Vampire Challenge 1: How You Got Started

As it happens, I already have an article on this very topic here. Having gotten into gaming via the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf gamebooks, first GMed when I was eleven or so, preferring less hefty systems and being a bit of a gothy-vampire-y-stuff nerd already, I was near the middle of the target for Vampire: The Masquerade from the start...

But since you can read that over there, some added content about that first game I ran.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, 

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore... 

Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven 

My first game was with a couple of my somewhat larger high school gaming group - and one is in my current Requiem game after getting heavily into the LARP side of the hobby, and the other has been playing and GMing games with me in them on and off ever since, with gaps for study and work abroad and the like. A third player joined after a while, he moved further away for higher education and I haven’t seen him since. :/

We used Gary from the rulebook (I think Baptism by Fire is an ideal introduction to what makes the Vampire games stand out) then Ashes To Ashes (which I was less impressed by) and then Chicago By Night as it came out, Blood Bond, some of the Succubus Club adventures and the like.

The game was a casualty of the needs of higher education, and we never got to the point of Jack the Brujah taking Sheriff down or Rachel the Toreador breaking away from her sire completely. Twenty-two years on, I still remember their names.