Storytelling
____The rules pamphlet you hold provides an introductory look at Vampire: The Masquerade, a storytelling game from White Wolf Publishing. With the rules in this kit, you and your friends are able to take the roles of night-stalking vampires and tell stories about the characters' triumphs, failures, dark deeds and glimmerings of goodness.
____In a lot of ways, storytelling resembles games such as How to Host a Murder. Players take the role of a character - in this case, a vampire - and engage in a form of improvisational theatre, saying what the vampire would say and describing what the vampire would do.
____In a storytelling game, players take their characters through adventures, called (appropriately enough) stories. Stories are told through a combination of the wishes of the players and the directives of the Storyteller (see below).

Players and Storytellers
____Most people who play Vampire are players. They create vampire characters - imaginary protagonists similar to those found in novels, films and comics. In each group, however, one person must take the role of the Storyteller. The Storyteller acts as a combination director, moderator, narrator and referee. The Storyteller creates the drama through which the players direct their characters. The Storyteller also creates and takes the roles of supporting cast - both allies with whom the characters interact, and antagonists against whom the characters fight. The Storyteller invents the salient details of the story setting - the bars, nightclubs, businesses and other institutions the characters frequent. The players decide how their characters react to the situations in the game, but it is the Storyteller (with the help of the rules) who decides if the characters actually succeed in their endeavors and, if so, how well. Ultimately, the Storyteller is the final authority on the events that take place in the game.
____Example: Rob, Brian, Cynthia and Alison have gathered to play Vampire. Rob, Brian and Cynthia are players: Rob is playing Baron d'Havilland, a Ventrue aristocrat; Brian is playing Palpa, a Nosferatu sewer-dweller; and Cynthia is playing Maxine, a Brujah street punk. Alison

is the Storyteller, and has decreed that the characters have been brought before the vampire prince of the city to face judgment. The players may now decide what to do: Rob, speaking as Baron d'Havilland, may try to smooth-talk his way out of the prince's ire; Cynthia, as Maxine, may angrily denounce the prince as a "fascist"; and Brian, as Palpa, may simply decide to use magical invisibility to flee the situation. Ultimately, though, it is Alison, the Storyteller, who determines the prince's reaction to the characters' words or acts; it is Alison, speaking as the prince, who roleplays the prince's reaction; and it is Alison who determines whether the characters' actions, if any, succeed or fail.

What Is a Vampire?
____Storytelling and roleplaying games may feature many kinds of protagonists. In TSR's Dungeons & Dragons, players assume the roles of heroes in a fantasy world. In Hero Games' Champions, players take on the roles of superheroes. In Vampire, appropriately enough, players assume the personas of vampires - the immortal bloodsuckers of the horror genre - and guide these characters through a world virtually identical to our own.
____The vampires who walk the Earth in modern nights are both similar to and different from what we might expect. It is perhaps best to begin our discussion of the undead as if they were a separate species of being - sentient, with superficial similarities to the humans they once were, but displaying a myriad of physiological and psychological differences.
____In many ways, vampires resemble the familiar monsters of myth and cinema. (There is enough truth in the old tales that perhaps they were created by deluded or confused mortals.) However - as many an intrepid vampire hunter has learned to his sorrow - not all of the old wives' tales about vampires are true.
____-Vampires are living dead, and must sustain themselves with the blood of the living. True. A vampire is clinically dead - its heart does not beat, it does not breathe, its skin is cold, it does not age - and yet it thinks, and walks, and plans, and speaksand hunts and kills. For, to sustain its artificial immortality, the vampire must periodically consume blood, preferably human blood. Some penitent vampires eke