Playing with vampires

15 YEARS AGO, I had dealings with two different kinds of vampires.

As part of my treatment, I had regular appointments with a friendly vampire, a/k/a the clinic phlebotomist. I started chemo with a great deal of fear and sensitivity where needles were concerned. To any degree that I’m more comfortable with being stuck now, I have her to thank/blame.

We warned her from the very first time, that I was a big baby about having a needle stabbed into my vein so two test-tubes could be filled with my vital fluids. But she was very understanding – she was experienced with babies of all ages. This wide range of experience helped a lot when the quality of my veins started to degrade.

During one of my visits, she opened a drawer to get out a small bandage and, noticing the kids’ Band-aids with cartoon characters, I jokingly said I wanted one of those. She said since I was a brave boy, I could have a Snoopy Band-aid. From then on, I got Snoopy.

One day we happened to have with us our toy stuffed “baby” Chulhu. It was one of the original handmade plushes sold by Pagan Publishing, which used a glove pattern for its tentacle-mouth head. The phlebotomist thought it was the cutest thing, and gave it a Snoopy Band-aid, too. ‘Thulhy still wears his to this day.

The other vampires I hung out with were our best friends, and became part of our morale support system during my season of chemo.

A couple of years earlier, I discovered the roleplaying game “Vampire: The Masquerade.” This was mechanically similar to D&D – write up a character on paper, talk through its adventures and roll dice to decide random events such as the success of an action. The twist on this was, instead of hunting a monster, you WERE the monster. All player characters are members of the thirsty Undead. The title comes from the “Masquerade”* of blending in with mortal society, hiding in plain sight both for survival and easier hunting.

By pure chance, I picked up one of the very first edition rulebooks in 1991. In ’92, I played in an excellent game at a Missouri sci-fi convention, after which my then-wife Kathy** and I started playing and running the game as part of our RPG campaigns. That summer, at GenCon in Milwaukee, all the scheduled VtM games were filled, so Kathy started an “open gaming” session – with my input – which ended up going “live” by the end of the convention, with about 30 people acting in character and us winging it with the rules. The official LARP (live-action roleplay) rules wouldn’t come out for another year.

In ’93 Kathy was out of my life, but Gwen was in, and it didn’t take long for her to get hooked on vampire roleplaying, especially after a weekend with an independent LARP group in Kansas City. That August, back at GenCon, White Wolf Games (the publishers of VtM) hosted the sign-ups for the official fan club and LARP organization, the Camarilla (named for the fictional society of “civilized” vampires in the game).

A quick aside: Our roleplaying was completely theatre of the mind. We did no actual bloodletting or sexual “blood play.” In fact, we made a point of not being part of the “real vampire” subculture. In the live version of the game, we would improv our speaking lines and use hand signals to represent use of power and rock-paper-scissors to resolve conflicts and settle anything that would require a dice roll in the sit-down version. Most of the time, the “feeding” aspect of the character was trivial. In fact, the games looked more like “The Sopranos” than “Dracula.”

By the end of that year, we had met a couple of other Camarilla members who lived in Fayetteville, and persuaded some of our roleplaying friends to try the game. At the start of 1994, we had established the organization’s first provisional chapter in Arkansas, which we called “Coterie Bellaluna.”

Our group had two scheduled meetings a month. One was roughly a business meeting. We kept the business to a minimum and had fun with it, patterning each meeting after one of the Clans (vampire subgroups) from the VtM rulebooks. The other meeting was a live roleplay session, and we rotated who was in charge of the storyline.

The camaraderie built this way, and my concentrating on club business as its first president, helped keep me occupied while undergoing treatment. I never considered going to a cancer support group. After all, my treatments were going well, and it felt good to spend a few hours every other week with friends, pretending to be immortal, with cancer the last thing on my mind.


- - - - -
* If you are unfamiliar with this game, but have heard of “Vampire: The Requiem,” that is the revised version of the RPG used today. Due to the revisions, and since I’ve drifted away from active roleplaying, I’ve never played this.
**Not her real name

(NEXT)