In order to rescue Arundel, you need to be thrown in Jail and then convince Lucca or Qui to let you go and accompany you to the mansion where the Prince is staked.
And in order to be thrown in jail, you need to either:
A) Betray Corliss by siding with a Primogen or simply piss her off enough that she wants to use you as a scapegoat or
B) Romance Jordan which leads to the Archon discovering their cult which she claims to be a Masquerade Breach which lands you in jail, from which you can then proceed to rescue the Prince.
I’m not particularly interested in romancing Jordan but, at the same time, it never made sense for my Ventrue or Toreador to be anything but unfailingly polite to their sire up until that point.
I’d like for the option to, for instance, after Lucca picks you up for Corliss’ coronation, read Arundel’s journal, realize where he is most likely being held and convince Lucca/Qui to come with you to rescue him.
Afterwards, Arundel is free to dust Corliss, I don’t care.
It has been quite awhile since I played, but I am pretty sure I went to the mansion with Qui, romanced Jordan, but going to jail didn’t happen, as if I remember correctly, I sided with the Anarchists and eliminated the Archon permanently.
I’ve given them all a whirl and while I definitely liked some better than others (Night Road and Parliament of Knives) I want mooore. Like just send an endless stream of VtM directly down my throat pls.
Hell I’ll take fucking anything with a vampire protagonist. I’m a complete slut for vampire-centric stories (so long as you are or can be one; I have zero interest being a pathetic basic bitch human as I am seemingly locked into irl surrounded by things I so desperately desire to be) and will take literally anything, even if VtM tends to be my favored style.
Speaking as someone who was completely new to ‘Vampire: The Masquerade’ until I tried ‘Out For Blood’, and as someone who likes transformations and well-written romance, my wish for be to have a vampire game (not necessarily VTM based) that allows your human-turned-vampire character the opportunity to woo your former human lover/friend (who has become aware of vampires) and turn them into your vampire childe.
Here’s another idea (not VTM based). You start off as an adventurer new to a village, who is turned into a vampire by accident. Awakening, one night, you vow vengeance against your sire - and must do it by harnessing your new powers to command human lackeys, rats, turn into mist, learn how to hunt victims, and build up a small army of vampires to fight for you against your sire and his/her forces! Who will win and go on to conquer the village? And how will you balance your ambition and revenge against the need to retain the last of your humanity? The setting could be in a fantasy world, or in 17th century Europe, as a suggestion.
The 2nd idea actually totally could fit into VtM rules, as long as you don’t have all of those powers right from the start. Maybe you can choose initial powers and gain more as the game progresses.
You know everything’s subjective. I’ve played and reviewed 2400+ interactive fiction games of different types and own almost every Choice of Game, and I have to say that the Vampire the Masquerade games are some of my favorite. I always wanted to play DnD or Vampire the Masquerade but could never get a group better, so these are like a dream come true. I like Night Road the most because it feels a lot like actually playing VtM, and Parliament of Knives I like because it lets you use high-level powers. Out for Blood wasn’t as good for me as a VtM game but I also enjoy small-town mysteries and games with occult/necromantic magic, so it’s still a solid choice for me. Have the newest one downloaded but haven’t tried it yet; I like the author’s other games so looking forward to it!
Edit: To people saying they’re half-baked or rushed, I can’t really refute it or not since it’s subjective and you can’t prove subjective statements. I can say though that the length of time it takes to write something has very little effect on its overall quality; some of the most famous IF in other mediums like parser were written in a single day (like Jon Ingold’s All Roads game) and some games that aren’t as popular took 20+ years (like JJ Guest’s Escape the Crazy Place). Among all IF and even among other Choicescript games, the vampire games to me seem to be well-written, have a variety of options, and have replay value. If you asked me guess what criticisms people might have of the games, ‘rushed’ wouldn’t even come to my mind as a possible criticism.
As someone who never had any real introduction to VTM before these, I liked these overall. Night Road continues to be my favorite CoG title and Knives is almost as good. I feel like there are aspects of Out For Blood that could have been better but it was solid. Sins of the sires feels like it needed more time in the writers room. The beginning was alright but it falls apart halfway through. I want to like it, and in some ways I do, but it is disappointing, especially compared to what came before.
Each of these games do very well in creating a good atmosphere and choices. Night Road dominates the roleplay field by representing the vast majority of the clans and disciplines and having tons of fun ways to handle situations. Knives feels the best in terms of plot, having so many branching paths to explore.
Stuff I would like to see? Well I won’t refuse new perspectives. Playing as a prince or an anarch from the start, or even bringing in the sabat would be interesting (I’m curious why none of these books brought in the Sabat). Heck, playing as the Second Inquisition could be interesting. Above all, I hope to see more in terms of Night Road’s problem solving and Parliament’s branching stories, though I do understand the narrative difficulty of keeping everything straight.
My impression is that “rushed” usually refers to plot jumping too quickly from point to point, meeting characters for a brief scene and never seeing them again, or limited choices/railroading. Basically, that the story does not feel fleshed out rather then the length itself. As you said, these are subjective impressions, certainly, but they come up in a significant portions of reviews for Sins of the sires and I’m sad to say I agree with them.
Yes! In this scenario, the player would be able to choose about half of the powers on offer, and maybe develop the level of their vampire abilities or gain another power or so during the course of the adventure. In the past I’ve tried a lot of gamebooks (Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf) - many of which use similar mechanics.
Out of the four VTM games released by Choice Of Games, I’ve only bought ‘Out For Blood’ - and I tried the free demonstrations of ‘Parliament Of Knives’ and ‘Sins Of The Sires’. ‘Out For Blood’ was reasonable - but I was disappointed that the only way to become a vampire was by keeping Chastain alive. By the Masquerade rules, there seemed to be no way for the MC to become a vampire along with the human love interest. Also, the game didn’t live up to the ‘Salem’s Lot’ vibe that the advertising blurb projected - and so there wasn’t enough town-under-siege action as I’d hoped for. That game still has several good points, though.
In my opinion out of the four games, Night Road is the one who is the most polished in terms of games mechanics, stoty’s pace and the evolution of the characters through the story.
The other three are decent at best, not to insult the author who did their best, let be honest, but i think that the characters feel hollow especially the main character and the story feel too rushed at the end.
All this games have a good starting point but in the middle of the game you feel like the plot and the suspens is basically “killed”. In the Sins of Sires, i think that the stat’s management is not good especially the blood art. I have played the games and i have only used four or fifth my stats through the games, that’s insane!
Writing a story is difficult because it’s about transmitting emotions, immersing your lectors in the narration and you fail to do that your book or work will be “half assed” or decent at best.
This has been some fantastic feedback! I really appreciate everyone who’s taken the time to relate their thoughts about Parliament of Knives! I can’t reply to everyone, but I’ll do my best to cover the bullet points.
Two outa three ain’t bad!
I think you’ll be happy!
DLC!
2 new clans, each with 30-40 thousand words of unique scenes, dialog, powers, and choices.
A new romance (including 3 all-new full scenes and too many snippets to count. Around 40k words.)
A fling with an Anarch! (it’s spicy) No, not that one, the other one!
Lots of extra bits and pieces including some extra Trevor and Ophelia content that was asked for.
New portraits!
I’m honestly not sure what content will be gated by the DLC cost and what will be part of a more general addition. I’m sure the clans will be gated, but I don’t really make those decisions.
Done.
It was meant to be trippy because the MC had just been beaten into near-torpor and ground into a fine paste. It actually used to be a little harder to decipher, but I listened to the beta testers and tried to make it a bit more obvious what was happening which I think improved the scene.
Basically, the mortals were there most likely for the normal reasons young lovers look for quiet places away from crowds in the dark. They weren’t mercs. The MC is so blood-starved that they are seeing visions of their lover/friend from before their first death as memories start to bleed through because Arundel’s disappearance is causing triggers to go off in your brain.
This is going to sound really lame, but I honestly teared up a bit reading this. I worked SO hard to write him correctly, and to have it recognized and discussed like this was an immensely joyful experience.
Thank you.
‘UN By Night’ is my new elevator pitch when talking up PoK, lol. Love it.
You can (currently) rescue Arundel by:
Romancing Jordan
Allying with Bouchard or Vivian
Allying with Qui (this can be done several ways with or without his romance)
Joining the Anarchs and going with Ward’s plan over Sevinc’s
lol. 2 decades of playing V:tM, 2 years of writing PoK, hundreds of hours immersed in researching almost 30 lore splat books, several days of consultation with Paradox Interactive (the owners of World of Darkness) to refine adherence to the lore and meet their exacting specifications, and all you got was ‘You is vampy?’ Either you didn’t read Parliament or you’ve never actually played V:tM. Pick one.
Preach.
Parliament took me about 2 years. The first 4-5 chapters were written while I was finishing up Werewolves 2: Pack Mentality. Honestly, though? I was rushed a bit at the end, but I didn’t cut any of the planned ending content. I just abandoned my social life and literally doubled my output for 3 months. To say it was mentally exhausting would be an understatement, but I’m very happy with the result of all my hard work.
I also wrote Werewolves 1 99% of Choice of Games’ books are written by single authors. There’s no real authors’ collective or anything. We work pretty much by ourselves with the occasional oversight of the CoG editor lucky enough to have us (Much love, Jason!)
600k is basically the length of 6 novels. Add to that the fact that you have to code, use a wide variety of variables, and keep every dividing twist and turn accounted for is quite something.
One thing a lot of folks seem to assume about these games is that much of the word count is inflated by redundant passages. This is not the case. CoG have very exacting standards regarding code efficiency, and we’re basically required to use subroutines for redundant text so it can be used in multiple situations and does not inflate the word count in most cases. I cannot speak for Hosted Games, but if it was released on CoG, you can assume the word count is the real word count.
In the words of Prince Arundel: “Trust is an ill omen among our kind. Respect your elders. Do as they command. But never trust.”
I will also note I’m not a native English speaker! My threshold of “confusing” is somewhat lower when reading in a foreign language, and English in particular can be somewhat sparse in terms of grammar which complicates such scenes further. I appreciate you taking beta feedback into account!
Them being random lovers looking for a quiet spot honestly hasn’t crossed my mind, probably because I imagined the scene taking place in a fairly open area except for the warehouses, with a surrounding forest but further away, and at a fair distance from the city. So not very cozy for a tryst, but a decent place to light a fire, pitch a tent and be left alone.
I think it would be helpful if there was an “average play-through word count.” So, a counter that adds up all the words displayed on the page, stores the count in a database at the game’s end, displays the average after a 100 completed play-throughs or so. It would be a more informative advertisement for this type of games than “x words in total”.
Again, though, I think the feeling of shortness is often really a “this game feels incomplete”. For example, The Picture of Dorian Gray sits at 82k words but hardly anyone will read it and say “man that felt short”. You could fit more than three Dorians into a 275k words long game that leaves players saying “…was that it?” so is it really about the word count?
Allow me to heap some more praise, then. The Ventrue have been my favorite clan since I first learned about VTM but I have sadly found that they are often not written to my taste.
A Ventrue Prince usually ends up being cartoonishly evil (Lodin), not the real power in the city (Panhard but also Lodin) or liable to fold under one punch (Lacroix and Lodin. Look, I just really hate the Ventrue of Chicago).
The two canon Ventrue characters in PoK quickly became some of my favorite depictions of Ventrue outside of my own troupe’s games. Powerful, brilliant, charismatic, manipulative but with laudable goals. I loved both Arundel and Vivian.
Ooooh, which? Lucca or Alisha?
My money is on Lucca.
Please.
Just kidding, just kidding, I don’t mean to pressure.
I do miss my girl Bly.
If you make it so I can romance two of these characters, I hereby promise to purchase every single game you ever make going forward. I mean, I do that anyway, but the sentiment stands.
Upcoming additional content for Parliament and Out for Blood?!?! Count me in! What’s the second clan do you think that is included in the update for PoK? I think its Hecata because the clan aesthetic suits Corliss well and adding that clan wont have any issues with the overall story.
I really disagree with you on that one. You can see how carefully crafted the political atmosphere in the game, and I felt tension on the later chapters when I sided with the Anarchs. What made you say the game was “empty or hollow?” PoK captures the very element of a Vampire chronicle since the game focuses heavily on political intrigue.
(Much love, Jason!)