Character Creation: Wine Dark Nights

We never drinks...nights. Er, wine.

The Game: Wine Dark Nights
The Publisher: Gallant Knight Games
Degree of Familiarity: None with this game, and yet...
Books Required: Just the one 

So, in Wine Dark Nights, you play vampires, which was a revolutionary and novel concept for an RPG in 1991. I'm not being flippant (yet), it really was. Vampire: The Masquerade may not have been the first game that did it - Nightlife came out around the same time and I doubt those were the only two - but Vampire was absolutely the game that put "you play the monster" on the map. (It had a bunch of other effects, too, but that isn't a deep dive I want to do today. If I want to do any kind of deep dive, I'll keep playing Dredge. It's a really good game, by the way.)

SO ANYWAY. Wine Dark Nights is...a love letter? An homage? A ripoff? A stripped-down version? All of the above? of Vampire. The mechanics and game structure borrow heavily from Burning Wheel and Blades in the Dark, but the vampire powers, the focus on hunger vs. humanity, the notion that if your Rage stat builds too far you "frenzy" (yes, that expression of frenzy really came out of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but why split hairs), that's all Masquerade, baby.

I can't say how it would feel to read this game with no familiarity with the properties on which it's clearly based. I can say that I think it would feel thin but playable. It reminds me in some ways of Undying, and my thought when I read that game was that it felt very much like the presentation of vampires that we saw in the 90s, but with a PbtA system. But looking back over that game now and comparing it to Wine Dark Nights, I have an additional point of criticism: There's no setting. It's just "you're vampires, they're manipulative," there's a lot of mechanical attention to that aspect of unlife (the predatory vampire society, the drinking of the bloods, etc.) but there's no context for it all.

Actually, "setting" isn't the word I want. There's no lore. Vampire, in both its Masquerade and Requiem expressions, had lore aplenty, stories about where vampires came from and how their society evolved through the ages and what the current clans were doing and so forth. Wine Dark Nights has none of that. It's basically the Avongers of vampire RPGs, because we know what they're really going for, but they just can't say words like "Malkavian."

So would I play it? Probably not. I've run a lot of Vampire in almost all its incarnations, White Wolf games are triggering for me anyway, and frankly if I were to run a game where vampires are the PCs I think I'd almost rather do it in Cypher or something and try to think about the presentation of vampires in more modern media rather than how they were portrayed in the 90s (I hear good things about the Interview With The Vampire show, but I haven't watched it).

That's all entirely more setup than we needed, and I wanted to mention that the cover doesn't make any goddamn sense because it's a hawt modern grrl holding a severed head, but if you didn't know she was meant to be a vampire, how would you know that?

And the goddamn PDF isn't bookmarked.  

Well, anyway:

I do not have a concept in my brainmeat, so let's have Mr. Random iTunes pick me an inspiration song.

That's "Last Dance" by Sarah McLachlan, and normally I'd skip it because it doesn't have lyrics (which is where a lot of my inspiration comes from when I do this), but I think for a game about vampires, even one as thin as this, it's a good choice. I picture my character sitting at a piano in what's left of a building. Everything's burned, but the piano somehow still works. 

So, I think my character was a dangerous man in life (hell, let's take some John Wick inspiration, too). His name is Kyrylo Chumak, he's of Ukrainian extraction, and his family was involved in some very illegal shit. Kyrylo was a rising star of the family, and he had one quality a lot of other young men in his position didn't - he was patient. He didn't go out and joyride around and snort coke and bang hookers and so forth. He did his job, he invested his money, he played his piano (he actually considered doing it professionally, but y'know, family first). Folks in the family called him "the Monk" or "Father" because of how he lived, but he actually likes drugs and sex and so forth just as much as any of them. He just didn't want it to make him sloppy (or dead).

And then one night, someone came in, killed everyone in the club (all these families own clubs, watch some movies), burned it, and Kyrylo took a bullet in the belly. He crawled out into the alley and some vampire grabbed and bit him. 

OK, that's enough backstory (I actually really like this setup, may have to hold on to this guy for something). SO! I set one Predator and one Prey skill to 4. Well, for Predator, I think it's gotta be Hunt or Stalk, because those are the subtle ones. Let's go with Stalk. For Prey, obviously Temperance. 

Then one Predator and one Prey to 3. Let's do Hunt and Insight.

Two each get 2s. For Predator, let's say Harm and Deceive, and for Prey, Education and Heal. That leaves Threaten and Empathy at 1. I like the idea that Kyrylo might seem "nicer" than other guys in his line of work because he's patient and soft-spoken, but he's actually just as heartless as any of them. Maybe it's worse, because he's not going to get bothered if someone gets all weepy before he pulls the trigger.

Coil is 6, Humanity is 5, Rage and Hunger are 1, Rank and Age are both 1. Easy enough.

I get one Vampiric Discipline Gift. If I wish to take Weaknesses (up to two) I can take more (up to two). Let's see.

So this is weird. Talking to and controlling animals is a Gift, and to turn into an animal you need that one and Age 2 (which means it's out of reach at chargen), but turning into mist is just one Gift that I could take. Well, whatever. I'll take three Gifts, so I'll have to take two Weaknesses. I want Celerity Unholy Speed, Potence Unholy Strength, and Flight (no Masquerade equivalent). 

Let's take Deep Roots (when I go into torpor Retire for a Time, it takes longer to wake up), Fitful Slumber (I have bad daymares, probably of fire), and Disliked (other vampires know that I'm the scion of a crime family that was supposed to be killed with the rest of them; my unlife is probably a nose-thumb to someone, but I don't know who or why).

And that's actually it, because the other stuff - Allies, Enemies, etc - would come with city creation, which I'm not gonna do. I picture Kyrylo as early 20s, sad blue eyes, clear skin (even paler now), light brown hair, long fingers.