It gives me great pleasure to welcome Adrien Party to TMtV, we’ve been online friends for at least a dozen years through our shared love of the vampire genre and Adrien is both behind the French site Vampirisme and the author of the acclaimed volume Vampirologie. Adrien has written a guest blog about the game Thousand Year Old Vampire, which is a game I too have played and enjoyed.
Since Ravenloft was published in 1983, vampires have always been an important part of the roleplaying industry. In 1991, Vampire: the Masquerade pushed for another evolution, and opened the way for players who wanted to play such characters. In 2012, Nights Black Agent provided a game without fixed world or vampire characteristics, leaving its entire creation in the hands of the gamemaster.
Thousand Year Old Vampire (2019) seems to be a new extension of this genealogy. Here, the player embodies a vampire through its entire lifespan. The vampire characteristics start with its social contact, resources and skills, with these constantly evolving as the game progresses. But the most important part of the character’s journey relies on its memories, and the event he’s confronted with. Contrary to classical multiplayer roleplaying games, Thousand Year Old Vampire is in fact a solo-RPG, a game where the player is also the gamemaster. If there are dice rolls during game, those are only used to help the player progress in their own history. The main part of the game is constituted by numerically ordered prompts that set the basis for events the vampire is confronted to: meeting new immortals, losing links with mortals, enduring the passage of time. The dice roll guides the player to move forward or backward in the prompt list. Each prompt number provides at least three possible starts, in case the dice roll leads the player to read again an already used prompt number. And here come the main work for the player: it’s up to them, drawing with current resources, connections and skills, to decide how the drafted event proposed by the prompt is lived by their character… and write it. The main part of the game pushes the player to write their character experiences, with a limit: a vampire being an immortal within a mortal envelope, he’s unable to retain memories from everything he has lived. He must then choose to forget things from time to time, in order to make room for new experiences. The only way to keep those lost memories is to add them in a journal (an object the vampire can own in the game), also with some limitations.
Thousand Year Old Vampire is an impressive game for vampire lovers that enjoy writing. The system imagined by Tim Hutchins perfectly succeeds in conveying the idea of the vampire solitude, and the difficulty he has to live for centuries. Experiences stay, but their roots in the vampire’s own existence is often lost from memories. This game is also a fascinating tool to explore history, with countries, political regime and science never stop changing. For example, you can start your existence as a vampire in Antiquity and die during Cold War. For all these reasons, it’s also a game that requires commitment. Because as already stated, the main part of the game is based on the player writing a lifespan history for their vampire character. Some will take more pleasure in writing small and short sentence, others will enjoy writing huge paragraphs to describe with many details what happens.
If the examples given in the game are classical, Dracula-type, there are no obligations in being faithful to a particular sort of vampire. There’s an Anne Rice vibe, with the idea of recording your memories through a journal, but there’s no restriction to play psychical vampire, alien vampires or other vampire types. The book provides a definition of what is a vampire but at the same time explains it’s up to the player to define the vampiric traits of his character. Your vampire will bear marks of its condition, but where are those marks is up to you.
The book in itself is magnificent. It’s a hardcover book, with two ribbon bookmarks, and an old diary or strange book flavour. The layout is amazing, and there are plenty of illustrations in there to dive into the system and get inspirations.
Among all the independent roleplaying game that have been published through the years, Thousand Year Old Vampire must, without any doubt, be set apart. It can be used as a basic way to entertain yourself but can also help you write vampire fiction, and testing ideas.
Biography: In 2006, after traveling to Transylvania in search of the historical Dracula and his fictional counterpart, Adrien Party founded Vampirisme,com, a webzine devoted exclusively to vampires. He also served as president of the Lyon Beefsteak Club, a non-profit organization dedicated to vampire-themed events, whose highlight was the Salon du Vampire (four editions held between 2010 and 2016).
After five years of research and writing, he published Vampirologie with ActuSF Editions in 2022. The book won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (Best Non-Fiction/Essay category) in 2023. A revised paperback version of Vampirologie was published at the end of 2024. Vampirologie explores the vampire as a fiction character, through books, movies, tv shows, RPGs, video games, etc. The main idea is to underline the connections between different media and to show how authors and creators use the vampire metaphor to translate the anxieties of their time. The book also includes many interviews with authors and specialists such as Anne Rice, Mark Gatiss and Dacre Stoker.
In 2025, Adrien Party published his second book, Stoker et Dracula: La fabrique d'une Légende with Nouvelles Éditions ActuSF. This second book is an exploration of the writing of Dracula, dealing with publishing history, themes, Stoker's biography and bibliography, etc.
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