The last time I played Vampire: The Masquerade was back in 2021 for a one-shot. I hoped this one-shot would develop into a longer campaign, but our group dissolved due to conflicting schedules. A few weeks ago, I was alerted in our Dungeons & Dragons Discord that Bad Wolf Adventure Studios was running a Vampire one-shot on Friday night. I immediately signed up because Vampire has to be one of my favorite TTRPG systems I have played. I’m happy I signed up because it was an entertaining one-shot from start to finish.

The DM running our Vampire session was the same DM who ran the Curse of Strahd campaign I was in, so it felt like a mini-reunion. To prepare for the session, our DM had pre-generated characters to pick from. I liked this a lot because it had been a while since I created a character from scratch, so having readily available options worked quite well for me. Whenever I play Vampire, I usually pick the Toreador or Ventrue clans. I wanted to choose something different and picked Tremere. Tremere is the Blood Witch clan who experiments with Blood Magic. While there wasn’t much time to experiment with all of my character’s abilities, I liked playing Tremere as a clan.

Our session had five players in total with three of us having prior experience in Vampire with the other two players being new to the system. Our group worked well even though we had never played a game together. One of the newer players straight-up tried to use her vampiric abilities to intimidate one of the guards. I was here for it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, but it was cool to see them dive into the game so quickly. One of the vampires we encountered tried to use a power called Dominate on my character which compels someone to obey. This worked, however, I retaliated and used Cloud Memory, so the Vampire didn’t remember anything I told her under Dominate. Our players were rolling well throughout the session which doesn’t always happen in Vampire. After the session ended, it seemed like everyone had a good time.

This was so much fun and I’m happy I signed up for the session. I hope Bad Wolf will offer a longer-term Vampire campaign or more one-shots of other systems in the future.