Thousand Year Old Vampire is a solo, journaling RPG that — in no time — underlines the value of memory and humanity.
When you write about board games, tabletop games and videogames you write mostly about iteration. In fact, for most of my career I’ve been mostly writing about iterations. It’s why I’ve always tried to make a big deal about something when it feels different, whether it works or it doesn’t, Thousand Year Old Vampire feels new, it feels exciting, and it still — six years on — feels like something experimental and new.
My most recent run at it took a Mesopotamian farmer through to the modern age (admittedly, a little more than a thousand years) and left broken kingdoms in their wake, while I recently DM’d — well, I read prompts and tracked notes — for a player who was chased around the world by a bloodline of royal vampire hunters ultimately culminating in them fading away into a kind of ethereal forest spirit.
A full, successful Thousand Year Old Vampire story culminates with your character as, well, a very old vampire, but the experience of it all — and what will stick with you most, even if you don’t make it — is the journey to get there. That’s because it plays out in little bites; Diary entries driven by prompts, memories and traits.
There are five different traits: Four of which are Memories, Skills, Resources and Characters. You’ll get an introduction to those four quickly as a result of the character set up, which has you create a living, human character that you then, very quickly, flip into a vampire. That’s when you pick up your first Mark — a tell that gives away your vampiric nature. Then, after that, you start moving through the book’s eighty plus prompts, which you do by rolling a D10 and D6, then subtracting the D6 from the D10.
I say eighty plus because a lot of them have extra prompts, in-case you wind up travelling backwards (which, as anybody who plays dice-based games knows that it’s incredibly likely) and there are also alternatives in the lengthy appendix.
A prompt is, in most cases, two or three sentences for you to think about before writing the next experience of your character, with three of those experiences making up a memory, and your character only being able to retain five memories before they instead need to either commit them to a (fragile) diary or lose them to time. When you first start out, and through your first dozen or so prompts, it’s perhaps not quite obvious how essential these pieces of your character are to your direction and narration as you give the story up to the book and your character.
Scratching out an experience that used to define your character’s motivation, or even literally defined your character — their name and place of birth — is incredibly poignant, and even if you try and start your character out with noble intentions, time will ravage them into something unrecognisable.
As a product, Thousand Year Old Vampire‘s physical version is a fantastic collection piece made to partially resemble an old diary, and pulled together like a hodgepodge of a reference book, diary and collage-heavy scrapbook. The artwork, of classic vampires and uncanny things, serves as great inspiration for when you’re playing and I love that you can flick it open onto almost any page and it’s got something interesting right there.
Thousand Year Old Vampire‘s rules for getting started are perhaps not as succinct as they could be, but I’ve perhaps been spoiled by ttRPG and Board Game manuals and their step-by-step examples of play. Ultimately, after playing it once you’ll know exactly how to play again, and you’ll want to… and you’ll want to tell your friends. In fact, I guarantee that you’d know if one of your friends already had a copy, as I’m sure they’d have told you about it… and, if they haven’t, then maybe you could be that friend.
Thousand Year Old Vampire is available through the website of its creator, Tim Hitchens.
