Vampires, Cocaine, Michael Jackson and AIDS
I think we've probably always known that Madonna is a vampire.
Vampires are, by their very nature, a decadent lot, unconcerned with quaint mortal morality and generally focused on their own sanguine pleasures. So what happens when you throw the Kindred into the most decadent era of the 20th century? A bloody good time!
The new World of Darkness doesn’t enjoy (or suffer from, depending on your point of view) the deluge of sourcebooks that the old version did. Instead of describing countless real-world cities, the neo-WoD sourcebooks are intended to illuminate some crucial aspect of life in a world filled with supernatural horrors. In the case of New Wave Requiem, the subject is a historical era: the 1980s.
Treating the 80s as a historical subject is an interesting tactic by itself, but mixing the excesses and glossy brutality of that decade with the presence of vampires is, frankly, brilliant. There are so many hooks upon which to hang an adventure or a campaign. You’ve got the amoral yuppie businessmen talking on their giant brick phones about mergers and acquisitions (murders and executions?) while snorting coke from the skin of delirious hookers. Who is worse, the vampires or the humans? You’ve got the age-old conflict between ancient Kindred and their newly embraced cousins, but now the conflict is magnified 1,000 times. Some vampires still live in crypts or mouldering manors, while others are writing computer programs and investing in IBM.
Then there’s AIDS. New Wave Requiem addresses the disease head-on – although it does not physically affect vampires, they can carry it and pass it on to their human victims, including their willing “blood dolls.” An infected party girl can tear apart a vampire’s entire retinue of mortal followers. The social stigma adds another layer of drama; remember, this was an era when AIDS was thought to primarily be a homosexual disease. As if things weren’t bad enough, the Kindred have their own AIDS-like epidemic to deal with, a mystical pestilence known as Malkavia.
This book gives players and storytellers a nice overview of the 80s (or the World of Darkness idea of the 80s). The various clans’ reactions and motivations during this period are included, along with tips for playing out the primary themes of the Me Decade. There’s a complete adventure set in 1983 Chicago, a bunch of NPCs, and a couple of crunchy rules, such as a way for vamps to mentally read information directly from computer disks or video tapes.
You can head over to DriveThruRPG to pick up a fully bookmarked pdf copy of New Wave Requiem, complete with a character sheet and a grey-scale version suitable for cheap printing.
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March 7th, 2009 5:03 PM
Got my copy and been browsing it through. As a person who hasn’t played or doesn’t own any other Requiem books but who played a lot of Masquerade stuff back in the day, I must say the book is great. It focuses on the era and thus is quite rules-light. The visual style of the book is just as cheesy as you should expect from an 80s-centric product. Also, good material for a decades-spanning modern days campaign I’ve been planning to run next summer.
Would be nice to see an old-school full city book done to the 80s style, not just a slight “these might be nice ideas”.