Vampire: The Masquerade

Vampire: The Masquerade

Vampire: The Masquerade (Revised Edition) cover
Designer(s)	Mark Rein-Hagen, Graeme Davis, Tom Dowd, Lisa Stevens, Stewart Wieck
Publisher(s)	White Wolf Publishing, Onyx Path Publishing, By Night Studios
Publication date	1991 (1st edition) 1992 (2nd edition) 1998 (Revised edition) 2011 (20th Anniversary)
Genre(s)	Personal horror
System(s)	Storyteller System

Vampire: The Masquerade is a tabletop role-playing game (tabletop RPG) created by Mark Rein-Hagen and released in 1991 by White Wolf Publishing as the first of several Storyteller System games for its World of Darkness setting line. It's set in a fictionalized "gothic-punk" version of the modern world, where players assume the roles of vampires, who are referred to as "Kindred", and deal with their night-to-night struggles against their own bestial natures, vampire hunters and each other.

Several associated products were produced based on Vampire: The Masquerade, including live-action role-playing games (Mind's Eye Theatre), dice, collectible card games (Vampire: The Eternal Struggle), video games (Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines), and numerous novels. In 1996, a short-lived television show loosely based on the game, Kindred: The Embraced, was produced by Aaron Spelling for the Fox Broadcasting Company.

Vampire was inspired by RPGs such as Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, as well as the writings of Joseph Campbell and vampire movies such as The Lost Boys. Rein-Hagen felt that hunting vampires, as a game premise, would get boring so he came up with the idea of a game where the players played vampires instead of hunting them. Rein-Hagen specifically stated that he purposefully didn't read Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles until "very late" in the development process but admitted she was probably an influence on the vampire films that inspired the game. He wanted to go beyond what Anne Rice had done by creating individual vampires, with a whole secret vampire society and culture.