Nocturnal Obeisance

You know those tests you can take, like, online and they give you a result like "Fox", or "Toilet Paper" or "Basically Underprivileged in the Size Department" , or other descriptions of your personality?

Well, I took one, offline. Actualy, it came with this new game I 'm playing, Vampire: Bloodlines. It's based on the pen and paper Vampire by White Wolf Studios? Anyway, yeah, cool game, runs on the Half Life engine which basically sucks, they shoulda picked the Doom 3 one, or, hell, the Max Payne one, but, back to my point.

When you start a new game, you 're asked wether you want to build your character from scratch, upon which you 're taken to a screen which is basically a character sheet that you can complete any way you like. Or, wether you 'd prefer to let the computer choose a character for you based on your answers to some questions. Well, first time I played the game, I pressed the button that started the questionaire, 'cause I thought I could go back afterwards... I didn't really trust the computer, not even young UNSTABLE, to choose a character I 'd like to play, but once I started answering the questions there was no going back so I proceeded. I don't remember the questions exactly, they were along the lines of "Some thugs rape an old lady and her girlfriend, what do you do?", stuff like that. And when I was finished, I had a Malkavian character.

Now, those of you who don't know Vampire: The Masquerade, either the original pen and paper, or the previous release for PCs, will not know what Malkavians are. So, I explain. Malkavians are just as sane, after their embrace (birth in the unlife) as they are alive. That means, not at all, still very much upright and verbal thank you, all of the above or completely fucking nuts! You gotta see the lines the computer gives me to interact with the characters in the game... all the other vampires (plus a Werewolf I already met and who didn't tear me to ribbons, they don't make them like they used to, tsk) just listen to my first line and go "Huh? Oh, a Malkavian". It's like, what, do I have it written all over me or what? Nope, it's just that Malkavians are notorious for being total nutters. No, seriously. Completely crazy. Of course they 're playing it up quite a bit, 'cause everybody's always going on about "You Malkavians and your damn insights". Insights my ass. They just fake madness most of the time, so that everybody shuts up and listens when they say something that makes sense. To tell the truth, a character who 'd be a real loon would be no good to anyone, except for some hardcore fun that most people don't really enjoy... for some reason...

No, I remember... Blast from the Past...

We was playing this game with Saruman and some other guys from an RPG club I used to go to. Now Saruman loved to play the archmage that knows it all and has advanced ahead of everyone else... and then came back to teach us with his deep and mystical RPG scenarios. That night I 'm talking about, he had us play some really powerful vampires, like, ancient ancients, really powerful and all, and the game was going fine, 'cause we were playing without character sheets, or dice and all, it was, like, pure role playing. I dug at first, I helped the party get through a difficult situation, then all three of us vampiric big brothers went and settled at a castle a very powerful vampire- wizzard had offered one of us. Well, up to that point I had started to be terminally bored with all the shit Saruman considered "instructive" and I thought, hey, I 'm playing a Malkavian, time I lived up to it. 'Cause, I forgot to tell ya, we were ancient but we did belong to clans, like and I had chosent the sons of Malkav, 'cause they were always kinda my favourites (them and the Daughters of Cacophony). So, I went and found one of the humans (lesser wizzards) that were serving around the castle and told him I was gonna make him my apprentice. Saruman played they way he felt all greedy and started slobering all over the floor very convincingly, so I asked him his name. Saruman said "Nocturnus", or maybe it was me who called the servant that, I don't remember. Anyway, a few days later (in the story) I killed Nocturnus in a horrible way. The others, all serious like, asked me why I had done it 'cause they thought I seriously wanted to make him my apprentice... I said, what the hell are they talking about, I didn't kill Nocturnus, Nocturnus is alive, I saw him today. I pointed at one of the other servants in the place and told them "nah, there he is. Hey, Nocturnus, bring your ass over here!" Obviously, I killed him too, and the Nocturnus after him and a lot of Nocturni after that. Somehow I managed to twang a nerve, there, though and Saruman had somebody turn me into a frog and the last Nocturnus shoving pens in my ass... Anyway, I must say I completely ruined their game, but, in all honesty? They had it coming. I mean, if they didn't want me to be a Malkavian in the midst of a serious story and ruin their session, they shoulda told me. I mean, the other guys too, not just Saruman, they too were like, "you shouldn't have". Shouldn't have, what? I played a crazy character doing weird things, and they weren't even half as crazy as a real undead looney would have come up with, y' know? Anyway, some other guys from the club that heard the story pissed their pants laughing, and not exactly for what I did to poor Nocturnus... I think they had played one game too many with Saruman too...

Another time, I wasn't playing a character, I was storytelling (you know, running the game, not ruinning it) and I had as a player a friend of mine who was always playing the Lawful Good Paladins in shinning armour and all that disgusting stuff, he was all over posters with Unicorns and pretty girls with long dresses and barbie-doll hair, beeugh. We were discussing how he and the other player wanted the game to go. We started talking about how nobody played Vampire as it should be, they all got drunk on the power of being an immortal predator of the night and they never minded the curse, the horror, the Beast Within and all those other dramatic elements of the game. So, I said to my players, how would they like it to have a game in which they 'd feel the real burden of the curse of undeath on them? Well, the Palladin guy said, yeah, sure, I 'd like to see a game like that. And so, I had him embraced by a Nosferatu.

Now I have to explain the Nosferatu.

OK. Take a handsome young man with pretty silky hair and a shinning full plate mail, that bears the holy sign of the god of justice, truth and love on his breastplate. A champion of the poor and downtrodden, a hero of the masses and a faithful servitor of the King and the Gods. You know, a poster boy for the Fantasy Act.

Turn him inside out.

And you have your Nosferatu.

They 're the true Monsters in the game. They are deformed, so much so that they can't live in human society without employing Disciplines (vampire magic...) that make them invisible. They look like zombies, no hair, leathery skin, disfigured, malformed, ugly like the butthole of satan on a bad hair day. Even the other vampires can't stand them for too long. They have to live in the sewers with rats and roaches. They 're twisted. They 're outcasts among the undead, for chirssake. In short, they 're the ones who feel, more than anyone else, the curse of the vampire blood on their shoulders.

Well, after all that, which was what my player had asked for, do you think he still wanted to play his character? You betchoor ass he didn't! The moment he heard me saying "your sire drops his Obfuscation and reveals his true clan, that of a Nosferatu, which shall now be yours too forever", he started screaming and yelling "What!!! WHAT!!! A Nosfera... No Way! I 'm not playing the character!! I 'm NOT PLAYING!!!" Big sissy him... Anyway, I solved that, gave him a potion that changed his clan back to something more his taste and we kept on with the game...
But since the whole episode with the Nosferatu Embracing (... making a vampire out of...) him was played in the club and the sire (... vampire daddy...) was played by a local guy, I guess the word spread out...

And so, one day, I got this guy, veteran gamer and all, coming and asking me if I wanted to play a Nuwisha in his Werewolf game. Well, now, the Nuwisha are the were-Coyotes and the trickster do they serve allright! They got all those powers that are geared towards completely ridiculing everybody that catches their eye, especially the big bad werewolves, who usually have egos bigger than mountains... Anyway, this guy I 'm talking about, he wanted me to play the Nuwisha because of what I 'd done with Nocturnus and the Nosferatu thing... at least I guess so, 'cause he did mention something about the session with Saruman and I can't think of any other way he could have come up with the idea in the fist place. Whatever.

I was saying that Malkavians are not so totally completely crazy. They 're supposed to have brilliant insights indeed, thanks to their madness. For example, in the Clanbook Malkavian (you know... guide for playing a Malk in the game, has all their secrets... all they know anyway...) there's this parable about the world as seen by the Vampire clans (kinda like ethnic groups, all with different powers, weaknesses and table manners). I don't remember it all, but, it goes sort of like this. Once, there was an elephant in the dark and thirteen bats, each from one clan, that were flying towards it. They fell on it, each on a different part of the elephant. The Toreador bat fell on the elephants' dick and it thought that the world was a big thing for having sex with. The Gangrel bat fell on the elephants' tusks and thought that life is a mean hard place where you have to bare your fangs all the time just to stay alive. The Nosferatu bat fell on the elephants' ass and got stuck there and thought the world is a dark damp place that reeks of shit... (It goes like that and then) Then came the Malkavian bat, that completely missed the elephant. And they 're stark raving mad. As parables come, this one's pretty accurately describing the vampire clans and the ways they look upon the word. All clans have stereotypes about each other, but the only ones who can make it accurate and funny in the same time is the Malkavians. So, crazy yes, dumbfucks, no.

Well, of course real madness tends to destroy a game in no time. So you don't get that in the computer game, but you do get a lot of insights, really. I mean, I don't know what happens with the characters from other clans, but my Malkavian chick, she keeps saying things that have me doing the twice-over. Like, there was this other Malkavian chick who had a split pesonality and everybody told me they were twins, 'cause they really thought there were two of them. But my character insisted on calling them the White and Black daughters of Janus... Janus? The two-headed god? And it turned out they were one person. OK, I figured at some point on my own, but then I felt a complete idiot for not having noticed the nicks my Malkie had given the two girls... one girl...

Anyway, yeah, I meant to say, this seems to be a well-made game, nice story, of course it's got a pre-developped world, the World of Darkness (if you 've seen the movie, Underworld, you know exactly what it's all about, right down to the Elders playing their childer as pawns and the Werewolves and Vampires having a blood feud going on for millenia) that's really cool... well thought out and makes sense...

And it thinks I 'm fucking crazy.