December 31: New Year

Happy Hogmanay!

31: New Year
“And a happy New Year!”

With the post-Dickens modern tradition of Christmas as a time for family, New Year’s Eve has become the big noisy drunk party point on the late December calendar. Time for going out to see friends, or partying.

If your characters have links to a nightclub, as is quite common in the Vampire family of games, this is a Big Night which could make or break the business. Bad time for a rival vampire to summon rats into the kitchens...

We’ve made Hogmanay a big Scottish branding event, and here in Edinburgh we’ve been having street parties since before I was born, and organised ones with big bands and fireworks since 1993, these days ticketed and increasingly inconvenient for people living in the demarcated areas. And when we come in, as First Footers we may or may not provide good luck for the year ahead.

Of course it’s also the symbolic end and beginning of years, a liminal time. What is to come in the year ahead?

Twenty years ago, the Millennium Bug could have wrecked a vast number of computer systems if not for a lot of work to avert it.

The Eighth Doctor Who TV movie was about the then-futuristic millennium as well. The Arnold Schwarzenegger movie End Of Days had New Year 1999 - local time, since he asks - as the potential marker of the Apocalypse. Buffy fought a literal Millennium Bug in a Dark Horse Comics special written by Doug Petrie. And we also have GURPS Y2K.

And this year we go into 2020, and a lot of early Cyberpunk players feel very, very old.