Wicked Nights
A Modern Horror Anthology Engine Game (With Vampires)

Wicked Nights is my attempt to write a vampire game. It's not really In a Wicked World of Darkness; there are some fundamental setting assumptions that differ greatly from the big Vampire games. Really, I conceive the setting as being more of a mix of Supernatural and Sin City.

Wicked Nights uses the rules of In a Wicked Age/The Anthology engine. You'll need those to play. The game features three oracles: Sex, Lies, and Blood, which focuses on intrigue, backstabs, dirty dealings, and (rarely) love. Hunters Hunted is about action and killing- vampires killing each other, vampires hunting mortals, and mortals hunting vampires. When Nightmares Walk the Earth features things even vampires fear. This is the oracle of stranger things, broader weirdness and creature features.

Gameplay

Drawing from the Oracles
The Spades and suit of each deck explicitly features a Vampire or Vampires. (So do the Aces.) If no Aces or Spades are drawn in the first three cards, the last card is automatically considered a Spade.
(If the 3 of Diamonds, the Four of Clubs, the King of Hearts., and then the 2 of Clubs are drawn, the last card- the 2 of Clubs- is considered a Spade instead.)
When playing off the Owe List, the player picking the oracle may announce that the third card counts as a Spade before it is drawn (if no Spade is drawn in the first two cards), and then pick any Oracle entry, or they may pick a Spade for the fourth entry. Of course, if a Spade is drawn in the first few picks, the player may choose an oracle entry freely.

Stats and the Supernatural
Supernatural beings tend to have an advantage over their mortal counterparts. To account for this, mortal characters have the normal stat spread (d4, d6, d6, d8, d10, d12.)
Non-Vampire supernatural creatures, such as ghouls (mortal humans who regularly drink vampire blood) other occultists, werewolfs, swampthings, and whatever the oracle generates, have a stat spread of d4, d6, d8, d8, d10, d12. Ghouls must put either their d4 or their d6 in With Love.
Vampires have a stat spread of d6, d8, d8, d10, d12, and they put no die in With Love. They may not act With Love, ever. Vampires have to have two other stats reduced to zero to be out of the fiction.

If a character becomes a supernatural thing in the progress of play, they do not get to reset their dice. Next session they may reset their dice as appropriate, AND gain a particular strength suited to their new status, if appropriate.

Particular Strengths and Such
You can't take an occult or supernatural particular strength unless it's reasonably indicated by the oracles. You can't be a supernatural creature unless it's reasonably indicated by the oracles. Mortal characters should generally have narrow, mundane particular strengths that are useful when they come up and allow them to be competitive in a certain specialization. Non-vampire supernatural things should generally take whatever they are as a particular strength (Werewolf, Necromancer, etc.) Vampires often have a particular strength tied to what particular vampiric powers they have unlocked, and should be given a bit of latitude in determining what those are.

Setting Themes

Social Isolation
Only the characters implied by the oracles are important to the story. These are personal stories, about people with personal wants, needs, and grudges. The outside world does not care about your shit. The only people you can turn to are the other characters in the session. The contact you went to great lengths to gain in the last session? He sympathizes, but is caught up in his own mess. If you want to solve your problems, you got to do it yourself. Cellphones and TV and the internet are great, but they just expose you to a world of uncaring billions. Packing up and moving to the next town over is fine and good, but it just takes you out of it as you leave all your best interests behind. This is a world of black and white, where anything worth happening occurs at night, the neighbors shut their windows and turn the music up to drown out the screams, and it's probably raining.

The Secret
Vampires are real. And also occultists, and werewolves, and who knows what else. You'd think with all those things going bump in the night, someone would notice?
Most people don't know. Most people don't want to know. The people who do know? They keep real quiet. Who's going to believe you?
There is no global conspiracy to keep the Secret secret. Yet the Secret is surprisingly durable. People have a way of rationalizing things, selectively forgetting things, trivializing things. They want things to make sense. Other people want things to stay Secret. There may be no global conspiracy, but there are individual ones.
Many, many individuals know a fragment of the truth- the supernatural is real. But society as a whole? It won't face up to it, and probably can't face up to it.
And no one is trying to reveal the Secret- not the whole Secret anyway. They're too damn caught up in their own messes.


Vampire Society (Or Lack Thereof)
Vampires are antisocial creatures. They do not organize themselves into clubs, organizations, or governments. (Some try, but these experiments are typically small and short lived.) Usually, they hate and avoid each other. A vampire likely knows other vampires, and grudgingly tolerates them and even cooperates for a time against mutual enemies. There are no kings of the vampires, no pacts, no worldwide alliances or networks. Vampires are parasties upon man, but in regards to their own kind, each must be prepared to exist in a vacuum.

Hunters Hunted

Clubs
2: Five blood-addicted ghouls, working to kidnap and feed on any vampires they can find.
3: The congregation of a small Baptist church, convinced vampires are real, and ready to deal with them with shotguns and molotov cocktails.
4: An open grave; the tombstone bears the name of a man still alive.
5: A pack of graverobbers, digging up bodies in the city cemetery.
6: A suitcase full of blackmail materials, accidentally left on the subway.
7: A bankrupt gambler, returned to home to settle an old score.
8: A high-speed collision on the freeway, killing three innocents but leaving those responsible alive.
9: The accidental killing of a favored ghoul.
10: A vampire hunter, a lifetime of success behind him, on the trail of a quarry he's been studying for over forty years.
J: A mother, grieving over the loss of her son.
Q: A burning tenement, children trapped within.
K: A police detective, assigned to investigate a murder he committed.
A: Two vampires, sharing the same sire, hateful rivals but under an oath to work together.

Diamonds
2: An attractive young woman, recently dredged from the river.
3: A pair of incompetent ghouls, lucky to be alive.
4: The ghosts of children, returned for vengeance.
5: A bus depot, bringing an ominous stranger into town at a late hour.
6: A driven cop, investigating a linked series of grisly killings.
7: A manor house in the outskirts of the county, filled with secret passages.
8: A robbery by masked men of the blood bank.
9: A weary journalist, close to a dangerous truth.
10: A man with strange tattoos covering his entire body, changing from a bullet-riddled jogging suit into an expensive business suit.
J: A distinguished historian, an expert in his field, and the vampire who was quite active during that period.
Q: A sword, on the shelves of a curio shop in Chinatown, mystically potent and thirsty for blood.
K: A hidden monastery of monks dedicated to hunting vampires, horribly infiltrated and compromised.
A: A dying vampire negotiates with a dying mortal for safety.

Hearts
2: A former addict of vampire-blood, once again longing for another taste.
3: A gaunt, rough-looking man in an ill-fitting suit, watching an annual party for signs of trouble-makers, his hand never far from the revolver that has hung concealed at his side for nearly two centuries.
4: Two old enemies, meeting at the crossroads at midnight.
5: The most renowned vampire hunter of all time, brought back from the dead by darkest magics.
6: A military surplus store, catering to paranoid survivalists gearing up for their secret war.
7: Two men, disposing of a body in a chemical factory.
8: The Red Line Subway, running through the city's most hotly contested territory.
9: A cargo ship, recently arrived, most of the crew dead, the hull full of illegal cargo.
10: A pious woman who unknowingly becomes a werewolf on the nights of the full moon.
J: A frantic man, a bullet-wound in his gut, screaming at the cab driver.
Q: A government operative, looking to capture a vampire for study.
K: A crime syndicate falls to pieces after a hit job.
A: A family of vampires, feeding and siring at whim, threatening to spiral out of control.

Spades
2: A skinwalking vampire, able to take the form of the people he skins.
3: A vampiric assassin from out of town, who commands prices far higher than mere money.
4: An urgent news announcement, warning of the oncoming hurricane, and a stodgy vampire who hasn't left his lair in eighty years.
5: A once-elegant noblewoman, now a walking corpse, trying to uncover the secrets of this modern world by torturing the “peasants” drinking in a city park at night.
6: An ancient vampire, with an appetite only for the blood of other vampires.
7: A ravenous vampire chewing into the neck of her sire while egged on by a crowd, fearful of what will happen to her afterwards.
8: A detailed map, showing the locations of several vampire dens.
9: The city's second oldest vampire, powerful, renowned, and possessing crumbling sanity.
10: A newly sired vampire, abandoned, clueless to it's true nature.
J: A disfigured female vampire, lying weeping over the cold slab of her own empty tomb.
Q: An outcast vampire, returned, exiled long ago by his sire.
K: A gunslinger vampire, stuck in the traditions of the old west, longing for the fateful shootout at Midnight.
A: A disgusting vampire, an odorous mockery of a man, betrayed by nearly everyone, risking his existence to help an old woman get to her car safely without being mugged.

Sounds really cool - can you explain a bit more about Particular Strengths and how these reflect vampiric stuff? I'm guessing the higher die types cover vampiric strength, mesmirising presence and so on, but how about turning into a bat, or the kind of V:tM powers like Obfuscate? Are vampires assumed to have a default package of powers + whatever they get from Particular Strengths?

I like the idea - I've had some success running In a Wicked Age, but I know a fair few people who predominantly only play Vampire, so this could be a nice way of trying to bridge our respective interest gaps.

Not bad. I don't understand the purpose of those special rules, though - seems to me like the game would work as well or better without them. The spade-enforcement for instance seems to be necessary only in a very narrow mindset that requires vampires to make a showing in every single story while being unable to just declare that an implicit vampire is lurking in the drawn oracle. Just as an exercise, try to select a valid oracle draw from those cards that doesn't make introducing a vampire into the set-up trivial - I'm not seeing it, and even if I were, I don't understand why the vampire needs to be in each and every story instead of just 95% of them.

This is wicked cool, Willow.

The oracle entries are thrilling.

-Vincent

Adrian- As played this far, vampires tend to be charming tough badasses right out of the box, but with little specific superpowers. If you want to change into animals, mesmerize people, or turn invisible, you'll need a discipline er particular strength for that.

Make sure you show them those three setting paragraphs. The fact that there's no socially enforced masquerade or higher authority is important.

This thread is useless without actual play!

So, I've ran two sessions. The first was me, Tim, and Brendan, and used the WNWtE Oracle. We drew 4C (Ex-cop, working for a shell company), the 8H (perpetual motion machine drawing energy), the Ace of Hearts (vampire child chained in a basement), and an entry I deleted, which was a freak snowstorm in July.

Story involved two corrupt university researchers, one (Brendan's character) experimenting on her own vampire son, and the other who designed an entropy machine that was tearing everything apart, and the characters stuck in the middle, like Tim's security guy, the father of the vampire, the scientists research assistant, and of course, Billy, the 6 year old savage blood starved vampire.

And that damn July snowstorm? Never really came up. Ostensibly created by the workings of the entropy machine, I nixed it from the oracles because it was not at all inspiring. Really, a good example of how to write a bad oracle entry. I'm not completely satisfied with what I replaced it with either (Jack of Hearts, Hell's Intersection.)

Session two was also WNWtE, and was a larger crowd- me running for Tim, Len, Amelia, Sabe, and Misha. Entries were the Marijuana Farm w/ Glowing Stone, Voodoo Magician, Dark Magic Fraternity, and Young Vamp forced to Eat Own Hand. Plot was basically the fratguys (Amelia, plus Sabe playing the girlfriend), trying to get high, not get shot by the crazy redneck lady who tilled the farm (Len), with interference from vampire Misha and voodoo guy Tim. Had very much a slasher movie vibe. Focus was really on the fratguys and the girlfriend. Mortals have an amazingly easy time of getting on the owe list, which may be appropriate in this kind of story, since it's really about the victims. Misha's vampire got rather low screen time, but ended up forging a cool unholy alliance with the Voodoo guy.

The oracle entries here were a lot punchier- the Fraternity was ripe with lots of characters, the marijuana field seemed to tie right in, and the glowing stone was the focus of power for the Voodoo guy, who was a great villain. The least punchy one seemed to be the vampire one, as we struggled to tie it in. But the session was good!

Nifty!

When we played, we used Injured, Exhausted & Shamed as options. Though I suspect whichever one effects With Love (I think Shamed) should work a little differently on Vampires- maybe not at all on them.

That die spread (different for different types of creatures) seems like it would land normal humans far more often on the Owe List. Over time, this suggests that your game is more about exploring the regular human characters than the supernaturals, who act more like monsters or villains.

Might this, by itself, not be enough motivation for people not to play vampires all the time?

Thanks for all the praise, everyone.

Vampire NPCs get a spread of 2d6, 2d8, d10, d12. And can't, within the narrative, act With Love.

And yes, the normal dudes got on the owe list much, much more often.

"That's still 4 forms? I'm confused. Are you using Action, Manuevering, and Self-protection?"

Yes. That's six dice across 3 forms.

Oh wow, I'd just assumed the second, but I think the first is totally hotter.

I can't wait to play this. I love IAWA and Vampires to death. Thanks for puttin the work in!

Y'know, I totally forgot that you guys had made this until this morning. Mind if I take it to run at Gencon? I was thinking of running IAWA, it would be cool to run the vampire version too.

While I really like the idea behind "no With Love", I'm not sure it fits. I'm not an expert on WoD, but do Vampires really not love? I'd sooner remove their "For Others", I see them more as solitary, egocentric, non-altruistic creatures. But creatures that can still love. Or maybe I've just watched Coppola's Dracula too recently. You know, the undying love for his wife transfered to Mina and all that.

And aren't ghouls in WoD often a sort of slave, bound to their vampire masters by blind adoration, something we might in fact call love? I'd give the ghouls the high die in With Love instead of high.


But yeah, it all depends on your interpretation of vampire lore, it's a great hack.