Thousand Year Old Vampire - Play Report and Review
What a beautiful edition of this game.
This week I discuss my experience with the Solo Roleplaying game, Thousand Year Old Vampire. When I visited a cool gaming shop, of which I had never seen such variety in the number of RPGs, I was stacked for choice. I ended up picking out the exquisite print copy of Thousand Year Old Vampire. The hardback has 2 ribbons and this wonderful journal aesthetic to it. It is hard to showcase just how beautiful it is, without seeing it in real life. Reading the instructions was easy and there were lots of great examples of play. I had read this game is a great entry point into the Solo RPG hobby. Having payed a bunch of journaling games before, I knew roughly what I was getting into. Though what didn’t hit me yet, was how powerful this game was going to be.
I decided to play it with my partner, as he had before with other story games. There were a few multiplayer options presented as optional rules in the appendices, but we went for a straight forward single vampire experience. My partner was the scribe (as you can see from the hand writing), I was the story announcer, and we both developed the narrative together. In retrospect, this was one of my favourite ways to play, as it meant we could bounce ideas off each other. There was more effort put into the writing and fleshing out of entries, as we did it together. For extra ambience I threw on some background gothic music I found online, and lit some candles. The added extras really helped set the mood.
We played an Australian Vampire from the gold rush era who was bitten by some bushland monstrosity that had serpentine features. This drew from our shared love of history in a country we knew well. In retrospect, I would have gone back a little further than the early 1800s, as there are multiple points where you skip forward. The process of making a vampire took about 20 minutes, deciding on their resources, skills and characters. After that we rolled our blood red d10 and d6 and took to building out our narrative. As the entries went by, we found ourselves growing with this character. The time jumps, the horrible choices and our loneliness began to really have emotional effect on us. It played out like an Ozploitation film, in the bet kind of way.
The mechanics are exquisite. The impact of having limited memory, and then journal space was profound. As the entries added up, we needed to lose some of our precious memories. That meant that certain story arcs came and went. We found ourselves filling up new spaces of Experiences, with no linked memory to why we were even there. It was hard and sometimes shocking to cross stuff out. Or to lose a journal that kept our precious memories. There was this sense of melancholy throughout it. I linked that the entires made us do things to lose our friends, resources and more. It meant that things kept moving. The creature we became was nothing like we had started as. I was shocked to find out that our character met their demise. Meaning that the experience lasted about 3 hours total. It made me want to play again. You can read about our story in the attached pdf. I went through the effort of writing out a short hand of the mechanics, but in the end I didn't really need them. there were only a couple of little quirks, the rest was very straight forward.
Some of the entries were ore thematic to us than others, but I guess part of that could have come down to the sort of story we were writing. We both were emotionally impacted by the story. I know a lot of games set out to have this effect, but it is somewhat rare to see this in practice. The back sections are wonderful, having additional entries, some safety tools and more. At first I was a bit confused as to why there were safety tools in a. Solo game; but I did note there were multiplayer experiences, and with a lot of these sorts of tools, it’s about intentionality. Being aware of what might be upsetting is powerful, as it helps you move on faster if you don’t wish to explore it. I also found that I gave a lot to the game emotionally, so it is good to include them after all. I would suggest having at least a couple of A4 sized pages to do this. The book does it in this digest size, which turned out not to be enough. Even with crossing things out. Of course I was not brave or foolish enough to write directly in the book.
I highly recommend this game. More than just an entry point to the solo ttrpg hobby, as a powerful and thematic game in its own right.
