INTEREST CHECK GROUP RP PLOTTING SHOVELHEAD - A Vampire Story

[Hecatoncheires]

"Where we are,
There's daggers in men's smiles.
The near in blood,
The nearer bloody."
- William Shakespeare, 'Macbeth'​

In your defence, it probably wasn't your fault.

You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Wrong shortcut. Wrong alley. Wrong party. Wrong date. Doesn't matter. Just because it wasn't your fault doesn't mean you can't suffer for it. One moment, everything was hunky dory.

Next moment, you're waking up in a mass grave amidst a burning building, trying desperately to figure out what the fuck is going on and why you have a thirst like the Devil's own.

​

You might be thinking that this is the worst moment of your life. And you may very well be correct in that thought. But let me tell you, friend: the night is still young. Things are going to get so, so much worse for you.

Call it a disease. Or even a curse, if that makes you feel better. In a world of blood-transmitted horror, you got the shortest straw possible: you've just become the monster's monster. In the eyes of the beasts that made you, you're a combination of leper and harbinger of the end times. A Thin-Blood. Dead yet not. A monster with half their foot still precariously hanging over mortality. Don't expect a warm reception. Except from the flames currently consuming the building you're lying in.

You don't know it yet but you've just been dumped, naked and afraid, into a world that exists beneath the one you used to call home. A world of shadows and blood, of ancient monsters and terrible secrets mankind was made to forget. A world of bloodlines and alliances forged in times so ancient they make the biblical flood look contemporary. A world of hierarchies, and be assured that you're at the very bottom of every single one of them.

Only saving grace is that you're not alone. There's a whole bunch of bodies in this mass grave, after all, and some of them are still breathing. Metaphorically speaking. Your new comrades in catastrophe, unified in just how universally fucked each and every one of you are.

So get up. Get moving. Because there's far worse than flames coming for you at this moment in time. If you survive long enough, you might just make some sense of the mess you've just been thrown into.

And if you're very lucky? You might have a chance to get even with the bastards that did this to you.

​

---

° 'Shovelhead' is a Horror RP about receiving the shortest end of the stick possible, set in the world of 'Vampire: The Masquerade'. Players will take the role of a small group of people awakening to discover that they have been transformed into Thin-Bloods, a diluted form of vampirism that marks them as pariahs in the undead world they are about to be thrown into. Assuming they can scramble out of the mass grave they find themselves in before the building they are in burns down. Dumped into a city they do not know and an underworld that largely wants them dead, what unfolds will be a story of desperation, survival and mystery.

° The goal of this RP is to be brutish, nasty and short - like a good hanging. You will be playing the ultimate underdogs, strangers in a strange and brutal land. Your survival is very much not guaranteed, but with enough ingenuity and cunning you might just last long enough to turn things around.

° No prior knowledge of Vampire: The Masquerade or the World of Darkness it belongs to is necessary. If anything, not knowing anything about it will help you get into character all the more.

° 'Shovelhead' makes use of Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition's ruleset. I chose this both because it offers the most potential for running a Thin-Blooded story and because (as the most recent edition) there are a number of quite excellent Actual Plays available online to help people get to grips with the system and the vibe. Yes, this means this RP does involve dice and the rolling of them. Yes, like D&D. Only not quite. If classes and levels and fantasy races have perhaps thrown you off in the past, you may find that Vampire's more free-flowing, narrative system is more your pace.

"I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men."
- H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider​

 

[CoffeeCake]

We live in strange times.

I used to avoid these kinds of games. At best, I'd read them because my talented friends and writing-crushes tended to be drawn to them. But I feel weird enough, that I'd like to give it a shot. I have a very fuzzy idea of WoD lore from wiki crawls and osmosis. It's probably a holey mixup of oWod, nWod, Chronicles of Darkness, various people's homebrews, and very hazy memories of Kindred: The Embraced. Basically drunk history of the World of Darkness but played straight. Makes me functionally a newbie, I'd say.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

There's quite a bit of metaplot overlap between World of Darkness and the Chronicles spin off, to be fair to you, and since Vampire (particularly 5E) is played at a local/street level you can largely relegate it to the background anyway. I think I'm something of an outlier in that I've played more Vampire: The Requiem (the Chronicles spin off that tried to escape all the metaplot shenanigans) than I have Masquerade.

I think that's why I like the idea of running something like this. The wider World of Darkness won't mean anything to the characters, at least initially, and what does need to come up can be revealed naturally as the story develops.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

MY APPROACH TO GMing
​

First, a disclaimer. A warning, even. I am a lousy fucking Games Master. This isn't me trying for a humble brag, or an attempt to beg some sympathy: my track record proves it. I have a tendency to overthink, underplan and get myself in way, way over my head. The result has been a whole host of failed projects that I've crashed out of in spectacularly awkward fashion, and though I do think I've improved over the last year or two there is no guarantee that it won't happen again.

All of this is to stress that if you're planning on joining this game? You're not just making a character.

You're probably making a mistake.

Self-deprecating warnings aside, I've spent the last year or two actually reading up on the process of RPs and the running of them thereof (turns out "just wing it" isn't always the best approach), and I've taken a fancy to a philosophy put forward by Justin Alexander over at his blog. One that I think might help with a game such as the one I'm proposing here. With 'Shovelhead', I'm not prepping a plot: I'm prepping a situation. Rather than trying to anticipate everything the players might do and overstress myself, or else forcing you all down a very specific path I don't want you to deviate from, I've instead worked to create a series of situations and characters with specific agendas that the characters will bounce off.

My hope is that this will create a reactive and engaging narrative that you have a great deal of agency to steer and develop. It's a style that I believe will reward the active, engaged players who want to get their teeth into the business of figuring things out and telling a cool story. You know, roleplaying. The thing we do here.

SOME RESOURCES​

As soon as someone like me breaks out the metaphorical dice and starts rattling them menacingly, there are a lot of people who tend to get nervous. And I get that. Tabletop RPGs are more popular than ever, but they still can be a little intimidating if you haven't played one before. That intimidation factor only increases when the weird guy rattling dice (me) informs you that he's not proposing something that people have heard of like D&D, but instead some weird urban horror thing popularised by goth LARPers back in the 1990s.

But trust me. If you've ever bounced off D&D before, or if you fear that all the maths and systems involved in it might slow down the story you want to experience, I have good news. Vampire: The Masquerade is probably a better game than D&D for actually roleplaying.

To help reduce any anxieties, and to aid people who may not be familiar with Vampire or the World of Darkness it belongs to, I've compiled a few videos and resources to help you all get a feel for what all this is and how it plays.

I mourn the loss of 'Emperor TTS' to Games Workshop's greed and bullshit, but I'm really pleased that the team behind it pivoted to World of Darkness content instead of something more obvious (like D&D). This video serves as a brilliant overview and introduction to Vampire and the other games associated with it, and is pretty damn funny to boot.

I will confess up top that Actual Plays actually aren't my thing at all, but I'm also very aware that I'm in the minority on this front. The above comes pretty well recommended as a great example of how Vampire's Fifth Edition (the one I'm using) plays, however, and there are some standout moments in the story that people have shared with me over the years (Brennan Lee Mulligan as a terrifying Catholic priest immediately springs to mind).

 

[rissa]

dont tempt me

 

[Hecatoncheires]

dont tempt me

 

[rissa]

dont tempt me

 

[Lyrikai]

I'm very curious. I might be tempted. You have my attention.

 

[CoffeeCake]

First, a disclaimer. A warning, even. I am a lousy fucking Games Master. This isn't me trying for a humble brag, or an attempt to beg some sympathy: my track record proves it. I have a tendency to overthink, underplan and get myself in way, way over my head. The result has been a whole host of failed projects that I've crashed out of in spectacularly awkward fashion, and though I do think I've improved over the last year or two there is no guarantee that it won't happen again.

All of this is to stress that if you're planning on joining this game? You're not just making a character.

You're probably making a mistake

"Oh, hey, twin!"

You've effectively sold on me this. I'm going to be rooting for this hard. I've gotta join.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

I figure honesty is the best approach with these things.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

Alright, I was always imagining this wouldn't be a huge game so I reckon the interest we've got is sufficient to get rolling. I'm currently at work building out the OOC to ensure you guys have all the info you need to make your characters and understand the general vibe of the game. As @rissa has already discovered, you can follow along via my testing thread starting around here. Just bear in mind that this stuff is very much a work in progress, and subject to change.

I'll aim to get stuff assembled as soon as possible.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

Took me a hot minute, but the OOC is now live and ready for any/all interested parties.

 

[CoffeeCake]

Still planning. Just busy until next week.

 

[SilverPaw]

Just seen this, will look into it more, as I'm interested, may join (though I'm busy but also got a craving for vamps).

 

[Hecatoncheires]