You're a regular person who has made the acquaintance of a dangerous unnatural creature. Are you a friend, a lover, food, or something else? This solo tabletop role-playing game is a direct sequel to the award-winning Thousand Year Old Vampire!
Congratulations, youâve made a friend! A mysterious friend with a complicated past. That friend is a vampire and might be a thousand years old, but you probably don't know that yet.Â
Letâs get to know your new friend.
So Youâve Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire is a game about a regular (or not) person meeting an ancient, dangerous, intriguing being. This vampire may be driven by hunger, love, art, anger, despair, fear, the need to fill its years with meaning, or none of the above. Thatâs where you fit in. But how you fit, exactly, is what can only be learned through play.Â
The vampire will tell stories, reveal secrets intentionally or not, and interact with you and your circle of acquaintances. The vampire may manipulate your character, acting out the complicated games it has mastered over its long unlife; it may be hungry and cruel; or maybe it is just lonely and needing a friend. All of this is driven by rich Prompts and simple rules that create a vampire with a will, hidden agendas, and other surprises. And you can play this game again and again, getting wildly different stories each time.
That's it. That's the game. And it's a good game, I promise. If you enjoyed Thousand Year Old Vampire, you'll enjoy this self-contained sequel.
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That text in the sample spread isn't final, so please don't squint at it too hard. Please do notice that this new book exists in a visual conversation with the previous game bookâthe illustration in the lower left is the next âframeâ of an illustration from Thousand Year Old Vampire and the âhow to roll diceâ section is borrowed from the original rules.
So You've Met A Thousand Year Old Vampire (SYMA) is the direct sequel to Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV), an award-winning solo game of memory, loss, and vampires. By backing this project, you will receive the following.
⢠A 600+ page hardback book that will match Thousand Year Old Vampire in appearance and quality
⢠Familiar-yet-different rules which support Prompt-driven play
⢠Hundreds of pages of collages to inspire and challenge your answers to Prompts
⢠Suggestions for multiplayer play
There are no stretch goals promising higher-quality printing or additional game mechanics. The book I am giving you is the best possible version of what it wants to be. It will be an artifact of disquiet and deceitâequally at home on your bedside table or mixed into the bookshelves of an inattentive antiquarian.
Backers can also choose to receive an optional journal that matches the style of both SYMA and TYOV except that it will be more ink-friendly than the pearlescent pages of the rule books. The pages of this journal will be lightly populated with words and images that may or may not influence what you write in it. (You do not need the journal to play the game.)Â
There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of collages to help you get over the 'blank page' problem. Don't know how to begin to answer a Prompt? Flip to a couple of random collages and isolate an element from eachâuse that unlikely combination to power your reply to the Prompt. It's great.
So You've Met Thousand Year Old Vampire is a totally self-contained game. You do not need to own or even be familiar with the Thousand Year Old Vampire game in order to play.
Prompts Power the Game
You play the game by answering a series of semi-random Prompts. Through your answers, you learn about the characters and the world. The Prompts quickly layer and complicate the emerging narrative. You will be surprised and upset by what happens.
Collages Come to Your Rescue
Stumped on how to answer a Prompt? Too many possibilities or none at all? Or are you just lacking inspiration? The book includes hundreds of pages of handmade collages designed to inspire and complicate your Prompt responses. Just flip to a collage, focus on a few specific elements, and your Prompt response will emerge from the sepulcher with eerie alacrity.
The Death Die and the Coffin
At the beginning of play you will roll a ten-sided die and hide it from your sight in a âcoffinâ. (I usually hide mine under a tea cup.) This Death Die shows the number that will determine whether your character lives or dies. Your character will slowly accrue Skulls over the course of play as the Vampire grows hungry or suspicious. When a Prompt instructs you to Check the Coffin, you uncover the hidden die and compare it to your number of Skullsâif the number on the die is lower than your total Skulls, then your game is about to end.
Variable Rules-iness
The game is not complicated. By following the bookâs simple instructions, even someone unfamiliar with role-playing games should be playing almost immediately. The rules allow different levels of buy-in to constraints around answering Prompts, complicating your Death Die outcomes, and using other simple systems to challenge yourselfâor not. Maybe you just want a writing exercise? The rules can scale down to support that.
Not Just Vampires
One of the great secrets of this game is that your mysterious new friend doesn't have to be a vampire. The richest, most wonderful games come about when you, the player, let the narrative find its own way. Your new friend might just be an unpleasant, manipulative, very energetic liar, and that's okay. But maybe your new friend is also a vampireâyou, the player, have control over that.Â
Scenario Play
The Worm is an optional new kind of tool for SYMA (and Thousand Year Old Vampire). It complicates your play with call-backs, surprising associations between Prompts, and predetermined narrative events. Even better, a Worm can be used to play out specific scenarios. You want to play Dust Bowl-era refugees heading for California with a hungry vampire in their caravan? I got a Worm for that.
Worms can be abstract, tying together disparate pieces of the narrative, or they can be pre-written to provide specific settings and experiences. I'll tell you more about Worms later.Â
This is emotional, tense play
One of my early playtests of the game followed the life of a naive member of the Victorian British aristocracy. She was quite taken with a mysterious stranger who became a guest in her household. This friend of her father's was brought from the Middle East, and his status was uncertainâwas he a guest? A business partner? A suitor? Even the father seemed muddled about it.
The glory of this playtest, the tense awful majesty of it, was that the young woman at no point suspected the vampire was anything dangerous. She weathered several Check the Coffins and never had a clue that she was in peril. I could watch the vampire manipulate her to its own ends, and I could feel the doom creeping on her as she became less useful to the vampire.
It was a fantastic, upsetting experience that I hope I never forget, and it came out of the application of the rulesâthe uncertainty of the dice, the surprise of a narrative that emerges when you let go of your preconceptions.
When I say the collages are hand-made, I mean I literally made them with my hands and scissors and glue and a vast amount of material I collected specifically to dismember for this book. Nothing in the collages is digital. (Well, actually there might turn out to be some digital fixes in case something slipped by me and needs to be removed.)
Every piece of stuff in every collage had a whole life before I pinned it in on the page in the manner of a butterfly collector. Every cut in every page was made by me or by the hand of some previous owner, probably long dead.
All that stuff in the collage above is "real"âold newspapers, photographic prints, that drawing on the left. I have chopped up around a hundred books for text, some of them precious and old and hand-annotated. I have destroyed dozens of handwritten journals, scrapbooks, photo albums, and sketchbooks.
There are personal things I've worked into the collages. Family photos and documents, gifts from friends, mementos, and traces left by the dead. The collage above includes photocopies I've had since I was in college and, I think, some text cut from a great-grandfather's English primer.Â
The rules guiding my collage-making include the following:
Every element in the collages is real. The source objects are original documents, photos, plants, bugs, whateverâno reproductions unless those reproductions are themselves old things.
The source objects were unwanted by other people. They were abandoned or bought cheap. Some things were deaccessioned by museums and bound for the trash can. These are unwanted things, easily victimized by a vampire.
Intentional marks, stains, and simulations of age are not allowed.Â
Cuts added while making the collage must be simple. Any complicated cuts are original, preceding my acquisition of the collage element.
Children should not appear in the collages.
A wide range of cultures are included in the collages.Â
Collage elements must not tell a story through their arrangement.Â
Text snippets from the same source should not be placed adjacent to each other. Texts using the same font in the same size should not be placed adjacent to each other.
The collages are not presented in any particular order.Â
Why adopt these limitations? Because the creation of the collages echoes the methods of vampires. They consume histories, people, personalities. They end things. That's what I made myself do while making these collages. When I cut into my first handwritten journal from the 1800s, I thought "Holy shit, I'll never forget how gross I feel at this moment." But I absolutely forgot because the corpse-pile was gigantic by the time I was done.Â
My name is Tim Hutchings, and I made this game. And by that I mean I wrote the rules, I'm doing the layout, and I'll be sending money to the printer. This is a choice. Other folks contributed additional Prompts, playtesters generously shared their time, skilled technicians will produce the actual book, Backerkit employees lured you here with ad placement tricks, Andy Action will put it in a box and ship it to you...
But this is my game. It's me in a way that a lot of fancy looking games aren't their makers. Just about every choice is mine, and there is no one who can tell me no. So, if the game is fucked up, that's me, too.
I used to travel the world and show artworks in fancy galleries, and rich people would (not often enough) buy things I made. I fell out of that world for lots of reasons, but the big thing was games: games can do things that film and words and things on walls can't. Games do a lot of things better.
But I'm still saddled with the critical tools and needs developed over decades thinking about the stuff artists think about. I mean, just look at the ridiculous limitations I laid on myself with the collages as described above. That wasn't a TENTH of it, either. No shit.
My game Thousand Year Old Vampire won three Ennie awards, the IndieCade Tabletop Award, and was called "one of the most critically acclaimed solo journaling games ever made" by Polygon. My other games have won Indie Groundbreaker awards, a The Awards award, and a North American Book Prize, and they have been featured in museums and art galleries.
This game is part of all thatâartfulness and experimentation and fun.
Finally
Games are important. Games are powerful. Games can be ugly, and that's good. This game can be ugly.Â
All shipping fees will be charged after the campaign is ended, during pledge management.
Here are estimated shipping costs for a single book, in USD:
⢠$11 USA
⢠$17 CANADA
⢠$28 UK/EU
⢠$32 AU/NZ/Norway/Ireland/Sweden
(If your country is not on the list then you can buy the book later directly from my website or from a distributor closer to you.)
I expect to have European and Australian fulfillment partners, which should reduce those costs. I believe fulfilling through an EU partner will fix VAT for some of you, but I cannot yet vouch for it.Â
If shipping turns out to be too much for you, then I will happily refund your money and direct you to someone in your country who handles my games.
Timeline
I expect to be shipping the books in early 2025.
Risks and Challenges
I've been printing books for several years now. I've been training myself to be less perfection-insistent when it comes to printing books and that, ironically, makes for a tiny bit more risk. I'll also be working with a new printer, so there'll be a bit of a risk there.
I'm printing in the USA, so I hope that global pandemic and things will interfere little with the delivery of the books.Â
