So, a week ago, my current #VampireTheMasquerade chronicle ended. There may be a successor, it's a pool group system, but for now, it's over. And considering I knew no one within the player group before, it was fun, mostly.
We played in Hamburg, which is a city I've been to enough to recognize, but not so much I was too familiar with it.
The story was a combination of two investigations: On one side, we were trying to investigate an attack(?) on the local Elysium, while also trying to find the abandoned Tremere chantry and secure a ritual from it. There was a link to the loss of Vienna, which was certainly fun because my character came from there. The interlinking of the two plots could have been a little smoother, but then again, the group was made up of two different factions with individual agendas, so there was a bit of friction that would likely have overcomplicated more intricate switching. Intra-group RP was really fun, especially towards the end when characters became a little less guarded with one another. And of course, the different states of knowledge within the group were fun when some people knew the background of certain events, but couldn't tell the others because it would implicate them in various ways.
I'm still not quite sure what to think of the final session - we found one of the people we had sought, but let him (and the ritual) go in exchange for a promise of information on the Sabbat, but the actual info itself only gets used in the next chronicle. So very little "action", just a tense conversation at midnight in a café, haggling with our quarry over whether his other information is valuable enough for us to let him go.
Also, I really like the V5 Humanity system. We chose "Knowledge belongs in the right hands" as a chronicle tenet and my Tremere has "I am not responsible for other people's deeds" as a conviction - so on one hand, she got stains for letting the ritual go when she really didn't believe it should have gone where it went, but on the other hand, she got to soothe her conscience with being outvoted by the others. Ah, the joys of morally questionable protagonists!
Which reminds me: The Prince had only recently decreed that vampires shouldn't communicate via electronic means. So we had a session where we impressed how any of our minor missteps were only in hunting down a vile culprit who had broken several traditions and (*le gasp*) used a smartphone! Of course, we did that after extensively coordinating our hunt via whatsapp... I'm sure we'll soon found the Cult of Hypocritas, honored Methuselah of Clan Not-My-Fault.
#CiferRPGMusings #TTRPG #ttrpgde