5V: THRONE
My main post asks who’s in charge in a setting and how that relates to the PCs. In the Darkness family of games starting with Vampire: The Masquerade, the smallish supernatural communities often have feudal structures with a single leader, and their relationship to the PCs will do a lot to set the tone of a chronicle.
Part of the appeal of playing Anarchs is that you can stick it to the Man and the Man will actually notice.
Camarilla Princes are the classic example, with Sabbat Archbishops and Anarch Barons not being as different as they might want. A bit of the feudal divine right but also the Machiavellian scheming as vampire rarely inherit their positions naturally, as well as the conspiratorial option for puppet leaders with ancients pulling their strings. After Revised in particular set the Camarilla against the Sabbat and put the Anarchs in third place, V5 nudges it to be more exclusive and elitist as it puts Anarchs back as a default group to play.
Anarchs in a Camerilla city pretty much need an unreasonable establishment to rail against, a proper bastard as LARP wrier Jason Andrew notes, and probably on more than one level.
Lodin in Chicago By Night first edition is a piece of work himself, his childer are mostly horrible with some put-upon exceptions there to make the city Camarilla plausibly work and offer some compromise options, and the setting also provides an ideal corrupt awful authority figure in Sheriff. (His derisive nickname became the standard title for the role, though none of the examples in following settings are as bad as he is.) Lodin and his gang set the standard, so much that the broken burned out Prince Modius and self-serving Anarch leader Juggler in the rulebook now feels like a deconstruction.
The asshole questgiver Prince is the Vampire plot hook equivalent of the old man in the tavern - an NPC who will give the PCs a mission often for no reward except “for the good of the Masquerade” and be a dick about it as they do. And this works, but best not to do it often. LaCroix in Bloodlines is a prime example, and on screen often enough that his personality shows through. The Prince of Prague appears in one scene in Redemption and is exactly this and we don’t even get to kill him later.
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| Cults Of The Blood Gods writer Jacob Burgess sums up player feelings about LaCroix. |
Players can also be the Prince or equivalent, either in tabletop where it might be the planned playstyle or more often in games with large player bases like LARP or chats - and doubly more often there because their immortal reigns tend to last a couple of months. This By Night Studios article about advice for LARP Princes has four sections and one of them is about surviving assassination attempts.
See Julian Luna, the Prince as protagonist in Kindred: The Embraced. See also series two of Being Human UK for why not to be Prince if you have a decent Humanity score.
I tend to make Princes fairly distant, to be approached through intermediaries unless the PCs are particularly powerful, so when they do show up it can be quite alarming. I make sure the titled NPCs aren’t always available right away, to give the sense that there’s more going on in the city than the PCs’ plots. I often have the Keeper of Elysium as the “reasonable” authority figure because they work to keep things peaceful, and the Sheriff is usually scary in some way.
So who sits on the throne in Last Dance?
1.05: Where’s Your Gavel, Your Jury?
Elizabeth Drake, politely callous Prince of the city, comes to Nocturne on a busy promotional Saturday night, with the overseer of the Rack and a couple of ghouls. She sits and observes, saying nothing. She leaves a card directing Paris to come to Elysium the following night. What does she want? Does she just want to talk and felt like making it threatening? Is she trying to draw the Nocturne coterie into the Camarilla, or make them look suspicious to their Anarch allies? Or is something else going on? Do you dare to go, or dare not to?
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