COMPARACIÓN DE RESULTADOS

While locations are important independently, their contexts are just as important. While many players can envision locations easily, the honest truth is that they’re just making assumptions based on stereotypes of location types. Find a location like the one you’re setting your game in. Drive around it slowly. Get out and look around. Take a walk. Look around, note the things that stand out and really make the area interesting and unique. Spend a paragraph describing the bodega and produce stand. Did one of the letters of the neon beer sign burn out? Are the steps of the glorious hotel cracked? Does the paint in the boardroom still vaguely stink? Can you see hints of bloodstains under that new paint?

Sure, that’s a lot of work for a game, but it helps and it gets you out a bit. If that’s not convincing, don’t do it. The Internet can give you a relatively strong facsimile without leaving your comfy com-

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• A creature claiming to be a werewolf approaches the coterie. He requests their assistance in petitioning the vampiric court for membership. He’s come into conflict with the others of his kind, and needs to belong to fulfill his pack instincts.

• The Prince’s power is waning. Very few Kindred still respect him, and he’s not much more than a figurehead at this point. An anarchist fringe is gaining prominence, and The Hiroshima Club is the heart of this move ment. Members of the fringe are openly hiring non-Kindred killers in the club to take out city figures. • A hotshot Daeva has decided to open The Hiroshima Club to a trendy new audience. This means synthetic

drugs, immaturity and the types of people who are just not used to the criminal element. He’s throwing his weight around, trying to change the scope of the place, risking the Kindred livelihood and Masquerade.

puter chair. Google lets you virtually walk the streets of many major cities. You can find 3D ren- derings of many major buildings, and many popular places have virtual tours.

Better still, you can use these as play aides. Some- times, pictures of your location make the job of de- scribing that much easier. A handout or presentation showcasing the location might remind the players that while they’re playing vampires, the places these vam- pires inhabit are ultimately human establishments.

Use It

If there’s a gun hanging in the wall in chapter one, use it in the last. This is an old literary staple. Never add anything without purpose. All the sym- bolism in the world won’t help in a game where your players expect to be told what’s important in their setting. If something is important, it must be introduced early on. Otherwise, it reeks of railroad- ing; players will be disappointed and feel like their decisions were devalued.

That said, it’s almost as damaging to present only the important items, immediately telling the play- ers what will ultimately play part in the story from the beginning. When designing a location, list the things that must be presented to the players. If at all possible, introduce these things during the first scenes of the chapter. Add a few other things that could potentially be important, but aren’t integral to your story. Give your players some wiggle room, but present only things with dramatic value.

History

Locations don’t exist in a vacuum. For the most part, gathering places aren’t designed with the

express and exclusive purpose of serving vampire parties. Certainly it does sometimes happen, but it’s rare. Most locations have histories, stories and even agendas.

There’s a clear parallel between buildings and Kindred; both are static, both can have remark- ably long histories. This can be a strong dramatic device; buildings are usually older than any of the Kindred inhabitants in a city. Some Kindred even feel kinship with architecture. They watch struc- tures change, decay and be rebuilt and modified. It’s much like the soul of a successful vampire.

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An ancient European vampire awakens after fifty years in torpor. After the initial reintroduc- tions to the city, he begins to form a kinship with a local hostel. He waxes nostalgic about how the building has played a substantial part in his life over the centuries. He remembers all the various owners, from when it was a medieval boarding house to when the current ownership converted it to a hostel shortly after WWII.

Shortly thereafter, his attitude towards the building becomes more intense. He refers to the hostel as the sire he never had. He harps on the nature of the building, how its inhabitants have changed and thus his herd has, while neither he nor the building actually changed. He says for this reason, he and the building have shared the changes they’ve undergone.

As the monster’s attachment increases, the characters come to realize that the ownership has again shifted, the family owning the building has sold it to a corporation dead set on tearing it down. Do they intervene?

51 framing the gathering ball for the Prince’s spurned childe” says quite a bit more, despite potentially being the same party.