Encroaching Darkness

I've always wanted to make an immersive sim.

Some of my earliest exposures to games when I was young were games like Thief and Deus Ex that emphasized several ways to resolve an obstacle with additional design for large, believable (but not open, in the modern sense) worlds. The challenge, is that usually immersive sims require hundreds of systems to snap into place late in development, and I am one person with extremely limited time and a crippling coffee addiction running on little sleep.

A little while into my first exposure to these kinds of games, I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons proper after hearing it in passing for a couple years at that point, particularly paired with faint echoes of the satanic panic. Unfortunately, the group fizzled and I had a pretty difficult time getting a group together (Roll20 didn't really exist yet to my knowledge and it certainly wasn't widespread until a hot while later). My exposure to and interest in TTRPGs up until 2019ish waxed and waned often. I was mostly playing Warhammer 40k until 2015, at which point the game just stopped being fun because of awful players and Games Workshop being generally a nuisance, and thus we swapped to other games like Corvus Belli's Infinity.

These days, my partner and I engage with a homebrew D&D campaign, but my interest in D&D has waned, and it's obvious Wizards of the Coast cannot be trusted with the OGL, so I have branched out to the World of Darkness.

I have had EXTREMELY little exposure to WoD, but I have played VtM: Bloodlines (and am somewhat familiar with its particular flavor of Source jank). It's an intriguing setting that I can't believe has bypassed my senses beyond the Source game for this long. It's a world that can be horrifying, bitter, and gruesome, but also heartwarming, intriguing, and at times, absolutely ridiculous, and I think that's important for making the setting stand out.

So I'm working out my Immersive Sim writing muscles. Designing a campaign that captures the intriguing, the insane, the hilarious, the horrid, and the inspiring. WoD is an intersection of things, and it cannot be all doom and gloom all the time (unless you're running a campaign like that [I guess]. Are you running a Time of Judgement scenario?).

I think one of WoD's strengths is that it takes place in $currentTime in $currentWorld, but I wanted something that was familiar, but not the same. A place that I could do the research for and not exactly rely on my own personal interactions with it. Due to my upcoming campaign being an introductory one, I wanted to avoid a massive metropolitan area like Seattle or Chicago. Making the premise has been somewhat the hardest part, but I think the work I'm putting into it will be worth it. I mostly got the idea from someone in friend circle making a joke that I'm essentially taking too far.

I haven't quite decided how much I want to involve another sourcebook, but if I do decide to implement another character or what-have-you, it'll probably be pretty surface level for this. I believe Demon and Mummy in particular are in dire straits regarding old rules weirdness. If anyone has suggestions on how either book is handled in the 20th Anniversary edition, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

In the meantime, I shall ponder my next steps.