A few months ago I heard that Dimension 20 was going to be doing an actual play of Vampire the Masquerade, and I was very curious to see what they'd cook up. I always had a great respect for their team and craft, and have been of the opinion that them trying new systems could lead to some great stories. So, after a few months of watching the new episodes of the City Council of Darkness, how did it play out? Let's discuss!
1) Disclaimers
There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.
First of all, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Every table is playing with a different tone and assumptions. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.
Secondly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Chronicles / World of Darkness games, I might be biased towards one interpretation and way of handling things in WoD that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other actual plays a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.
Finally, this is not only a review of the show but also a long-form analysis of it, so there will be a lot of spoilers for the show, it would be rather hard to discuss some things without that...
2) Overview and minor things
The City Council of Darkness is a Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition actual play hosted by Brennan Lee Mulligan from Dropout.tv. The game features a cast of six vampires of various clans banished to the town of Purpee Oregon. The production also had a number of other people helping with the show, including but not limited to art by Aviv Or and Skye Smith as the lore keeper.
In contrast to many of Dimension 20's other series, this one was said to have been a lot more of a sandbox, with the details of the town being written out but the plot being up in the air.
The series takes the form of 14 pre-recorded video episodes (and 14 Adventuring Party bonus videos) available on Dropout. The cast consists of experienced actors / comedians with a long history of playing actual plays (although mainly new to Vampire the Masquerade from what I can tell).
And for those interested, this isn't the first series from the group that I have watched. I have finished Fantasy High (season 1), Escape from the Bloodkeep, Tiny Heist, A Crown of Candy, Misfits and Magic, as well as On a Bus. I have also been playing Vampire the Masquerade from time to time since the Revised edition in the early 2000s.
3) Player Characters
The player character coterie consisted of the following characters:
HJ Wingstreet (m) - a Ventrue ancilla businessman, sire of LeVonte and a drug connoisseur, played by Ally Beardsley
Le Contesse Madelaine d'Artois (f) - a Toreadore elder noblewoman with a taste for bluebloods, played by Siobhan Thompson
LeVonte Worthy (m) - an ambitious Ventrue businessman, childe of HJ, played by Lou Wilson
Mitch Frederick, aka Darkness Man (m) - a Nosferatu superhero sounding like Christopher Nolan's Batman, played by Brian Murphy
Vesper Childers, aka Bat Child (f) - a half ghost bat superhero, protégé of Darkness Man (clan unknown, I'd assume Lasombra or Hecata / Giovanni), played by Emily Axford
Zaeth Bondana (m) - a Brujah rebel, played by Zac Oyama
4) General Plot
The game starts with an extravagant party at the opulent Rediron Tower in San Francisco. After meeting the characters we learn the many many ways they have messed up so badly they have been exiled to the middle of nowhere town of Purpee Oregon where they must redeem themselves by taking over the place for Carmarilla, and complete their thirteen tasks:
- Control the aristocracy.
- Corrupt the clergy.
- Master the engines of the state.
- Command the flow of money.
- Dominate all cultural forces.
- Establish Elysium and a Council of the Primogen.
- Expel all non-Camarilla vampires.
- Utterly destroy the Sabbat.
- Banish Anarchs.
- Repel lupines.
- Embrace mortal mages.
- fey ghosts demons
- Thwart hunters and the Inquisition.
But as they soon find out, there are many secrets lurking in the town that has become a small sinkhole for the supernatural...
5) Criticism
With all of the formalities out of the way, let's get into what this series has to offer.
I'll be talking about the various characters and situations and using them as a springboard to talk about bigger things about the series as they become relevant. I hope it doesn't feel too meandering and disjointed, I figured this way of approaching things would make the most sense.
5.1) The system and the tone
Vampire the Masquerade is a game that lives and dies on its tone. It is gothic horror, a game where you play as the monster, and a system where you can slowly slip into losing yourself. The setting itself is a dark reflection of our world, where the shadows are longer, the monsters are real, and bad things happen to good people. The Carmarilla is an organisation of predators that wear the masks of civility but are a drop of blood away from tearing at each others' throats like Beasts they truly are.
The City Council of Darkness touches on those moments at times, but fundamentally it is an absurdist comedy that escalates and escalates until at the final episode the cast is dying of laughter at what's going on. It is a game where Bigfoot is an ancient master of Kumite and blows people up with a bazooka and there is an endless war between ghosts and clowns in the Underworld.
And I know, World of Darkness sometimes IS a clown world, crazy things happen and crazy characters are all over the place, but you don't have to fuck that clown... For some people this might be a very accurate way of portraying Vampire the Masquerade as it is actually played by regular people, but I would personally expect a bit more from a high production value series that might be people's first introduction to the genre...
So if you are looking for a game that is faithful to the tone of the game, look elsewhere. If you are a Dimension 20 fan, you probably already watched the series anyway. So probably the rest of the review is mainly for the curious, and the morbidly curious as to what's going on...
5.2) The characters and their plots
At the core of the tonal direction of the game are the characters. While the Storyteller did a pretty good job for the first half of the series to make the world somewhat grounded in response to what the characters were doing, but you can only keep that up for so long in a series that keeps escalating into silliness.
5.2.1) Madelaine
First, you have Madelaine, one of the characters I personally don't have much against. She is an elder Toreadore, childe of Marquis de Lafayette. She is a socialite and yearns for the grandeur of the big cities and high societies. Her being thrust into Purpee is a personal tragedy, being cut off from the world. She nearly has a breakdown in episode 2 when she discovers the highlight of the whole town is student teens going off on a Friday night to the only local bar that is open late and the big game they are playing is "skip the lip" where they hop on some train rails with a small turn. This really encapsulates the whole tone of the game's premise - the player characters are big fish vampires in such a small podunk pond they are suffocated by the sheer smallness of it all. If the whole cast was like this, it would've been a great series.
Madelaine is also the only character that seems to grasp the magnitude of shit they have gotten themselves into. They have been sentenced to their exile by the Nosferatu Archon of the Carmarilla, and they barely escaped their Final Deaths. Over the course of the series the characters grow to resent the vampire society that put them there and try to weasel their way out of the situation. They take the task they have been given and want to do things their own way. A few people look for ways out of Purpee into some other Carmarilla domains. I think even the idea of becoming an Anarch town gets floated. The series lasts less than a year and the characters can't even take that much. But the elder Toreadore is the only character that knows you don't fuck with the Carmarilla, that if you cross them they will eventually find you and put you in your place. That is one of the themes of Vampire the Masquerade - the young being oppressed by the old.
Another tragedy of Madelaine is that she can only drink the blood of nobles (or at least that's something she keeps repeating, looking at her character sheet it doesn't seem to be there). Given that Purpee is a tiny nothing town she was thrust into without preparation, that could've been a death sentence for her. First four episodes of the series she has problems finding any blue bloods in town, and the characters almost go into downtime before she can resolve this. But luckily for her, she gets in with the only local family that has aristocratic blood running through them - the Whittakers (and also unfortunately, the regular feeding stops being an important part of the game after roughly this episode).
Her dealing with her limited diet could've been an important point of tension in the game. In episode 5 the characters try divvying up who feeds on whom, and for just a moment Bat Child and Darkness Man suggest they need to feed on the Whittakers because they only feed on criminals, and Whittakers are a rich asshole family. Since those two tend to feed by killing people, that would leave Madelaine starving. This should've been a point of tension for the coterie - fighting over a very limited feeding pool that isn't big enough to sustain everyone. This could've been a moment where characters show fangs and get ready to fight for their survival. But the moment passes and the issue is never brought up again. Such a missed opportunity...
That being said, Madelaine is by no means perfect. She also tries calling on her sire to get her out of Purpee, despite knowing the Carmarilla will go after her. But a more grating thing that came up early in the game was her Ingénue Advantage. It's a small mechanical bonus a character can have to appear innocent and blameless. Sounds fine on paper, but in execution it came off a bit like the oldest vampire in the coterie pretending to be the youngest and least experienced. She tried using that in episode 1 when everyone was getting assigned blame to pretend to be the smallest bean that doesn't know anything and she wasn't responsible for what happened under her watch. For a vampire society that would really come off as "if you can't be a responsible grown up, maybe we should treat you like a childer that can't be entrusted with anything" and not as something someone that wants to run an Elysium would do...
5.2.2) LeVonte
LeVonte is perhaps the second most grounded character of the cast. He is an ambitious businessman Ventrue, a billionaire, and a problem solver. He is the key lynchpin of some of the group's biggest projects, like running a few political campaigns or diffusing a tense situation with the town's Mage that was strained by other PCs.
He is also the childe of HJ, the other Ventrue of the group, which gives the two characters an interesting dynamic. When those two characters get together and have a heart to heart (like in Episode 7) it can be really touching. They play quite well off of one another. They also have a neat relationship with one of the most interesting NPCs of the campaign, Tyler Morimoto, an economics student they bring on as their Retainer that does a lot of legwork for them and their crazy schemes.
On the flipside, however, the character does also engage in some big memes of the campaign. The most notable starting right at the first episode where he diffuses a big Masquerade breach where a vampire rampaged through a lot of people by calling it a Banksy. The same joke kept coming up again and again and each time it detracted from the seriousness of the situation (which usually involved people getting killed).
Given that he is very much a non-combat character and the series finale was pretty combat-focused, he also came off a bit clown-ish. Riding a golf cart, screaming that this is their Normady and shooting at people with Dexterity 1 and Firearms 0 definitely was a choice. But that whole episode was off the rails, so whatever.
But that part of the character was balanced off nicely with a few scenes where you saw the character deal with things he really cared about. Like realising he sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into running a political campaign for a dog, complete with big ads on busses and so on, before they secured the dog to be the candidate and a license to run those busses, the character slowly seething as the realisation dawned on him was pretty palpable (episode 7). Similarly, when a few PCs bungled a meeting with the local Mage in episode 13 in a pretty insulting way LeVonte did just come in afterwards and was able to clear the air by being brutally honest about how he had a change of heart about the whole town, which was a great scene.
Structurally, the main problem I see with the character is that his wealth can trivialise a lot of problems the town has. His level of wealth can buy them a comfortable mansion, hire anyone they want, get access to any kind of thing you could buy to address your problems that are so beyond almost anyone else in Purpee (two families that run the town notwithstanding). It would've been amusing to see that cause some more problems when the characters applied their wealth heavy-handedly, but we didn't get that.
Similarly, given that Brennan is pretty outspoken against the system that produces capitalist billionaires, there was a surprisingly little pushback against the characters being so rich. The coterie basically had two rich San Francisco finance bros roll into town suffocating under capitalism and nobody nobody balked against them being basically like the two families that have been dividing the town between themselves to wring out as much money as they could from it.
Heck, one of the scenes LeVonte had that for me was a missed opportunity was him wanting to invest in the local biker bar (being pretty much the only joint in town worth a damn to the characters). Instead of a San Francisco businessman having to find an angle he could work with the recluse owner that looked like a hardcore biker, the ice instantly broke when our Ventrue complained about the local traffic (in a tiny town that barely would have any) and that was pretty much enough to win the owner over. I'd imagine he would see this as some kind of private equity asshole trying to ruin his thing, but I guess money to fix the septic tank is all that matters at the end of the day...
5.2.3) HJ
On the opposite end of the cast, at its nadir, we find HJ. Sire and a business partner of LeVonte, and a Ventrue of about 120 years. Where to begin with this one...
In Vampire the Masquerade circles there is this concept of "Fishmalk". It's short for Fish Malkavian. For those new to Vampire, Malkavians are the Clan of vampires where every character is afflicted by a mental disorder. In practice, the Clan attracts all the players that want to play a wacky, cooky and crazy character that usually end up being the silliest people in the group. For people that know D&D, this is the clan of Chaotic Neutrals. This is where you get characters that would hit someone in the face with a fish and run away hooting.
Well, HJ is pretty much that. He starts off the game as a business dude that snorts blood cocaine (AFAIK not a real thing in WoD) on the regular, and starts experimenting with SSRI-laced blood in episode 1. This is basically used as an excuse for the character to be acting cooky most of the time. He would randomly announce during a middle of a conversation with the other PCs that he is talking while swimming naked in a bathtub. Or he would suddenly get obsessed with being into pottery, to the point of making it his life goal. Or, during the final episode, and I quote directly (see 1:49:50 timestamp) "I dig a small hole in the first. I bury the clown. I say 'In flagrante delicto'. I have sex with the clown deep in the dirt." (I'll explain where the clown came from later). As to why, we don't find out during that episode, only in the Adventuring Party (it was because there was some kind of blood sex orgy ritual going on to make the land fertile so he wanted to counter it by defiling it. It REALLY needed an explanation to the table of what was going on...).
This isn't to say that HJ doesn't have any good moments in the series. A few of his scenes with LeVonte and Tyler (their ghoul) are pretty neat, but it kind of feels that's more due to LeVonte than HJ.
The character would also work pretty hard to derail the campaign on a few ocassions. During the later part of the season the coterie is dealing with a local Mage Maya Jayashtri that is weary of the group. They come off as some big city predators coming into the town to wreck stuff (after racking up a body count of a few notable big names and a few big stunts), while she is trying to keep the people of the town safe. Maya tentatively trusts HJ because he has shown her a small kindness once or twice and is one of the few vampires that doesn't want to just ditch Purpee, so she wants to have a serious meeting with him to discuss them working together. Their relationship has been tense since Maya has gone behind the PCs' back once already, so things need to be handled diplomatically. First, HJ strains that relationship by trying to weasel in more and more of the other PCs into the meeting until he is basically trying to invite the whole coterie. When that doesn't work out, it ends up being a meeting between Maya, HJ and Bat Child, two of the vampires with the least good heads on their shoulders. HJ comes off insulting to Maya, as if he's toying with her and lowballing the amount of money he can command into the local Credit Union, at which point Maya just walks because there is no point in that meeting and she is right. She is a serious person, the two of them are not.
On another occasion, Bat Child announces it's her birthday tomorrow, to which most of the characters in the coterie channelled what the cast later described as "sitcom energy" to scramble and get her a birthday gift. HJ took the biggest initiative in that moment, and decided she could use a gun. So what do you think an Intelligence 4 character with high Resources would do to get that? Of course, go to the police station and steal it from the evidence room. HJ has Dexterity 1, so breaking in wouldn't work. So he tries the next best thing, approach a cop in the police station and try stealing the gun directly from them. Not using their Dominate 2 to get the gun, just steal it directly from them. When that fails, he goes off and escapes the scene on a small electric scooter, ends up being chased by a lot of policemen in their cars, shot full of bullets, falling into the river and crawling on the bottom of it across most of the town to escape. Oh yeah, and also we get the line of "Luck check, can I find something beautiful and antique that was tossed into the river go give to Bat Child?". That is the kind of goblin brain we are dealing with with HJ...
Another weird choice with the characters were his Disciplines. The guy is a Ventrue with Dominate 2 being his highest in-clan Discipline, which is tied to him taking Protean 2 at chargen. And what's the use for that? Using Vicissitude (for those that haven't read V5, it's now a single power in Protean rather than its own discipline, just roll with it) to yassify himself. It's not even following the rules, just declaring he's getting a facelift without a rouse check or a roll. Was it ever useful in the story? Not really, he did try using it to pretend to be someone else for like, a frat party or to escape from the cops, but it never came into play.
HJ and LeVonte also have a prey exclusion of only drinking people that know they are vampires and consent to being drank. It is pretty amusing during the first episode, but as feeding becomes less important down the line we don't see much to come of it. Pity that, it might've been something interesting for the character. As it is, the only time it came up later in the game was him refusing to drink the blood of a clown because he couldn't establish consent with that nonverbal creature (I'll get to explaining the clown later, I promise!).
5.2.4) Darkness Man
LeVonte and HJ were one close pair of characters of the coterie, the other pair were Darkness Man and Bat Child. So let's get to them now.
Darkness Man is a pretty young Nosferatu that sees himself as a superhero. He carries himself like a cross between Spider Noir aesthetically, while doing a Christopher Nolan's Batman impression as his manner of speaking. He is here to fight crime while leaping from rooftop to rooftop with his sidekick Bat Child.
As far as the characters of the coterie goes, he is one of the ones that was pretty alright. Sure, I'd personally see the core character premise as a choice and he does go a bit over the top when he really gets into crime fighting, but most of the time the character does come off as a bit socially inept but not in a goofy way. He gets frustrated when people call him a pervert for wearing a trench coat, a fedora and a full face cover. He wants to organise a swingles night for the local people but only has dots in Streetwise so it doesn't go well. He has a good power set for what he is going for and uses his repertoire effectively, even despite constantly circling back to how he turns into a pile of trash (even after someone has already seen him and he's not fooling anyone)...
I wish we had a bit more consequences follow character actions in this game. Initially, it seems that while Darkness Man might be acting like a superhero, the world still reacts as if he was a crazy vigilante. The tone setter was very early in episode 1 where the two superhero vampires jumped through a window onto the street in a superhero show off moment... only to have the glass from that same window eviscerate someone on the street. So to save them, Darkness Man decided to embrace them on the spot. It could've been a start of a neat NPC the coterie could need to deal with (or maybe in a show of Carmarilla's cruelty, an execution of an unauthorised childe), but no, we never hear from them again...
as long as you don't think about the hard glass falling onto people at terminal velocity...
As is the theme for the coterie it seems, Darkness Man does have a feeding restriction (although once again I don't see it on his character sheet) to only feed on justice (aka criminals). He does tend to kill them in the process, which kind of raises the question of how sustainable that can be in the tiny tiny town of Purpee. But as already mentioned, feeding doesn't come up too much after the first few sessions and his one friction point with Madelaine over their feeding overlapping also never goes anywhere.
But beyond that, there isn't too much to remark about the character. He is good at combat and stealth and he does use that to some pretty great effect during the game. He is part of some really silly scenes (like performing a singing invite to a group of ghosts), but those are mainly towards the latter part of the series. Him acting like a superhero does have some acceptance from the world from time to time. Overall, his tone is a bit less The Dark Knight Batman, and more of How It Should Have Ended Batman.
For all I can say about Darkness Man, he is very much overshadowed by the other superhero of the group...
5.2.5) Bat Child
Bat Child is a very young half ghost bat acting as a peppy superhero partner and protégé to Darkness Man. No really, she doesn't consider herself a vampire. But mechanically speaking she would probably map onto something like a Lasombra or Hecata / Giovanni, given that her big focus is Oblivion.
Bat Child is another one of our Fishmalks of the group, but at least she has some more grounded and immediate goals and an innocent heart that make her a bit more endearing than HJ. But she was pretty committed to her bit of being pretty out there.
First, the character saw herself as not a vampire but a half ghost bat. The player literally envisioned the character backstory as being embraced by a vampire in a bat form that drank her dry while also having a nosebleed which turned her on accident, so she would think she was part bat (and the bat was crushed by some vending machine or something on top of that). She also didn't know her dad, was raised by some other single dad after her mother disappeared from the picture and so on. Already, that's a choice of a backstory. Sure, we don't know much about Darkness Man's sire, and HJ was also some character that was embraced by some rando and left in a ditch, but this is another level.
She also sleeps in an umbrella upside down, turns into a Christmas tree to hide while in cars, tends to geek out about how she wants to run an animal sanctuary but wouldn't be able to see some animals because they are diurnal, at times tries using echolocation to see in the dark, and is a gadgeteer with suction and rollerblade shoes. All of those just keep adding quirks to the character that are pretty tonally dissonant with the gothic horror of Vampire.
What kind of bothered me during the game about Bat Child is her imprinting. I understand that part of this is the rule of improv and comedy do "yes and" things, but we saw this before with Fig Faeth in Adventuring Academy obsessing over Doreen the lunch lady (to the point she wanted to kill herself to save Doreen), and now we saw it again with Bat Child and Bigfoot. Basically, as soon as the characters learned about this cryptid and that he is a master of Kumite in Episode 4 Bat Child instantly wanted to learn that martial art and saw herself as his pupil, despite not meeting him until Episode 12. It's kind of strange seeing such parasocial relationship be rewarded.
5.2.6) Zaeth
Finally, we come to Zaeth, the Brujah rebel. As far as the coterie goes, he's not too bad, a bit rudderless at times, but gets stuff done.
Initially, he comes off as an anarch that is too cool to care, being nonchalant about tossing invites to the Elysium out to the wind that got picked up by a lot of people that shouldn't know about it. This shows that the character is pretty cocky and doesn't understand the difference between carefree and careless, which is a decent start to a character's story, especially in a game where everyone needs to mess up at the start to end up in exile.
In Purpee he doesn't seem to have much to do however. He tries impressing some students with a stunt that goes horribly wrong due to a very badly botched roll. In Episode 4 Adventuring Party we get an interesting conversation between Zac and Brennan about the game - apparently, Zaeth really wants to get a horse, something Zac has not mentioned to anyone up to this point. Brennan talks about how in their normal games that are more improvised he would just put a horse in the game, but since this setting is pre-written and more of a set sandbox, if there is no horse in the town there is no horse. So of course two episodes later we get a horse for Zaeth to steal, pretty much the only horse in town that nobody seems to be looking for or even mention being stolen until a passing line in Episode 13.
The character also has a kind of petty rivalry with Tyler the ghoul to the two Ventrues. It's kind of comedic but doesn't go anywhere, and kind of feels like an excuse for the character to have anything to do for a bit.
But Zaeth does have some neat upsides. He has an interesting relationship to his sire Koschei, and in a very memorable few scenes he steps up to be the Prince of Purpee and handle that responsibility and opportunity quite well.
So in general, Zaeth feels like a character that needed a stronger foundation than "rebel" in a setting where he wouldn't have much to directly rebel against. You can't shirk the authority when there is no authority watching over you. In a longer series he would probably straighten out to be a pretty neat character, but here he was a little hollow. Generally not as bad as Bat Child or HJ, but not as good as Madelaine or LeVonte.
5.3) The setting of Purpee
Purpee is an interesting and unconventional setting for any Vampire the Masquerade game. Usually those take place in big sprawling cities, home to hundreds of thousands if not millions of inhabitants, tens of vampires and a score of other supernaturals. A setting big enough to fit anything in and have enough big, important characters for the player characters to be able to enjoy large rivalries and so on.
Purpee is the opposite of that. It's literally a one horse town, so small a big city vampire would not be caught dead in. If you go by the old Vampire rule of thumb of having one vampire for 100k people, Purpee would have a fraction of one. But for this game, apparently it has become big enough for Carmarilla to take notice and want to establish a whole princedom in.
Generally, it's a neat departure from the norm of what you'd expect from Vampire the Masquerade, which is great... on paper. Vampires are really social animals, they define themselves by their Clans, their lineages, their coteries, their rivals, and the Eternal Struggle. Childe against sire, fledgelings against younglings, peer against peer, vampires turn on one another while only truly being able to live with their kind. Vampire is a game where you act as a civilised monster wearing the face of a human as a mask against other predators you mingle with, and that is a great source of drama.
Purpee has very little in the way of that. There are no other vampires in town, the coterie is all there is, and the only contact they have with vampires they have is through phone conversations or when someone visits. This means you don't have the staples you'd expect from a Vampire game - no real politicking (the game features politics but they are on the human level and also you don't feel it), no struggle for feeding grounds, nothing of that sort.
You do get some other supernaturals in town, but there is literally one time when there is any meaningful struggle between the coterie and them asides from the big bombastic finale. That is not to say that the regular people of Purpee don't matter, they do, but most of them are often ill-equipped to be dealing with the coterie, not only because they are vampires with mind control and supernatural strength, but also because these PCs eclipse regular people in terms of their raw charisma, access to wealth as well as being player characters that can bend the plot to themselves.
You want some property? You buy it. You want someone to be your political puppet? You buy them or give them a pep talk of their life. You want in with the most powerful family of the area? You seduce your way into their home. You want to join a fraternal knight order as an enthusiastic gal? You show them your go-getter attitude and you're initiated!
This town would probably work a bit better if the player characters were scaled to fit it. It is pretty easy doing wacky and crazy stuff in a small town when you command more money than its GDP. Now if characters were cut off from that and had to operate on the ground level, it would've been a much different story. But this is Vampire, so with no extra restrictions a starting character can be a globally influential billionaire and it wouldn't even require devoting that many points into...
Regardless, it was an interesting and unique of a premise that I'd love to see the sourcebook for it and maybe run a game in it myself. I do believe since this series was made to be a sandbox there should be some master document with everything written up in a way that other people could use it, unlike many of Dimension 20's other games. I think it was mentioned around episode 1 or 2, or in their Adventuring Parties, that someone other than Brennan wrote it up.
5.3.1) The pain of being seen
As odd the setting of Purpee might be for Vampire the Masquerade, it certainly resonated on a deep level with a few of the players. In episode 2 multiple players remark how the pathetic (affectionate) habits of a small town teen students made them be seen, how they have experienced stuff like that themselves. Even during one of the Adventuring Parties Brennan shares stories of his own small town having to deal with some rich assholes rolling in and wanting to build a gated community. So it is definitely neat to offer that homely feeling to the players to help get the campaign's tone down (at least early on).
5.3.2) Vampire colonialism
One thought that came to mind for me in Episode 1 was how the premise of the series is kind of colonialist in nature. When the characters were being sentenced to exile to Purpee the Archon was explaining to them how Purpee has crossed the threshold of being big enough for Carmarilla to move in and take it over. This was kind of a weird concept to me, first time I've heard of such an idea for the organisation.
Normally, what I'd expect to happen would be for vampires to more naturally migrate and spread out due to being squeezed out in bigger areas. Old vampires claim a city's core, they bring their own childe in and give them some good hunting grounds which push the disenfranchised vampires out into suburbs. Then in the suburbs vampires encroach on one another's turf since the top dogs at the city centre don't care about you, so you're left to fend for yourself. So some desperate vampires are pushed even further, to satellite cities and the countryside. Purpee might not be anyone's best pick (unless you grew up there), but if it is a quiet town where you can predate on people in peace, someone will worm their way in.
It would've been interesting for the coterie to have to deal with some local vampires. Heck, maybe they would assume they are here first, only to discover that no, they never went looking and they are in fact encroaching on someone's turf that they need to deal with. But we have not seen any leeches local to Purpee in the entire series. One character mentions that some vampires briefly pass by, but that's about it.
Instead, we have a group of new vampires being thrust upon this town, tasked with taking it over for the big empire, driving out all the other supernaturals from town, subverting its government and other institutions and making a small fiefdom to extend Carmarilla's reach. It's interesting that the characters never seem to deal with that concept.
And it's not like the themes of colonialism aren't present in Purpee. People being driven out of their homes and exploited by big landowners are a big thing in the game. There is also a literal group of people that bring over a big foreign spirit, Jack of the Pines, to town that is pretty much an invasive species.
And since we are dealing with such themes, it is also interesting that we don't really get any Native American representation. I think one character, Cody, is Native American coded, and we get Bigfoot the spirit that could be native to the area, but that is about all we get.
5.3.3) The supernatural sinkhole
One interesting thing Purpee has going for it is that it attracts weird supernaturals from its surrounding areas. To that end it's kind of reminiscent of Gravity Falls and its Natural Law of Weirdness Magnetism. This forms a fine enough explanation of why there are so many things in Purpee, although at the same time it kind of would lend itself more to a setting like Chronicles of Darkness and Vampire the Requiem that is more keen on supernatural splats crossing over. Masquerade Vampires don't tend to poke their heads into the business of others, especially given that they have very poor tools for interacting with them unless they specialise...
5.3.4) Everything is a little bit shitty (as it should be)
In general, Purpee did have that World of Darkness feel to it where everything is just a little bit shitty, or worse. You have your usual corrupt government, police force that is way too trigger happy, landowners that want to squeeze all the money out of everyone and turn their homes into AirBnBs, etc. Poor and desperate people try to get around those problems and limitations by getting creative, like building a pole dancing joint in a trailer on some cinderblocks so it's not technically a building...
But what stood out to me was that even things you'd expect from Brennan to be standing against that were also a bit bad. Like the local food coop that helps get people some affordable and healthy food requires a membership, and that membership requires that you volunteer at the coop - run a class, work there and so on. So people that already work two jobs to make ends meet still have to put in the legwork to be able to buy groceries. It's a neat touch that even in fighting against the big shitty things people still have to deal with small shitty things, as is the way with World of Darkness.
5.3.5) Location marker dump and the town being a bit flat
The problem with a setting the player characters are unfamiliar with is that someone has to give them all the details, which means giving the audience a similar location marker dump. In this series that happened in one of the earlier episodes, where the characters sat down with some local they befriended and got all these location and plot hooks delivered all at once, which felt a little bit like a drag.
On top of that, once the characters started exploring the various locales the things you would find were usually a touch flat. It seems that any given location had about one or two things to do in it, and you had a resolution to what was going on by doing just one thing.
Like, there is a graveyard in town that is eerily quiet. Hearing that the players were speculating that something really sinister could be going on here. But in the end, it's just one thing connected to one of the big families and that's it. Once you resolve that there isn't anything else to pull on there. Same with a haunted lumbermill, or the Knights Templer shrine, or the flooded mine, or the pole dancing joint, etc. It seems everywhere had just one thing going for it.
But I do understand this was made for the needs of a 14 episode series. Having some kind of a grand unified evil you'd need a few layers of investigation to get to simply wouldn't come up.
5.4) The other denizens of the night
A roleplay game is defined as much by the player characters as by the NPCs they have to interact with, and in Purpee we find a good deal of interesting and colourful characters, for better and worse. Here are some of the most important ones for the critique. But first...
5.4.1) The empty World of Darkness
The coterie are outsiders to Purpee, which means they have to find their footing and explore the town with no prior knowledge of anything. But this creates a bit of a structural problem - by their very nature, the supernatural denizens of the World of Darkness are hidden.
Episode 1 is the establishing episode where we are in San Francisco. There are vampires a plenty. But this is just the inciting incident, so we don't get to dwell with too many of the people here. Episode 2 the coterie gets dumped unceremoniously to an AirBnN in Purpee. It is pretty nice that they get two blood dolls to feed from right there, which is surprisingly generous for Carmarilla tossing them into exile (the only character with Herd is Zaeth and I'm not sure any of his Herd ever showed up explicitly). Episode 3 the characters talk to one ghost, and another in like Episode 5, and only by Episode 8 do we get an actual, confirmed flesh and blood supernatural to show up (the coterie met them before but they weren't confirmed anything). So a good half of the series we don't have any corporeal supernaturals for the players to interact with. Not really the thing you are looking for when playing or watching Vampire the Masquerade honestly...
5.4.2) Nancy Danderhoof
No character has perhaps defined this game as much as Nancy Danderhoof. She came about at an intersection of two characters - Darkness Man took her as Criminal Contacts 3, and Bat Child took her as Enemy 1. Nancy is a reporter for the Omaha Sunday Scoop, and really effective at that. She apparently has figured out the whole coterie being vampires before the game and now is using that knowledge to blackmail them to give her a more interesting story each month than "vampires are real".
On one hand, she is an interesting NPC that is constantly nipping at the players' heels to get them motivated to do stuff, while also helping them out with investigations. On the other hand though, she seems to be the most competent character in the room wherever she goes. This unfortunately has the side effect that she is a fast shortcut through a lot of interesting legwork the characters could be doing.
So for example, in episode 2 the characters get a hint that the local mines are hella haunted. In episode 3 they get more information about that and it is building up to be a really interesting place to explore. Then they proceed to do nothing with that, instead giving it a lead to Nancy that hoofs it there herself and does a whole expose on how the mine was pretty much flooded on purpose. The characters don't go into that mine until episode 13 when they want to round up every supernatural of Purpee. So instead of having a cool and spooky episodes of the PCs exploring the mines, we get Nancy to do it.
She gets similarly involved in a few other plots and by the end of the series she grows into this mythological figure feared by the likes of Bigfoot that knows her by name and reputation, a character that saves the PCs, solves their backstories and so on. It's perhaps not the best when the NPC overshadows the main cast with competency like that...
5.4.3) Bigfoot
As mentioned before, Bigfoot was a pretty important character in the series that instantly imprinted on Bat Child as soon as she got a vision of him in episode 6. The players would only meet him in person in episode 12 though, so a lot of the relationship they had with him felt kind of parasocial.
When our coterie has a face to face meeting with Bigfoot, the whole situation feels like they are fawning over him and how cool he is. How he's a master of kumite and calls Bat Child his pupil (despite not having met her before) for learning it, how he's a member of the secret society of cryptids spanning the globe, how he's friend with Nessie, how he stops by Atlantis from time to time, and even that there is some bad blood between him and Mothman, and how he runs away when people mention Nancy Danderhoof. It all sticks out like some kind of weird fanfic and how we yet again get an NPC that overshadows the players themselves.
There is also another scene that comes to mind. The players are investigating the Whittaker family and learn they have been involved in some horrible stuff - they have been exploiting people of Purpee for generations, and they even flooded the aforementioned mines while a lot of miners were still there, drowning them and turning them into Wraiths. They are also responsible for a lot of old people being exploited in their senior nursing homes, creating even more Wraiths with the misery. The family has those two tribes of Wraiths fighting one another over who gets to tear them apart, all while being protected by something. Well, the players find that something, a magical tombstone in the cemetery that is dampening a lot of supernatural powers. So what does Bat Child do to end this situation? Well, obviously she channels her kumite training and does a ghost kamehameha at it to break it apart. A pretty bathos moment, but alright, the ward is destroyed, and the Whittakers are now vulnerable. So we get a scene of the patriarch of the family going for a bath, and do we see the dozens of Wraiths his family has wronged over the decades just drag him to hell for all the pain and suffering they had to endure? Is he torn limb from limb by the ghosts that want to just consume his flesh? No, we get Bigfoot appearing and drowning him in the bathtub, as he too is an ancient enemy of the Whittakers. Kind of an anticlimax for my liking...
Honestly, Bigfoot doesn't add much to the story that other characters couldn't fill. Pretty much the only thing he's good for is helping a bit in the final big fight...
5.4.4) Ermine Damanescu
While a lot of the tone of the campaign was all over the place, Ermine Damanescu hit the World of Darkness tone right on the money. She's a high ranking Tremere working on some big project with some tech company that's mostly been in the background of some of the episodes but never the focus (from what I've gathered, it's some kind of technological singularity mixed with Roko's Basilisk). She appeared in the campaign due to Madelaine taking Prestation Debts, and she tries cashing it in by getting the player characters to help a deal of hers to go through.
After that pretty much falls through she graces the town of Purpee with her presence in Episode 12 to spur Madelaine to step up her game and delivers perhaps one of the most thematic explanations of how vampires do business. That vampires operate on such long time scales that nothing holds value beyond their boons. Empires rise and fall, institutions crumble, doubloons go bad and lose their worth but the only thing that remains that is worth a damn is one vampire's debt to another because that is not made lesser with time.
But the coterie does not appreciate the cut of her jib and doesn't want to let her get what she wants (because that would upset the local werewolf), so they decide to kill her. She is ambushed, grappled by Darkness Man and the trajectory of the campaign hinges on one roll from Bat Child. To underscore in how deep a shit the characters are, Ermine just chuckles to herself and says "this better kill me"...
A powerful scene for sure, but also doesn't seem to utilise the characters' powers to the fullest. She is an important vampire with ghoul bodyguards, you'd think they'd be on the lookout for any trouble. And this is before you remember that Tremere have Auspex (supernatural senses) which would make any kind of ambush really challenging. And the way the coterie decides to take out Ermine is also pretty mechanically questionable, but I'll leave that to its own mechanics discussion since it's a bigger thing.
It's a shame that ultimately this character gets a much more unceremonious end in the final episode after coming back from the maw of Oblivion, being kicked to death by a horse...
This goes back to the big premise of the show - we don't get characters like this on the regular due to Purpee being devoid of vampires. Imagine having a whole city of people like Ermine for the players to interact with...
5.4.5) Smiling Nixon...
If there was one thing to point to as proof that the campaign went from a sandbox carefully curated by someone who cares about World of Darkness to "fuck it, let's roll!" it would be the Smiling Nixon.
In Episode 3 we have characters exploring an old cold war era secret government lab bunker they encounter something that sends down a shiver down their cold, undead spines - a portrait of smiling Richard Nixon. That site itself is linked to a few other supernatural things - the Bigfoot, the ghosts of the drowned miners and also the clown (I'm getting to it!). The stuff the characters discover isn't too noteworthy in the grand scheme of things, but that image of the Smiling Nixon stuck with the players.
In the Adventuring Party for that episode we get Brennan mentioning that in order to make vampires heroic you need to introduce something worse than them, like Richard Nixon. That is definitely a take on Vampire the Masquerade. Normally the game is not about being heroic, it's about struggling with the slippery slope to your own eventual downfall, where heroism is poisoned by cynicism. In such dark setting, being actually kind and heroic shines so much better than just having someone worse than you show up so you can feel better about not being as bad as them.
But speaking of which, we get to the penultimate episode. The characters are a part of the town's biggest event, they are gearing up to fight the biggest enemy still on their list, Jack of the Pines, and the other asshole family of town, the Douglases. Then who rolls into town but all the other vampires that matter to the coterie - Zaeth's sire Koschei Severov, Madelaine's sire Marquis de Lafayette, and her ex Maria Josefina, the Archon that exiled the coterie to the town Clive Tarker, and none other than the final big bad evil of the campaign, Smiling Richard Nixon, the Ventrue Justicar.
Now those of you that know Vampire the Masquerade and its Carmarilla politics know that Justicars are almost the top dogs of the organisation, second only to the Inner Circle. Those vampires are usually hundreds if not over a thousand years old and wield tremendous powers, both political and supernatural. So how did Nixon get here, being embraced at best a few decades ago? Well obviously he got embraced by someone important and then forced them to reveal the secret of where the Antideluvian Ventrue rests and diablerised himself to the tippy top of being a 3rd generation Ventrue himself as one does! Just ignore the old lore that Ventrue was one of the Antideluvians pretty much confirmed dead ages ago.
During the Episode 14 Adventuring Party Brennan does mention that as soon as he described Nixon stepping foot in Purpee the episode prior the vibes were off, but because the series is recorded in two episode chunks, there was no going back now. We are jumping the shark!
So alright, we have Nixon coming down to town, and what's he up to here? Well, he wants to figure out whether the coterie has properly called a blood hunt on Ermine Damanescu for breaking a Tradition, or have they just murdered her unlawfully.
Alright, a good goal, so how do you think he accomplishes that? Perhaps looking any of the PCs straight into the eye and going "Tell me the truth, was the blood hunt properly called and announced?" while using Dominate 2+ to force the player characters to heel with the true power of the Blood? Does he sick his own Archon Tarker to perform some proper interrogation only a vampire elder could pull off? Does he even ask them in a way that would require a social roll? No, he doesn't do any of that, instead just rolls with whatever the characters are serving him up until the point becomes moot.
But I suppose none of that mattered in the end since turns out Nixon isn't that strong in a fight if you only use physical Disciplines. You'd think a Ventrue like that could at least throw up Majesty as a defensive mechanism, or use Mesmerize on the strongest person in the room to get lackeys. Or perhaps not go around places you can get murdered without an armed detachment of bodyguards befitting your station. But I guess this was the end of the game, past trying to fuck a dead clown, so who cares...
5.4.6) ... and his Archon
The other big hitter character the coterie had to deal with was Clive Tarker, Nixon's Nosferatu Archon. We first saw him in episode 1 of the series where he gets driven to frenzy by putting on VR goggles that beam sunlight straight into your eyes, which drives him to frenzy where he starts decapitating people and yelling "vampires are real!".
Given that this is the first episode where everything goes wrong, it would be a bit much to nitpick that, but I will come back to how the series handles frenzy...
Then we don't see him until the last two episodes where he doesn't do all that much all things considered. Which is a bit of a shame, given that he'd probably want to be helping protect Nixon from being killed off. He almost kills one of the PCs, but is easily redirected to attacking some NPCs. It's a bit of a missed opportunity, given that we do see how deadly Nosferatu can be from what Darkness Man pulls off in the last episode! We similarly don't see him use anything other than physical Disciplines...
5.4.7) Jack of the Pines
Christian! Christian! Jack of the Pines!
The ultimate enemy of this campaign is Jack of the Pines. While we don't even hear him mentioned until the last third of the series, he does embody the colonialism theme of this game quite well. He's brought over here by the Douglas family from the old world, and is literally an invasive species spirit that messes with the local landscape. He is also a spirit of fertility, which does lead to a lot of phallic imagery - another spirit locking eyes with him in the distance literally gets a boner...
Jack is also mushed together with Douglass' Christian beliefs into some quasi pagan mishmash cult that is all about Jesus, as well as blood fertility rites to renew the soil and help grow some Christian weed...
While that is played for a laugh, one of Jack's actions kind of makes that connection stronger. See, in the final fight before he is unceremoniously blown up Jack is able to punch Bat Child so hard she turns back into a human. For those unfamiliar with the World of Darkness, that is a feat that is night unheard of. Vampires have legends of one being able to attain salvation and return back to mortality, and that's about it. In a setting with literal Biblical angels, demon kinds of Yama, Archmages that can rewrite reality at a fundamental level, a multitude of gods like Osiris walking the Earth or even Lilith the Elohim, none are able to do any of that. It seems the purview to lift the Curse of Caine lies only with Caine himself (as per the Gehenna book) or with Yahweh. And well, as the Douglasses are chanting, Jack of the Pines is either Jesus Christ or his friend, so maybe some of that holds water in a way I don't think our Storyteller intended...
5.4.8) Hector Childers
As mentioned before, Bat Child had one of the most convoluted backstories of the whole coterie. Her player initially wanted her to be turned by accident by a "ghost bat", a vampire in a bat form with a nosebleed that drank her dry and dripped their blood into her, before being squished by some vending machine or something, which would mean Bat Child would see herself not as a vampire but as a half ghost bat and try to live with the bats.
Well, in the finale we get the resolution to that story that is only a bit better than Fantasy High's Gorgug finding his dad... We have Nancy Danderhoof delivering this white bat to Vesper just as she was turned human and also shot in the gut and bleeding out at zero health levels. Then we get a quick exposition how he's Bat Child's real dad, Hector Childers, a were-bat (which I guess in World of Darkness are called Camazotz), one that was born a bat rather than a human (equivalent of Lupus for Werewolves), that at one point turned into a human, conceived Bat Child with her mother, and then watched from afar to see if she'd change, but then Bat Child got stolen by the Carmarilla, turned into a vampire and had her memory altered or something.
In Episode 14's Adventuring Party we do have the cast mention Bat Child slowly dying in the episode proper being one of the few moments of pathos in the series. Now imagine that playing out while we get all of Hector's exposition delivered in the most squeaky voice our Storyteller can muster, just as Bat Child is bleeding to death. We are bath to bathos.
Ultimately, while we had characters offering to turn Bat Child into a vampire to save her life, nobody thinking to ghoul her to heal her up, we have an alternative of the local Werewolf speedrunning a spiritual journey for her to let her turn into a were-bat herself (ignoring that in World of Darkness that's something that pretty much only happens during puberty, who cares!)...
5.4.9) The Clown
So at the end of the series, the coterie decides that Elysium should be for more people than just the local vampires. So instead of one throne for the Prince they order a bunch of them and decide to invite every supernatural in town - the Werewolves, the Mage, the Leprechaun, their ghouls, Bigfoot, the dozens of drowned miner Wraiths, etc. Everyone is ready to re-enact Kingdom Hearts...
First on the docket - Nort the boy!
And then we get one supernatural that shows up that the coterie hasn't ran into yet, the Clown. He only communicate through gestures, slapstick, balloon animals and honking his nose. Nobody knows what his deal is. As I understand, he is supposed to be a reference to the 2016 clown sightings, but from what crumbs of information we get about his kind, they are locked in some kind of endless war with the Wraiths in Oblivion or something and him returning there either via Bat Child's mouth or the secret government facility would bring peace or balance to it or something.
I think the Clown was also supposed to tie into HJ's SSRI blood addiction as with his dying breaths he was trying to get the Ventrue to drink him, but given that HJ feeding limitation is that he only drinks from consenting victims and the Clown was only communicating in slapstick that never panned out.
All of that pretty much leads me to conclude that sometimes it's best to leave leave some parts of the setting unexplored if you don't have the time to actually devote to them. Was the Clown funny in the last episode? Sure, I can see how some people would find him funny and it fit the wacky tone the series ended up on. But beyond that he appeared out of nowhere, didn't have any good setup or payoff, and it drew way too much attention to itself in a session that was already jam packed with other stuff people needed to deal with. Sometimes less is more, and it certainly would be the case with the Clown...
5.4.10) The ghosts
Purpee has a pretty dark past, and it's exemplified by the ghosts of the town. Nathaniel Hoggins is the first person the coterie comes into contact with that they are sure is a supernatural, back in Episode 3. He is a ghost of a dead miner that is now stuck haunting a drive-thru due to some shenanigans. He tells the coterie about how him and his co-workers were betrayed by the Whittakers when they flooded the mine they were working in. Truly horrible stuff and a sure-fire way to get a lot of Wraiths (maybe even Spectres if you let them fester for a few decades like they did). So what do the players do about all of that? Nothing.
Initially the coterie is interested in exploring the mines which could've been a great set piece. But they dilly dally a bit and give the scoop of ghost miners to Nancy Danderhoof during their first meeting, so she explores that place for them instead. That pretty much closes that plotline. Then, when the vampires decide to make an Elusium for everyone in town they decide to invite the ghosts. So in Episode 13, full 10 episodes after they first met Nathaniel, Bat Child and Darkness Man go into the mines to talk to the ghosts and one of the players pitches sing-inviting them, so you have a Christopher Nolan's Batman doing an improvised song and dance on the spot. Great...
But now that the ghosts are out of the bag, there is this teeny tiny problem of them being angry, vengeful spirits wanting to tear up the Whittaker family. But since we are dealing with vampires that might not want to fully embrace the nature of the World of Darkness, the coterie negotiates them down from "murder the entire family" to "scare love kill maybe any Whittaker that turned 18 while still rich", since they didn't want to kill the children, and had a soft spot for the people Madelaine was drinking and so on. This kind of takes the edge off the whole affair, before it turns into more of a slapstick of the ghosts possessing the bus the coterie used to elect a dog as a new mayor and using that to smash the various Whittakers that are on their shit list.
And this is beyond the aforementioned situation where Bigfoot stole the revenge from the ghosts by killing the Whittaker patriarch, but I already talked about that earlier...
Other than that, in general the idea of having Wraiths in your Elysium isn't a good one since Vampires barely have any tools to deal with them. Out of all the player characters maybe Bat Child could have something to interact with them eventually, but otherwise you are inviting a bunch of vengeful spirits into your home that could make the place miserable for everyone. Then hope they don't talk to any other Wraiths that might be following the Vampires (even the coterie have killed a few innocent or semi-innocent people in town, so it's only a matter of time before they accumulate a few...).
So in general, the ghosts feel like a bit of a missed opportunity for the game, a plot thread that was left to dangle too much and then needed wrapping up for the big finale in a way that didn't give it enough time to resolve.
5.4.13) Maya Jayashtri
Maya is the local Food Coop organiser and the resident Mage of Purpee. She is perhaps the character with the most nuance of the NPCs.
She and her partner Amelia are trying to make the town of Purpee a better place but keep running up against the general shittyness of the world. They try to get a bus line working that gets shut down by the town. They run the local food coop that only exist because trying to drive it out of business would be too much effort for what it's worth. They lose their family home due to the scam that is the retirement community of the town. And then, a bunch of vampires show up in town...
Maya doesn't initially know what do make of the coterie. To her, they are a weird group. They show up, kill a few big problems that have been plaguing the town and start to make themselves cosy. They flaunt their billionaire wealth by outbidding the Rockefeller Center for their Christmas tree to install it in front of a biker bar, or move into the home that was stolen from her partner.
She gets very vulnerable with them, since they know a bit about her and also know her mortal partner Amelia, so if they were a regular group of Vampire assholes they could get her killed quite easily. But they establish a working relationship for the time being.
But Maya isn't a pushover, she has agency of her own and goes against the PCs. She redirects one of the Nancy's investigations to suit her needs, she probes which of the vampires really care about Purpee, and almost has a falling out with the coterie (as mentioned in the HJ's section of this analysis).
In general, she is the kind of NPC I'd love to have seen more of, someone with goals that have friction with what the players are trying to accomplish. Not a total asshole, but someone local the new vampires in town are running up against as they sledgehammer they way around town.
5.4.15) Davis Otherman and the Technocracy
While his plot that hasn't been much explored in the series, it was interesting seeing what the series had cooked up with Davis Otherman. He was a techbro though and through, a stand in for Zuck, Musk and so on that ended up being murdered in the first episode. But that was not the end of his story as his company was heavily involved in AI to the point he gets quasi-Pantheon'ed.
The coterie mainly forgot about him for most of the series until someone stumbled upon the plot related to him during Episode 13. But it was so late in the series it didn't matter any more.
What was interesting though, was that Davis having a chip on the shoulder against the coterie drew the attention of the Technocracy at them, which is really some big big hitting kind of enemy you do not want to be messing around with unless you want literal terminators showing up at your door.
Generally, it feels like so late in the game you wouldn't want to be bringing in this kind of elephant into the room...
5.4.16) The rest
The rest of the NPC cast is pretty neat and varied. We do have a neat amount of just regular people in the town that live their own lives and the PCs get very invested in (like trying to hook some people up, organise some swingles night and so on). We have some that touch on the supernatural, and we get some other creatures of the night that play minor roles. There is something and someone to interact with at any level of the story so the players aren't just funnelled into dealing with just the supernaturals like a good deal of Vampire games end up going towards.
It would be nice to see the setting book for Purpee to learn what else was lurking in there, or generally have a clearer picture of the various characters the coterie was interacting with.
5.5) The Mechanics
While a lot of enjoyment comes from the player characters and the NPCs in the story, this medium is still a game, so we ought to discuss the mechanical side of things.
City Council of Darkness ran on Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition. I personally haven't played in that version of the system, but I have familiarised myself with the book while watching this series, plus I have ample experience with the previous iterations of the system.
While a good number of mechanics were used competently, and the production team even put out a nice video explaining it to their viewers, there were a few things that were notably not used or heavily misused we ought to talk about...
5.5.1) Why mechanics matter
I know that the folks behind Dimension 20 are some great improv comedians and a lot of people watch them for that. I have seen the discussion started a few times that it's all good when players are on a roll to have that guide the game, disregarding the rules. And hey, if that's how you want to run your games, whatever floats your tables' boats! But there is a reason why the crew is playing Vampire the Masquerade and not like, doing some kind of DnD 5e hack into D20 modern with some vampire rules thrown in, right? We have seen them do a modern fantasy setting with Fantasy High, so it wouldn't be beyond them to accomplish that.
First, this is a Tabletop RPG show, so it is an implied assumption that we want to see people play the game rather than watch an off-the-cuff improv. Second, when we play roleplaying games it is the assumption that the system is made carefully by the designers in such a way that following the rules ought to create the intended game feel (whether that's true is the distinction between good and bad systems). In this way, the mechanics inform the story! Thirdly, there are people that are here to watch a given system be played. Heck, I'm pretty much in that camp - I had my fun with Dimension 20 back in the day and had my fun, but I didn't have time for it for a while. But hearing that the crew was playing Vampire the Masquerade did draw me in!
Vampire the Masquerade is a system that, as already mentioned, has a certain feel to it. It is meant to be Interview with the Vampire or Dracula, not Twilight or Morbius. It's a game where being a good person is a struggle, and the mechanics reinforce that. You are a creature of immerse power, but you live in a world of fragile people you need to hurt on the regular to survive. The difference between being a parasite and a predator is one bad night where you need to feed and get sloppy, or angry, or just need that extra bit to get by in a hurry...
Lastly, Dimension 20 is a popular show that will be an introduction to Vampire the Masquerade for a lot of people. I'm glad they are able to do that (I've been a long proponent that popular shows ought to be a gateway into other systems for people to help grow the hobby rather than funnel all the money into Hasbro). But this is also a responsibility for the creators - they shape how people will view and play any given game. It's kind of like the Matt Mercer effect. People watching the City Council of Darkness might act in a similar way at their own tables, for better or worse.
5.5.2) The tenants of the Chronicle and missing Humanity
One of the core mechanics of Vampire is the Humanity. It's a measure of how far someone has gone from being a person into being a beast driven by impulses. Similar to D&D's alignment chart, but with actual teeth and mechanics tied to it, rather than being a toothless meme.
In the V5 edition of Vampire Humanity is a bit different than before. It's no longer a more rigid set of rules, but instead revolves around characters' conviction and chronicle tenets. This offers a more flexible approach to morality that suits the needs of the story, which is interesting.
City Council of Darkness has none of that though. No chronicle tenets are established, some character have some assumed code of morality to them (like Bat Child and Darkness Man being superheroes that "feed on justice") but none of that ever comes into play. In Episode 1 we have the superhero duo manslaughter pedestrians by jumping out of a high window and letting glass rain onto the sidewalk like daggers. Darkness Man also embraces a guy. Nothing. In Episode 2 we have Darkness Man toss a guy for Bat Child to feed on to death (sure, he was comically shouting how much he loves the police and beating up his wife to make it morally simple to kill him). In Episode 6 we have Darkness Man kill a pervert to drain him. In Episode 9 we have Zaeth kill some random bystander in a frenzy that barely matters at all. In Episode 10 we have some convenient cop asshole for the vampires to sate their hunger. Etc.
It would be an interesting problem to see characters grapple with over the course of the series. It's not like there was that much time for the characters to go into a deep downward spiral, but having that little sting when the characters are stepping out of line could help draw attention to the fact that being a vampire superhero is actually challenging and not just easy mode...
5.5.3) Feeding
Another core mechanic of Vampire is the problem of feeding. Vampires draw their power from the blood, which creates some potential source of problems and tension in the game. Things are pretty easy when you are a predator that is nice and full. But put some screws to that and let the characters ride that hunger a bit and you will be able to see them squirm under pressure and show their fangs.
We do see that a bit in Episode 2. The characters are dumped unceremoniously into Purpee and a lot of them are pretty hungry. I think Bat Child is at Hunger 4, which is a neatly dangerous place to be. This is also not mentioning that a lot of the characters have feeding restrictions (implied or mechanical, it's a bit all over the place as mentioned in the character discussions) - the two Ventrues feed on consensual victims, which is a Masquerade breach waiting to happen. Bat Child and Darkness man "feed on justice", which means they have to go and quickly find someone that is breaking the law or is generally an asshole. Madelaine only feeds on noble blood, which initially seems an impossible task in the bumpkinville of Purpee. Everyone is in an unfamiliar place, far away from their comfort zone. This would've been a perfect place to set the tone for the coterie being like someone dropping a herd of wild leopards into a middle of town.
But no, we don't get that. The coterie has a neat AirBnB place set up, they have two blood dolls to feed on (alas, not noble enough for Madelaine), and the superheroes find some convenient asshole abusive wifebeater to devour on their prowl. The friction point is smoothed over and things mainly return to normal. The only character that suffers still is Madelaine.
As mentioned before, she doesn't find any suitable victims for multiple episodes. This could be an interesting problem to solve. Heck, by Episode 4 she is still running on dry and the game is starting to run into its downtime mechanic (skipping time forward to let the characters do some bigger tasks). I was wondering how they'd square that away with Madelaine not having anyone to feed on, but she finds that the local Whittakers are bluebloods so the problem gets resolved.
Later on we get some tiny morsel of tension between our Toreadore and the superheroes since they both want to be feeding on the Whittakers - her because they are nobles, and them because they are assholes that need justice. It would be a neat conflict between the characters - clawing and showing fangs at one another over their limited food supply dwindling, but that never amounts to anything.
As the game progresses feeding becomes even less of an issue. Each time the players enter downtime their hunger and Willpower resets to max, and even if they spend it during downtime, it resets again when they leave downtime. This means that unless they get into an actual fight they can pretty much coast and never feed on anyone on-screen. It is a bit of a pity that we lose that kind of source of drama from the series.
That being said, it is kind of what I've experienced in a lot of Vampire games - usually the characters start off kind of hungry since it's a random luck of the draw (at least in the previous editions of the system), but since games often take place one night after another characters quickly coast at 90% full all the time and you don't have the tension either.
I suppose a better approach to feeding and downtime would be to only reset the hunger at the start of it, so when characters leave downtime after spending a lot of blood juicing their rolls they would be at a disadvantage. This would give you some reprieve while also not making downtime rolls an automatic "I spend blood to get more dice!" territory.
Finally, later on in the series the characters get into a few big scuffles and suffer Aggravated Damage, which is a pain to heal requiring spending a good amount of time and blood to get fixed up. This could've been a driver to have characters feed more or run lower on blood for some amount of time, but that also gets negated. The characters are given blood from a Werewolf instead to help the process along and they barely suffer any consequences (more on that Werewolf blood later).
I suppose feeding is a strange balance to strike in Vampire. On one hand characters feeding all the time can be a bit boring to watch. Episode 2 has like, 20 minutes of just roleplaying feeding. Having that come up again and again would be like watching Critical Role roleplay a character buying paper parchments over and over for their spells. But foregoing this entirely also means we don't feel the characters being very vampiric, or risking hunger frenzy...
5.5.4) Frenzy
Another big mechanic of Vampire is Frenzy. Those are the moments when the character loses control and turns bestial. It's an ever-present reminder that vampires in this world only wear the façade of humanity, while deep down they are monsters that only care about feeding and survival.
The mechanic is present in the game, although it's kind of not exactly right.
First frenzy we see is the NPC Clive Tarker, the Nosferatu Archon, getting his eyes blasted with sunlight and starting to massacre people while yelling "vampires are real!" for everyone to stream. There are two problems with this scene.
The first problem here is that Vampire the Masquerade has multiple types of Frenzy. You have the hunger frenzy, the anger frenzy, and the fear frenzy (aka Rötschreck). Feed, fight, flight. They all drive the characters to act differently. Hunger drives the characters to feed on blood and ends when characters sate their Hunger. Anger frenzy drives character to rampage and needs a separate check to end. Last one drives the character to run away or fight like a caged animal. Sunlight, fire and so on cause the fear frenzy, which what Tarker would've experienced here, which wouldn't drive him into rampaging. But alright, minor point here, but we will get back to the distinctions later.
The second problem is that Frenzy is not an "I'm angry response and I'm going to take it out on people", it is literally characters going bestial. You don't form coherent sentences or talk during it, you are an uncontrollable animal. So Tarker wouldn't be yelling what he did. But this is the inciting episode and this is an NPC, that doesn't much matter.
Then we get a bit of a reprieve from this mechanic up until Episode 9 where things get messy. The characters are a bit spent and they are pursing a local hunter that is shooting at them. First we get Zaeth trying to spot the hunter at Hunger 2, which turns into a Bestial Failure, the GM says the Brujah is enraged, so that sounds to me like an anger frenzy. Then we get Darkness Man dodging a stake, rolling with 5 Hunger, and gets a Bestial Failure, and then rolls again on resisting frenzy and gets another Bestial Failure, indicating something of a hunger frenzy. Finally, we have Bat Child attacking someone, getting a Messy Critical, and also failing her frenzy roll, so I think this would be an anger frenzy. They all start yelling at one another about where the hunter is so they can coordinate the attack, make animal noises, and eventually descend on the hunter and kill him, drinking him dry between the three of them getting them to Hunger 1 and ending all of their frenzies.
But if we look at the rules, only hunger frenzy ends when the characters are sated. Anger frenzy persists until you get a successful roll to resist it, which would mean at least one or two characters would probably still be frenzying. Given that all of this happened during an important shindig, this could be an interesting problem for the characters, seeing what else they go after in their rage, or whether someone else will be able to restrain them.
Heck, in the Adventuring Party for this episode the Zaeth player did remark that he enjoyed there being a Frenzy mechanic in the system, so maybe leaning more into it could've been interesting for the group!
Another important moment when it comes to Frenzy was the very next episode, episode 10. The characters got into a really nasty fight with a cryptid that gave a few of them Aggravated damage. That damage is really nasty to heal, requiring a lot of blood and time to recover from, and could've been an interesting consequence of the characters taking a fight. But instead, we get a really helpful NPC werewolf that offers to give the character his blood to help them heal, and giving them a neat vision quest / exposition vision as a bonus. But that's not how things usually go. Sure, Werewolves have potent blood that gives you a lot of bang for your buck, but they are creatures of primal instincts, and they pretty much send you into Frenzy. Their blood doesn't have any innate healing powers either, so this was generally too easy of a way for characters to get over the consequences of the fight they just picked. It's a pity, it could've been an interesting source of drama...
Finally, since the group forgot to keep track of Humanity, they also weren't adding 1/3rd of their Humanity to rolls to resist frenzy... And for that matter, I don't think we ever got the Brujah Clan Bane to come up that would also make resisting frenzy harder. But speaking of which!
5.5.5) Clan Banes
Clan Banes in Vampire are what helps distinguish the various vampiric families from one another on a mechanical level (beyond their Discipline preferences). This is what makes Nosferatu hideous and a Brujah boisterous.
Over the course of this campaign, from what I can tell they were applied a bit unevenly and superficially. Our Nosferatu of course had his Repulsive Flaw, but didn't get penalties to disguising himself as human. Our Ventrue did adhere to their feeding preferences, but that was something a lot of people were doing. Our Brujah did not get penalties to frenzy checks, and our Toreadore did not get penalties to Discipline rolls for being in non-beautiful surroundings. If Bat Child was Hecata, she didn't inflict painful feedings on people (mainly because she was devouring everyone, but one time she did feed on Nancy Danderhoof with no issue), and if she was Lasombra, we didn't get any distortions to phones or mirrors (she did make a few calls and did at one point try to examine her abyss maw in a mirror).
But given that the characters were Blood Potency 1 I guess not much of that matters since it's such a small penalty most of the time it wouldn't affect the game too much...
But what was pretty mechanically impactful was...
5.5.6) The Kirby Maw of Ahriman
During this campaign, Bat Child had one power that defined the character for the entire series, that being Oblivion's Maw of Ahriman. While she used it in pretty cool ways to open up a portal to the Abyss to disappear various things and people in some really memorable scenes, there is only one small problem with it - that's not how the power works, like at all. So let me paste the text of the power straight from Blood Stained Love, page 152:
Maw of Ahriman
Mystics of the Abyss draw its void inside their own bodies, holding it there ever-ready to smother the very motivation of a another person. The Ceremony’s effect can be used to spring a rather nasty surprise on a sex partner, making it possible to use it in situations where the victim is seduced with malign intentions.
Ingredients: A room that no light enters and is quiet as the grave.
Process: The vampire performing the Ceremony contemplates the darkness and the silence, then unleashes their voice as loudly as possible, casting it out to make room for the darkness of the Abyss.
System: The vampire’s player makes a Ceremony roll. The character’s mouth or another orifice becomes a void of inky blackness, destroying inanimate objects placed within in a matter of seconds.
For the duration of the Ceremony, the character cannot speak if the power was used on the mouth, as it most commonly is. A bite attack deals 1 aggravated point of Willpower damage in addition to the fang damage. The vampire is unable to slake Hunger while this Ceremony is in effect, though, as any blood swallowed is annihilated.
The Ceremony lasts until sunrise or the vampire cancels it. Canceling the Ceremony requires the character to pay in flesh: they must stick a small portion of their body into an orifice, dealing 1 point of Superficial damage which cannot be reduced in any way as a bit of flesh is consumed by the Abyss. It can be mended normally.
First of all, it's not an at-will Discipline power, it's a Ritual, which requires 10 minutes and special preparations to cast. Secondly, it requires a Rouse check which I think was skipped a few times. And thirdly, it's not an instantaneous annihilation portal, but a small bonus to damage while they are biting people and something that can destroy inanimate objects placed in it with haste but still taking some time.
So how did Vesper use it? To dispose of bodies of people they killed (which sure, with enough time I'd give her that), to swallow a tomahawk missile being fired at a building, and to instantly resolve a combat against Ermine Damanescu by a single "I pounce on them from the top with my mouth open and swallow them whole" manoeuvre like she was a mix of Kirby and Mulch Diggums...
Sure, it works on a rule of cool, but setting the bar for what a character can do diminishes some of the dangers in the World of Darkness. The characters deciding to take down a vampire Elder ought not to be taken too lightly. While the players already had a numbers advantage on their end and probably would be able to kill Ermine, it would've been more interesting to see them actually have to slug it out.
I guess this illustrates some small point about World of Darkness writing, that often powers have some fluff descriptors to them that imply a lot, but you have to read the actual mechanical side of things to get how they apply in game.
5.5.7) Aid with all the dice!
A problem many RPGs face is that of one character aiding another and how to express that mechanically. If you make it too easy and generous, characters will clump up into one big group and do everything together with way too many dice. This sometimes was the case in this game.
How teamwork works in V5 is that if characters are effectively working together on a task, you take the highest pool and add one dice into it for every helper with the relevant skill. That's it.
Meanwhile in Purpee sometimes we had situations like this in Episode 12 - Zaeth talking one on one with his sire over the phone trying to convince him of something. Then we had LeVonte slide in with his Presence Wingman power (that lets you give the benefit of one of your Presence powers to another), Bat Child chimes in with Ingénue Advantage (that gives you bonuses to appearing innocent and blameless), and then Madelaine adds that she has Melpominee (a power that lets you use Presence without seeing your target) to just keep stacking those dice.
The thing is, none of those would apply. Zaeth is doing a one on one talk with his sire, LeVonte's powers don't work over the phone, Madelaine can use Presence over the phone but she's not the one acting nor does she have Wingman (if you combined the two powers you could get some help), and Advantages don't have transferrable bonuses.
Having too many bonus dice means characters don't fail things and you don't feel the consequences. It also slows things down since for every important roll you have the whole table going "mother may I?" and start haggling for the bonuses they can give. But most amusingly, none of that mattered since Zaeth nailed down his argument by himself to the point the Storyteller didn't even make the roll result matter all that much...
5.6) The rest
We have covered a lot of ground in the various sections so far, often talking about related topics as things came up. But here is the wrap of everything else that didn't fit into the previous sections.
5.6.1) V5...ish
The system City Council of Darkness was ran in was Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition. There are a lot of people that don't particularly enjoy its mechanics and lore, but that's up to the individual table to judge. It is interesting to see the system being ran, although it would be interesting to see the group commit to its changes.
See, V5 took some big swings in the setting. Most of the Elders and the Sabbat have peaced out of the world to go into the Middle East for their Gehenna War due to some kind of supernatural calling. Vampires have shunned the digital space due to being tracked too easily by the Second Inquisition so they are now luddites. That sort of stuff.
We don't get that in this game. Elders are very much present and are big hitters when they appear, and even vampires as old as Madelaine are having facetime chat with her sire, an even older vampire. It would be really interesting to see people try to operate in a modern world without the aid of our modern conveniences...
5.6.2) Temptations to leave Purpee and the fear of Carmarilla
The coterie is sent to their exile in Purpee and some of them didn't take it too well. Many of the vampires here were cainites of ambition. Madelaine was already in despair in Episode 2 when she realised what a podunk town Purpee was and how pedestrian their entertainment prospects were. But they all mustered on!
Then by the time episode 10 and 11 of the series came about the coterie was starting to be disenchanted by the place and the terms of their exile. They had second thoughts about having to kill the other local supernaturals since they befriended a few, they wanted to re-write their tasks to suit their own interpretations and whims and some were getting quite flippant about it. It seems that only Madelaine felt the gravity of the situation knowing you don't just flip off the Carmarilla.
Then some characters started giving in to temptations. Our Toreadore was desperately trying to contact anyone to get her out of Purpee. She longed to go back to Paris, so she reached out to her sire in hopes of getting an out, but best he could maybe get her was a trip to Melbourne. Meanwhile we had LeVonte being offered the position of Seneschal in Austin.
It was interesting to see the characters being tempted to go against the coterie and focus on themselves. It would be nice if we saw that earlier in the series, perhaps giving each character a goal to work on for themselves to give them an out, since as it stands, episode 11 out of 14 is way too late for that kind of division in the group to really work.
But when you think about it, all of that is kind of a moot point anyway, since you are not dealing with the coterie being exiled to Purpee by some local Prince out of spite. They have been sanctioned by an Archon of the capital C Carmarilla itself, a global organisation reaching to every corner of the globe and infinite time to enact its justice. Even if a character could run away, they would be on the run for the rest of their unlives. Even if they were beneath the notice of the Archon, someone in their new city would find out about them and use them breaching their sentence as a way to exert influence over them.
It was nice to see that early on in the series Madelaine had the proper approach to this, knowing you don't mess with the Carmarilla, too bad others didn't get the memo of the gravity of their situation...
5.6.3) Lafayette schlumping it
But speaking of Madelaine contacting her sire, it was a bit of a jarring scene. You have your old french noble lady doing a facetalk call with an officer of the American Revolutionary War and a marquis, and he's just living his best unlife in a sweatshirt and track pants, looking like this...
Madelaine pours her soul out to him, pleading to be rescued from her exile, and after the call we have Lafayette forgetting to hang up and instead he turns on his TV and watches his favourite clip from Hamilton, Guns and Ships (song about himself) and starts to wank himself. Bathos, yet again...
But I guess given that the big finale of the series is going against Jack of the Pines that is pretty phallic, it's at least strangely thematically fitting?
5.6.4) Happy with the social system
In one of the earlier episodes of the series, after the players had their chance to get the feel for the system someone made a neat remark. They were impressed by the social system the game had, that it had more substance than their regular affair and powers that interact with it. Apparently someone was looking at the table, seeing a few social characters and didn't want to also go into social not to have too much redundancy in the coterie and not to step on people's toes, but then it turned out that even if you are not a social-focused character having some good stats for talking with people comes in handy for everyone. Given that the game only had a handful of combat encounters rather than Dimension 20's usual affair of one big combat session every other session, you could see the next iteration of the group playing in Vampire could look much different.
5.6.5) Prerolling social interactions and players taking advantage of that
Over the course of the game the group has had a few periods of downtime where they could engage in schemes to achieve their longer term goals. Before episode 12 our two Ventrues have budded their heads together, rolling Intelligence+Leadership and Manipulation+Finance to convince a student to let them run his dog for mayor (long story). They netted 21 successes, which is enormous for the system, so our Storyteller pretty much let them run the show.
And well, they kind of run the scene to the ground. Everyone is giggling like they would be high on something, HJ is doing some really poor backward heelys and intentionally failing them, turning the scene into a bit of a joke knowing they have this in the bad and the Storyteller can't do anything to change it.
It is kind of bad hearing Brannan say that he did them a favour letting them pre-roll the conversation so they wouldn't be giving an Oscar-winning performance only for the roll to fail, and that he is regretting doing that and won't be doing it again.
Honestly, pre-rolling a social interaction roll so characters can know which way to take the scene could be a really good approach to be taking, but it does require everyone to be on-board with following where the dice point them and not abusing the situation like this...
5.6.6) Heart to hearts, all at once!
The series has been recorded in two episode chunks and sometimes you can see the coterie coming in with new ideas after a break and shotgunning it. One such theme I noticed was around episode 11 when everyone decides to have a heart to heart. You have Madelaine reaching out to her sire and being vulnerable, you have HJ and LeVonte having one of their best scenes together where they try talking about how they see themselves in the future and getting mad at one another a bit (LeVonte thinks HJ is thinking too small that he just wants to do pottery for a few centuries, while LeVonte gets way too ambitious of wanting to go to space with no real plan of how he would do that from where they are now). Then we also had Bat Child and Darkness Man having a moment.
The scenes are nice, but it's kind of weird how it's all concentrated in this one episode and feels so jarring, like the cast remembering that the series will be wrapping soon and that they need to have some emotional moments with their characters while they are still playing. Would be nice to see more of this sprinkled throughout...
5.6.7) Only one Downtime with opposition
It was interesting seeing an actual play of a game where the time actually passes between (some) sessions. By my count we get 6 downtimes during the series amounting to about a year passing between the start and end of the game. These let the characters influence the politics of the town, accomplish bigger projects and so on in a way that feel more realistic than your typical RPGs where you accomplish a lot in like two weeks of time since sessions take place one after another in game time.
That being said, it would be nice if there was a bit more to them. As mentioned before, you had the mechanical problem of refreshing characters' Hunger too easily. But I guess since there aren't that many good rules for downtime in Vampire (I guess other than Mind Eye's Theatre LARP rules or more basic stuff like Extended Rolls / Projects) I can't complain too much.
Similarly, it feels like the series wasn't long enough for the characters to be meaningfully challenged during the downtime. I think there was just one instance of NPCs rolling against the coterie - when Nancy was doing a big expose on a key political figure of the town. It probably came down to characters being largely unknown in the first half of the series and knocking out a lot of big things outside of downtime, and then things not mattering as much during the later part of the game once all the pieces started falling into place.
Perhaps taking some inspiration from Danse Macabre / Damnation City books from Vampire the Requiem could've spiced things up a bit and given more weight to downtime big picture political manoeuvres, but those probably wouldn't have worked in this format or setting (the coterie were very big fish in this very small pond of Purpee)...
5.6.8) Everyone gets along nicely
World of Darkness is a setting where you have a lot of supernaturals vying to control the world (or even reality itself). This has lead to a lot of them budding heads over the millennia, and they do not get along. Werewolves hate vampires because they are creatures of entropy, the literal antithesis of everything they strive for, and are also responsible for the ever expanding cities that choke their mother Gaia to death. Changelings see vampires as so banal it hurts to be around them. Mages despise the undead because they revel in the mundane world they are trying to change. Wraiths are often created by vampires' careless feeding and violence.
But this being a limited run series set in a small town with not that many creatures of the night around, we don't get much of that. The only people our coterie doesn't get along with are pretty much members of one rich family since they haven't interacted with them like at all. And who hates our vampires in return? One hunter (and maybe some more people once they start making waves at the end, but that's not intrinsic to them being vampires).
It would be nice to see a bit more animosity in the series. As it is now, the setting feels a bit more Chronicles of Darkness rather than World of Darkness. But I get that having more nuanced conflict can be hard in actual plays. Once you start humanising others in a game you don't want to be their enemy...
5.6.9) It would be nice to hear from the lore expert
It is nice listening to the Adventuring Parties for a game where the players have the chance to discuss the events of the game out of character. At least when those don't devolve into stuff that's entirely off-topic. But you know who would be nice to see during those segments? Their resident lore expert.
Since the Adventuring Parties are more chill and relaxed, it wouldn't be too jarring to see some people from behind the scenes come in and chat with the crew as needed. Since this series apparently did have someone that was in charge of keeping the lore of the setting straight (and presumably also writing the setting?), having them to clarify things, answer questions and generally chat with the players could've helped keep things more grounded or at least get some rules straight.
Heck, when we are recording our podcasts we do that ourselves - check the rules after the session and issue clarifications / corrections at the end of the episodes. This helps to inform the viewers when we do something incorrectly so they don't repeat our mistakes.
5.6.10) It's a Banksy!
As it is with some comedy, if you repeat a joke too much you run it into the ground. Such for me was the case with the Banksy this series.
It started off in the first episode where LeVonte decided to come up with something on the spot to calm all the mortals at a party that have just witnessed a rampaging vampire behead a few people. He rolled really well and called it a Banksy performance. The roll went well, and the joke was funny enough that everyone was just fine with it.
But then the same joke kept appearing most of the times the coterie needed to paper over something big, be that a few people getting killed during a Christmas party or explaining a big massacre at the end of the series. But alright, that's pretty much the same characters doing the same joke, you can imagine that they would repeat the same line multiple times. But then the same joke echoed back from the world.
In episode 9 the characters explored the backstory of an NPC, checking their home, and they found out their parents were cops killed in a line of duty during a Banksy (and being unrelated to what the coterie was doing) and you feel that bathos strike again...
5.6.11) Gasping for air, laughing
As much as I may criticise the series, it's been pretty clear the cast have enjoyed themselves a lot playing it. It was nice seeing them laugh so hard they had problems gasping for air at times, especially at the finale.
I heard that when the group tried being more serious with some more tense campaigns of theirs it drove some of the actors into stress and even smoking, which obviously isn't a good thing.
So even if I might prefer the game to look differently, I wouldn't want it to come at the cost of the actors' wellbeings. If that means turning gothic horror into a comedy series, so be it!
5.6.12) The rest rest
There have been a lot of other minor minor things one could be remarking about with the series. Like the coterie deciding to "talk in a frequency only we can hear" to have a sidebar right in front of Nancy Danderhoof during their first meeting. Or our elder Toreadore noble deciding that the best way to talk to the performing pole dancer was to also get onto the stage and be a part of the show. Or the coteries obsession with swingles night. Or how a character jumped off of a skyscraper without killing themselves and then managed to run up it to catch a missile with their face. But those are minor things all in all and I think I've ranted enough in this article...
6) Conclusions
This review and analysis is some 25+ page long at this point and I'm sorry for having so much to say about the show. So let me give some more brief summary of things and some advice for anyone else that might be still reading at this point...
6.1) Sometimes, you have to say "no"
A lot of comedy and improv relies on "yes and"ing what other people are putting forward, continuying the joke and iterating on it. But when it comes to TTRPGs, especially ones with an established world, tone and so on, you sometimes have to say "no". If you let everything go, you end up with an old undead vampire fucking a dead clown in a shallow grave and the other players at the table almost reaching for an X-card.
We have done similar things in our games since we tend to bash systems and settings together. When playing something like Fellowship PbtA that encourages the players to make up their own lore and explain things as they go, but you have an existing setting like Transformers or Exalted, the GM does tell the players "no" from time to time. Heck, when they forget to do that we end up with them expecting a neat Transformers game about Autobots PTSD'd by the war they've been in but end up with a party with a Decepticon that napped through most of it, a Decepticon that was in the colonies for a large chunk of it, and some unaligned Transformer being the majority of the party.
I have already expressed a number of things that I would personally leave on the cutting room floor for this game, so I won't repeat myself.
6.2) Less is more
When you have a cool setting and a lot of neat things to show off you feel like you must cram everything in. But honestly, sometimes less is more. Leaving some areas unexplored and some plot points not finished makes the world seem bigger since you haven't explored it all the way to the boarder. Focusing on fewer things gives them more time to breathe and lets you have a more satisfying conclusion to them, rather than making everything feel rushed since you need to both introduce and resolve three entirely different supernatural things in one episode all the while the established stuff is also vying for attention.
6.3) System recommendations
As the group didn't seem to be all that interested in playing Vampire the Masquerade for the elements unique to it, perhaps I can offer a few other system recommendations that might fit in better with what I've seen the group enjoy in this game.
First, if you want to lean into the "supernatural creatures know one another and hang out together" kind of vibe, Chronicles of Darkness in general would be a better fit. Those games tend to have a world that supports it more. Heck, you could play multi-splat group to make things pretty weird ("a vampire, a werewolf, a mage, a promethean and a changeling walk into a bar..."), although that might be a bit much for the Storyteller if they are not already proficient in all of those systems. I understand that that game line might also not be popular any more, so it would be of a niche appeal to viewers...
Secondly, if you are interested in a supernatural type that is more into exploring the world of the strange and have a freeform power system, Mage the Awakening or Mage the Ascension could be much more up your alley. They both let you deal with cryptids, ghosts, weird things that go bump in the night and so on. It is also more conductive to dealing with really quirky characters that are larger than life because sometimes your powers rely on basically playing Harry Potter esque magic, sometimes getting into raypunk weird science, and sometimes you just get so swole and monk'ed you can punch a car in half. Of course you'd need to find the ideal version of Mage to play since I heard some of the editions are not that great (you can build a character wrong and be unable to do anything in a shorter game). From what I gather, Mage the Awakening 2nd edition is a pretty good version of the idea, although I heard old old editions of Ascension are also really good.
Thirdly, if you want to play super-powered superheroes having the power to stand up against some really big bad things in the World of Darkness setting, there is always Exalted vs World of Darkness. It lets you pull off things akin to Bat Child being able to swallow someone straight into the mouth of Oblivion. If you'd like an equivalent bonkers demigod level powers in an OSR system, Godbound would be a really good solution.
6.4) Avoid bathos in a world of pathos
World of Darkness is a setting with a tone, one that teethers on the edge between sincerity and a parody of itself. Again, it's sometimes a clown world where there is an evil toy company making toys for children to condition them to fight werewolves. You can make jokes about it and play it up for laughs, but then you have the same company making dolls that cause little girls to develop anorexia and you stop laughing...
A lot of people that come to watch World of Darkness shows look for that balance where the world is dark and bleak and it's up to the players to be the light against the darkness, even if it's just a candle light. This doesn't work as much when you do Marvel and undercut pathos with bathos.
It could've been an interesting juxtaposition if you had the player characters being the quirky ones out but the rest of the world to be played more straight. You have a Ventrue joking that the people have just witnessed a Banksy performance, but all the while someone is holding the severed head of their boss. Would such a person just accept that explanation?
Let this world be dark.
6.5) Lean into the pain
Vampire the Masquerade is a game of personal horror, where the player characters are meant to suffer a bit. Things ought to get messy, collateral damage out to happen, and you shouldn't have an easy way out of the consequences of your actions. Whether that means dealing with the fallout of your Frenzy, losing your Humanity or the like, you do want to see that in the game.
So lean into it. Let your characters make goofy jokes one moment and then cry the next as someone else's blood is dripping from their fangs and hands. The system is giving you excuses to be the monster you don't usually get to be in regular TTRPGs!
Heck, I do remember Zaeth's player in Adventuring Party episode 9 remarking that he enjoyed there being a Frenzy mechanic. Maybe exploring such things you don't normally see in your regular game would be something other people would also find interesting! I know we had fun with similar mechanics of Limit Break in Exalted...
6.6) Use non-combat powers
Vampire the Masquerade and a lot of non-D&D games often have a wide range of powers you can use outside of combat to achieve great things. If you only focus on violence-based solutions, you will get violence as the only solution to anything.
So lean into those other leavers you have to get what you need. Show the power of social manipulators, charismatic leaders and ingenious characters. This way you won't be disappointed that someone that ought to be a threat to the players isn't because you used a brains character in a brawns scenario.
6.7) Have a rules expert on hand
It's nice that this series had a lore master on hand to help with the deep lore of the World of Darkness. We do even hear some of their factoids chime in when the group is trying to figure out how much damage would a tomahawk missile do.But at the same time, it would be nice if you could have the person that knows the system better help out and chime in more often when the players were doing things a bit out of whack. There have been a few instances where aiding other actions have been pretty generous, and that's not to mention the Maw of Ahriman situation. Having someone to be able to focus on the rules of the game (especially when most of the cast is new to it) be on hand and consulted more often when things like that come up could make the whole game more authentic to how it ought to be played.
Now I know this is a comedy show and its focus is mainly on the actors playing the roles, but there is a reason why this isn't just pure improv, instead being a TTRPG show, right?
7) Signing off!
To sum all up, City Council of Darkness was a pretty goofy take on the Vampire the Masquerade game from the folks at Dimension 20. I enjoyed seeing the group branch out away from D&D and explore a new system, even if I didn't enjoy everything the series had to offer. It had some great moments when the tone of Vampire poked through and established itself with a few key characters in the series, but the series as a whole has gone off the rails and into the stratosphere by the end. But hey, if they will play another Storyteller game or some other interesting system, I'll probably be back and watching it every week like I did with this series. I'm holding out hope!
Now if you'd like to see something else in-line with how City Council of Darkness blends comedy and World of Darkness, I'd highly recommend checking out Bruva Alfabusa's Hunter the Parenting. It's a mix of comedy, silly antics, high stakes action, drama and so much more, rendered by a group that is really steeped in the World of Darkness lore.
And thus concludes my longest TTRPG Actual Play review and analysis to date. If you want to read my runner-up, check out my retrospective on our Princes of the Universe game!
