Words by David C. Obenour
The perception of time can be complicated to comprehend. Even when considered from within the constraints of our personal finite understanding, its passage is felt unevenly. Month’s old memories can feel like decades old. Experiences from decades ago can feel as recent as only a few months back. And that’s just taken from what we can remember! Imagine how time would feel if you lived forever. In Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, designer James Cox invites players to gain new perspectives by role playing through their endless existence by creating keepsake artifacts and imbuing them with stories and meaning.
Off Shelf: Five Hundred Year Old Vampire was inspired and preceded by the game, Thousand Year Old Vampire. What stories and themes does it invite differently or uniquely from that game?
Jason Cox: Though Tim [Hutchings] and I had known of each other for a few years, I met him physically at Metatopia about seven years ago when he play-tested a game I was co-writing with Dr. Lillian Lewis called Mantles in the Museum. Mantles in the Museum is a pervasive educational LARP [Live Action Role Play] designed to teach lay people about critical frameworks for looking at art and challenging the voice of “authority” when it comes to what counts as art, who it is for, and what it means. Tim’s background as a professional artist made his feedback incredibly valuable to us. After Thousand Year Old Vampire came out, a lot of people came to Tim to ask if he had considered writing an educational version, and he was kind enough to offer me the opportunity to follow up on that interest!
In my view, the original Thousand Year Old Vampire is about isolation, the vicissitudes of identity, and the ways that memories are distorted or forgotten over time. I love it and engage with it as a profound work of art. Five Year Old Vampire developed started from there, but as it diverged to meet the needs of the expected players it also altered the nature of the story.
Because I am a professor of art education I always wanted to include visual artifacts, but using it in a class immediately pushed the game towards creating letters and artifacts that were created and examined discourse within the context of a group of peers / vampires. This process was designed to be adaptable for many kinds of people, including those who might be uncomfortable with too strong a spotlight or people who need to have written a thing before speaking it. Since many students had never played a role-playing game, much less such a high concept one as Thousand Year Old Vampire, I slimmed down the character creation process, added recognizable structures, and switched the dice mechanic out for a card mechanic. I kept most of Tim’s prompts, though I added a few of my own, but I changed some of the text and created a template to make the concept and effects quickly identifiable.
I also wanted to encourage students to draw on the history, lore, and artifacts from all over the world, not just Europe, which meant adding the mechanics to guide that process. I quickly realized that Imperialism had been highly effective at destroying some histories, and rather than leaving those cultures out I shortened the time span from “one thousand” to “five hundred”.
Another thing I did was introduce a set of cards called Beguiling Whispers, manipulations from older and more powerful vampires that create interactions between different cohorts of vampires for large scale play.
The end result is a game that is, on the surface, about clinging to people you know and who have known you as a way to try and hold on to something of who you are, despite the ways that events and the ways we respond to them shape us over time. However, it is also a game where a group of people get to sit, tell stories, and share deeply personal works of art to each other.
OS: How did you arrive on your three universal truths for vampires? What makes them core to a Vampire’s existence and did you consider others?
JC: I am a forty-nine year old nerd so my idea of vampires is a mixture of Coppola’s version of Dracula, the World of Darkness, Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and Ravenloft. These cultural touchstones are givens for me but they are different for many of the people who I wanted to play this game. They might be familiar with Twilight or maybe even What We Do in Shadows. I knew their understandings wouldn’t be the same as mine and would change even further as popular culture shifts. So I looked for commonalities from the lore and from what Tim had already created to form a baseline understanding of what was meant by “vampire”, as well as the narrative needs of the game – namely that the passage of time is an overriding theme, that they must stay hidden, and that they are fundamentally monsters that feed on humans.
OS: In researching the game, were there traits of vampire-esque creatures from other cultures that you found interesting or insightful to the philosophical exploration of what it means to be undead?
JC: I read a lot of vampire texts, and benefitted by talking with some experts on vampire fiction in the Pop Culture Association. But some cultures do not actually have “vampires” as we typically think of them, so if I wanted to include those cultures – especially in the Pregens – I had to dig into their history and lore to find out how they felt about things like life, death, time, and how we interact with the world around us. I think I have a much broader appreciation of history than I did when I started writing this game, but in terms of what it may be to be a vampire I would say that reflecting on actions, for good or ill, is a whole lot easier before they become something that has always been done. I would also say that several of the cultures I researched are much better at accepting change and loss than I have ever been, and being turned into an immortal monster breaks hard with that peace of mind.
OS: The rulebook explains the imbalance of histories in what has and hasn’t been recorded. When looking at more marginalized communities of origin, are there references you could highlight as valuable research materials?
JC: Primary sources are always best and we are lucky enough to live in a time when a community can make a space to talk about who they are and what matters to them. The pre-generated characters often refer to such sites, though some communities are understandably guarded about sharing cultural knowledge, and one thing I had to realize in working on this game is that I do not have a right to anything they do not want to share. I found that the Brittanica website had a wide range of resources I could draw on, and I found visual artifacts drawn from museum collections useful for trying to get a broader sense of a culture or time. One thing I try to avoid is only using a single source, as any given writer cannot help but have some kind of agenda and having multiple perspectives helps me illuminate my own assumptions.
OS: Can you talk about the role that “Connections” play in Five Hundred Year Old Vampire? How do they shape the play for the game? Do they exist differently from other RPG’s non-player characters?
JC: Connections were in Thousand Hundred Year Old Vampire as well, and mechanically function nearly the same way that Skills and Resources do – as a thing that can be used to pay the penalty or opportunity described by a prompt. However, they have a few important differences. One, they are the only resource that is sometimes shared with another vampire and anything that affects them in one vampire’s story will affect them in their’s as well. Two, there is always some sort of initial emotional attachment between the Connection and the Character, though it is not always positive, stable, or permanent. And three, if the Connection is mortal they are theoretically bound by a mortal lifespan, though there are cases where this might not be the case for one reason or another. In this set up, a mortal can be come to be seen by a vampire as nothing more than a commodity in a manner that is more overt than other RPGs. But I have also seen players make narrative choices that are more in the interest of their Connections than themselves even though they are highly aware of how they exist within the system. Especially if that Connection happens to be a dog. For me that is a recognition of what “winning” looks like in Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, because it is not about the character surviving or never losing anything, it is about telling the most impactful story.
OS: How do you think players can best look for opportunities to create meaningful stories as opposed to opportunities for optimum play?
JC: I think that as a person plays the game they realize that creating meaningful stories is optimal play, especially as they are told the stories of others in their cohort. The thing that holds some players up is the art-making, because players without formal training are often self-conscious about it and hesitant to take risks. I generally find that this starts to resolve itself around the third round, because it is around that point that they begin to trust the community of players that they are working with and to focus more on the meaning than on making something “perfect”. Trust is a difficult thing to build, especially now, but I’m of the opinion that no great thing can be done without it.
OS: The game also provides a series of prompts that help to shape play. Without asking you to give anything away, can you talk about what you considered in developing these? Maybe asking you to give something away, can you cite a few favorites as examples of how they move play along?
JC: All credit and glory to Tim for the exceptional amount of work he put into the original prompts. However, there are some changes aside from the template I used and the difference between moving back and forth between numbered prompts to pulling a card.
Firstly, in Thousand Hundred Year Old Vampire some prompts are set up to be in a sequence where you cannot access one before another, which is not the case in Five Hundred Year Old Vampire. So here, any connection between one event and another is made by the player. The cards are separated into decks that correspond to different stages of life for a vampire that speak to different common themes and which advance their numerical age. The early decks add very few years compared to the later ones, to help create the feeling of the vampires becoming increasingly disconnected from the mortal world.
I am always much more interested in how a player creatively interprets a prompt to fit in the time and place their character is in than in the prompt itself. One example that sticks out for me is an early playtest where a character lost any memory of her human mother. They represented this by doing a charcoal drawing of a woman and then hitting it hard with an eraser, a work of art that legitimately brought me to tears when I saw it.
OS: What have been some of the favorite keepsakes that you’ve heard of players creating? What makes them stand out to you?
JC: I suppose it is the creative use of materials that sticks out. In my own classes I have seen an incredible diversity of works – photographs of vampires in repose, burned remains of letters, the shape of teapots created from tea leaves, and magical wands bedecked in crystals to name a few. Once in a while people have sent me the images of works they have made in their groups, such as a slate with their own invented language or images said to be scratched into the back of a pilgrim’s bible. But one that always especially comes to mind was created at Gen Con – their character collected bugs, and to show the collection they pushed brass fasteners through on the underside of a piece of foam core and spread out the tabs to resemble wings. That player began the game by telling me they didn’t think much of their own artistic ability, but it was honestly one of my favorite pieces.
OS: After the tenth prompt, players run an Exhibition – where they assume the role of a scholar evaluating and considering the keepsakes left by the vampire. Why did you choose this shift in perspective and how do you think it helps better tell the story?
JC: The Exhibition gives a player the chance to reflect on their experience as a whole and to reframe it in a way that is meaningful for them, a bit of John Dewey’s philosophy if you are familiar with him. Contextualizing it as a modern day symposium helps justify why there are so many artifacts in the same place and at the same time. If there are multiple cohorts, as in a large game, this short vignette may also be the only time many of the players get to hear about the character and their story. I don’t necessarily think this highlight reel is the “better” story, just another way of presenting it and of players having the opportunity to decide what was meaningful about it.