I had the uniquely twisted pleasure of playing not one, but two games of Monsterhearts recently with a friend of mine. We traded off on running and playing, and it was extremely fun, packed full of drama, angst, and dysfunctional relationships.

The first game, which I MC'd, featured the doing-what's-necessary Chosen, Carleen Lin. She was shipped off to the City of London Freemen's Boarding School, a high profile prep school with a habit of letting the students run wild. It was quickly discovered that Carleen was living in the shadow of her older brother Ian, an accomplished demon hunter and straight A student who had pretty much ruled the school before Carleen got there. This provided some interesting background, which ended up coming to the forefront when Carleen was out on patrol and stumbled upon her brother, broken by a superior foe and begging for her help. Yikes.

My favorite moments from this game included Carleen threatening a super-popular, bad boy vampire named Gabriel to stop drinking from a poor, mousy young girl named Steph. She ended up granting him Mercy, which he almost immediately seized as a chance to spread the rumor throughout school that she was a creepy stalker who had been peeping on him and Steph getting hot and heavy. Thus was born the trite yet impossible to be rid of nickname, Freak Girl.

A few things that came up:
-At one point, Carleen showed up at a a party wearing a very stylish outfit, and we weren't sure how to handle her attempt to turn almost everyone there on. In the end, she picked out a good five people and rolled individually, which worked out great, and also meant an instant advance for her.
-At the start, the player of Carleen asked if he could use the other playbooks as inspiration for NPCs; I thought this was a great idea and ended up inspiring a great deal for the second game we played together.

Hey, guys! So, I've been increasingly entranced by the old (or "classic) World of Darkness after playing in a Mind's Eye Theatre game... and increasingly frustrated at the tabletop's "storytelling system." Specifically, there were all these dark, tragic, romantic, horrific themes... But where was the support in the rules themselves? But say... Wouldn't it be great if someone tried to take that setting (or a similar one) and work it into a system that could support awesome, badass characters mostly-destined for tragedy... like, say... Apocalypse World?

So, with a great deal of help from my dear friend, Antisinecurist, I started working on it. In addition to Apocalypse World, I've taken a great deal of inspiration from Dungeon World Hack... In a way, I'm hoping to for Vampire what DWH is doing for D&D. I'm keeping track of the rules and setting info on Obsidian Portal, where I hope to eventually chronicle the games I run with this hack.

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-york-nightlife/wikis/main-page

Specific areas where I'd like feedback:
-Are players rewarded for driving their characters towards tragedy?
-Did I capture the feel and hidden meaning of each of the clans?
-Do you think it was a good choice to have character development largely determined by clan? I ask, because while writing it, I felt torn between two ideas. On the one hand, I don't think every character is necessarily defined by what clan they are, but on the other hand, I felt strongly that as characters develop, they go from being mostly defined by their Humanity, to becoming increasingly vampiric (where "vampiric" is defined as "more like their clan").
-Are there any glaring holes, things I'm missing, or general advice you'd like to share?

Thanks a lot!