Vampires, vampires everywhere

After listening to episode 81 of the Actual People Actual Play podcast where mcdaldno ran the group through a game of Monsterhearts at MonsterParty, I've been kicking around the idea of a Vampire: the Requiem hack. He mentioned that Monsterhearts could be used to play something similar to Vampire, so long as the characters still acted like (or still were) teenagers.

That got me thinking about translating the five different clans of the Vampire: the Requiem setting (Daeva, Gangrel, Mehket, Nosferatu, and Ventrue) into Monsterheart Skins books. The clans seem to be different enough in outlook, ability, and method that I imagine they'd play differently enough to warrant the different Skin books. I'd have to change the names of course, something like The Desired, The Feral, The Hidden, The Cursed, and The Regal. Stats and Moves would reflect each clan's outlook, method, and abilities. The Desired = Hot+ Cold+; The Feral = Hot+ Volatile+; The Hidden = Hot+ Dark+; The Cursed = Cold+ Volatile+; and the Regal = Cold + Dark+. The Moves in the Skin book would also (hopefully) highlight their differences.

Speaking of Moves, I also though it would be interesting to create separate "faction books" (based on the five Covenants from V:tR). Whenever a player is entitled to an advance, instead of choosing one from their Clan playbook, they could take one from their faction playbook instead. It'd be kind of clunky to have two books for a character (clan and faction) but I don't see how to make the faction moves available to everyone/anyone without making them a separate book.

Thoughts?

Cool! I think this is an awesome idea.

One possibility for the factions is to do them as cards - if they're all just lists of moves, then put each move onto its own card and put the faction symbol up at the top.

Noooo! Not cards. I love cards. I love trying to boil down all the relevant mechanical information to a card-sized chunk and making it look pretty. But if I do cards for the faction moves, then being the anal retentive completist that I am I'll have to do everything as cards.

Which I guess I could do. If cards are put into clear sleeves, you can write on them with a dry erase marker to record your name and stats, and to track damage, strings, and conditions.

I could also see Monsterhearts being translated into card format. You could have separate Skin decks that would include the blank "tracker cards" (name, strings, etc.), cards for each of the Basic Moves, cards for each of the Skin specific Moves, Sex Move, Darkest Self, an Advancement card, a possibly a "Playing the X" card. So if someone picked up The Chosen Deck, they'd have everything needed to play The Chosen for several sessions, including advances. Wanting to take an advance from a different Skin would require picking up that Skin deck. The MC's Deck would be the "fat pack" and have Basic Move cards (maybe more than one set) and the moves for all the Skins. Cool.

For now though, I think I'll stick with the Skin books. But only because I've already laid them out in In Design.

Well, this'll basically be my online "notebook" to track my ideas on this project. So here we go.

It appears that each Skin has about 6 or 7 moves to choose from. I haven't exactly figured out when a Skin that has a mandatory move (Fae, Ghost, Ghoul, Infernal, Mortal, Queen, Witch) should allow the player to choose one or two other moves. I'm guessing that when the mandatory move either screws you over or really captures the nature of the Skin, the player would get to choose two other moves. But that's just speculation on my part.

I'm wondering because I feel to capture the nature of the vampires in V:tR, each clan Skin book should have the vampire's The Feeding move as a mandatory selection. Some myths present the vampire feeding on other things, but the background of V:tR describes them as only being able to survive on blood. Plus the move is just so awesome and generates all kinds of player choice and consequences.

I plan to steal moves from the existing Skins wherever possible to create the moves for the five clans. But I'm not going to try and shoehorn in moves that don't fit the flavor of the clan just because they exist. I'll have to create some custom moves. Which is fine with me as I love to tinker with stuff. Yeah.