- Joined
- Feb 19, 2017
I've recently been re-reading my copy of the 1E Corebook for Vampire: The Masquerade, and I am loving it.
I may have said this before, but I have always felt there was a certain charm to the very first edition's setting, style, themes, and early fluff, especially when compared to the metaplot-ridden trainwreck of the later editions.
The early weirdness of the setting and the fact that the World of Darkness was a lot more mysterious and felt more like our actual world as it existed in the early 1990's is part of the appeal of First Edition to me.
The artwork and the text perfectly captures the whole "Gothic-Punk" style without being either pretentious or diving straight into over-the-top edgelord territory, and that is something that no other edition of Vampire (or possibly any other World of Darkness game for that matter) has managed to achieve.
Mark Rein-Hagen caught lightning in a bottle with Vampire 1E, although others helped such as Steve Wieck and his brother, the late Stewart Wieck (RIP).
I like how the setting was less "everyone is evil" and more "black and gray morality", so being a Kindred didn't automatically make you damned and irredeemably evil like the Revised books seemed to suggest, it just made it a lot easier to become damned and if you looked in the right places and fought really hard for it, you could achieve Golconda and from there, possibly even become human again in 1E.
The Sabbat was less the main antagonist and more of an insidious boogeyman that nobody really knew anything about, while the Independent Clans and the lesser Bloodlines were more sidelined and were largely intended to be NPC material. PC's were assumed to be young Anarchs (or at least sympathetic to the Anarchs) who were rebelling against the rigid and sometimes downright oppressive authority of the Prince and the Camarilla establishment that backed him.
Settings were also a lot more localized, and you had the Lupines and the Magi, who were mysterious and powerful antagonists that turned out to be more interesting than either the Garou or the Awakened, and I say this as someone who likes Werewolf and Mage.
Hunters were also a major threat instead of a throwaway antagonist, with the Inquisition and those few Feds who were in the know actually being quite scary. Your ties to the mortal world were also more important in 1E than in 2E or Revised.
Vampire: The Masquerade was also originally intended to be a distant sequel to the game Ars Magica, which was an RPG set in Medieval Europe where the players are wizards in a secret society that Mark Rein-Hagen worked on prior to starting White Wolf. This was quietly dropped by the time Vampire 2E and Mage: The Ascension 1E came out.
The Gothic-Punk style was presented perfectly in 1E, at least in my opinion. You had personal horror without being a whiny "Woe is me!" angst-fest like Revised was, and you also had the classic look of trenchcoats, sunglasses, and katanas without reaching the levels of comic-book silliness that 2E had achieved (Anybody remember Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand?)
Neither play style was presented as the "One True Way" to play Vampire either, which was a refreshing change of pace from Justin Achilli telling you that you were playing the game wrong every other page like he did in Revised (and early Requiem as well, for that matter).
I've proposed it many times before, and it's still in the works as a back-burner project, but I would love to run Vampire 1E with all the early setting weirdness played straight and none of the later World of Darkness materials taken into account.
I may have said this before, but I have always felt there was a certain charm to the very first edition's setting, style, themes, and early fluff, especially when compared to the metaplot-ridden trainwreck of the later editions.
The early weirdness of the setting and the fact that the World of Darkness was a lot more mysterious and felt more like our actual world as it existed in the early 1990's is part of the appeal of First Edition to me.
The artwork and the text perfectly captures the whole "Gothic-Punk" style without being either pretentious or diving straight into over-the-top edgelord territory, and that is something that no other edition of Vampire (or possibly any other World of Darkness game for that matter) has managed to achieve.
Mark Rein-Hagen caught lightning in a bottle with Vampire 1E, although others helped such as Steve Wieck and his brother, the late Stewart Wieck (RIP).
I like how the setting was less "everyone is evil" and more "black and gray morality", so being a Kindred didn't automatically make you damned and irredeemably evil like the Revised books seemed to suggest, it just made it a lot easier to become damned and if you looked in the right places and fought really hard for it, you could achieve Golconda and from there, possibly even become human again in 1E.
The Sabbat was less the main antagonist and more of an insidious boogeyman that nobody really knew anything about, while the Independent Clans and the lesser Bloodlines were more sidelined and were largely intended to be NPC material. PC's were assumed to be young Anarchs (or at least sympathetic to the Anarchs) who were rebelling against the rigid and sometimes downright oppressive authority of the Prince and the Camarilla establishment that backed him.
Settings were also a lot more localized, and you had the Lupines and the Magi, who were mysterious and powerful antagonists that turned out to be more interesting than either the Garou or the Awakened, and I say this as someone who likes Werewolf and Mage.
Hunters were also a major threat instead of a throwaway antagonist, with the Inquisition and those few Feds who were in the know actually being quite scary. Your ties to the mortal world were also more important in 1E than in 2E or Revised.
Vampire: The Masquerade was also originally intended to be a distant sequel to the game Ars Magica, which was an RPG set in Medieval Europe where the players are wizards in a secret society that Mark Rein-Hagen worked on prior to starting White Wolf. This was quietly dropped by the time Vampire 2E and Mage: The Ascension 1E came out.
The Gothic-Punk style was presented perfectly in 1E, at least in my opinion. You had personal horror without being a whiny "Woe is me!" angst-fest like Revised was, and you also had the classic look of trenchcoats, sunglasses, and katanas without reaching the levels of comic-book silliness that 2E had achieved (Anybody remember Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand?)
Neither play style was presented as the "One True Way" to play Vampire either, which was a refreshing change of pace from Justin Achilli telling you that you were playing the game wrong every other page like he did in Revised (and early Requiem as well, for that matter).
I've proposed it many times before, and it's still in the works as a back-burner project, but I would love to run Vampire 1E with all the early setting weirdness played straight and none of the later World of Darkness materials taken into account.
