{"id":6010,"date":"2022-05-18T16:00:43","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T14:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pr.gagadget.com\/vampire-the-masquerade-swansong-review-a-gleeful-rpg-soap-opera\/"},"modified":"2022-05-18T16:00:43","modified_gmt":"2022-05-18T14:00:43","slug":"vampire-the-masquerade-swansong-review-a-gleeful-rpg-soap-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pr.gagadget.com\/en\/vampire-the-masquerade-swansong-review-a-gleeful-rpg-soap-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong review: a gleeful RPG soap opera"},"content":{"rendered":"
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong review: a gleeful RPG soap opera<\/div>\n
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In senior year at my strict religious boarding school, watching Passions<\/em> was an afternoon ritual. Beyond the basic soap opera premise of rival families getting messy, the iconic series had everything for a restless teen: suspense, melodrama, shamelessly imaginative comedy, awful sex, and campy supernatural storylines (including witches and warlocks \u2014 it was, after all, set in New England). Our febrile minds projected cartoonish power fantasies and petty grievances onto its absurd archetypes \u2014 the rebel, the dark horse, the struggling parent. Passions<\/em> became a daily mainline to a hotter, more fantastical world, and it was awesome.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t realize there was a Passions<\/em>-shaped hole in my adult life until last week, when I played my first Vampire: The Masquerade game: Swansong<\/em>. When the first Vampire tabletop RPG was released in 1991, it stood out in a genre where vampires were usually monsters to be killed. But it\u2019s a post-Twilight world now (sorry, Anne Rice), and the idea of the undead secretly living among us is a common fictional conceit. Upon booting up Swansong<\/em>, I had no idea what to expect. I spent my first few hours slowly poring over the in-game codex and staring blankly at my character sheets.<\/p>\n

Nineteen hours later, it turns out that baby\u2019s first Vampire game was a gleeful return to all of the good stuff I didn\u2019t know I missed: courtly intrigue, indulgent posturing, and coldblooded betrayal, but this time, with fangs. There\u2019s no combat, so everything boils down to conversational dominance and manipulation. It seems that the relative isolation and sobering reality of the pandemic have created an itch for the dramatic frivolity that fueled my high school afternoons.<\/p>\n

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Image: Big Bad Wolf\/Nacon via Polygon<\/cite><\/p>\n

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Swansong<\/em> takes place in the World of Darkness RPG universe, where vampires (\u201cKindred\u201d) juggle soap opera-scale power grabs, mind games, and existential crises. Most Kindred follow the Masquerade, a survival protocol maintained by the ruling Camarilla faction to stay hidden from mortals; humans are usually livestock or slaves, and in-game documents highlight the Camarilla\u2019s pragmatic interests in environmentalism for the sake of their prey\u2019s health. Atop this food chain is the city\u2019s Prince, supported by a council known as the Primogen; at the bottom are \u201cthin-bloods,\u201d whose weak powers are the supposed result of their generational remove from the First Vampire, Caine.<\/p>\n

Swansong<\/em> opens with the Boston Camarilla in panic mode, and introduces three playable Kindred: Emem, Galeb, and Leysha. Someone has called a Code Red (the emergency lockdown procedure). Kindred have gone missing at an important party, nobody knows the details, and we\u2019ve been summoned to help Boston\u2019s Prince, Hazel Iversen, the personification of Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss in a red jumpsuit. She gives each character missions (\u201cscenes\u201d) and clearly has a hidden agenda of her own. <\/p>\n

Emem, Galeb, and Leysha share the same base mechanics: a Willpower bar that determines how they interact with others and a Hunger bar that denotes the need to feed (at max Hunger, their next interaction will most likely jeopardize the Masquerade). Kindred drink from live humans (\u201cvessels\u201d), which must be done discreetly in a limited number of safe zones. It\u2019s also bad form to drink the vessels to death. I turned cool, sophisticated Emem into a habitual rat eater \u2014 a gross survival decision that increased her Suspicion meter and made her later interactions more challenging. (I never fully got the hang of Suspicion \u2014 it\u2019s supposed to indicate how much you stick out through mistakes and gaffes, but on my playthrough with the most dire screw-ups, I had the lowest Suspicion yet.)<\/p>\n

Emem, Galeb, and Leysha all have elaborate backstories and core personalities, and each belongs to a different clan (Toreador, Ventrue, and Malkavian, respectively). Through character builds, I\u2019m allowed to determine how they approach problems and conversations. On my second playthrough, I opted for the custom build for full control over my Character and Discipline sheets. Character covers stat-like abilities (like Persuasion, Technology, and Deduction) that affect conversations, confrontations, and interactions with objects. Discipline covers clan-specific Kindred skill trees, like Auspex (augmenting senses and seeing memories) and Celerity (slowing time or Blinking from one place to another).<\/p>\n

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