Great Maps and Floorplans from Fabled Environments

The Storyteller recently spent about six dollars on the Office Spaces bundle from Fabled Environments.  This particular set of floorplans includes a two-story warehouse, a one-story office building, and a high-rise office building including lobby, office level, restaurant level, and rooftop garden.  It’s been absolutely invaluable in our gaming sessions, and we can’t recommend them enough.

Besides an 8.5 x 11 overview, you also get a large, blueprint-sized scale map, tiled to 8.5×11 sheets, as well as a full untiled version.  These are high-quality floorplans, simple yet creative, and an excellent tool for storytellers.

Check out Fabled Environments’ store on RPGNow.com.

Goodbye to Sanguinus Curae

Sadly, after many years, Sanguinus Curae has disappeared.  I delayed posting a eulogy in the hopes they would return like nothing every happened.  This is not the case.  They are well and truly gone.

They were an excellent resource site for Vampire: The Masquerade and I’m sorry to see them go.

Go Digital

Permit me for a moment to extoll the virtues of the digital RPG book.

Sure, it’s not as pretty.  However, it has a lot going for it.

Picture this: You’re in the fifth hour of your roleplaying session.  There are pens, dice, coffee cups, soda cans, and books all over the table… especially books, because the Tremere in your troupe is a Thaumaturgical nut job who needs like six books to take any action.  But!  What if you could easily search all of your books on your MacBook Pro, because they’re in digital format?  With a few keystrokes you can bring up whatever obscure ritual or piece of occult he needs and get back to playing.  Or, even better: you have a lovely binder containing all Thaumaturgical knowledge compiled from your various books, which you can toss his way while still referencing your own copies.

Also, if he spills his coffee all over your copy of Blood Magic, fuck it – charge him a few dollars for a ream of paper and re-print that sucker.

Another point I’ll make: World of Darkness Classic is out of print.  The only way you’re going to find it is used.  They may wind up being expensive and difficult to find.  If you want to game today, digital copies can be in your hands in as much time as it takes to type your credit card number, and usually for about half the original price.  As an added bonus, some of that money goes back to White Wolf, and helps support the company that made the games you love so dearly.

My favorite source for digital books is DriveThruRPG.  Quick and dirty, and they’ve got it all.

Cahptan! Ahm givin’ er all she’s goht!

So you’re the Storyteller… and you’re the worst actor in your troupe.  Oh.  Wait.  That’s me.

You have an entire city, or (shudder) several cities worth of vampires to portray.  And sadly, not all of them are going to share your mannerisms or your accent.

You’ve got a couple of options.  If you can pull off a decent accent, feel free to do so.  However, if your Assamite assassin winds up sounding like Apu from the Quickie Mart in The Simpsons, it’s going to nigh impossible for your troupe to take him seriously.  Your next best bet is to lay the description on thick and include the accent as a part of the description, letting their imaginations add it in.  If you can adopt some cultural mannerisms or speech patterns without hamming it up, you can get the point across without being distracting.

In my not-so-humble opinion, if all your NPCs wind up sounding exactly like you, it’s not because you couldn’t pull off an accent, but because you haven’t made them come alive in your players’ minds.  If the character’s ethnicity is a vital part of their character, then their ethnicity should show through in many other ways besides the way they talk.  If it’s not essential, then neither is the accent.

Sketchy Characters

A game journal makes a great gift for a fellow player.  An artistic member of our troupe customized a composition book for each of us, with VAMPIRE: The Masquerade, the chronicle name, and our own names laminated on the front cover and our character names and permanent info on the inside.  In just this first story, playing about once a week for nine months, I’m almost halfway through the book.

I’m a pretty diligent note-taker, much to the delight of my Storyteller.  Besides recording essential action items and learned information (I can’t carry my character’s entire memory around in my head; I have a hard enough time holding on to my own), I like journaling my character’s thoughts, and sketching her and other characters.  The friend who made the books for us is quite the sketch artist herself.  Drawing characters, especially with a relevant prop or two, helps me conceptualize them.

Though I’ve taken a few drawing classes, I’m no visual artist.  The human body is a challenge for me, especially without a source.  I can scratch out a halfway decent face, but even then I work much better from life.  (I love the shadowy portraits in the sourcebooks, and recently sketched an NPC from one of them, adding additional details.)  Lately I’ve had a full-body sketch idea in mind, and decided to search online for free figure drawing model images.  I’m happy to say I found an excellent photo gallery on CharacterDesigns.com, which features almost forty extensive photo sets. (Be advised: there are nude photos, though not all sets are nude.)  If you’re like me and you like to draw characters, this is great resource, and there are some fun costume sets, including a very pretty gothic set if you like your vampires in black leather.  (Who doesn’t?)

For players, too.

I’ll be bringing a player’s perspective to this here shindig.

Alone in the dark

And so it begins. I’ve been running my first VTM chronical for about 9 months now and discovered a problem. There just isn’t a lot of help out there for a Storyteller.