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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8848257" data-attributes="member: 11760">I love vampires and I suffer from <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seasonal-affective-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20364651" target="_blank">seasonal affective disorder</a>.I've embraced my gloomy end of the year mood (while still seeking ways to ameliorate it, never fear) in the past by running <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/198895/Do-Not-Let-Us-Die-In-The-Dark-Night-Of-This-Cold-Winter" target="_blank">Do Not Let Us Die in the Dark Night of this Cold Winter</a> as a prelude to Death Frost Doom (purchased before all of the stuff about the writer of the second edition came out). If you're going to have winter-time depression, I figure, you should get something out of it.I've had a copy of the Ennie award-winning <a href="https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/collections/basic-book-selection/products/thousand-year-old-vampire" target="_blank">Thousand Year Old Vampire</a> on my shelf for about two years, but work has prevented me from digging into it before now. I wanted to make this a daily writing exercise, like <a href="https://nanowrimo.org/" target="_blank">NaNoWriMo</a>, but with no pretensions that it would lead to anything publishable, just (I hope) an interesting vampire story. So from Nov. 1 through Dec. 4, I played one turn each day. Everything is very much a first draft, and if there's things that make you cringe in this, they make me cringe, too.I approached this like a Dollar Store version of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Powers" target="_blank">Tim Powers</a>, smashing together everything I thought was interesting. I realized pretty early on that this isn't an entirely solo affair, and that Tim Hutching's prompts in the game were going to drive the story to a greater degree than I had expected at first. I've done collaborative fiction before, so you will see me throwing hooks into my responses to prompts. Often, I initially had no idea what they meant (the thing Julian presents the protagonist, at first, was just "ooh, here's something cool; I'll figure it out later"), only to realize in the shower later in the month "oh, yeah, that's what that is all about." Sometimes, the hooks lead somewhere. Sometimes they don't. (I know what was going on in Rome, for instance, but it never seemed natural for the story to go there.)The heavy use of the internet to research things on nearly every turn will either impress you with how it makes the world beyond the edges of the story feel fully fleshed out or make you roll your eyes at some of the cheesiness. It does the same for me, too.The game's mechanism is relatively simple: There are 80 pages of prompts in the book, with each page having between one and three prompts. The first prompt is the player character being turned into a vampire. After that, the player rolls 1d10 and 1d6, subtracting the 1d6 from the 1d10, to figure out what prompt to go to. If the player goes backwards and lands on the same page again, as happened several times to me, they go to the next prompt down on the page, which is usually related to the prompts above it, creating a plot thread.There are also rules about NPCs (mortal and immortal), resources and the traits that make your vampire what they are. They mostly work very well, although some of them I didn't grasp fully early in play. Those should all be clear enough when you look at my turns and the attached character sheet for each.There are 35 turns, although one about midway through got eaten by my software, so you just have the character sheet for that.But that's OK, because one of the biggest mechanisms in the game -- and thus the story -- is about the loss of memory. Your vampire can have five capital-M Memories at a time, each with up to four linked Experiences, and you're expected to write an Experience onto the sheet each turn. In other words, by the end of the game, there's no way my vampire, Guillaume, could remember everything about who he was as a mortal. Up to four Memories of three Experiences each could be shunted off into a diary, but diaries can and do get lost in response to prompts. By the end of the game (which occurs on prompts 72 through 80), it is very likely your vampire will have lost large chunks of their identity over the years, including of once-critical things.It would not be hard to run this as a game about aging and dementia, although my playthrough is a tiny bit more upbeat than that, as I bring to the game a lifetime of constant moving and thus having people pass out of my life, which this game also does a good job of embracing.Anyway, if anyone cares about any of this stuff, please save your questions for after turn 35, which takes place in 2022.</blockquote>

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