Excerpt from a PC's prelude I wrote for a V5 Dark Ages Vampire campaign I'm running

I thought fans of Vampire The Masquerade, especially Malkavians, would really enjoy this. There’s a number of bits connected to the VTM meta (I won’t say which, though you’re welcome to try to puzzle it out).

It’s one and a half pages, and written in 2nd person, since it’s for a tabletop roleplaying campaign, and is heavily laced with cryptic information, some of it nonsense, some of it not, that’s been filtered through the Malkavian Madness Network.

The character, Augustus, is a medieval actor groomed for the embrace by a Toreador, but scooped up and embraced by a Malkavian. It’s a dream sequence during the moments that the embrace is taking hold, when Augustus is transitioning from mortal to Cainite.

I’ve written 138 pages spread between my seven players’ preludes. They made mortals, and gave me a list of clans they’d like to end up being, then I took that info and created preludes for them to play through, which takes them from mortal through their embrace, then up through their first 50+ years of unlife.

Normally I don’t write preludes for my players, and before going ahead with anything, I made sure to discuss what I had in mind for the game with everyone during a session zero. I’ve learned from experience what can happen when there’s poor communication between the storyteller and players, and when they don’t have the same expectations of the game that’s going to be run, so I like to have very clear goals, expectations, and player buy-in before I run a game.

If people like this, I’ll start posting more preludes and VTM fiction occasionally on my WordPress.

1 Like