October 2025 – Words Deferred

Tips for Thousand Year Old Vampire

If you saw my previous post, you know I’ve been playing the solo RPG “Thousand Year Old Vampire” recently. I enjoy the game, but like so many TTRPGs, the source book is heavy on rules and light on examples. With a few rounds completed, I thought I’d offer some tips for new players, to make the game more fun and easier to run.

One Easy Trick They Don’t Want You to Know

The included “character sheet” consists of two paperback-sized pages with six headings (memories, diary, skills, resources, characters, and marks). If you abuse the book’s spine, you can probably scan this onto a single sheet of standard paper, but anyone who has played the game will know that you’ll need the world’s tiniest handwriting to fit everything on that single page. And even if you do, you’ll be carefully erasing half of it as you play.

I’ve tried playing by writing everything in pencil on 4-6 sheets of paper. It’s manageable, but not great, especially for your first run. Luckily, we have the perfect technology to improve this situation: sticky notes. They come in a rainbow of colors, and they’re the perfect size for a one-sentence blurb, which is the format of just about everything in TYOV.

I really enjoy the tactile aspect of pen on paper, so I’ve been using color-coded Post-It notes that I can stick on 3-4 standard-sized sheets of heavy tagboard. You could also use a larger sheet of paper or poster board, or just array the notes across a table, but it’s nice to have something you can pick up and put away if you have to pack up an incomplete session.

The game doesn’t specifically tell you to, but I also like to track the age of my vampire (whether they know their own age or not), the current year, and all the prompts I’ve hit in the current game. This makes it much easier to pick up a game from a previous session.

Virtual vs. Physical

In our post-pandemic world, many of us are now used to playing our tabletop games on virtual tabletops. Since TYOV involves a significant amount of adding, deleting, and copy/pasting; tracking everything on a laptop can make all that easier.

However, the typical TTRPG virtual tabletops cater (by necessity) to Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and a lot of similar games. TYOV has only a little bit of die rolling, and none of the minifigures, maps and crunchy bits that these platforms put a lot of effort into. So virtual tabletops strike me as ineffective overkill. All TYOV really wants is a big whiteboard and some sticky notes.

As luck would have it, I know from my day job that a lot of professional project management and software development jobs happen to have similar requirements. Trello, Miro, and the dozens of similar apps are perfect for TYOV, and while they may be catering to big business, they all generally have free tiers that are more than adequate here.

Min/Maxing?

It’s clear from the very light-touch mechanics that TYOV is a story-centric game. However, there are still mechanics in the form of skills and resources. These are the currency that keeps the game going.

Before beginning a game, it’s worth thinking about what your goal is. If you want to let the story develop however it may, then there’s no need to worry too much about your resources. After my first vampire met a relatively early demise by running out of skills and resources, I decided I wanted to see a game all the way through to the “end”—reaching one of the last nine prompts. In that case, you’ll want to play with an eye toward the mechanics, and staying alive.

Many prompts offer choices. Characters and memories are ephemeral. Marks can impact the story. But none of them matter toward your vampire’s continued survival compared to skills and resources. So long as you pick options that maximize those, and you don’t roll too terribly, you’re likely to reach the final prompts.

Memory Miscellany

The TYOV rules as written place a hard cap on the length of an experience: one sentence. If you stick to this, you’ll quickly find yourself writing convoluted run-on sentences full of commas, colons, semicolons, em-dashes and parentheticals. Even the few examples in the book do it.

I appreciate the purpose of the rule: to keep the game tight and quick. But sometimes it’s just faster and more fun to write a couple of sentences, rather than heaping abuse on the English language. As far as I’m concerned, a short paragraph of two or three sentences is just fine, and if you use sticky notes, each experience will still have a natural built-in size limit.

When it comes to memories—the headings that experiences must be filed under—it pays to pick something that will be easy to fill with a full roster of three memories. To this end, I find that single-word concepts work well, especially emotions and vampire-related things.

Love, hate, hope, fear, loneliness, determination.

Blood, feeding, pain, death.

Many new experiences will be able to fit under several of these memories, which means you can pick and choose to better max out your fifteen possible slots for experiences.

Alternately, if you want a highly forgetful vampire, you can try the opposite: very specific memory headings will make it harder to slot in experiences. This will force your vampire to offload to diaries and forget things sooner. This may be fun if you want to play with a monster who has forgotten his own origin, or increase the likelihood of repeatedly running across a nemesis or lover that your vampire has forgotten.

Thousand Year Old Vampire — A Solo RPG

Thousand Year Old Vampire is a lonely solo role-playing game in which you chronicle the unlife of a vampire over the many centuries of their existence, beginning with the loss of mortality and ending with their inevitable destruction.

I happened across this little hardcover book at a games store in a mall near my house. I was there to have the failing battery in my phone replaced, and I had some time to browse and meander. Since most TTRPG books are oversized tomes, a novel-sized book stands out on the shelf.

I don’t have an active gaming group these days, and most game books don’t come cheap, so I don’t buy random game books as much as I once did. But a solo RPG sounded appealing, and my kids had been asking if there was something I might want for Father’s Day. So I texted a pic of the cover to my wife with a note about where I had seen it. Lo and behold, a week or two later I was unwrapping it.

Becoming a Vampire

The rules of TYOV are simple. Your character is defined by their memories, and you can only keep a limited number over your long (un)life. Each memory is a collection of experiences, defined by some particular theme or topic. Each experience is a single sentence that describes something that happened in a turn of the game. You can have up to 5 memories (topics) with three experiences attached to each.

Although this gives you enough space to retain up to fifteen experiences, those experiences need to fit under the existing memories, which can sometimes be tricky. Additionally, you can “offload” up to four memories into a diary—a physical object that could be anything from a book to a cuneiform tablet—they’ll no longer take up space in your head, but they can be lost forever if something happens to that diary.

Along with memories, your vampire has skills. Skills are one of the two mechanically important resources that your vampire can use to survive when things go wrong (and they will go wrong a lot). Skills typically relate to an experience, and can only be used once, usually to get out of a jam. However, skills that have been used (or “checked”) can sometimes become relevant again in later prompts.

Your vampire can also accumulate physical “resources.” These mechanically important (and personally significant) items can be anything from a trinket to a castle, and are differentiated from mere possessions that you may accumulate over the centuries.

The other aspects of the game are marks and characters. Marks can be any sign of your immortality, such as the classic vampire tells: nasty teeth, failure to show up in a mirror, and sparkles. You could also choose to go big with bat wings, glowing eyes, or something more extreme.

Characters are the mortals and immortals you meet, meat, and perhaps re-meet along the way. Mortals will typically only be relevant for a few turns of your long life. Immortals may become allies or enemies, and be lost and found again across the centuries.

Play

To play, you move through a series of eighty numbered prompts. Each turn, you roll d10 – d6. This means you can move forward and backward, although statistics ensures you’ll eventually progress forward. If you land on the same prompt more than once, there are additional prompts for the second and third go round (and even more options in the appendixes).

Prompts will present a new situation, and you’ll have to decide what happens as a result. Each prompt may change your story mechanically, by granting or using up skills, resources and NPC characters. Prompts also add story context. You make choices, if instructed. And you always create a new experience that must be added to one of your memories. If no relevant memory has an open slot, you must give something up: forgetting a memory or moving it to your diary.

The last eight prompts end the game, providing a natural limit. It is also possible to use up your skills or resources. In a pinch, you can substitute one for another, creating some fiction to explain how you escaped a sticky situation. If you have no skills or resources left and the game demands one, then your vampire dies. My first game ended at prompt 25, having completed seventeen experiences. The endings at the high end of the prompts are a goal to aim for, but you aren’t guaranteed to make it there. There are a few ways the game can end: death and destruction, being trapped forever, or losing yourself in the throes of madness.

Variations

The game suggests two modes of play: quick game, where you simply track the state of your vampire with the minimum necessary information, or a journalling game, where you write vampiric journal entries for each prompt in addition to tracking experiences, memories, skills, resources, and characters.

A scant three pages in the back of the book are dedicated to suggestions for group play, suggesting that “journalling games” be treated as a long-form game of letter writing between participants that may last days or weeks, and “quick games” can be done in-person over the course of a few hours.

In multiplayer, the book suggests sharing non-player characters and creating stories that link the players’ vampires. It also outlines a mechanic for sharing or stealing resources.

This section seemed like an afterthought to me. There were minimal examples to help understand what this kind of game might look like in action. I don’t expect really crunchy rules from a game like this, but at least a little bit of rigor seems necessary, so the players actually know how to interact.

The Fun

The last time I played a solo TTRPG was A Visit to San Sibilia. That game was extremely mechanically light, and felt almost like a series of slightly randomized short story prompts (which I found very enjoyable, but might not satisfy someone who is more interested in the “gamier” aspects of TTRPGs.)

Thousand Year Old Vampire is more mechanical, and gives you more opportunities to choose whether you’ll make decisions for story reasons (do I save a favorite character?) or mechanical ones (do I save my skills and resources?). These mechanical aspects also mean that there is more stuff to keep track of over the course of a game.

Despite following the life of a single vampire from start to finish, this is less of a storytelling game. With San Sibilia, the natural result of playing the game is a short story. The artifacts that come out of a game of TYOV are more fragmented. Until I got into it, I didn’t realize how much erasing or crossing-out I’d be doing. Characters, skills, and resources all come and go. Even memories are liable to be erased eventually, and diaries can be destroyed.

It’s easy to end the game with a sheaf of scribbly, messy papers. While it’s possible to carefully document your vampire’s life in a journaling game, I think it may be a stronger experience if you lean into the ephemeral nature of the experience. One of the more interesting things that can happen in the game is your vampire living so long that they no longer remember their origin.

It’s probably good to treat your first game of TYOV as a test run, just as you’d expect to need a few sessions to get comfortable with the rules for a “big book” group TTRPG like D&D or Shadowrun.

Delving Through History

Something that was not obvious to me at first is that this game is at least as much about history as vampires. If you begin in Spain in the 1300s, you won’t get through many prompts before you’ll need to know some things about what life is like in that time and place. And your vampire will likely travel the world as they pass the centuries, so you may soon need to learn about 14th century Africa or the New World in the 15th century.

A good general background in history helps, but isn’t necessary so long as you’re willing to go down some Wikipedia rabbit holes. However, learning about history ends up being a significant part of the game. If that sounds boring, this may be a tough game to get through.

Of course, you could always make up some alternate history, or start your vampire in the modern day and let them travel into the far-flung sci-fi future…

The Corporate Cold War Gets Hot — The Story Idea Vault

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The Corporate Cold War

When the history books were written, the story started with an exodus of intellectuals and policymakers from the United States and Britain. Their failure to effectively change the festering kleptocracies of their native lands only galvanized them to fight even harder for the more favorable battleground of the EU.

The opening salvo was the unexpected passage of laws that set hard limits on the size of corporations by employee count, profit, and revenue. Any company too large would have to split up. These limits would tighten over time, and any uncompliant company could do no business within the economic block.

The first front of the war was political, with multinational corporations spending billions to influence elections and run ad campaigns. They threatened to abandon Europe, an empty threat, knowing how much it would cost them. They claimed prices would skyrocket. But they underestimated the public vitriol against them.

When political wrangling failed make the problem go away, a legal arms race began. The corps found a hundred ways to split one company into many while maintaining total control and channeling profits to the same shareholders. Regulators updated the rules, and the corporations changed structure again. It took decades of closing loopholes to see the laws really go into effect.

Some of the corps followed through on their warnings, leaving the EU altogether and eating the loss. Others divested themselves of their European branches. But some of the biggest, loudest corporations gave in and broke up in a sudden cascade of shocking announcements. The continent celebrated.

However, the elite shareholder class had been busy consolidating their power in America, Britain, and parts of Asia. As their influence waned in the EU, elsewhere the lines between corporate and political power blurred and fell away.

This, the history books said, was what led to the worldwide split into two socioeconomic blocs: a new cold war. And if there was one thing the gleeful intellectuals of the EU underestimated, it was the amount of bloodshed the rich would embrace to keep their wealth and power. The rhetoric became increasingly violent, demanding that the “continent of socialists” accept “true capitalism” into their borders, no matter the cost.

Armies rallied along the borders. Fingers hovered over the controls that would launch fleets of missiles and drones. And the doomsday clock ticked forward: five seconds to midnight…

Xenocide — Read Report

Book | E-book | Audiobook (affiliate links)

Xenocide is the third book in the Ender series, after Ender’s Game (link) and Speaker for the Dead (link). I read the book decades ago, and remembered almost nothing about it. I’m now reading it again with my daughter.

The plot is split between two worlds and sets of characters. On the planet Lusitania, the story of Speaker for the Dead continues, with Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, his AI companion Jane, and the Ribeira family that he has now joined through his marriage to their matriarch, Novinha. Soon, Ender’s sister Valentine and her family arrive as well.

The Lusitanians, including the native Pequeninos and imported Buggers, live under the looming threat of an approaching fleet armed with the planet-destroying MD device, as well as the constantly shifting threat of the descolada virus that is integral to the Pequenino life cycle, but eventually deadly to all non-native species. The fleet is held back temporarily by Jane, who disables all their communications at the risk of revealing herself to the universe at large.

On the planet Path, we’re introduced to Han Fei-tzu, an important official, and his genius daughter, Han Qing-jao. They are members of the planet’s high caste, the godspoken, whose intelligence is linked to OCD-like compulsions that the populace believe to be the way the gods speak to mortals.

Fei-tzu is tasked by the congress of the hundred worlds to solve the riddle of the fleet near Lusitania, which seems to have suddenly disappeared. He assigns this important task to his daughter. Soon they are joined by one more character—Si Wang-mu, a servant girl who is not godspoken, but also turns out to be highly intelligent.

** More Planets, More Problems

Ender’s Game was clearly intended as a single novel that stands on its own. Speaker for the Dead was decidedly more complicated, and left a pile of unresolved plot points to pick up in Xenocide.

Despite this “head start,” the first half of Xenocide feels plodding, and it mostly involves setting up a large number of major problems that the characters are going to have to solve, along with a web of reasons why absolutely every character is going to be at odds with every other character.

Conflict can be an engine of story, but Xenocide proves to me that it can go too far. I couldn’t help feeling that the constant animosity between characters was exhausting, and when certain characters finally gave in and decided to work with others near the end of the book, it felt abrupt and somewhat unearned.

** Thinking Fast and Slow

The first half of the book is slow, and it would be easy to blame this entirely on the setup required by the huge cast of characters and the many interconnected conflicts. That is absolutely a factor, and I think this book was trying to do a few too many things at once. However, I think a lot of this is actually just Card being long-winded and having too much editorial clout at this point in his career.

There are pages of internal narration where characters muse on their feelings. These deep thoughts are sometimes interrupted by one or two lines of dialogue, only to immediately drop back into more pages of their thoughts! If there was ever an argument against a third-person omniscient perspective, this is it. A first-person narrator or even a tight third-person would have limited these long and winding detours and perhaps forced Card to show how characters feel more through their actions and words.

By contrast, the latter half of the book ramps into a much faster pace. All of those problems set up in the first half have to get resolved. Unfortunately, this leads to another problem of pacing, where everything feels like it’s happening overly fast. Again it feels like there was simply too much going on, and some plot points inevitably got short shrift.

To me, some of the resolutions felt like an abrupt tonal shift. This is a far-future series with advanced technology, but felt like hard sci-fi grounded in reality. Near the end of Xenocide, ideas are introduced that are decidedly further afield. There is a brand new kind of magical physics. When the whole plot hinges on these ideas, there’s a whiff of deus ex machina—even if they would feel perfectly reasonable in a story that plays a little looser with its sci-fi extrapolations.

It’s been long enough since I read this series that I no longer remember anything about the fourth book, Children of the Mind. Without spoiling Xenocide, I’ll say that the final bit of sci-fi magic also brings a pair of characters more or less back from the dead, further complicating an already over-complicated book, and I suspect they’ll be heavily involved in the conclusion.

This may be the first inkling of Card’s eventual obsession with rehashing his old stories. It would continue with his “Shadow Saga,” where he spends another six books rehashing plots and characters from the Ender books. I see from Wikipedia that there are at least 19 books in this same world.

** New Perspective

When I originally read these books, I was a teen. Those memories are fuzzy now, but as far as I recall, I found them to be a powerful vision of a distant future.

Re-reading now, I think that’s true of Ender’s Game. But Xenocide feels far less grounded and almost metaphorical. The conflicts, from interpersonal to intergalactic, largely boil down to people talking at cross-purposes, unable or unwilling to understand each other’s viewpoint. It’s ultimately a depressing view of the world that suggests real empathy and compromise is almost a super power, and most conflict is inevitable. It’s depressingly resonant here in 2025.

If there is a central theme across Xenocide’s many plotlines, it’s that people and cultures tend to act in ways that make them dangerous to themselves and each other. Humans are easily controlled or manipulated, and often give in to their most base instincts, even when it’s obviously bad for them.

We see evidence of that on the nightly news, but it’s far more depressing to imagine that we’ll still be so barbaric and unenlightened in three thousand years.

** Final Thoughts

In an appropriate twist, Xenocide leaves me conflicted. It does a number of things that irritate me. I’m still of the opinion that Ender’s Game was the best book in the series. But Xenocide incorporates a lot of strange and provocative ideas, and it has made me think. It comes from an era when the genre conventions of sci-fi expected intricate plotting and…less intricate characterization. So the complexities of the plot can perhaps be forgiven, and the characterization, as heavy-handed as it sometimes is, should perhaps be praised.

Once upon a time, I would likely have considered these books among my favorites. I don’t think they still hold that place. They’re by no means bad, but I do think the state of literature has changed significantly in the past 25 years, as have my own personal tastes. I’m enjoying my foray through the series, even if I do have the old man tendency to complain the whole way. And there has to be merit to any book that you find yourself thinking about well after you’re done reading it.

Bad Music — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Bad Music

There was a long-running debate among fans of the band Bad Music. Were they the most punk of the “neo-unda” punk bands, or were they marketing geniuses who truly understood how much people wanted something that was impossible to get?

The name of the band was designed to make it difficult for internet searches. Their shows were never announced more than one day in advance. Everyone entering the venue had to go through tech scanners and put their phones and smart glasses into the block of modular mini-lockers that seemed to travel with the band. They wore masks on stage and never revealed their names. And holy hell did they rock.

They had no label, and they claimed that they didn’t release records. Fans competed to post the highest quality bootleg tracks. There were eternal arguments over which songs were legit, and which were made by copycats and fakers.

At the height of their fame, debates raged over whether “unreleased” songs could win a Grammy while Bad Music topped the charts on every streaming platform. Then the band vanished. No more popup shows. No more cryptic announcements on the “cool” niche music sites.

New songs surfaced here and there, but they were widely regarded as fakes. An expose in The Guardian made tenuous connections, claiming to have tracked two of the anonymous band members to a suicide cult, and two more to a plane crash in Brazil.

The songs remained popular in the ensuing decades. The band’s disappearance only fueled their legend. Conspiracy theories abounded, and many fans were convinced that the band was still alive. Lookalike cover groups became popular, with some even insisting that they were the real deal, back from the dead.

Every year or two, someone claimed the band had reappeared for one last secret show in an unexpected place.

And maybe they did…