Dimension 20, Dropout‘s actual-play series, has used a few different tabletop RPG systems across its 27 campaigns. The show uses Dungeons & Dragons (5th edition) most often, but it has also experimented with Kids on Bikes, Kids on Brooms, Dropout’s own Never Stop Blowing Up homebrew system, and Good Society. However, those were all for “side quests,” or shorter campaigns that don’t feature the main cast. The only time the series’ main cast (GM Brennan Lee Mulligan and players Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson, collectively known as the “intrepid heroes”) has used anything other than Dungeons & Dragons was for the sixth main campaign, 2022’s A Starstruck Odyssey—and even that used SW5E, an unofficial Star Wars system that’s still based on D&D5E. So it’s kind of a huge deal that Dimension 20‘s next mainline campaign, City Council of Darkness, is branching out into something completely different: our intrepid heroes are finally playing Vampire: The Masquerade.
I say “finally” not because this is something for which the fanbase has been waiting with bated breath—which is almost certainly not the case, given the number of people in the Dimension 20 subreddit who were unfamiliar with Vampire: The Masquerade when Dropout announced City Council of Darkness last week—but because I am inordinately excited for this season.
I’ve played a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade games over the years, including Coteries Of New York, Shadows Of New York, Night Road, and Parliament Of Knives. (No, I did not play Bloodlines 2, and no, I do not want to talk about it.) But there’s just one problem: all the Vampire: The Masquerade games I’ve played are visual novels or interactive fiction. They’re offshoots of the original TTRPG. I’ve never actually played a tabletop game of Vampire: The Masquerade.
Part of this has to do with the difficulty of branching out from D&D in general; it’s hard enough to get a group together that can sit down and play a tabletop game for several hours at a time on a semi-regular basis, so when you finally do, it’s often easier to jump right in with the system which the most people are likely to already have some knowledge of—and that’s Dungeons & Dragons, 100 percent of the time. When I coax a bunch of people into going on a magical roleplaying adventure with me for an indeterminate but almost certainly quite long period of time, am I really going to roll the dice and try to convince them to learn a whole new system that they (and, let’s be honest, I) might hate? Nope. I’m going to do the easy and familiar thing that’s less likely to fall apart instead. So even though I’ve become invested in the lore of Vampire: The Masquerade and the larger World of Darkness series of games (which includes titles like Hunter: The Reckoning and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, among several others) of which it is part, I’ve never had the quintessential VTM TTRPG experience.
That’s why I’m so excited for City Council of Darkness: I’ll finally be able to get a sense of what it’s like to play Vampire: The Masquerade as a tabletop game, even if it’s only vicariously. And yes, there are plenty of other VTM actual play shows out there I could have sought out by now (L.A. By Night and New York By Night are, as far as I can tell, fairly well-regarded), but Dimension 20‘s secret sauce is that it’s fully edited, produced, and presented in roughly 2-hour episodes. It’s not a seemingly endless livestream that I struggle to finish, like most other actual plays. Dimension 20 hits just right for me in a way that other actual plays don’t. And now that I’ll have a better idea of what playing the tabletop version of Vampire: The Masquerade is actually like thanks to City Council of Darkness, maybe I’ll feel more confident about trying to rope my friends into playing it with me, too. Or maybe I’ll end up hating it and never wanting to play it at all. Either way, at least I’ll know.
City Council of Darkness premieres April 8 on Dropout. Why they didn’t save it until the more thematically appropriate month of October, I cannot tell you, but I’m also not about to complain if it means we get to see what our intrepid heroes do when they live by night a little sooner.
