12/16/2021

For Halloween, my wife asked me to run a Vampire the Masquerade One-Shot. I agreed and got to work on a “setting” for the one-shot. I talked about this in an earlier post. Below are the details that I didn’t share before.

For the city, I chose Seattle, Washington since it is not a big city but one that everyone would have heard of. I didn’t want to do the same “Prince” or Baron” thing in my setting so I went with a city that is run like a business. Each Clan would have a Director (usually the most powerful member of that clan) that would sit on the Board of Directors. Every ten years, the board would elect from its members a Chairman to serve as head of the city. No member could serve 2 consecutive terms as Chairman (this would keep one Director from becoming a “Prince”).

With that framework in mind, I came up with the chart below. It shows the current Directors from the different Clans along with some notable Vampires from the Clan (usually Sires or Someone else important). At the very bottom are the pre-generated characters, one for each clan. These vampires would be members of the Night Shift, a special team of vampires that work directly for the Chairman of the Board. Only one vampire from each clan is allowed on the team at a time to keep the Night Shift “fair and balanced”.

So I created the 7 vampires that the players could choose from during the game. We ended up with Ana Flores (Gangrel), Charoette Hill (Malkavian), Gregory (Nosferatu), and Benjamin Archer (Tremere) for my players. I knew my wife would want to play the Malkavian (she really liked them from the Vampire PC games) so I made sure she had a link to cats (my wife likes cats, we have 6 of them).

It was a fun game that actually stretched into 2 sessions. The basic idea for the game was a human lawyer that worked for the Chairman was found murdered in her apartment. The Night Shift was tasked to find out if it was related to Vampires and the Board (capture the person and bring them in for questioning) or just humanity’s ugliness (then just kill the person for wasting the Chairman’s resources). The people behind this crime were a fanatic sect of Catholic nuns known as the Daughters of the Son. They are a military-trained group that goes into the world and removes Evil. I used the Faith Hunter stats from the core rulebook for the Daughters.

Below are the files that I handed out to the players for them to use. There was a character sheet that had all of the stats and skills filled out. The other sheet was background information on the vampire and a description of the Disciplines so the players could read how their powers worked since they hadn’t played Vampire 5th edition before.

Please feel free to steal any and all of the materials that I have posted here. If you use any of it for your games, please leave me a comment that tells me what you thought of the items, what you have changed, etc.

As always, keep on gaming!