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Hey vamps, scamps and tramps, welcome to another exciting day of B3: Biting, blood and... brole-playing. I'm neck-deep in Troika's most ambitious (and possibly best received) RPG Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and left you all with the merest coppery taste of things to come.
The Story So Far
Odette, a lovable failing artist from LA, has been turned into a vampire by an amorous suitor and is now working for an organization of vampires that rule this part of the world in order to pay off her life debt. Uh, unlife debt. After a few tutorials, she's sent off to the seaside city of Santa Monica to help resolve a tricky situation involving a human underling and the continuing turf war against a rival group of vamps. Seeing how time was of the essence, Odette instead elected to help a local bail bondsman track down his bounty hunter contact to the basement of a serial killer. An auspicious start, then.
Part 2: I Thought You Was a Little Ghoul, but You're Just a Little Gurl. Not a Ghoul.
So things have been going swimmingly so far. I've been dropped into a reasonably big hub area with a lot of interesting sites to see and sights to visit. Or is that sights to see and sites to visit? I always seem to mix up sights and sites; my writing bights sometimes.
Talking of bights, what is a young vampire to do in the thick of night in the middle of a bustling city? Go clubbing of course! We've all seen Blade, after all.
I swear the track that was playing took its cue to end as soon as I started dancing. At least we all look stupid together. So yeah, this is Asylum. Kind of hard to miss the place, since it's this big gothic-looking establishment smack dab in the center of town. You actually have to walk past it to get from one section of the area to the other, so clearly the game designers wanted to make sure it was visible. Heck, that is probably true for its proprietors as well.
Talking of the proprietors, upon entering club I was met with this enchanting (perhaps literally? I didn't get any cues from the game) creature:
I've seen Jeanette pop out up a few times outside of the game, so I imagine she's a fairly important character. After an enigmatic introduction, she leaves via a secret elevator and I find myself milling around the club purposelessly until I figure that this location will probably be of some import later. Foreshadowing and whatnot. (I've definitely thought about the organization of the blog today - matching bookends and everything!)
Back to the bail business I left off with last time. Well, unfortunately after checking the apartment that Kilpatrick points me towards, the trail runs cold. Turns out the guy's hotfooted it back to downtown LA, which is where I am currently not. I get my couple of hundo from "Eh, Sleaze" (Homestar references in full swing tonight!) and leave that loose thread dangling in my quest log for the time being. I figure it's time to go visit my contact Mercurio.
Except... he ain't looking too good. Instead of receiving the materials he was holding onto for me, I get news instead that he was robbed and left for dead by a pack of hooligans. I get given two quests and an interesting bit of information about the world of Vampire the Masquerade: I need to recover the goods from the hoods (they may well be Bloods, but that's neither here nor there right now. Mmm, blood), I need to dull Mercurio's pain while he recuperates from his life-threatening injuries and it turns out the guy is actually a Ghoul.
Ghouls are like the Familiars in the Blade movies. In fact, I dare say that's where Marvel got the idea. They're pet humans: vampires use them to do various odd jobs generally involving other human underworld establishments in return for an occasional sip of vampire blood which - while not turning them entirely vampiric - gives them a considerable boost in strength and longevity. They become remarkably better Risk players too. Figured I should get the P4 Ghoul jokes out the way early.
Anyway, I figure I ought to find some painkillers first. I'm not going to earn much from the quest if the dude up and dies on me. (I don't imagine his master will be all too pleased either.) Time to make like Louis and go pill hunting.
Yeah, figures. I did just find this in my apartment after all. Why did I decide to be a female vampire, again? Eh, I'll search around town, maybe I'll come up with something.
After talking to folk across town, I eventually meet a few Kindred (that's our name for vampires, you see) on the beach and by talking to them learn something else new: they're "thin-bloods" - near-powerless vampires that are apparently the result of far too many generations of vampire. I get the sense this is something the larger universe is struggling with, since I hear many times that they've been called harbingers of the apocalypse and are actively hunted down by other vamps. It's a curious idea: as you get further and further down the family tree from the King of All Vampires (which is apparently Cain - yes, that Cain. From the bible) the vampiric essence is diluted further each generation. Having absolutely no knowledge of the franchise outside of what I've seen and heard so far in this game, it's kind of neat to get little tidbits like this. Makes the world feel lived-in, you know? Unlived in. Whatever.
Anyway, turns out the most talkative of the thin-bloods, an Australian surfer type named E, gives me an idea of where to track down more information on vampires of his type. I have a dying toady and a very important mission to do, so I figure I can put all that off for some extra lore and an experience point or several. I have a wonderful sense of priorities.
First stop is a local diner. E's sire was a young woman by the name of Lily, whom I am supposed to seek out. The kindly old lady that runs the place gives me her possessions after I provide a general description of her (which seems rather irresponsible - I'm starting to understand how someone in LA could feasibly get away with thieving an entire film shoot location of its cameras). I track down a bail paid out to a German fellow, her ex, and use Kilpatrick's computer to find out he left collateral behind in the form of a red Thunderbird and pop the trunk of that bad boy to find Lily's diary. Turns out she intends to rob a blood bank to keep herself fed. Wait, there's a blood bank?
There most certainly is a blood bank underneath this medical center, and after barging into the place I find this dying young lady. Figuring she's on the way out, I attempt to steal her face for this grisly trophy collection I've kind of got going on. Someone needed to continue that Gimble's guy work, right? (Actually, I saved her with my own blood. This apparently had the side-effect of turning her into my official Ghoul, but she vanishes before I ask her to go fetch my Cappuchaemo and a Bloody Mary. I don't doubt I'll be seeing her again. Probably in the next Arcana Chance, amirite?)
After blackmailing a nice Rastafarian doctor I check the rest of the place out, top to bottom. The top floor is full of difficult locked doors and a rather annoying security guard. The ground floor didn't have much else besides morphine pills (it comes in pills?) for that useless pile of bloody viscera I call a contact and I search the basement until I come across a fellow in scrubs who asks me if I'm here for "the special sauce". That doesn't sound ominous. Hell, what are the chances I come across two morally deplorable, sadistic prisoner situations in one night?
Here's Lily. She's been tied down here and incrementally drained of her powerful blood by a few of the male nurses. Unleashing her bonds causes her to Frenzy and eat the poor sap who chose that precise moment to walk in through the door. Blood's kind of an "easy come, easy go" type of resource around here. We, of course, decide to bail after Ms. Tie-Dye shirt empties the lad (put in your heads the noise of a straw sucking up the last few drops at the bottom of a Diet Sprite cup if you'd like) and I get to complete two quests simultaneously once back outside.
If I may digress here, and I may because this blog isn't too long already, it's good practice in any RPG of this type to try and identify what the available quests require of you and do as many of the non-combative ones as possible first. The idea being that the experience you earn from relatively danger-free assignments can be used to augment and steel your character for when you might actually have to do some fighting. It's valuable advice for Troika's two other games too: Arcanum and Temple of Elemental Evil (I'd go so far as to warn you not to step foot outside the starting village of ToEE until you're at least level 2. It's not nice out there).
The hood's home base is a combat zone: These were introduced early on as places where it's safe to go wild with your vampire powers and other forms of violence. Any humans met around here are generally of the "not innocent" type and are thus fair game for whatever gruesome designs I have for them. Since I'm more of the "softly, softly, bitey monkey" persuasion, I carefully break around the guard on duty and slit his throat. I then knock out the power from outside the house (seems like an ideal place for a generator to me) and "[REDACTED] from Game of [REDACTED]" that poor bastard too. Man, this knife really pays for itself.
The rest aren't a big deal. I have a few points in Presence, which is a spell that saps the martial prowess of my opponents. It's simply a matter of slashing them to pieces and collecting a lot of valuable ammo from their bodies after that, as well as the explosives I was sent here to recover. Killing humans seems easy enough, turns out; it's the other stuff out there that's causing me some worry.
Talking of worries, I get the next quest from my exsanguinated lickspittle and it's a big one: In order to find out where these explosives need to be explodified, I need to ask a legendary underworld figure who is currently in hiding. Which means mediating a feud. Which means talking to the most powerful vampire in these parts. And who would've guessed it, but that person just so happens to be the owner of Asylum.
Therese Voerman is the cool, rational head in charge around here. She's also the twin sister of that Jeanette we met earlier. At least I would have to assume so, given the huge portrait of twin girls sitting on the wall behind me. She'll call off the entirely unintentional feud if I do a little task for her: Simply clear out a certain Ocean House Hotel of a certain spirit that haunts it.
How bad could this possibly be?
Next Time
I'm thinking I start making these a lot shorter and/or more abbreviated. I don't want to spoil the rest of the game for everyone, after all. Anyway, the next location - the Ocean House Hotel - is kind of infamous for its spookiness. You might all recall a certain Fear Gauntlet on the subject. I'm intending to build the next update entirely around it, hopefully with plenty of images I won't forget to take. On Day 3 I'll probably wrap up this chapter of the game - finding Tung, planting those explosives and hopefully getting back to LA proper again. I'll post my overall thoughts about Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines at that time as well. After that? I'll probably keep playing it, but without all these updates. I figure you'll all have a sense of the game by then and know whether or not it's for you. No need to LP the whole thing, especially with everything else on the docket for this month.
See you all next time for some horrible hotel happenings. And I don't just mean the room service. POW.
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