Vampire go-to ideas

A group was asked for Vampire: The Masquerade plot hooks. You will have seen some of these before, here or at the table with me Storytelling.

Ten of my go-to plot hooks for single sessions or multi-session stories in chronicles I’ve run:

A murder threatens the status quo or the Masquerade. (I don’t start every chronicle with a murder... just most of them. And my last one started with the newly embraced PC of a new-to-the-game player as the not-fully-dead victim.)

It’s coming up on Halloween, Midwinter or New Year’s Eve, one of the biggest party nights of the year as well as a very long night. The elders want to make sure the neonates are occupied. And someone sets out to sabotage some major planned celebrations, be it a gala at Elysium or a major event at a Kindred-backed nightclub.

Refugees arrive from a nearby city claiming sanctuary, saying that the city’s ruler vanished one night and the court descended into civil war. (Bonus point if the court was of a different sect for added suspicion and hostility.)

A connection to a (probably youngish) PC’s mortal life, like an old friend or estranged relative.

A broodmate or other NPC ally of one of the PCs gets into the kind of trouble PCs usually do, like being blamed for a Masquerade breach or getting into a fight with the Sheriff’s lackeys, just to show it isn’t only the PCs this happens to.

Someone is hunting Thin-Bloods in an attempt to learn how to go out in sunlight. This will obviously be of particular concern to any Thin-Blood PCs.

A vampire old enough to challenge the Prince rises from torpor. (When I did this he was also the progenitor of a major clan in the city, including one of the PCs, for added conflict.)

The most prominent member of a clan that isn’t a major power in the city goes missing. (To get weirder still, the entire clan goes missing, if there’s a suitable clan containing no PCs.)

Rumours of a Kindred artefact like a page from the Book of Nod get everybody interested looking for it. (See the Ankharan Sarcophagus in Bloodlines, or The Maltese Falcon for an example of how many factions could come looking for it.)

A mortal political event (a protest march that the police try to shut down, for example) stirs up trouble unexpectedly during the night, and now the city centre’s cordoned off. And some faction takes this as a cue to attack another.