Dracula Dossier Retrospective

“Perhaps at the end the little things may teach us most.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula

Here’s my retrospective on The Dracula Dossier campaign, based on my thoughts while running it and feedback from the players during the campaign and in discussion after it closed. I suppose in a sense it’s a review, based on some 50 sessions of play over a year and a half, and the odd one-shot with different players.

TL:DR – highly recommended, the best campaign I’ve ever run, even better than The Pirates of Drinax.

The Dracula Dossier and the Adventures

This campaign was great fun for all of us; well-paced, atmospheric, scary in the early stages but with the PCs – and players – gaining confidence as they learned how to exploit the vampire’s weaknesses. All the published adventures are well thought out, and while each is built around a different kind of vampire with a different plan, it’s easy to incorporate them into a single campaign.

The published materials are well-written, and the original Dossier in particular lends itself to an improvisational style, because wherever the players’ inclinations take them, there’s a place, a person or a thing written up in just enough detail that you can absorb it quickly and insert it on the fly. It’s especially useful that many of them have multiple options – a person, for example, can be innocent, an asset for one of the human organisations, or a minion of one of the supernatural factions. Most of the time, I didn’t decide what an NPC’s allegiance was until well after the players had engaged with them, and selected it based on what I thought would be most fun.

The PCs have encountered 25-30% of those people, places and things, so it would be entirely feasible for us to play the campaign again at some point, with a different kind of vampire and avoiding the things we’ve already done. In particular, there are a lot of things in the UK and southern France which the players skirted around, and either could be a whole campaign.

There’s a huge amount of information for the players to absorb, and in the early stages of the campaign you need to telegraph leads quite strongly so they stand out, perhaps more strongly than I did.

Using SWADE

I used SWADE instead of Night’s Black Agents for the core rules because I don’t like Gumshoe as a game engine, simple as that.

I added rules for Heat, Solaces, Symbols, Safe Places, and Contacts (a weaker form of Connections), and suggested adding the Logistics rules from Sprawlrunners. Only one player was interested in any of that, and then only in the Contacts; so that was all wasted effort.

There were comments that SWADE needs more Edges, especially non-combat ones; I think for the next game I will take up one player’s suggestion that people who want new Edges can propose them, with the GM having a veto.

Most of the problems we encountered were related to fluency with the combat rules or encounter balance. The full-on Situational Rules for SWADE combat are quite crunchy, and slow play down a lot if you use them; but many of the character development options are based on exploiting those rules, so if you don’t use them, you shut the door on a number of PC Advances.

Conviction is immensely powerful, and if you let PCs use more than one Conviction per turn, it becomes overpowered. So in future, they can’t.

Double damage from magnetised iron and PCs always going first in every combat round tilted things too far in the players’ favour, and I wouldn’t use those again.

The house rule that no enemy NPC may use more than one Benny on a given roll works well; it can stay. The house rule that whenever an enemy could use a Benny it does so if a 1d6 roll scores less than or equal to the number of GM Bennies remaining is too restrictive because they do too many stupid things, so it will be dropped.

One thing we might tinker with next time is the rate of Advances. There was general support for the idea of Advances being closer together at the start of the campaign, getting gradually further apart as the game progresses. That would extend the viable length of a campaign.

Children of the Night

I had three different kinds of vampires, four kinds of human minion, and werewolves, all of them worked out in some detail. That was a waste of effort, and I should have limited myself to soldier allies and vampires from the core rules. The strength of the vampires is in their cunning and adroit use of human minions, and the strength of those minions is in numbers, weapons, and tactics. If an NPC has more than about three special abilities, I can’t remember them and the players gun them down before they have a chance to use more than that anyway. What would have been useful is adding precalculated combat options to the NPC statblocks so that I didn’t need to work them out on the fly. I’ll do that next time.

It’s unlikely the players will figure out how the vampires worked, and I won’t use that kind of bloodsucker again; but after promising the group “no Cthulhu mythos and no vamps from the core rules” I gravitated to Telluric vampires, whose powers are all tied to the Earth’s magnetic field. That makes them deadly if you don’t know their weaknesses, but once you do, they’re not too hard to handle, and likewise werewolves. What did scare the players were Renfields, who were built as combat-focussed Legendary PCs; so in a sense they were fighting themselves, and that was tough.

Running the Game

I found it useful to work through all the materials I had – the most useful for this purpose were the Directors’ Handbook and The Edom Files – and put together a timeline of events going back to 1466. It was this which suggested to me that the SOE mission to Romania in 1940 must’ve woken up the wrong vampire and thus reignited the dormant war between vampiric factions.

Three factions for the PCs to play off against each other, with a couple of independent actors, is about right; simple enough to remember, complex enough to be interesting.

The default Conspyramid didn’t really work for me, so I built a more corporate structure for Dracula with each Bride running one of the main divisions. EDOM and Lilith both had very flat structures relying on a small core team, buffed by mercenary specialists hired in as needed, which made them open to using the PCs as contractors.

Don’t get too attached to your early drafts of the conspiracy, because the conspyramids mutate in play according to what your players get up to; let them, and glory in surfing the ragged edge of chaos.

Having a ‘back office’ pseudo-PC (Hopkins) the PCs could use for skills they didn’t want to invest Advances in worked well; I think we should do that again, although there was no benefit in giving her a detailed statblock and next time I would make her a shared Connection. Or, if we go for an SF game next, the ship’s AI.

A campaign which lasts 30-50 sessions works well though; doesn’t overstay its welcome, but lets you play with some of the cool toys at Legendary before it closes. This one could have gone on longer, as we followed the collapse of Dracula’s organisation and the fighting over who picks up which pieces, but once you’ve dealt with Dracula himself, it would be an anticlimax.

Better to go out on a high note.