A Game About Tears in Rain - Thousand Year Old Vampire RPG Review
All these things will be lost, in time...
Tim Hutchings’ Thousand Year Old Vampire is one of the most difficult, challenging, and demanding games I’ve ever played. It’s intensely personal, it requires you to surrender to its whims, and it may leave you feeling exposed and alone. And all you are really doing is writing a vampire story.
Packaged as a lovely hardbound book filled with a Vaughn Oliver style collage of images, textures, and words, Thousand Year Old Vampire is a solo role-playing game with just a scant whiff of mechanics to support the generation of an almost boundless narrative of memory, experience, the relentlessness of time, and most significantly loss. The game is the story of your character, who becomes a vampire at its outset, and through pages and pages of prompts you will create not only this identity but also the world around them as you play.
Initially, your vampire is just a couple of Experiences, which are grouped into Memories, along with a couple of Resources, Skills, and Characters that have a relationship with you. You get a Mark, which is a physical representation of your affliction, and you create who or what made you into the monster you will remain. From there, you’ll roll dice and advance to prompts throughout the book. These will ask questions that you respond to, writing down your new Experiences within Memories. You might have to check off a skill or lose a resource. Or someone you love might die at your hands, whether intentional or not. The game (and your life) can end prematurely if you can’t mark off one of your skills or resources, or you could go the distance and reach one of several ends.
Perhaps you’ll decide to start out as a Mayan warrior sent to eliminate the Jade Fang, an outcast lurking in the jungle around your village who turns out to be the vampire that creates you. Or perhaps you are a sculptor in fin-de-siècle Vienna, turned by your mentor who wants to preserve your talent for the ages. You could even set your story in a sci-fi setting, exploring entirely different themes and concepts as your vampire’s lifespan stretches into a speculative Afro-Futurist alternate history. You might travel the world, hole up in a castle for 200 years, become the CEO of a global corporation, or haunt the sewers of Rome. All while dealing with love and friendships, learning new skills and talents, and watching everything you hold dear or otherwise slip away while you persist.
The catch to all of this is that Mr. Hutchings has a very specific idea about vampires. If human identity is an accumulation of our memories and experiences, then the vampire’s identity is as much about losing those memories and experiences. You see, you can only have Memories, each of which contain three Experiences. Eventually, you have to lose Memories. And as you strike through these on your character sheet or delete them from your Word document, you’ll feel something very strange. The game is telling you that you’ve forgotten the love of your life or the empire you once ruled. And it’s just gone. This is a profound, impactful sensation as you continue with your story, watching your own history disintegrate with the passing of time.
Losing a Memory might mean that a hundred years have passed. It could mean that you’ve chosen to forgot how you killed the little girl that befriended you and brought you rabbits to feed from as you hid in a cave when she got older and realized you were a monster. Or it could just mean that whatever it was has just slipped away, rendered as unimportant and irrelevant as a random Autumn day 200 years ago. You can preserve some memories in a Diary, which could be anything. Maybe your vampire has painted an elaborate mural sometime during the Renaissance that contains secret symbols and codes to remind your future self of your past. Maybe hidden in the genetic code of an android are your Memories and that is your “diary”. Or maybe you’ve written them all down in a book called Thousand Year Old Vampire.
Playing this game, I can’t help but think of Roy Batty’s dying words in Blade Runner. You know the speech, attack ships on fire and all that. Tears in rain. This is a game about tears in rain, about watching time wash over you and wash things away from you. But Roy Batty had a four year lifespan. Your lifespan in this game could be the whole of human history.
That’s a lot of time for tragedy, but also triumph. Over the course of your character’s life, there are undeniably moments of beauty. Sometimes you will connect threads that you’ve developed in ways that are surprising. You’ll be amazed when elements just work together, and your story takes on an almost magical logic. The prompts are simple, but what they cause you to reveal in your storytelling can be harrowing, surprising, startling, or even upsetting.
Without a doubt, this game is undeniably tragic, and I’ve been surprised at how emotionally wringing and sometimes introspective it can be. I’ve found myself pondering decisions for days. I’ve felt regret at making painful choices. I’ve dreamed about situations that I have created in the game with my characters. This is a game that is digging deeper than just about any other I’ve ever played, and this is why I find it uniquely challenging and even difficult to play. It demands a lot out of you, and not just because you’ve got to write sentences and come up with characters, timelines, settings, and environments.
It’s also particularly demanding if you want to play it as a strictly or roughly historical game. You might wind up searching online for Cherokee names so that you can give a character an authentic name. You might be learning more about the Ainu people than you ever expected to while playing a game. But this is also game that will generously give back to you whatever you decide to put into it so ultimately, the commitment is worth it.
But it is not, however, a game I could recommend to anyone. The book warns that it is a “lonely” game, and that is very true. I’ve found the loneliness to be not in playing the game alone, but in visualizing situations and creating this detailed identity and having no one to share it with. And also in some of the deep-seated psychology that the game has dug up and made me aware of. This kind of isolated self-realization is not an “all audiences” kind of quality, and some players might find themselves confronting situations that make them uncomfortable- alone, with just a book, some dice, and something to write with. This is not necessarily healthy for some people.
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a stunning piece of work and specifically as an example of the kind of narrative that games can create. It is profound and moving, contrasting almost bottomless mortal grief with the limitless ascendancy of the immortal. And it is maybe a little dangerous, which is not a quality I think I’ve ever attributed to any game in my entire life. It’s thrilling to encounter something as singular and engaging as Thousand Year Vampire, but I would caution that one must completely surrender to what it is doing in order for it to work. You might be surprised at how difficult this is to do, to let the game absorb what you create and return feedback on it for you to react to and play with. But if you can let it in, a delicious life awaits.
Editor reviews
A profound and demanding solo RPG about the persistence and transience of memories and experiences.
Thanks for the review and the caution about wallowing in introspective tragedy. They should have those on Smiths LP's.
Andi Lennon wrote: Thanks for the review and the caution about wallowing in introspective tragedy. They should have those on Smiths LP's.
That joke? Not funny any more.
hotseatgames wrote:
Andi Lennon wrote: Thanks for the review and the caution about wallowing in introspective tragedy. They should have those on Smiths LP's.
That joke? Not funny any more.
Oof. Nice one, Dad.
I suspect that it requires a significant degree of buy-in from the player, but may reward it with a rich and unusual experience not found in other games or entertainments. Try to whip through it fast with low commitment, and you will get the approximate entertainment value of a book of Mad-Libs. Take your time, do some research and thinking, and you might discover a unique diversion.
One reason that I am particularly interested in Thousand Year Old Vampire is the gradual erasure of past memories of the character. My mother passed away in 2017 after nearly a decade-long spiral into Alzheimer's disease. She was living with my sister in a distant part of the country, so I only saw her about once a year, and the changes each year were jarring. I also talked to her on the phone on a fairly regular basis, until finishing sentences became too difficult for her and she mostly stayed on the phone just to hear me talk at her.
For most of her life, my mom was somehow a warm, friendly extrovert who also loved to read. The dementia gradually stole language from her, to a point where she could read a sentence out loud and not comprehend it because she had already forgotten how the sentence started. At first, she mainly lost short-term recent memories. After years, most of what she had left seemed to be childhood memories, often leaving her in a childish state. I was just as relieved as saddened when she died, and I have not really allowed myself to fully process those feelings since.
And yet.
I have a deep, deep phobia of Alzheimer's, for familial and personal reasons. I'm not sure I'm in a place where playing this would be remotely healthy right now, and so I very much appreciate the caveats in the review.
I went to Disney World while she was in a nursing home, and got her a tiny Mickey Mouse snow globe. When she passed, I got the snow globe back and put it on my mantle. It was really the only keepsake I had of her.
Years later, I got a cat. It jumped onto the mantle, knocked the snow globe over, and it smashed into bits. I can't describe the despair I felt at that moment.
Marks:
Twin puncture wounds on the neck which have scabbed over but never healed
Skills:
Can hold my ale
Care and feeding of horses
Bloodthirsty
Sketching with Coal
Mastery of knots
Recognition of ghosts
Pistol
Bartending
Painting
Resources:
A pouch of gems
A poem written by the lover I turned into a vampire
Mortals:
none
Immortals:
Lucius, Roman centurion turned vampire and my sire
Poppy, my half-sister, lover, and vampire childe
The necromancer Pierce
A foolish old man turned into a walking blood supply
Memory 1:
In Venice, I take up work as a barkeep; the hours suit my aversion to sunlight.
I return to Venice and find an old cache of wine, aged to excellence.
I sell the old wine and invest in jewelry and paintings.
Memory 2:
An unfortunate series of events leads me down the Silk Road to Cathay; I ply a new trade as the fur trader Paulo.
I awaken in an ornate tomb in the orient, covered by the dust of ages.
To occupy the long nights, I learn to ply the brush in creation of intricate landscapes.
Memory 3:
Increased trade along the Silk Road makes my pale skin less remarkable.
Memory 4:
In Milan, I meet a familiar woman but know her not; Poppy tells me that we were sweethearts until I turned her into a vampire, but now we are friends again.
Time takes a toll; my fangs have fallen out and hunting becomes too difficult. At dawn, I choose to pass into dust and history.
Memory 5:
The mortals have deadly new weapons, so I learn to fire a pistol.
My friend responded with great enthusiasm, sending me a full-page write-up of his character, plus another page of paragraph-long Experiences to start each of his five Memories, plus another half page of lengthy descriptions of his Skills and Resources and Mark. On a daily basis, I send him a prompt and he sends back at least a paragraph of an Experience. Three prompts in and his word document is already over four pages long. It will be interesting to see if his wordy approach changes once he starts losing Memories.
I see three possible issues. First, his responses have been so long and detailed so far, and that is much more demanding than the one or two sentence responses recommended by the game designer. Second, his most recent prompt asks about a humanizing experience with a child, and that might not hold much interest for him. Third, this experience will fill up his last available space in memory, so he will face the daunting choice of either moving memories to a physical diary that could be eventually lost, or losing some of his long memories right away. All three of these issues could have been avoided if he had stuck to the guideline of one or two sentence responses. For example, I got that same kid prompt when I played, and got past it with a brief, perfunctory experience.
"The hunters are persistent, capable, and well-informed. They know things about you that you don't - create a Mark that is revealed during a confrontation. You are driven into hiding in an unpopulated wasteland. Lose any stationary Resources. Learn a new Skill related to this desolate region. What new name comes to you in this loneliness?"
Seems like an interesting prompt to respond to, but maybe he is thrown by the idea of his character leaving his familiar homeland.
Three weeks ago, I was telling another friend about Thousand Year Old Vampire on the phone, and he wanted to play the same kind of correspondence game. I know that he is a very concise writer, so I expected his responses to prompts to be less burdensome for him. But he is also taking some college classes, so he warned me that he might get busy from time to time.
It took him a few days to respond with his character and his starting experiences, skills, resources, and mark. But he misunderstood the concept of the game and had described a vampire that was already 1,000 years old and now living in our time. I re-explained the default assumptions of the game, but offered him the option to go ahead with his character anyway, with the understanding that most of his game would take place in a science-fiction future of his devising. I guess that he wasn't feeling to creative, because he has stayed in touch but never mentions the game.