Well, I told you there would be more Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game along the way and it's coming this month, as I pulled out the books to adapt some Vampire: The Masquerade material to my chosen forever system for this sort of fare (Cinematic UniSystem). Don't hold me to it because I'm already swamped, so it might be a little late for Halloween proper, but it's coming this here Fall season for sure because I'm in the middle of designing it now.
I got the latest Humble Bundle featuring World of Darkness games, including Vampire, Hunter: The Reckoning, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. I already have a lot of the 1st-ed. Vampire and Werewolf books in print from the 1990s, but I constantly forget about them because I never played Masquerade all that much. I have some good memories of it, I've always liked the system, and I even got to playtest the LARP shortly before it went on sale back in the late '80s or early '90s at a local con in Memphis, TN, but my main groups played AD&D and Cyberpunk 2013-2020, and did not read Anne Rice books.
Buffy has a bad habit of being limited by the TV series, and that's across the boards. It really would have been a better game had they not had to deal with branding, and hewing so closely to the TV show. To these ends, the vampires (all of the Supernatural Types, actually) are either complex NPCs or faceless, thoughtless mobs for the Slayers to trounce - there's really no in-between. Either way, you have all these undead perpetually living and feeding in the same general area, but they have no organization or seemingly even knowledge of one another's existence. (At least most of the time; when it was convenient to the plot, this changed.)
Angel (the TV show) did a much better job of establishing, and playing with, the larger cast of demons and handling their relationships, both to and with one another. Oddly, Angel's demons were mostly from multiple dimensions and had no real connection to one another, while the overwhelming majority of Buffy's were vampires. So, it's just bad writing from the show that got carried over into the game.
My goal here is to establish some reason for vampires to exist other than to feed, which is about as deep as most of them go on the show; figure out what it is that they do other than feed; establish some sort of factional divisions amongst the throngs of vampires clogging the Hellmouth; and generally give vampires a little more character. For this, I am using Anarch and Camarilla from 5th-Ed., as well as looking at all of the aforementioned WoD games. I don't plan on using this information wholesale, as I don't think it will fit like that - unless maybe I wanted to put together a PC party of vampires (Angel has build-your-own vampire rules), but I don't.
I'm not looking to expand minor vamps into full-fledged VtM characters, just get some ideas of what I can add to set them apart from one another so they at least come across as possibly frightening. When played as presented in Angel, vampires are terrifying and extremely capable, but Slayers as presented can still wipe the floor with them pretty quickly (especially Veteran Slayers). I don't just want to add some HP to them and call it a day; I want the vampires in my BtVS RPG to have some real teeth - and some real legs. As it stands, they're designed to either die right out of the grave, or are destined to be the next Big Bad.
Anyway, I'll try to get that up by Halloween.
© The Weirding, 2025
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