The Vampire Next Door

"A game for bold and meddling kids".

I picked up a copy of Cat Elm's The Vampire Next Door ages ago, but only recently had the opportunity to actually run it. I've now run it twice - once for an actual one-shot (about 2 hours), and once for a two-part game that ran to roughly 3 hours.

I don't have a bad word to say about it.

"It's the late 2000s, school's out for summer, and you're headed out of town to stay with your grandparents in the idyllic Yorkshire village of Wymton-on-Tee. Your summer plans include exploring the countryside, and most importantly enjoying Grampy's famous chocolate chip cookies.... except that you're pretty sure that Vladimir Alucard, Grommy and Grampy's new neighbour is an evil bloodsucking vampire.

And none of the adults will believe you."

If you'd like to listen in on our game, here's Part One and Part Two.

The rules are fairly novel to me, with a very simple dice mechanic (roll 1 die of a particular size, 2 if you have an appropriate hobby) and no crunch at all. Players simply state what you're trying to achieve, and roll against a number the GM picked to represent how easy that is. The GM doesn't roll dice at all, instead picking from a list of 'moves' that Vlad can do whenever it seems appropriate - things like "suddenly appear in an unexpected place" or "menace someone you care about". My own experience is mostly more traditional (simulationist?) games, but we didn't have an issue with this at all; I'm sure a lot of this approach will be familiar to others who spend more time in the narrative and storygame end of the hobby.

The game is painted in broad, vivid strokes that I found very accessible. Cat sensibly leaves us to fill in the details, and is satisfied with lining up tropes for us to build on. The village has a handful of key locations, all of them easy for me to depict: here's a village shop, there's The Pub, that's the little country church. Grandparents are kindly and hands-off, and neighbours are talkative. And then there's Mr Alucard...

Oh, Vlad. There is something truly joyful about getting to play an unabashed melodrama-loving in-your-face vampire. Swoosh cloaks! Crawl gecko-like out of windows! Turn into a cloud of bats! Say "I do not drink.... tea" and raise an eyebrow! Make obviously menacing remarks to oblivious adults while smirking at the nearby kids!

Because the setting is fairly simple, the characterisation doesn't need to be deep here. This makes it easy for the GM to jump into any number of NPCs without prep. I was freely devising farmers, publicans, neighbours and other kids as necessary. The only NPC who needs a bit of thought is Vlad, and the advantage of a classic vampire tale is that I rarely had any hesitation over what he might do.

The game is built around trying to collect enough evidence to convince the adults that Something is Up. You can of course vary this according to how long a game you want - you could make it a sort of TV series over several sessions with one clue per session. We found three clues was plenty for a short and vivid game. It's a departure from the common RPG structure where the PCs are aiming to actually defeat the baddies themselves; that isn't necessarily in genre. However, in one of the two games we did accidentally drift towards that conclusion and it worked perfectly well.

Cat makes things easy for the GM by offering a good selection of suggested clues to find. You could absolutely devise your own along similar lines, but it's really helpful to have these available as a starting-point. Apart from anything else, it means when the players are doing something that ought to turn up a clue, you have some ready-made ones to drop in. There are still several I haven't used in either of my games so far.

The Vampire Next Door took very little prep and was extremely quick to start. I read over the rules a couple of times before running it the first time around, but that's about it. Character generation is picking a hobby, a name, and allocating dice to four themes: Creativity, Luckiness, Sociability and Physicality. While these don't cover every possible activity, they don't need to either - if nothing really fit, I just made a call on it without a roll, or rolled at random myself. The players had no trouble with it.

I'm planning to run this again for the office Christmas party, for a group of people who mostly haven't roleplayed before. I think it'll be a good first game, with a familiar genre, simple rules, and very little for the players to remember.