In my A Game Per Year project, my goal has been to read one roleplaying game corebook for every year they’ve been published. However, I soon started to feel that it was hard to decipher how the games were really meant to be played. For this reason, I decided to start a parallel project, An Adventure Per Year, to read one roleplaying adventure for each year they’ve been published.
The Ventrue Chronicle is a series of three linked scenarios for Vampire: the Masquerade. Like the four-part Transylvania Chronicles, it uses the uniquely long timespan afforded by Vampire. This time too the story stretches from the Middle Ages to the modern day but the characters are not the same.
Rather, the players create a new set of characters for each scenario, as the childer of the characters in the previous scenario. Thus, the chronicle tracks three generations of Ventrue.
There are versions of Vampire published for three different settings and these are ones used by The Ventrue Chronicle as well. Vampire: the Dark Ages has a scenario set in York, then Victorian Age Vampire in New York and finally modern day Vampire goes to Savannah, Georgia.
The first scenario is a detective story set within a vampiric power play. The two latter stories deal with the war against the Sabbat as both New York and Savannah come under attack. The New York scenario has the added theme of an incompetent Elder (a fun touch!) and in Savannah another Elder who’s been present thorough the three scenarios is close to losing her last vestiges of humanity.
I like the way The Ventrue Chronicles uses the unique affordances of Vampire’s setting. The only other reference point for this kind of durational play that comes to mind is Pendragon.
The Ventrue Chronicle is one of the last books published for Vampire under its original home with White Wolf. In subsequent years, Vampire books would be published by Onyx Path and then by Paradox Entertainment with different partners.