Monday, 1 April 2024

Vampire: The Masquerade 1920s

An entirely unplanned blog post as I discovered 300 words with paragraph gaps is more than a whole screen on Discord, when asked for ideas for a 1920s Vampire: The Masquerade game. Some of this will be familiar, but hey.

As noted above, Call Of Cthulhu is the big RPG for the 1920s. A useful book for a non-Cthulhu game set in the era is the 1920s Investigator’s Companion, which has a historical overview of major events and cultural ones like which books and films came out when as well as which vehicles and weapons are available, price guides and the like. It also has lots of adventures, some city and regional books - the one for Weimar-era Berlin could be great for a game like Vampire.

In the USA, Prohibition is a major factor in organised crime, and Kindred society is (among other things) connected to organised crime. Speakeasies, secret bars and clubs where people come for a drink of something illegal...

I’d look at vampires in popular culture as well. The film Nosferatu is released in 1922, and due to being based on Dracula without permission it’s quickly sued by Bram Stoker’s widow Florence, who couldn’t claim damages as the production company went bankrupt, and all copies were ordered destroyed at the end of the case in 1925, some escaping due to international distribution legal or otherwise. It popularised the idea of vampires being destroyed by sunlight and of course in VtM there’s a clan whose unlives were complicated when it come out, so who helped suppress it and who helped save some copies from destruction?

And Dracula itself is also well known, with the play that the 1931 film will be based on being a big hit from its 1924 debut in the UK (the first authorised adaptation, which Stoker’s widow was happy to licence to help fund the Nosferatu legal battle) coming to Broadway (with Bela Lugosi) in 1927. 

... I may have considered this before.

See also the rise of Spiritualism after the Great War for Giovanni and other now-Hecata bloodlines as well as Wraith connections, the Russian Civil War, the Tut-mania ancient Egypt craze after Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered which is why vampires like ankhs...

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