#promised this an age ago and now I'm working on Prague so here we go!

[gorbalsvampire]

the world is a vampire (vtm city meta 1/?)

playing the world

So, you ended up as a Storyteller. Maybe you happen to own the rulebooks. Maybe you had the idea. Maybe nobody else in your group will put on their big gender pants and step up. The point is: you've got the 'sponserbilities. Now what?

The charm of being the Storyteller, for me, is getting to build wide rather than deep. Rather than inhabiting one character you get to occupy an entire world, moving it in response to the other players' actions but - and this is one of the big Storyteller Secrets - also in spite of them, and without anything to do with them.

In my experience a real good city and story are dynamic environments. SPCs want things that aren't necessarily anything to do with the PCs; they have Ambitions that they will advance whether the PCs are interfering or not, even whether the PCs are paying attention or not.

That's the secret to playing the world. What the players are interested in is the primary plot - there's no point in dragging them to Your Story - but you still get to do everything. Things can happen that the players only discover later, when their attention turns and they realise there was always something else going on.

choosing your location

There are two wolves inside me.

One abhors the very words "lore" and "canon" and has no interest in living any deeper in the shadows of the "IP holders" than necessary to play. One is obsessed with the World of Darkness and has years of fond memories attached to published material, and is also kinda lazy.

One of the wolves gets to pick my cities, but it's not always the same one. If it's the first wolf, I pick a city that doesn't have a By Night book and might only have one or two lines of attention paid to it. If it's the second, I pick a city that has a good By Night book, or a writeup in one of the gazetteer chapters/books. Glasgow was a first wolf pick; Prague was a second wolf pick.

why did I pick Glasgow?

I wanted to set a story in Scotland, for the Dunsirn connection, and I wasn't going to use Edinburgh because I didn't fancy tangling with The Gentleman's adopted OC. (I can be quite a brat about this, sometimes - it's why I've never run a game in Manchester despite knowing and loving the city.)

Vampire as a game turns on sectarian violence, the conflicts between conspiracies. Vampire as a mode exaggerates real history, setting up the Kindred as influential parasites and predators, moving it but being moved by it. Generally, when I pick a city off its own merits, it's because I've looked at it and gone "oh, that could be vampires."

Glasgow's history is, forgive me, full of lines drawn. Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Independence, Rangers and Celtic. It's really easy to wire and crosswire vampires into those conflicts, and to set up tensions within a clan or sect's power bloc by having its members on different sides of them. Divided loyalties aplenty.

I also have a literary point of reference. I'm a big Iain Banks fan, have been since I read The Wasp Factory at school, and his novels Espedair Street and The Crow Road are mostly and partly set in Glasgow. That helps - if the city isn't somewhere I've ever been I like having a sense of it informed by fiction, a vibe that I can draw down and inflect with Vampire's core concerns.

why did I pick Prague?

Partly, I had Redemption on the brain. (I've always had Redemption on the brain, it's how I came in, it's my Bloodlines.) Statting Christof Romauld for a Reddit thread got me started on the rest of his coterie, then reading Transylvania By Night and seeing how it didn't align with the PC game kept me going. And... OK, I'm not going to lie, the anachronisms were getting to me.

Sometimes, the desire to reach in and do a different job to the authors - not an objectively better one, but one more aligned to my priorities, subjectively better, for me - is too strong. There's a lot of that at work here. The buildings that shouldn't exist yet, the Discipline choice that doesn't make sense in V5, the desire to see if I can make this work - that's it, really, that's why I pick cities with more published material. The urge toward transformative work expresses itself as it will.

other reasons

In the past I've often seen advice to the extent that you should pick a city you know well, maybe the city that YOU live in. I don't think you have to do this, but there's one way in which it undeniably helps: grounding, through little details, through street names and cultural cues that you just know in your bones and don't have to fake. That can be really helpful if you don't want the cognitive load of pretending you're multiple different people and having to sell the sense of a different culture and do that respectfully.

Also, we need to talk about history. Some places are better for vampires at this point or that in their real history - Glasgow of the twentieth century was definitely an easier place to tell a kind of grotty, gangland vampire story than the twenty-first. Since I wanted to use it for V5, and I was bridging through from Revised, I made that part of the story, part of the theme. The city was cleaning up its act, gentrifying even, and the controlling ancillae were being left behind.

I could very easily do a Nineties Camarilla game, or a Victorian Age thing, showing the city in its glory days (for a given value of glory), but if I wanted to do a Dark Ages game, it would be more of a frontier thing, with the PCs the only Cainites in town: the city is too small and too new for much else to work.