From our Developers & Editor: I am extremely excited that we at By Night Studios can finally reveal to you Enemies of the Night and Laws of the Reckoning. Personally, working on these books has not only been a pleasure but it has been the culmination of a 90’s kid’s dream to work on Vampire: The Masquerade. We knew when making Laws of the Night that the world of Vampire Fifth Edition was too large to be contained in one book. You were hungry for more content to add to your LARP experience, and we were hungry to give it to you. Enemies of the Night is first and foremost a storyteller’s resource detailing rich and robust enemies that your vampires may face in their nightly struggle for power, prestige, and domain. Herein we detail the ravening Sabbat, hell-bent on their Gehenna War. We also remind you, that mortals are not an enemy to scoff at. One mortal may be easy prey for a savvy coterie. A small group of mortals, no problem. But a unit of armed and armored government-backed special forces is an existential threat. Finally, enemies come in all shapes and sizes, and in the world of Vampire: the Masquerade. Cults have grown in prominence since the supposed onset of Gehenna. Some of these cults are antagonistic to the Kindred and Licks of the Camarilla and Anarchs, such as the Bahari. The Bahari venerates the Dark Mother Lilith. They are focused on the destruction of Caine’s childer, posing a substantial threat to the established order of both the Camarilla and the Anarchs.

Storytellers can have hours of fun devising the next new threat to meet your characters, but you didn’t think we would leave out a bit of candy meant for you, the players, did you?

Enemies of the Night has new powers open for you to take as a player character. Many of these powers are LARP adaptations of powers that you have seen in the Tabletop books for Vampire: The Masquerade. What does it take to adapt a power to LARP? First, you have to stand the power up. What do I mean by that? You must take a power that was built for dice rolls, push it away from the table, and make it useful on a LARP floor.

One of these powers that we decided to stand up was the Fortitude power of Gorgon’s Scales. This power is complex and developed completely for a table where you’re rolling dice. In the tabletop version, one of the abilities adds bonus dice to dice pools. However, when we stand this power up, we cannot rely on adding traits where tests are the way we arbitrate challenges. These challenges were converted to success without a test, which is in line with Laws of the Night rules. Another ability under Gorgon’s Scales is the Choleric ability for a stake to decay and turn to ash. For Tabletop, this power turns the stake to ash at the end of the scene. This is not conducive to the fast pace of Live Action. To help facilitate play, especially when the Storytellers are conducting mass combat, we needed that stake to decay much faster. Now, for the Enemies of the Night version the stake decays immediately.

This is just one example of how we translate tabletop powers to LARP. The key is making sure that you can stand up your power. Making it play easily on the LARP floor with the fast pace of game play, and without forcing time-strapped storytellers to figure out trait bonuses on the fly.

In the next Dev Diary we will talk about developing with considerate play in mind.