Pages

It's up to you, New York

The cousins Mangano continue to try to get used to the idea of being vampire gangsters in 1920s New York City ...

Anybody who is anybody will soon walk through that door

It's 1922 and the Mangano crime family are keeping their part of New York, uh, safe? Going about their daily lives, three cousins run a speakeasy and a gambling den, things like that. One day they're told they're going to be Made Men (and Woman), and have the ceremony with lots of booze ... and the next thing they know they black out, and when they wake up they're in pools of blood and lack a pulse.

Huh.

It didn't go so well for little Lottie, whose mind was somewhat ... fractured in the process. At least her sire brought her a snack. Val discovered that while he might still bite the first hobo he came across, he wasn't going to eat him without first cleaning the guy's neck. Frankie decided to be cautious and not eat a cop, but instead went for a canoodling couple, because hey, dinner AND dessert! (He even offered some to his sire, who wasn't as impressed as he expected.)

This was sort of session zero, in which we get to know the characters and take them through the traumatic lovely memorable experience of being turned into vampires. Turns out the Cosa Nostra is a bit bloodier than expected ...

Starring:
  • Carlotta "Lottie" Mangano, Malkavian flapper girl
  • Frankie "Fatso" Mangano, Brujah speakeasy bootlegger
  • Valtena (Val) "Pretty Boy" Mangano, Toreador gambling den maestro

We are NOT becoming the Columbos!

So, here's what happened. We have that Gamma World game run every month or so. The February session was cancelled because people weren't feeling well. It was rescheduled to the end of March, and by that time we were in lockdown and decided to get together over Discord instead. Because reasons we decided to put the Gamma World game into hiatus for now, and maybe get back to it when the world appears slightly more normal than it does at present.

Question was then what to do instead, as we still fancied roleplaying. Our Gamma World GM had an idea for a gangster Vampire: The Masquerade game set in 1920s New York. "Gangster vampires, eh?" said the players and so it was decided on as an idea. I've never played this game before, but the other two players suggested we all play newly turned vampires so that they would both be as clueless in-game about the specifics as I am in real life. (Read: part of my struggles with some games we've played before is that everyone knows the setting extremely well except for me, so I feel left behind when I don't know stuff everyone else takes for granted, and it means I don't enjoy playing.)

Plus, who can resist 1920s New York gangsters who turn into vampires? RIGHT?!

Having decided this is what we were going to do, and the other players saying I'm allowed to tell them off if they start to go over my head with their combined decades of experience, we tried to figure out what characters to play and how they'd fit together, and what their family name would be. We ended by having decided not to be relatives of Detective Columbo, but to be of the Mangano family, of Italian-American mobster fame, and were left generating our characters as homework before the next session.

How often we're going to play remains to be seen.

There might even be Medium Teeth

As per the previous post, we're gaming over Discord instead of meeting up twice a week around our kitchen table. On the plus side, no one has to drive home afterwards, so if we happen to get stuck in a battle, it doesn't matter so much because no one has to get up and drive for an hour (give and take) to get to work, and don't even have to change out of pyjamas.

On the negative side, the person with attention problems finds concentration even harder than usual, so this is the result of three sessions. Or, technically two, because I was so all over the place last Monday that I forgot to open the document I've been using for notes, and never even realised until the session ended. FUN TIMES. Look after your mental health y'all.

There was a table where we were sucked into some other dimension and Gunda got to speak to Tempus and was named his successor. And then there was a library and a clone of John Irenicus who was a dick, unsurprisingly. And he was alive, but somehow not, and he was trying to die properly, but because Silvanus cursed him, he kept coming back in different bodies. Something like that.