Thousand Year Old Vampire: Introduction

The Game

Thousand Year Old Vampire is a narrative-based solo RPG by Tim Hutchings in which you create a character born in the distant past, and then born again to darkness as a blood sucking immortal.

I've only played one session of it so far and it's already proved to be challenging, dark and almost upsetting as your vampire slowly begins to lose their humanity and do terrible things to survive in a world that has no place for them.

You can read all about the game on Hutchings's site above, but the main focus is memories. You begin the game with several memories from your mortal life (which contain up to three experiences each, like sub-memories), and space in your mind for five in total. As the years go by these will change and become corrupted until you lose all sense of who you were in life and exist only as a demonic caricature of your original self.

The graphic design of the rulebook itself is lovely and really conveys the main theme of the game, containing scraps of letters sent over the centuries, library index cards, newspaper clippings about blood-drained murder victims and ephemera of random points in time, like a ticket for transport aboard a ship to the new world at the turn of the 20th Century.

The Rules

Since this is heavily focused on the fiction and narrative of your character there are no stats, no combat rules, hit points or any of the crunchy stuff of DnD to be found here. You simply imagine your character's beginnings at some point in history you know a little about, give them memories, skills and resources (physical assets), and then get started with the prompts.

The bulk of the rulebook is taken up by the prompts: a list of numbered paragraphs that you visit like a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, except you determine which ones to read by deducting a D6 roll from a D10 roll and going that many prompts forward or back. If you hit the same one again there's a more extreme version of it for you to use.

Memories will be lost, corrupted and gained, and can be recorded in a diary to save them. However if the diary is lost they're gone forever. Resources can be objects like a sword, useful animals like a horse or even a gang of pickpockets or an army if it makes sense for your character. 

Of course, at some point in time your vampire will die. This happens when you're instructed to check a skill or lose a resource and you have none available.

The rulebook gives two options for playing: the quick game and the slow game. In a quick game you can make a note of your memories, skills, resources and other characters at the start, ticking checked skills and crossing out memories but simply reading the prompts and imagining the results.

The slow game involves keeping a written record of everything that happens, either as bullet points or journal entries, but Hutchings recommends not letting yourself get carried away with the writing side of it.

I'm thoroughly enjoying my first playthrough and will start documenting it in the next post. To see all the sessions of this game in one place just click the Thousand Year Old Vampire label in the side box on the left.

Next: Character Creation