Milan by Night, 1526 

An Alliance of Shadows

Storyteller's Notes:

An Alliance of Shadows is an attempt to tell a multi-layered story, with a large cast, each of whom have their own part to play, whether historically significant or not, in the events that will shake the future of the Cainites – or Kindred – to their roots. It gives us the opportunity to explore the origins of the Sabbat, how and why the sect developed as it did, and what gave it the means to survive five hundred years despite being disorganized, highly factionalized and outnumbered by its opponants from its very inception. (It also gave us a chance to use White Wolf characters such as Sascha Vykos, Giangaleazzo Torriani and Marcus Vitel, who were historically involved in the founding of the Sabbat, but whose roles in that founding had never been explained to my satisfaction). To approach such a complex story, we did a few things differently than the usual style of play:

 

Multi-Character Casting

While the cast of characters was large, the pool of players was not – and so, in addition to 'signature' characters such as the Lasombra members of House dell' Aquila, Jovan Ruthven, and of course, Etienne de Vaillant, we took the list of other characters, the spies, delegates, busybodies, villains, monsters and even mortal servants – and split them up among the participants, with an eye to preserving interesting character combinations and balances, so that at any given session, no matter what characters and subplot was being explored, everyone would have something interesting to do – and nobody, save maybe the Storyteller ever knew everything that was going on. Some of the character and plot combinations also permitted sessions to be run at which not all participants could be present, without having them miss anything. What this structure gave us (it is still in playtesting, and will doubtless be refined as we go...) was a multi-faceted, episodic approach to a fairly large-scale and complex epic, with many differing subplots and points of view. The metaplot will develop as the story arcs evolve, built out of how small incidents and conflicts between one or two characters begin to impact on others around them. In fact, taking a tip from LARP designers, the characters for this chronicle were intentionally developed to have both close connections to, as well as ongoing or potential strong conflicts with, at least one other character or faction.

 

Open Plotline Development and 'Clause 13'

To keep the storylines compact, and so that the combination of different subplots would weave together in a coherent whole, and keep to the history outline we had devised, plots were (mostly) not secret. There were a few twists that the one player or another didn't know about (everyone likes a few surprises, after all), but in general everyone had a good idea of where a plotline or scene was supposed to be going – the fun came in seeing how it got there. To this end, everyone had a bit of Storyteller responsibility, to keep the chronicle on track, and the opportunities to suggest, "what if...?" We also had a very definite notion of what characters were guaranteed to survive past this period of history (commonly known as the "Clause 13" in their Character Contract), either because they were destined to have a place in 20th century history, or because their fate (and date of Final Death) was already determined at some future point in time, and thus in turn became plot points for a future chronicle in our timeline. This gave certain characters a great deal of freedom to take foolish but dramatically interesting chances, or get involved in matters that under normal game rules, a player would never dare to risk. But when the power of the script is on your side, the chances of success (or at least, the guarantee that failure isn't a fatal mistake) increase to heroic proportions indeed.

Diceless Gameplay

Because the chronicle was played over the Internet, and concentrated on character interactions, rather than combat or even much use of character disciplines or skills that required die rolling, we all but eliminated dice, and even most of the game rules system, from play. This isn't a game so much as an interactive, participatory epic story, where everyone had considerable input into where any part of the story could go, and determine what kinds of challenges their characters would face, and how likely it would be that they would suceed – and what might happen if they failed. Any disagreements on character direction, interpretation of the World of Darkness, or story points were discussed, and some kind of compromise acceptable to all was found. To be sure, this meant that sometimes 'canon' was by mutual agreement completely scrapped – but the Golden Rule was always one of the ones we kept.

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