Season 3 episode 23: Chicago By Night

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CHICAGO BY NIGHT is a 2018 city sourcebook for Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition, written by Matthew Dawkins and a host of others, and published by Renegade Game Studios, who have the rights to do all this stuff these days. The most recent iteration of a sourcebook that first appeared in 1991, this edition is by far the longest at 357 pages. It describes the vampire culture, clans, people, locations, backstory and subterfuges of the eponymous city. (‘Eponymous’, because I always have to check, means ‘lending its name to’ a thing, not ‘taking its name from’). We talked about the latest edition of Vampire the Masquerade earlier this season and concluded that it did what it needs to in a suitable style, if you like that sort of thing. How does that fit with huge chunks of crunchy campaign-world detail like this? Don’t click that dial!

“Any time you change something in a setting that people are invested in, you’re going to get one group who are, ‘Oh thank God, you took that out, that always bothered me and I hated it’, and you’re going to have another group, just about as large and just about as loud, going ,’How dare you take out my favorite thing, you bastards, I’ll never buy another thing from you again’.” – Greg

 

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SHOW NOTES

These are the notes for this episode, a chance for us to pick up the threads, fill in the blanks, throw up some links, and correct the occasional errors that we didn’t have time to deal with in the episode itself. Anything in yellow text is a clickable link.

The Chicago By Night book has 357 pages. How is that possible? Printed books, a format that this title exists in, have to have an even number of pages because a page has to have two sides: the state of the art in printing and binding technology cannot yet cope with moebius strips or paper that exists outside the normal dimensional paradigm. Nevertheless, there it is: 357 pages. (We didn’t count them to check.)

Greg calls Chicago By Night a ‘meta-campaign book’ which is not a term that has a lot of usage in RPGs, or anywhere else. It’s a book that sets out the components and systems for a campaign in the setting it describes, and then lets you do the tricky stuff and hard work of actually creating the campaign yourself.

We talked briefly of the multiple Jose Garcias in the games industry, a problem made simpler by the fact the 1990s Jose Garcia was long gone before 2020s Jose R. Garcia appeared. Name overlaps in RPGs are rare but not unknown: James was startled in the early 2000s when RPG books started to appear with the byline ‘Jamie Wallis’, made more awkward by the fact that mostly they were not very good. Jamie Wallis, when contacted, seemed unaware that he shared a name and country with someone who’d been visible in the industry for a decade and a half, he couldn’t see a problem and didn’t think anyone would get the two JWs confused. James disagreed, because he knew one of his friends (the late artist Martin McKenna) had only agreed to work on Jamie’s books because he thought he’d be working with James. People continue to confuse the two of them, to the extent that James’s Wikipedia page opens with ‘Not to be confused with Myriador’s Jamie Wallis…’. The latter designer seems to have fucked off out of the industry a few years ago, and it would be improper of James to comment on his departure.

A large part of the Chicago by Night metaplot revolves around the arrival of Clan Lasombra into the Camarilla. As Greg says later in the episode, “A little bit Ventrue and a little bit Tremere. You’re the Lasombra. It’s fine.” The White Wolf wiki describes them as “shadowy predators and ruthless social climbers known as much for their unnatural manipulation of otherworldly darkness as for their cultivation of influence over mortal society through religious institutions.” So… vampires, then.

Greg notes the book has 54 GMCs. That’s ‘Game Master Characters’, or NPCs in normal RPG-speak.

“See page XX”, once the watchword for the lack of proofreading in White Wolf books, is these days a free monthly webzine produced by Pelgrane Press that’s been running for almost twenty years.

World of Darkness Chicago, which Greg worked on, was a 2005 release developed by Justin Achilli for the Chronicles of Darkness line published by White Wolf, as a sourcebook that covered all the major World of Darkness RPGs at the time. As Greg notes, its 420 pages makes it even larger than Chicago by Night.

If you met someone called Kevin Jackson, from the name you would not automatically think he was the vampire prince of Chicago. It’s an odd choice of name, and not to be confused with Kevin Jacklin the freeform designer, Chaosium author and Reiner Knizia playtester, who is probably not a vampire.

Dispatch is a 2025 video game created by ex-Telltale deveopers (the Walking Dead narrative videogames) released over eight episodes and set in the Superhero Dispatch Network in LA. You play Robert Robinson III, aka Mecha Man, an Iron Man analogue. It reviewed well and won a bunch of awards. The trailer’s pretty.

James says early on that there are two types of citybook, the pinball table (Citybook) or the domino-run (Middenheim/Power Behind the Throne). Later on he refers to the map-and-description ones, which are generally quite flavourless and lacking in life, and were generally found in the early days of the hobby, such as the City-State of the Invincible Overlord and other Judges Guild products.

The Chicago-based company James worked for in 2000 was 3Com, where he was part of the Internet Appliance Division, reporting to Ray Winninger, who would go on to be head of D&D at Wizards of the Coast. It was a fantastic job for four months, at which point the incoming CEO closed down several divisions including that one, and laid off thousands of people.

Jepson’s Malört is apparently a ‘bäsk’ liqueur, a Swedish-style drink flavoured with wormwood or anise—Sweden has never banned the use of wormwood in food or drink. ‘Bäsk’ means ‘bitter’, and ‘Malört’ literally means ‘wormwood’. It was introduced in Chicago in the 1930s and is apparently growing in popularity, despite the fact that its main sales tactic is to advertise how unpleasant it is.

The World of Warcraft cinematic that James discusses in the context of the importance of including player-characters in world-changing events, is the Wrathgate from the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. This event was the forces of the Alliance and the Horde coming together to take down the Lich King Arthras, which is a huge deal, the whole of Warcraft and WoW‘s lore and gameplay is based on the two groups’ mutual hatred… and then the Forsaken, one of the races of the Horde, fuck it all up like the rotten bastards they are.

‘Metaplots‘ are a concept that originally comes out of the world of RPGs, and Wikipedia will tell you so if you don’t believe me. “The metaplot (also, metastory) is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting, also defined as an ‘evolving history of a given fictional universe’.” it says. Click the link to read more explanation in a similar style.

Book reviews complaining of wokery are, for those of us whose books are on the receiving end of them, things of pure joy. We frame them and copy them to social media. James knows that the Amazon review of Everybody Wins which accused it of “apologist liberal political views that are unnecessary and unpleasant to read” was responsible for at least two actual sales of the book. Also, “apologist”? I apologise for nothing.

Bluebeard’s Bride, which we discussed and praised in season 1 episode 7, is a game in which all the players play aspects of the same character, the young bride of the murderous Bluebeard, as she explores a succession of nightmarish rooms. Far from conventional, not for everyone, and very good indeed.

James notes that the letters that Chicago vampires send each other in the book are all presented in a font that resembles a manual typewriter, because these vampires can’t use technology like computers. However it looks like many of the vampires are using not just the same model of typewriter, but the same actual typewriter, since the letterforms and distinctive traits of the type on each letter are the same. Also, real manual typewriters are monospaced and these documents aren’t. And crucially none of these typists ever makes a mistake—errors on a manual typewriter aren’t corrected with a simple backspace, it needs correction fluid or correction paper or special abrasive pencils, all of which leave faint marks on the paper. One would hope that someone laying out a book that’s going to sell tens of thousands of copies would know something about the documents they’re supposed to be replicating, but it appears that either they don’t, or once again Vampire books are being put together on short deadlines, with corners being cut at the end of the process, and that’s a shame.

 

Thank you for listening! The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this podcast or these notes has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and chat about it on our friendly Discord. 

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