A Taste of Tabletop Roleplaying Games about Vampires
Spooky season blog entry part 3! This time it is all about vampires…
I’ve always liked vampires in fiction; I think I’d already watched the 1992 Dracula movie and read Bram Stoker’s novel as a tween. And while I do see how unwatchable it is nowadays, I do admit to liking Twilight in my teenage years. My favourite vampire media now mostly includes Interview with the Vampire (1976 book and 2022 series), as well as What We Do In The Shadows (2014 movie and 2019 series).
Vampire stories explore fascinating tropes and themes! Eternal (un)life and exploring what that means for those involved. Monsters hidden behind a thin veneer of civility. Predator–prey relationships as mirrors of social hierarchies. Alienation and loneliness.
This post offers a glimpse into tabletop roleplaying games with vampires at their centre, but it’s only a sip, not the whole feast. There are many more great games out there and I encourage you to go look for the one that fits your table.
Paint the Town Red
Game Designer: Zachary Cox
Publisher: SoulMuppet Publishing
Publication Year: 2025
Pages: 242
Mechanics: 2d6 + stats, traits
Genre: Horror, History
Content Warnings: blood, depression, gore, grief, memory loss, murder, sex, trauma, violence
This has been catapulted to my favourite RPGs as soon as I've read it. I'm currently just one session into running it, but seldom has a game clicked for me as much as this.
Players play a group of sad, possibly gay, vampires that have been moping around in their misery the past decades/centuries. But now it's time to do something. It’s time to party and let out the disaster that you are. It’s time to fuck shit up.
Vampirism in this game is a metaphor for depression, trauma and queerness; the gameplay loop intended to culminate in the realization that to truly be yourself, to be happy, is to topple the conservative hegemony. Fun!
The mechanics are pretty straightforward with 3 base skills to roll with (Savagery, Allure, Duplicity), two stats to keep track of how your vampire feels (Pulse and Chaos) and combat moves like “Eat Some Fucker Alive” or “Get the Shit Beaten Out of You” (among others).
As the GM, your prep mostly consists of NPCs, Factions and a handful of locations, as well as research about the time and place you're playing in. The book already includes three loosely interconnected settings with all of this work done for you.
The default way to play it is around four sessions per city until you fuck shit up too much, figure out what happens in between, repeat. The length per city is adjustable, but 4 sessions seem like a good spot. I especially like that you can end the campaign any time between cities - and just play as long as you feel like it.
Thousand Year Old Vampire
Game Designer: Tim Hutchings
Publisher: Petit Guignol LLC
Publication Year: 2018
Pages: 155
Mechanics: GMless prompts, journalling, simple dice mechanics
Genre: Horror, History
Content Warnings: blood, depression, gore, grief, memory loss, murder, sex, trauma, violence
You might have noticed the overlap of genre and content warnings to the previous game; this is because Paint the Town Red matches the feel of Thousand Year Old Vampire pretty closely and Paint the Town Red even includes advice how to use it in concert with Thousand Year Old Vampire.
I have done three playthroughs of Thousand Year Old Vampire on my own, as well as one with friends, according to the advice given on playing it as a group. While group play certainly is fun, the true experience is to play this alone; being alone is basically a part of the game.
It’s a journalling game that can also be played with just a sentence per prompt. There are around 80 prompt pages and you move on average 2 pages per dice roll, so a game can be played within a few hours.
The prompts are amazing. Each page has three of them, so if you land on a page repeatedly, they build on each other. Since it’s not that often, that you land on a page three times, these can become pretty wild and make each playthrough unique. Some even more so than others.
Beyond the little rules section in the beginning and the default prompts, there’s also a whole lot of alternate prompts if you want to see something new. They are not as refined as the default game, but they can also be bolder and/or play with the mechanics of the game a bit more. Afterwards you’ll also find some random number tables (in case you don’t have any dice on hand), a safety tool for solo play, an interview with the designer, suggestions for group play and an example of play.
This will definitely be a game that I will return to from time to time, either as part of another game (it can really be played in any setting) or just for the fun of it in itself.
Eat the Reich
Game Designer: Grant Howitt
Publisher: Rowan, Rook & Decard
Publication Year: 2023
Pages: 76
Mechanics: stats, d6 dice pools
Genre: Action, Horror, War
Content Warnings: blood, death, fascism, gore, grievous injury to player characters, guns, mental domination, Nazis, over-the-top violence
You get coffin-dropped over Paris, turned into mush on impact, get revived by nun’s blood (the good stuff!) and are then let loose in Paris with one goal: drink the blood of Adolf Hitler and kill as many Nazis on your way to his Zeppelin.
Characters are premade and amazingly designed and illustrated. While there are rules about making your own characters, the game really is made to be run with a selection of those six premades.
There are a lot of different locations and players can choose their way through Paris; meeting various enemies on their way to the Eiffel Tower. Eat the Reich can be played over a few sessions by exploring large parts of the city, but I personally prefer to keep it short and simple in a single session of a handful of locations.
The game also has a brilliant section about how to make players feel safe playing a game with Nazis and extreme violence, the game's ethical stance and how to portray the topic with care; something every GM should take to heart while running this game. The goal is to make it a cathartic experience, not a grim one.
Mechanically, you roll dice pools that get modified by various factors. Characters have abilities that are activated with Blood (which is gained on good rolls) and can get more Abilities with Advances during play.
Visually, it's one of the most beautiful books I own. Each page is fully illustrated and they went all out with details like the pink edges and glow-in-the-dark splatters on the cover.
Curse of Strahd
Game Designers: Jeremy Crawford, Tracy Hickman, Laura Hickman, Adam Lee, Christopher Perkins, Richard Whitters
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Publication Year: 2016 (Original I6: Ravenloft by Tracy and Laura Hickman released in 1983)
Pages: 224 (Revamped Edition)
Mechanics: D&D 5e (but also goes back to 1e) (needs the core book)
Genre: High Fantasy, Gothic Horror
Content Warnings: abusive relationships, alcohol, blood, body horror, coercive relationships, forced marriage, gaslighting, gore, harm to children (including murder), hopelessness, loss of agency, loss of bodily autonomy, similarities to real-world religion, stalking, torture
Last but not least, the classic vampire adventure from D&D. I’ve run the campaign, as well as a Ravenloft campaign up to level 20. I’ve read everything this edition has to offer for it, as well as a few books and novels from older editions. I’d go so far as to say that there was a time in my life where I lived and breathed this setting.
You find yourself stranded in a strange land you’ve never heard about and in order to get out, you’ll need to vanquish its ruler. In my eyes it’s one of the strongest official modules and while you can adjust a lot of it, it’s also decent just straight from the book. One of its strongest aspects is the constant threat of Strahd and how he can show up at any point of the game - something many published modules sorely lack. It’s harder to include backstories of players than in other modules due to the setting’s isolation, so I would recommend giving that special thought when preparing to run it.
I struggled portraying Strahd from time to time; as GM you spend considerable time thinking about how to be a raging asshole. Some GMs portray him as redeemable, lovable even. My Strahd definitely tried to look that part. But in the end he is a manipulative, narcissistic asshole who abuses his powers to get what (or who) he wants. Seeing the patriarchal asshole that Strahd is being killed definitely has something cathartic in it.
Disclaimer: Some of the text is, even in the newest version, dated. There are some harmful stereotypes in there that might need adjustment for your table.
Other Games
If that has whet your appetite, you’ll find some more games below!
- Mythic Carpathia, a supplement for the Vaesen RPG, which introduces an adventure centered around a vampire (I loved running that!), several vampiric monsters and the Vampire Hunter as a playable option (and much more).
- Night’s Black Agents, a spy thriller RPG where players step into the shoes of ex spies who recently learned that there is a vampire conspiracy.
- Monsterhearts, a game about teenage monsters in high school, with all the angst and secret love triangles you’ll ever need.
- Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants, a Forged in the Dark game about building the rebellion that will topple the vampiric tyrants that rule over the land.
- Blood Lords, an Adventure Path for Pathfinder Second Edition that features a city of undead. While vampires aren’t exactly central to the story, they could definitely be played here without issue.
- Vampire: The Masquerade, a game of power and politics among immortal clans, of monsters hiding behind masks in a grand, ancient conspiracy.