Tuesday, July 19, 2011

A second life for a Requiem

Well. Three years and a half later, the prospect of a game which spawned this blog died in the end, for a variety of reasons that I honestly cannot remember precisely right now. It really doesn't matter at this point.

What does matter to this blog is that I came back to the idea of a Nocte Roma, or "Rome by Night," for Vampire: the Masquerade, some time ago. A few friends and I got back together online after some downtime. After various discussions, we decided it would be great for us to collaborate on a project together. We decided a "by Night" setting for the Masquerade, especially with the 20th anniversary edition just around the corner, would be great for us to work on. What I did not expect, is that the first idea that would pop up in our brainstorm sessions would be to design Rome during the reign of Nero (in 62 AD or two years before the Great Fire).

Not exactly the same time period, nor the same game for that matter, but this is interesting because this directly brings me back to this blog in an attempt to bring it back from the dead.

Let me explain.

I do not intend for this Nocte Roma I am talking about to be some sort of carbon copy of Requiem for Rome, far from it. That'd be pointless, and a waste of time for everyone involved, authors and readers alike. The parallels are bound to come up, however, especially since I read both RfR and the Fall of the Camarilla since the first few posts of this blog.

There is bound to be some sort of cross-pollination between the two, in other words.

Is that a bad thing ? Well... if it is going to happen, it'd better not be. By which I mean that I might as well embrace the process. Avoiding carbon copies, copyright infringement and the other pitfalls that instantly come to mind, I can use this opportunity, working on Nocte Roma, to come back to my Requiem for Rome set in the 4th century AD as well, and create some kind of synergy between the two settings. No, I do not mean that the two settings or the two games, Requiem and Masquerade, will somehow become compatible or coexist within the same World of Darkness timeline. That would be a bad idea, and would just end up wrecking both games.

What I do mean, however, is that both versions could explore different time periods and different approaches to the idea of role playing vampires in an ancient Roman setting. If my Requiem for Rome and the Nocte Roma are sufficiently differenciated from each other and provide different types of pleasures at a game table while exploiting the specificities of the games they are each using separately, then this might become interesting for the readers of this blog, for my gaming and, more broadly, for my creative impulses going forward.

Interesting experiment. And a good opportunity. So I'm going to take it, and bring this blog back to life to be able to share the experience as it occurs. I hope you will stick around and enjoy the ride from your side of the screen.

Cheers for now. -Ben