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So I'm working on a system conversion in my spare time: Vampire: the Masquerade 20th anniversary edition -> Powered by the Apocalypse, because I am nothing if not a man who has no idea how to use his time wisely.

The big complaint about V20—and Vampire: the Masquerade in general—is that the Storyteller system is old, clunky, outdated, cumbersome, and unbalanced. This hack aims first and foremost to address those problems by providing a conversion document to one of the simplest, cleanest resolution systems out there at the moment, but one which still provides enough nuance for a big game like Vampire.

One thing I discovered while doing this conversion, though, is that while Vampire adapts pretty nicely to the resolution system of PbtA, it doesn’t gel terribly well with the design ethos the PbtA engine was intended to lend itself to.

To elaborate, the Apocalypse World engine was designed to make games that are very strongly about something, and to flense away everything that isn’t that thing. Apocalypse World is about a violent, desperate, sexy, weird end-times scrabble for resources: so it has rules for being violent, desperate, sexy, weird, and it has rules for resources, scrabbling over them, and making yourself the Big Cheese when you get some control over something. By contrast, Monsterhearts is about the messy sexuality and social life of teenage monsters, so it has rules for stumbling or being shoved ass-backwards into uncomfortable situations you can usually only half-control like a car with no brakes, and rules for hurting people and getting hurt, and counting tallies on your friends and enemies (and no real systemic way of differentiating the two), and it doesn’t have a single solitary rule about gear or money or resources or anything like that because those things don’t matter.

Vampire isn’t like that. Vampire is a big tent game. You can play Vampire many ways out of the corebook and be recognizably playing Vampire.

You can play a game of jaded immortals engaging in high-stakes but ultimately vacuous political jockeying to satisfy their predatory natures and fill the empty years of a vast gaping pointless eternity.

You can play a game about grappling with what kind of desperate compromises you’ll make to get through the night, and how much of your soul it’ll cost you—and how hard you’re willing to fight to get your sense of identity and humanity back.

You can play a game about supernatural espionage and warring sects.

You can play a game of occult investigation into ancient mysteries and supernatural conspiracies, peeling back layers of intrigue like an onion, with monsters older than Babylon hidden somewhere in the distance pulling the strings.

You can play a violent urban fantasy action-romp with fangs.

Usually, you’ll play some weighted blend of the above. They’re all Vampire. And while this hack does some flensing, it doesn’t try to flense any of those elements all the way out of the game to say, for example, “This is a game about cutthroat politics and nothing else!” I wanted to give people an easier way to play Vampire, not to change what Vampire is into some distinct subset of itself. As you’ll see, this led to some oddities.

I'll be uploading chunks of the system document over the next couple of days with developer commentary on why I did certain things, what certain parts of the game demanded, and what considerations went into the hack. When it's finished (and it's getting close), I'll upload the entire rules hack as a public post; I can't really make homebrew for a non-OGL game I don't own patron-locked, alas, but I can restrict the game dev essay stuff so that only you guys get access to it.