A number of these are using AI art. It looks terrible.

Several present themselves as toolkits giving groups flexibility in terms of how to design races/classes. This is nice and all but I'd like to see more practical examples like sample settings, adventure paths and so forth. I'm not expecting reams of interconnecting lore, but standalone and modular content like what we got from the d20 3pp glut is more than sufficient.

Most of these are very emo goth and I'm pretty tired of that cliché. I prefer content more light-hearted or darkly comedic in tone. (My unfinished attempt would've been a splatterpunk dramedy pastiche.) You're not constrained by the pretension and lore of a white wolf IP so you can do more fantastical or heroic stuff. God I miss Everlasting. The writing was flowery and pretentious af but aside from the unliving splatbook the tone was much more upbeat then these bazillion emo goth imitators.

Stokerverse looks neat, I agree. The premise is typical vampire hunters like Chill, Night's Black Agents, etc. The presentation and production values are very nice.

One or two sound interesting but I tend to like games with a higher page count - So more I can get my teeth into (pun intended!).

Stokerverse looks good as I was saying, and Art by Clint Langley!

I know what you mean about AI art though. Originally I was quite stoked by it (believe it or not considering I'm an artist) but I'm starting to get sick of it. Basically, unless you're really good at keywording it all looks plasticky and very samey. So my eyes just glaze over when I see it now.

I think us hand drawers are safe for a while.

Prompt monkeying sounds so stupid. Why should anyone waste their time learning the inane way that a blackbox AI organizes information when you could just hire a real artist? Or learn to draw yourself? Nobody is better at translating the images from your visual cortex into art than yourself.

Anyway, a lot of these indie games are just too derivative and don't try to do new things imo. I want to write my own games sometime with less tired premises like "you play as heroic Carpathians who fight their evil vampire kin" or "you go on fantastical adventures involving a variety of magical phenomena hidden from muggles" or even "silly b-movie soap opera shenanigans."

Stokerverse gives a lot more material to work with, such as locations, secret societies, a bestiary with monster ecologies and flexible monster design (the rules explicitly state that all stats are generic and should be tailored for individual monsters). The backstory is very pulp-influenced, with serpentfolk, old ones, etc. I'm surprised it didn't use explicit Call of Cthulhu references considering it uses explicit references to other 18th and 19th century fiction, instead writing its old ones as wholly original entities. The copious White Worm references make me think the author was inspired to write it after watching Chapelwaite (and Penny Dreadful).

Nightlife: Obscure, but its not a bad system.
 
Nights Edge techno-horror setting for Cyberpunk 2020. Vampires feature in a few modules.
 
Palladium's Nightbane might work.
 

I own Nightbane. 

Let's all get together and play it online!

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 14, 2023, 10:40:30 AM
Prompt monkeying sounds so stupid. Why should anyone waste their time learning the inane way that a blackbox AI organizes information when you could just hire a real artist? Or learn to draw yourself? Nobody is better at translating the images from your visual cortex into art than yourself.

Anyway, a lot of these indie games are just too derivative and don't try to do new things imo. I want to write my own games sometime with less tired premises like "you play as heroic Carpathians who fight their evil vampire kin" or "you go on fantastical adventures involving a variety of magical phenomena hidden from muggles" or even "silly b-movie soap opera shenanigans."

Stokerverse gives a lot more material to work with, such as locations, secret societies, a bestiary with monster ecologies and flexible monster design (the rules explicitly state that all stats are generic and should be tailored for individual monsters). The backstory is very pulp-influenced, with serpentfolk, old ones, etc. I'm surprised it didn't use explicit Call of Cthulhu references considering it uses explicit references to other 18th and 19th century fiction, instead writing its old ones as wholly original entities. The copious White Worm references make me think the author was inspired to write it after watching Chapelwaite (and Penny Dreadful).

That's the ideal... For people to produce their own vision through art. But it takes a lot of time to learn it as a skill. I think AI art will always be seen as the 'quick and dirty' route.

I know what you mean... When writing a vampire game it's always hard to get away from VtM as that's what everyone expects and is the benchmark (for many). For my own current game that I'm writing, I've deliberately not used dice pool mechanics (I'm using GJ's Actual Fucking Monsters game). And I've got a Lovecraftian origin. But people will always probably drag it back to VtM, sadly.

The pulp feel for Stokervese might work well - Given the fact that you are tough vampire hunters. Although, I'm skeptical to dip my toe into their latest stuff, given what they did with Terminator and Sla 2. I'm not mad about their proprietary system (although, Stokerverse might use its own).

It's especially weird when more than >99% of vampire fiction nowadays is about romance, not... whatever the fuck "personal horror" is supposed to be. I'm not interested in that emo goth shit. I live in a dystopia every day, what with stuff like AI killing human-made art and making people stupider. I play games to escape. To stimulate my imagination. Not kill my imagination with a cult mentality.

"You're playing your character wrong!" is the absolute nadir.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/458886079/mister-vampire/description

Oh my god, somebody actually posted a blatant ripoff to Kickstarter last month and was successful.

"Prince of the city"? Seriously? This is the third blatant ripoff I've found after Vampire Undeath and Vampyre Hack and it's easily the worst of the three if that description is anything to go by. Even Vampire Undeath and Vampyre Hack knew better than to outright copy Rein•Hagen's own jargon, even if their jargon was just find and replace using a thesaurus or random gibberish. (And Vampyre Hack was written by a creative person who deliberately decided to limit himself but his creativity shined through even thru that.)

What is wrong with people? Everlasting was released in 1997 with a full dozen bloodlines and it wasn't a blatant ripoff. Did creativity suddenly take a nose dive since the 1990s? What kind of creatively dead and media illiterate person makes such a lazy ripoff? *glances at the fantasy genre lazily ripping off Tolkien* That's probably a stupid question. But still! There are video essay playlists on YouTube that explain "how can I make my vampires different?" Like this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn98Bs0xnjT9WZvwlTlh72UHf3Rvc-MXz&si=zRYZ-yaz9zIEGlah There's really no excuse for you to publish a book that screams "I've never read any vampire fiction besides the white wolf wiki".

I'm definitely reviewing this when it releases, if only to add to my list of "what not to do."

EDIT: it's already available to purchase here: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/460786/mister-vampire

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on November 21, 2023, 09:43:04 AM
What is wrong with people? Everlasting was released in 1997 with a full dozen bloodlines and it wasn't a blatant ripoff. Did creativity suddenly take a nose dive since the 1990s? What kind of creatively dead and media illiterate person makes such a lazy ripoff?

But doesn't that pretty much describe a great many RPG projects on Kickstarter (or the Internet in general)?

Any time some trailblazing movie or TV series comes along, there's a host of RPG projects that pretty much duplicate whatever the storyline is. All the "Stranger Things" RPGs for example.

I see this as well even in product naming. It seems like nobody bothers to do a simple Google search before naming their product (or bother to see if a same domain name is available).

Incredibly helpful!! thank you

The name is awful, and I wonder if some of those symbols are trademarked. But I'll give them credit for this:

QuoteY'know what problem people run into in, like, eighty percent of their vampire games? The problem of "okay, we've all made vampires - now what?" And Mister Vampire solves this problem with mechanics both for seizing control of the city's secret supernatural government and for protecting it...

That's a focused premise that tells you exactly what the game is about.

I skimmed the book and ultimately gave up.

It outright copies the jargon from V5. Names of superpowers, spelling child with a pretentious silent e...

The magic system is divided into astral, orphic and infernal... oh my god, the author is ripping off Frank Trollman's After Sundown too?!

One of the interior arts copies the ankh from White Wolf games.

This is somehow worse than Vampyre Undeath. That was a ripoff, but at least it tried to pretend it wasn't. This? This is painfully uninspired and doesn't even care to hide it.

Here's the thing - what do you *really* want out of a "vampire-game" that's not been done to death?

No one outside of the morons at WW(or whatever they're calling themselves these days) is even putting out Vampire material that's not (as you and others posted) blatant rip-offs. Hell even modern Vampire is ripping itself off and doing a shit-job of it.

The beauty of Vampire 1e was it forced a narrow sandbox: the city. Gave everyone some basic rules: The Traditions. Gave your some in-game distinction to glom on: Clans. And it told you to go play.

Everything that came after and grew out of those assumptions and conceits were hit/miss to your personal likings.

I think that's what any modern Vampire game should be - City, Rules of Engagement (after all - immortals would have established rules right?), Distinction (whether it's bloodlines, powers whatever) - now go find a ruleset that will support those things and have at it.

Insert your own "genre tone" and conceits as you see fit. If you're waiting for someone else to do it for you, I think we'll all be waiting a long time.

There really isn't any room for anyone to compete anyway. WW has been dead for years due to competition from video games and D&D becoming mainstream. Urban fantasy is a dead stagnant genre. The remaining WW fandom, a pale shadow of its 90s heyday, is only interested in circlejerking the lore rather than playing games or being creative. The video games Paradox has been shoveling out have all been terrible.

The only positive experience I remember coming from that IP is playing Bloodlines on PC. And that was due to Troika's writing, not anything specific to the IP. Hammy, campy, irreverent... the tonal opposite of how the IP is traditionally written.

The closest I've been able to find is the Abyss ttrpg, which has plenty funny writing, but it doesn't really have much in the way of activity. Not many books for it and not much of an active fandom.

I'm more interested in making video games, honestly. At least those seem to get actual engagement.

I honestly don't know how Vampire: The Masquerade keeps digging itself out of the dirt, when Vampire: The Requiem is twice the game it is. Better balance, smoother mechanics, better vampires, more customizable lore, and without a lot of the cringey stereotypes. Just a better game.