The Vampires of San Francisco

Hello gamefans! Yes we are still alive out here. I wanted to post a quick update to apologize for the delay and give some explanation why. First, I’ve had trouble bouncing back after the flu, what with my regular teaching workload and all. Secondly, what I’ve been working on with the game currently looks like this:

Don’t read too closely if you don’t want spoilers, but basically I have almost a dozen game sessions to untangle and partly rewrite. See back when these game sessions were played, for months we kinda got stuck in loops. Plot beats were accidentally repeated, a couple things were forgotten about and other details dragged on far too long. So what I’m doing is my most massive restructuring yet, trying to condense and build solid narrative arcs from the base material. I have transcribed notes for all those sessions and am going to start moving stuff around to make more sense before I go in for the full-draft version. So thank you for staying tuned, good things are coming I promise!

It’s like this project is teaching me a lot about the mechanics of epic-scale storytelling or something, what….

Jason: “So, Jim, I want to point something out to you. You just gave an entire Sabbat pack werewolf blood.”
Jim: “Yeah…?”
Jason: “So now they’re all hopped up on goofballs and it’s time for LEEROOOOOY JENKINS!!!!”

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In our last Scout update of major relevance, we return to 06/09/16, the night/day that eternal darkness first fell over the city. This segment shares her point of view from a couple already-published scenes and fills in one very major secret scene missing until now.

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The following epilogue bit fills in two conversations that were only half-completed in the mainline writeup. More details after the jump.

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The following is Scout’s version of the scene from 05/12/16 wherein she hunts down the Settite prisoner at the Pyramid and diablerizes him to learn what he knows. Obviously I wanted to share what he knew, but it comes at the cost of having to get more…intimate…with her point of view.

Content warning: I’ve kind of danced around the details of diablerie so far in the main-line writeups, but with Scout I’ve had to get more specific. And this one is the most specific so far.

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The following is a brief summary recounting Scout’s perspective during the action-packed events of 4/19/16, 4/26/16, and 5/03/16.

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Thank you everyone who has contributed a little to the Patreon page! Your support means a lot to me and helps give the extra kick in the ass I need to keep going. 😉

So there will be five Scout’s Honor Epilogues to give some more details from her point of view, some more detailed than others. Most will briefly summarize what happened to catch her up to the main-line writeups. The first here gives a little bit of context explaining what happened immediately after the events in San Jose and provides some unique Scout character-perspective on a few more events from 4/14/16.  Continue reading →

Happy New Year, everyone! As always, thank you for sticking with us! We’re coming up on the 5-year anniversary of our game and the ~4 year anniversary of this blog this year. It’s been quite a journey and we hope you’ve enjoyed it too.

My personal hope for this year is that this is the year I’ll finally get my shit together enough to take my own writing more seriously. My first professionally-published RPG module, The Crisp Line, will be coming out from Evil Hat Games later this year, so stick around for more information on that. I’ve also begun submitting individual stories to publications for the first time in years so hopefully something there will pan out. Jim and I have also been discussing developing a visual-novel style game together using my writing and his engineering talents. It’s still in the early stages of discussion but we’ll see.

As part of this new wave, I’m trying something new with the blog. I’ve bit the bullet and finally started up a Patreon page to support it. I’ve been uncomfortable with the idea before but I’ve come up with some compromises to help justify it. Firstly, those of you without ad-block may notice that the blog is now ad-free. I’ve upgraded to a paid WordPress plan to get rid of them. This incidentally also comes with our first real URL address: http://vampires-of-san-francisco.com. The old link should still work as well but it’s nice to have a more professional-looking title at the top of the page.

Secondly, I’d like to empathize that the Patreon is completely optional. All current and future narrative content will remain free to access here on the blog. I may come up with some sort of “extras” later once I play around with Patreon some more, but basically if I get a few bucks to help cover hosting fees with some money left over to chip in toward our game-night dinner, I’ll be happy 😉 Also, putting us out there on Patreon might bring in entirely new readers, who knows!

I don’t know about you, but these past few years of reality have been pretty draining for me. Having a creative outlet like this to play with and grow through has been one of the most important things keeping me optimistic about the future (which is kinda ironic, considering all the horror themes). Thank you again for coming around to visit us and I hope we can continue to keep the drama, hilarity, and poor life choices flowing!

The following concludes the multi-stage rescue of Tom Lytton, originally portrayed from Rabenholz’s perspective in 3/29/16. When I wrote up that main-line scene, I was very very careful about how I described things and which meta-quotes I included, so once again I recommend going back to review it if you have the chance.

While this Scout version contains a few game-played conversations that Jason and I played in secret, once again the vast majority of it–including the entire last half–are new creations of my own to fill in what happened in a character-exploring way. Fewer content warnings of abuse in this one but definitely warnings of violence.

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The following post is interesting. First, this was going to be called simply “The Rescue of Tom Lytton, Part 2” but as I went through my final edits and rewrites I came up with this much better title. Secondly, this is yet another post where the majority of it is complete whole-cloth narrative I created in an effort to fill in more of Scout’s backstory. The first third is based on actual played dialogue and actions (done secretly off-screen, of course) but the rest, well…you’ll see.

Content warnings abound, including violence, abuse, and post-colonialist horror.

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