Vampire: The Masquerade is getting a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook—titled Bound by Blood, this tome’ll contain a Kindred class (with six subclasses), a 4th-level adventure, some extra systems to make being a vampire in D&D make any sort of sense, and a bunch of new feats.
I will start off with something kind before I unleash the ravening beast inside my TTRPG-loving heart: It’s probably neat for D&D players to have a supplementary book that lets players fully commit to being a vampire, especially given Baldur’s Gate 3 put spawn in vogue (and with good reason, Astarion’s a great character). I also like new feats because I’m a character-building little munchkin. Also, the art is very pretty.
Now I’m breaking the lock on the cage and setting my inner feral beast of the night free: Are you goddamn serious? What are we doing here?
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God damn these vampires
(Image credit: Random House Worlds, Wizards of the Coast, Eleonor Piteira)
My irritation, to be clear, isn’t with White Wolf for this move—it’s rough out there if you aren’t big old Hasbro, and I hardly blame the TTRPG publisher for cobbling together some homebrew so it can cross-pollinate with the bigger boys. It’s a profitable move, one can hardly blame the business practice. They’ve got an eye-roll out of me, but not much more.
Instead, I’m exacerbated with the entire industry as a whole because, look—I think D&D is a fine game. I’ve played a ton of 5e and I’m currently in a D&D 2024 ruleset campaign with my cousins. I’m playing a Stars druid and having a lovely time. I’m an avid watcher of Critical Role.
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But the overarching prison of one system that is halfway decent at doing dungeon-crawling turn-based combat and not much else isn’t great. The main advantage of D&D is that it’s just crunchy enough to satisfy numbers dorks like me and just rules-lite enough to please less optimisation-hungry players.
You’re not gonna burn up like a vampire exposed to the sun by learning some new rules once in a while.”
But if you want the best version of what it’s offering, Pathfinder 2e exists. If you want satisfying turn-based combat, there’s LANCER. If you want to tell a story, there are PBtA systems like Masks. If you want to do horror, there’s Mothership. And if you want to do vampires—guess what! There’s already Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition! It’s right there!
D&D is the “let’s just have pizza” of systems, but there are so many different, wonderful, and interesting rulesets out there and I don’t think we should be propping up Hasbro’s efforts to get its grubby little fingers into everything. Not just because of how the company operates, but for the sake of the hobby itself.
If you wanna buy this thing to tack on some character options for, say, a Curse of Strahd campaign—or even just your own homebrew D&D thing with vampires? Go ahead, you’ll probably get a lot of use out of it. But if you want to play a game with a bunch of vampires, I implore you to play some Vampire: The Masquerade. You’re not gonna burn up like a vampire exposed to the sun by learning some new rules once in a while.
