It is amazing to see some of the quality and ingenuity coming out of the indie roleplaying game community these days. Innovative ideas are bankrolled by crowdfunding campaigns and turned into beautiful books, games, and miniatures. Some of these efforts are truly unique and inspired.
Such is the case with Tim Hutchings' Thousand Year Old Vampire. Just as a piece of book art, this $45 book is something to behold ($10 PDFs are also available). It is absolutely gorgeous.
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a solo roleplaying game. It is basically an exercise in dreaming up a vampire character and then imagining and journaling their transition from mortal to immortal, their likely long, ugly, and undead existence, and their inevitable demise.
This is a very rules-light game. The skills your character uses? I spent several minutes trying to find the Skills list in the book. There isn't one. You make up the skills your vampire possess. And what resources they have. And who their friends are. And who the immortal is who turned them. You even get to dream up your vampire's Mark which is something that betrays their true nature (a wound that never heals, glowing red eyes, a nimbus of gloom that surrounds their head, etc.) that must be concealed from mortals.
The main engine of the game is a series of Prompts that you have to resolve. You navigate these by rolling dice (1d10 and 1d6) to see which prompt you have to resolve. There are three prompts on each page of the Prompts section. Read the rest
