Tim Hutchings – Words Deferred

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 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…

Tag: Tim Hutchings

Tips for Thousand Year Old Vampire