Atop this food chain is the city’s Prince, supported by a council known as the Primogen at the bottom are “thin-bloods,” whose weak powers are the supposed result of their generational remove from the First Vampire, Caine. Most Kindred follow the Masquerade, a survival protocol maintained by the ruling Camarilla faction to stay hidden from mortals humans are usually livestock or slaves, and in-game documents highlight the Camarilla’s pragmatic interests in environmentalism for the sake of their prey’s health. Swansong takes place in the World of Darkness RPG universe, where vampires (“Kindred”) juggle soap opera-scale power grabs, mind games, and existential crises. It seems that the relative isolation and sobering reality of the pandemic have created an itch for the dramatic frivolity that fueled my high school afternoons. There’s no combat, so everything boils down to conversational dominance and manipulation. Nineteen hours later, it turns out that baby’s first Vampire game was a gleeful return to all of the good stuff I didn’t know I missed: courtly intrigue, indulgent posturing, and coldblooded betrayal, but this time, with fangs. I spent my first few hours slowly poring over the in-game codex and staring blankly at my character sheets. Upon booting up Swansong, I had no idea what to expect. But it’s a post-Twilight world now (sorry, Anne Rice), and the idea of the undead secretly living among us is a common fictional conceit.
When the first Vampire tabletop RPG was released in 1991, it stood out in a genre where vampires were usually monsters to be killed. I didn’t realize there was a Passions-shaped hole in my adult life until last week, when I played my first Vampire: The Masquerade game: Swansong. Passions became a daily mainline to a hotter, more fantastical world, and it was awesome. Our febrile minds projected cartoonish power fantasies and petty grievances onto its absurd archetypes - the rebel, the dark horse, the struggling parent. Beyond the basic soap opera premise of rival families getting messy, the iconic series had everything for a restless teen: suspense, melodrama, shamelessly imaginative comedy, awful sex, and campy supernatural storylines (including witches and warlocks - it was, after all, set in New England).
In senior year at my strict religious boarding school, watching Passions was an afternoon ritual.
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