While it initially seems like a bit of a letdown for the novel to not have VTM terminology (I had to look up terms in the online glossary quite a lot), there is one big advantage to being separated from the World of Darkness. For example, Merovingians are basically Ventrue. It’s pretty easy to map them back to VTM clans too. If you are curious, they include the shapeshifting Balkanics, the future-seeing Aznuits, the blood-controlling Neshmaals, and the mesmerizing Merovingians. And the four possible clans that you can play are also previously unknown. There is also a Masquerade, but its called the Brume. You are a Regent, which is basically a Prince of a city. What Newberry and Zaper did instead was to create their own version of the World of Darkness, only without any of the names or terminology that we have come to expect. So you won’t find any Ventrue, Nosferatu or Toreadors running around. The other thing that is really surprising is that the authors clearly did not have the VTM license. That is a really nice touch actually, because it means that the story is not linear, other than a few key scenarios along the way that advance the main plot. The actual events are randomly presented from a fairly large pool, so you probably wont experience them all on a single play through. It works by letting the player choose what activity they want to participate in every night, from playing poker with other vampires to heading out to a nightclub to try and find some special company and a dinner. And unlike every single other game like this that I have played, The Vampire Regent features randomized encounters, so every playthrough of the game is different. It’s written by Morton Newberry and Lucas Zaper, and they did a really good job of weaving together a coherent and interesting story. The Vampire Regent is a text adventure novel with 460,000 words of total content. So, there are a lot of great choices, which is why I was so excited to find The Vampire Regent on Steam. There have even been titles like Our for Blood which involved vampires, but which did not have us playing an undead. These include the beautiful graphic novels Coteries of New York and Shadows of New York, and fully text adventure games like the (best of the bunch in my opinion) Night Road interactive novel. But there have been many others over the past year or so. The most recent one I reviewed was Parliament of Knives, which delved heavily into vampire politics of the most well-known vampire world, Vampire the Masquerade’s World of Darkness.
Thankfully, there are quite a few vampire-themed adventures, graphic novels and story-based adventures for us to enjoy in the meantime. Yes, we are all still waiting for Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2, and it seems like we might be waiting for a while.
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