LARPing as Punks: The Problem with Modern Vampire the Masquerade

09.30.25 // 4:47pm

This is an essay I wrote in 2020 when I got so mad about a VTM larp that I malded about it for 5000 words. It’s a bit rough, but I think it makes for a good read—plus I needed a blog for September. Enjoy, and happy Halloween season!

I think many a classic horror story starts with the following phrase: So I tried to join a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP.

They weren’t meeting in person—it was mid-2020, the height of Covid—so it was more play by post than anything else. But I figured it was a good way to dip my toes into the style of game before going out and doing the whole dressing up and buying a membership thing.

I was enjoying it a lot—I hadn’t done proper play-by-post roleplay in years—but then something happened. My character arrived at Elysium wearing her trademark silly sunglasses and a cool face mask with fangs (because she’s a cool vampire, obviously)—but then, somebody pinged me and corrected me: we were playing in a 2020 without COVID.

This piqued my curiosity. It made sense to me—people LARP to escape from reality, after all—but I felt the need to probe deeper. What did happen in this year 2020, then? Did the BLM protests happen? Was Donald Trump acquitted, then impeached? Was Biden elected president?

The answer to all of these questions was no. Kind of. “Nothing political happened”, they said. “The World of Darkness is like our own world, but apolitical. Nothing political has happened in the World of Darkness since the year 2000. Anything that has happened since then in our real world (9/11 being the major example) didn’t in this fake one. Anything that can be interpreted to be political has not happened in our World of Darkness. Vampires don’t care about human politics.”

This bothered me.

It bothered me so much, I couldn’t find it in myself to continue playing. Everyone was very nice and cordial about it, and I left without much issue, but the whole situation kept poking at the back of my mind. I was consumed with so many questions:

“How do you play a political, gothic punk roleplaying game without politics?”

“Why do so many people play a political, gothic punk roleplaying game without politics?”

And, most prominently—“Is this version of Vampire: The Masquerade still punk? Is it even Vampire without punk? If it’s not punk, what is it? I mean, what even is punk?”

…My experience with VtM differs from most players. I haven’t been playing the game for very long—I got into it around six months ago, after my aunt gave me a 2nd edition VtM rulebook that used to belong to my passed cousin. I’ve heard of VtM before but never really gave it a shot, so I sat down and read the entire book cover-to-cover.

Then I realized nobody plays 2nd edition, so I had to put that down and read the 20th Edition book cover-to-cover instead.

I have never played or watched or read anything about VtM aside from the handbook, so I went ahead and treated this thing as gospel. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. What type of game is VtM? What kind of themes should I have my players explore?

Luckily, the book lays that all out for me. It lists seven major themes: A Beast I am, Lest a Beast I become, the Masquerade, A War of Ages, Inherent Conflict, Conspiracy, and the Apocalypse. All very fun things. Even before that, though, there is a bolded section on GOTHIC PUNK.

What is Gothic? In VtM’s terms, it’s an aesthetic—churches are more powerful than either, and places of culture are adorned by gargoyles. But it’s more than that, too: the book defines Gothic as a mindset. “A tenement erected at the turn of the 20th century, fronted by dingy, fluted columns and infested with squatters, is a neo-gothic rookery. A merciless millionaire’s estate on the edge of town is a modern castle, as is his lavish penthouse in the bustling district where mortals go to dance and drug away their cares.” It takes aspects of our world and looks at them through a Gothic lens. It focuses on the madness, the romance, and the greedy gluttony of man. All makes sense for a Vampire.

But then, what about Punk? Punk stands at a polar opposite. The book describes Punk as “the context in which people experience their world. It’s about anger, about getting in someone’s face and saying NO MORE.” It is defiance, conflict, and rebellion, all hard-built into the game with the squabbles between different Sects and Clans. Combining the two together, then, we see a dark, barbaric dystopia laced with conflict—it is a world where the evils of man and beast are brought to terrible extremes. But “Punk” doesn’t just imply anger and violence. The Brujah clan in itself represents this: while they possess Fortitude and Potence, they also have Presence. Brujah believe in a cause. All Punks have to.

To be Punk, you first have to recognize the darkness that puppets society—and you reject it. You get into someone’s face and say, “No More.” Punks don’t just recognize the darkness, but they seek to challenge it and change it. NO MORE.

Vampire the Masquerade posits a world full of treacherous tradition and splintered bloodlines. Everyone is in conflict with each other, as they have been for all of time. Vampirism, in VtM, is the curse of Caine; a punishment delivered by God himself to smite the wickedness of man. A vampire is a parasite: they feed off of others, steal that which is not theirs to take, all while pretending to be human. To be a Vampire is to cause pain to all mortals that happen to cross your path. It is a world without love, family, or religion.

The Blood Bond, for example—a major component of vampire, involving drinking another vampire’s blood—results in a love-like obsession manifesting in the drinker. It is not true love—it is a wicked, Gothic facsimile of it, driving the thrall to madness over the regnant. The family—one’s sire and progeny—is rarely kind. To ghoul and to sire is not transactionary: the vampire solely takes. A vampire cannot ask a Ghoul if they are interested in that ascent, for that is a violation of the Masquerade. They simply take, just as they do their blood—and if the Ghoul rejects it, then we have a breach—and that means a potential vampire hunter on our hands. Conflict is built into the very definition of vampirism. It is designed that way: it is part of the curse.

Clans do flock together on occasion—though more so than that, there are sects. Clans, for the uninformed, are essentially vampire families, or bloodlines (but not really because bloodlines are technically a different thing): they are groups of vampires who all share a similar curse. The Nosferatu, for example, all share the same clan curse of being hideous abominations. If the vampire who bites you happens to be a Nosferatu, you too become a Nosferatu.

If your sire abandons you, though—if you are left to wade through the darkness by yourself—then you belong to no clan. You are Caitiff. Your curse is that of loneliness, fear, and ostracization: Caitiff have nobody, and they never will. It would be pertinent, then, for vampires to stick together, maybe govern each other’s actions a bit—and that’s where we get sects. Sects are a group of vampires with similar ideologies. In V20, there are three major sects—the Camarilla, the Sabbat, and the Anarchs, all of whom have different interpretations of the Laws of Caine and what it means to be a vampire.

The traditions of the Camarilla—the most prominent Sect—are inherently flawed. They benefit those with age, with better blood. Those who are weak, or god forbid clanless, have no place in the Camarilla’s society. Power corrupts even the Anarchs: a taste of true power, of any victory in this eternal war, is enough to drive even the kindest Barons to implement rules and laws reminiscent of the Camarilla they claim to oppose. Elders do not share their power with other Kindred, and they rarely sire to create progeny—progeny, after all, is competition.

It is a dark, barbaric world. And the only way to succeed in it is to stand up and say, NO MORE.

Both of my VtM groups are being played with people who have never played the game before. I witnessed their reactions and frustrations to the World of Darkness in real time. It’s unfair of the Prince to ask neonates to go and do dirty work that she herself or other Elders could get accomplished with a snap of their fingers. It’s cruel and hypocritical of the Baron to dispose of those who oppose his reign, even though the Anarchs are supposed to reject the status quo of generation and power. Some players wanted to side with authority—they realize that this is simply the way of the world, and in order to succeed, they needed to play the game. (A beast I am, lest a beast I become.)

But that amounts to nothing. No matter how desperately they scramble up the ladder, they will still pale in comparison to their Elders. They will never achieve any true power or respect because their generation is too low, and that cannot be changed… unless you turn to diablerie: the act of consuming another vampire whole. Tempting, yes, but it stains your soul for years to come. It marks you as a beast.

No, player characters will never know power. Both the characters as well as their players have heard about the wonders of the Masquerade. They’re expecting to witness the awesome power of the Camarilla, the wicked ties that connect vampire society together, and they’re excited to shape the World of Darkness for themselves.

But then they play the game, and they witness what this awesome power sacrifices in its awesomeness—who it sacrifices. And that’s always the PCs. They are the victims of cruelty, of bigotry. VtM is not like D&D where you gain experience and notoriety for doing good; in VtM, if you do the Prince’s favor, you gain little. She might offer you a bargaining token, perhaps a fraction of a Domain—but compared to her and the Primogen, you are still nothing, and you will always be nothing.

It’s frustrating. And that’s the point.

It’s time to say NO MORE.

Let’s talk about Gehanna.

V20 is an especially interesting system to me because it’s not quite dystopian yet. One of the major themes the book mentions is that of Gehanna, or the vampire apocalypse. Essentially, every Kindred knows an Apocalypse is around the corner, but nobody is sure what it’s going to be. I think that this is a really interesting, really compelling idea for a setting—I really like campaign settings that offer a mystery that the GM is supposed to fill in for themselves. It’s one of the reasons that Eberron is my favorite canonical D&D setting—mysteries for the GM to build adventures around are built into the world, like with the Mournland. VtM does this too: it doesn’t specify what Gehanna could be, but it gives some options. Maybe it’ll be the technology with the internet spreading a breach in the Masquerade. Maybe the Antediluvians will all wake up real grumpy and decide to eat all of their children. Maybe Caine himself is gonna appear in all of his might and decide he wants to, like, rule the world or something. Not only do I think that this is a really compelling way to make each game unique, but it also makes every game feel important. There’s a possibility that the player characters will witness Gehanna and have to deal with the consequences of vampire society fracturing.

But the reason why this works so well is because it slips beautifully hand-in-hand to that “punk” theme. As we established, Kindred society isn’t awesome to live in: it’s built on centuries of racism, clan…ism, age…ism, barbery, and all sorts of horrible, evil deeds. The laws of Caine, the rules of the Camarilla and the Sabbat, are all about power and wielding power over others at the expense of other Kindred and their feeding pool of mortals. The game encourages players to start as 13th generation vampires, one of the youngest generations there is—and in addition, it encourages them to play as neonates who have just left their sire’s wing. This is the group that gets to witness the unfair, oppressive nature of the traditions first hand, because they are the group being exploited. They’re the ones who have to run around doing the Prince’s laundry or buying the Baron’s groceries. The frustration at the system in power is going to curdle into rage, and maybe—if that spark grows hot enough—rebellion.

The rebellion of the youth against their elders, of punks against the system, is a tale as old as time, and I truly think this is what the book is encouraging. I believe that’s why Gehanna plays such a huge role: Gehanna could very well be that rebellion. Maybe the youth believes that the only way Elders can be held accountable for their actions is for the Masquerade to break, and that will usher in an entirely changed society. It’s only a matter of time before something happens, so you might as well get onto the right side of history. The player characters get to shape what their Gehanna is going to look like and have a hand in bringing about the end.

I’d like to briefly digress for a moment here and talk about the most recent version of Vampire the Masquerade: V5. This version was published in 2018, and is probably the version most people are playing. It is a very, very different beast from V20.

After literally 30 pages of flavor text, the introduction to V5 starts not with themes, but by delving straight into what has changed since V20. It talks about the New Tyrant Generation, in which Elders of the Camarilla have been mysteriously disappearing. The Sabbat has all-but disappeared, existing only as monsters of legend. Anarchs have won the revolution, but have created a society of individuals—nobody has any real connection or understanding of the world at large. In addition, the Second Inquisition is at hand, and advances in government technology have led to secret governmental organizations hellbent on erasing—or worse, controlling—the supernatural.

5e also makes a point to mention that there are No Heroes in the World of Darkness. “In Vampire, you play characters who are vampires. They must subsist on the blood of the living. They have strange powers they can use to force their will on hapless humans. They can give bits of their undying Blood to people, turning them into servile blood junkies doomed to cater to the whims of the undead in hope of their next fix. This is not a roleplaying game where you play good guys.” This is hard-built into the system of V5, where your character’s hunger has the chance to increase on every roll, and messy criticals are always in danger of ruining your night.

There is not a single reference to Gothic Punk in the entirety of the book.

V5 stands in direct antithesis to V20’s themes and tone, to the point where the book doesn’t even talk about the themes it wants the game to represent. The 20th Anniversary edition, despite being published in 2011, is very much the 90s version of the game, with all of the rebellious, hopeful spirit exemplified in the popular zeitgeist the time. V5, on the other hand, is a much more… well, exhausted game. It’s apathetic. People rebelled, and things still suck. In fact, it’s worse now. Gehanna came and went, it’s old news, get over it. There’s no point in rebelling—there’s no system to rebel against any more. All you can do is form your small, independent coteries and try not to get killed. V5 is not a political game—it’s a dystopian one.

But there’s something strange about this, I think. Something that can’t be ignored, and that’s—well, there still is politics. The entire game is based around politics. Vampires are split into sects, those sects are comprised of clans, and pretty much everybody hates each other. In addition, many of these clans choose who to Embrace based on, you know, what they have access to, and what they want the clan to represent. Venture, in the modern age, are going to be Embracing billion-dollar tech moguls. Toreador might be Embracing popular Twitch streamers. The Brujah are an entire clan of activists, so it’s only natural they’d embrace somebody with strong beliefs—as in become literal social justice warriors. Politics are hard-built into the game. You can’t take human politics out of the game and focus only on vampire politics; vampires don’t just spring out of the ground (unless you’re like a Gargoyle or something). Vampires were humans once, with human beliefs. Not only that, but you’re literally surrounded by humans—most vampires have herds or Ghouls. The V5 sourcebook even encourages players to have “anchors” or “touchstones”, which are human characters who are specifically meant to connect the Kindred character to mortal affairs.

In fact, the ancient political squabbles of Kindred have pretty much vanished in V5, with Elders either going missing or going insane. No longer is the traditional Chronicle built around a coterie of Camarilla Kindred doing favors for the Prince, but instead, the book encourages players to take on the role of Anarchs vying for safety under the watchful eye of the Second Inquisition. The Second Inquisition, here, refers to efforts by world powers to eliminate the vampiric threat. Essentially, in 2004, the NSA hacked the Nosferatu deep web and found out that vampires were a thing. And then, and I quote all of this directly from the wiki, “After years of careful research, the Second Inquisition had targeted Vienna as the "capital of vampires" and prepared a strike against their headquarters. In 2008, a united USSOCOM and Vatican ESOG force augmented with experienced Brazilian hunter-killer teams stormed the Vienna Chantry of Clan Tremere and destroyed it, blaming it to an ISIS terror attack to the public.”

But yeah, no human politics in Vampire: The Masquerade.

It is impossible to remove human politics from the game, whether it be V20 or V5. Politics are baked into everything that we do. The place that we live, the languages we speak, our income, our gender and our sexuality—those are all political. If a setting takes place in our modern world, even if it’s a darker, edgier, fantastical version of it as we see in the World of Darkness, it’s going to have politics. The books never say that human politics should be ignored. They imply that human politics may not matter much to vampires, sure—but try as Kindred might, they can’t avoid them. Even if the book wanted to avoid politics, it can’t. Certain clans generally comprise the wealthy, for example—and there are certain clans who only Embrace those of a certain ethnicity, such as the Ahrimanes and, traditionally, the Romani-stereotypes of the Ravnos. V20 has the guts to say that Kindred literally don’t even exist in East Asia, and instead they have the Kuei-jin; a bloodline of mystical warrior vampires who follow a comedically stereotypical hodgepodge religion slapped together from Chinese, Japanese, and Indian beliefs.

This is political. Not only is it political, but it is deeply, deeply… well, let’s just say “outdated”. It was the 90s, it was a different time—whatever excuse you want to give, these clans are something that has to be addressed in any World of Darkness game. The socio-political discourse that the mere existence of these clans poses is human discourse, not… vampire discourse. By allowing the thieving, trickster, dark-skinned Ravnos into a game, played entirely straight and completely unchanged from the source material, you are allowing content that is inherently stereotypical and prejudiced. That choice is a political statement, whether you want it to be or not. A game made by human people about human people is always going to be in some way political, because everything humans DO is political. It is impossible to avoid.

The 90s game was far, far, far from perfect. However, it has a built-in failsafe, beyond homebrewing, beyond White Wolf’s own attempt to fix the built-in political issue with Vampire: The Requiem. And that failsafe is the core theme of the game: punk. The game encourages rebellion. It encourages players and Storytellers to think critically about the world beyond the World of Darkness. The book never once posits itself as the end-all, be-all resource; it mentions multiple times throughout its hundreds of papers that all rules should be considered suggestions, and if something doesn’t work for a particular group, you’re free to do away with it. The book is the authority figure, and it understands that the very nature of the game is to rebel against a misguided, out-of-touch authority. Punk covers its ass. Remove the punk from the game, and you’re left with a system and a world that plays all of the Gothic intricacies completely straight, right down to the racism and rape. If you frame the Camarilla as the good guys, as certain traditions as inherently correct, you are missing the point of the entire game.

So, what does all of this have to do with LARP?

I am very much aware that most Vampire LARPs don’t use the White Wolf sourcebooks, but instead have versions of their own that are more suited to the medium of LARP. However, at the end of the day, it’s still Vampire, and it can’t be separated from that. If it wanted to be seen as a separate entity, it would call itself something other than Vampire: The Masquerade.

LARP is a little bit weird. It’s a much larger event than a personalized group sitting around the table. Hundreds of people from all walks of life attend conventions to play these games. The world of LARP is populated not by specially-tailored NPCs of a Storyteller’s design, but by people. The Elders, the Primogen, the Princes and Barons? Those are all player characters. This changes the dynamic of the game. Now only a proportion of players are playing down-on-their-luck, recently-Embraced neonates; some players, namely players who have been around for a while and have built up a lot of reputation and experience, are playing as Kindred in positions of power. Some players have authority over others, as they are benefitting from the nonsensical traditions the Camarilla enforces.

That is where the problem occurs. The theme of “punk” cannot exist in this type of medium. If neonates rebel against the established authority, they wind up rebelling against actual living, breathing people. Of course there’s not going to be some huge, Masquerade-breaking event in LARP; there’s way too many people to juggle that. In addition, there’s not going to be a huge Anarch uprising; when the more experienced players wind up being Elders, those are the same people who know the system well enough to exploit its flaws, or appeal for redactions of in-game events. The people who benefit from being in a position of power aren’t wont to let it slip away.

This is political. Of course, this is fake political—this is kids on the playground arguing about who’s the king of the jungle gym political—but it’s still political. And it can so easily slip into human politics, too.

In many, many fandom spaces, you’ll often hear the phrase, “KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MY FANDOM.” Political talk is going to be banned in the community Discord, for example—or at the very least, it’s all going to be quarantined to one channel. This was exactly what the organizers of the LARP told me: politics has no place in the hobby. In an effort to keep tensions to a minimum, nobody was allowed to discuss real-world politics in-game.

They were playing in a 2020 without COVID. It was a 2020 with Trump, but an apolitical Trump. A Trump who existed, but couldn’t be commented on. Similarly, it was a 2020 with an ecological global warming crisis—but again, not one worth commenting on. “Those things don’t matter to vampires,” they said.

However, not allowing the discussion of politics is, inherently, political. By keeping Trump as president, for example, but not allowing people to discuss him, you have taken the stance of passive Trump support: that his being in the White House is totally normal and totally cool. This is made doubly hilarious when you consider that the Second Inquisition is an active threat in LARP, too, and canonically, Vampire-AU George W. Bush issued a drone strike on Vienna under the guise of an ISIS threat. Granted, operation FIRSTLIGHT, the secret vampire-hunting secret service, hides its operation from high-ranking political figures, but one has to wonder if Vampire-AU Donald Trump knows anything about the blankbodies infecting the U.S. government. In a setting where a major obstacle players have to overcome is a U.S. government organization, it’s literally impossible not to think about the political aspects at play. This can’t get any MORE political.

The reason fandoms don’t like discussing “politics” is because politics are, of course, divisive. COVID is a hot-button topic. Masks are debated. Social distancing is debated. Fandom is touted as a place for people to go to avoid debate (LOL); to escape from the stress of everyday life. People dress up as vampires to escape from the horrors of everyday life. But… I dunno. VtM seems like a weeeeird choice for that. It’s a dark, edgy system meant to tackle the sensual, mysterious horrors of the human psyche. As quoted from the V20 book, “Vampires exist in the World of Darkness because they are the monsters among us, the products of a world so dark that only something truly horrible and captivating can challenge the depths into which the living residents of the world have plunged it.” VtM isn’t a game you play to escape; it’s a game you play to confront the beast that exists inside all of us. I completely understand that players don’t want to deal with triggering topics on a normal basis—and when it comes to LARP especially, playing a racist character and being racist towards other player characters is just kind of being a dick. But at the same time, sterilizing the world is not the solution to this problem.

If you want to play a game about escaping from the banality of everyday life, White Wolf has a different game for you. It’s called Changeling.

By disallowing discussion of politics—by pretending racism and homophobia and current world events aren’t a problem, that they don’t exist in a game system that has racism written into the game in the form of outdated racial stereotypes—you’re taking a side. You’re saying that there isn’t a problem—or if there is, it isn’t worth discussing. It doesn’t affect vampires. You shouldn’t care about it.

But vampires ARE humans. Once upon a time, they lived through all the joys and pains of being human. And, most importantly, they’re played by humans. They’re played by humans who are shaped by the political landscape in which they live. Humans see their city—their Domain—through their own unique lens, colored by their race, gender, sexuality, age, economic class, and countless other factors. Any work created by humans is inherently human, and inherently political—and a game about vampires in our own, urban world is especially so.

The Camarilla is a dark reflection of modern society. It’s a critique of the nature of political power and influence. It comments on the generational gap between wealth and influence—about how the established power will exploit the working class for their own gain. It parallels how certain children are naturally better-off due to their higher generation or their influential Sire. This isn’t subtext, it’s text. It’s written right there in the book. This is the entire point of the game.

VtM encourages players to look at the systemic powers controlling how they’re allowed to eat, where they can live, who they can interact with and really analyze it. It wants them to take a good, hard look at the system and go, “This is broken. This needs to be fixed. Someone has to fix it.”

“I’m going to fix it.”

That’s punk. Without that underlying theme, the game is spineless. It isn’t Vampire: The Masquerade if it’s not punk. If the political issues behind the Camarilla—the real politics that drove the creation of the game, that everyone has to deal with to live—are ignored in favor of creating a “sterile” environment, one that allows radically toxic opinions to go unnoticed and fester… at that point, you’re not just LARPing as vampires, you’re LARPing as punks. You’re ignoring the actual issues ravaging the world outside of your cute little hobby in favor of a derivative environment where the system isn’t that bad—it’s fun! It’s goofy! After all, it’s not like there’s a real machine we could be raging against.

It’s the community’s responsibility to regulate themselves. Regulation and change can’t happen without admitting there’s an issue. Don’t hide from it. Don’t be passive. Get angry, get in someone’s face, and say, “No more.”