which, to my young eyes,
was even more alarming/alluring) pictures. There was an odd little “comic” that
seemed to reappear, about a man who gets turned into a Vampire by some ancient
seductress, and his struggle against her. It was like no game I had ever conceived
of before.
Of course, I didn't buy it. My parents barely tolerated my “D&D
phase,” they certainly wouldn't tolerate me bringing home a horror game that
had THOSE kinds of pictures in it. But I was still fascinated by it, and every
time we went back to the mall, I made sure to check it out.
Until one day, it was gone. I wasn't even sure if I
remembered what it was called, just what it looked like. I was too afraid to
ask the staff about it, since I was still convinced that I was too young to even
be LOOKING at such a thing. After enough months went by, it faded away like a
dream.
It was probably a year or so later that I was back at the
mall. Old enough, this time, to go with my friends, and actually having my own
money from mowing lawns around the neighborhood. I saw, something, that looked
familiar in the store. It wasn't the same book—it was hardback, while the one I
remember was soft. It didn't have the odd comic running through it, and the
opening narrative had changed. But it was the same cover, I thought, and it
seemed right. Free from direct parental oversight, I grabbed the book and,
rather brazenly I thought, brought it the register.
My friends were pretty sure they wouldn't sell it to me,
since you clearly “had to be like 18 to buy THAT”, but they rung me up without
a second look. This naturally made me “cool” for, most likely, the first time
in my entire life. Of course, I still made damn sure to hide the book in my
backpack amongst my math homework and literature text books—couldn't risk the
parents seeing such a thing.
I read the entire book cover to cover the next day. And then
again. I was hooked, I was in love. The world, the characters, the concepts of
role-playing that were, to me, revolutionary. It was the game I had been waiting
for since I had first played a thief sneaking into an Ogres lair to try and
steal some treasure.
I had always been something of an oddity in my gaming
circle, focused more on character than on combat. When I had to play multiple
characters, I made sure to give them different voices and different goals, and
different histories. More than once the game ground to halt, as the others were
confused as to why my fighter wouldn't share his healing potion with my wizard;
when I patiently tried to explain that my fighters village was burned by elves,
and he’d be long dead in the ground before giving his last healing potion to a “damned
elf,” well, they acted like that wasn't an explanation at all.
Vampire was the first game I played that seemed built for me—a
focus on character and story, rather than combat or power fantasy. As I got
older and my gaming group changed and matured, at least somewhat, I tried to
get a number of my friends to play, but they took that attitude that if they
wanted to play vampires, they wanted to play “monsters” and not deal with the
annoying and restrictive Humanity thing. Needless to say, I was bereft.
These same players finally got excited about Werewolf, and occasionally
they’d bend the rules to let me play a Gangrel in a few of the games. It was
nice, to an extent, but not really want I wanted from the game. Eventually in
late High School I got to play in a couple of “real” vampire games, but they
all seemed to descend into some kind of weird “Storyteller processing his
issues”/”power gaming maniacs” that I had felt was the antithesis of Vampire. Sadly,
I didn't get a chance to play what I felt was a true game of Vampire till after
College, and it made me realize that despite my dreaming over all those years,
this game could really be as amazing as I dared to hope.
But still, no matter how many revisions or changes the game
has gone through, or how many different historical era’s they try to cover, or
how many horrible, horrible By Night books they published, just looking at the
classic 1st/2nd Ed cover can bring me back to being that
young man in the game store, utterly enraptured and tantalized by the
possibilities the game promised.
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