Vampire the Dark Ages V20 - Europa by Night (Learn to Play)

Creating your character

Before you sit down at this table, I want to have a conversation with you. Not a gatekeeping interview, just a friendly conversation. Europa by Night is a road, and one that puts specific pressures on your Cainite that the listing hinted at: the Inquisition at your back, a crusade rolling east, and a choice you make again every night about whether to hide among the living or run ahead of them. Those pressures land better if I understand where your character is coming from before we begin. I want to know what drew you to the Dark Ages, what kind of story you are looking for, and what you want to explore. You will want to know the same about me and the game. Clan and concept are open, High Clan or Low. If you have something fully formed, bring it. If you have only the beginnings of one, bring those. And if you cannot yet tell a Cappadocian from a Nosferatu, that is fine too. We will build the rest together in the conversation, and the work we do there is what makes the story better for everyone at the table. To start, send a message here or at saithefae on Discord. Friend me with one line about what drew you to Europa by Night. The game is just beginning, I do hope you'll come explore the Nights of Europa with me.

Preparing for the session

Players need a Foundry VTT account and a Discord account. I pay for all Foundry hosting and provide every other material you will need. You do not need to own or have read the V20 Dark Ages corebook. After our 1:1 conversation I will send a campaign primer built for this table that covers the world, the system basics, and the elements specific to Europa by Night that you need to start playing. It will not overwhelm you. V20 Dark Ages is a dice pool system. You roll d10s equal to an Attribute plus an Ability, count successes against a difficulty, and narrate what happens. Story and character drive the resolution; mechanics support them. Your Cainite manages three core resources: your Road, your Willpower, and your Blood. Your Road is the moral code that holds the Beast at bay, and in this era there are several to walk, not one shared Humanity. Most of the horror in Vampire comes from the choices you make when those resources start running low. New to Vampire? Welcome. I will teach the system at the pace of the table. Veteran of the World of Darkness? Europa by Night will not work the way you expect. There is no Camarilla and no Sabbat; those sects are centuries from being born, and the night belongs to the High Clans, the Low Clans, and the War of Princes. You walk a Road, not a Humanity score, and different Roads forgive different sins. Faith here is mechanics, not flavor: a holy relic can sear you, the prayers of a truly faithful mortal can drive you back or burn you outright, and it is not only the Church, for faith in this age wears many forms. At present the great elders a modern Vampire may have heard of are awake, ruling the great cities in person rather than sleeping out the centuries, providing you, the player with a very unique flavour of Vampire. Bring what you know; you will still find new things.

What Yuthika 'Fey' brings to the table

Voice acting across every NPC. I am a professional voice actress with anime and video game credits. Every Cainite elder, every clan envoy, every mortal ghoul, every informant you meet on the road has a distinct voice and cadence you will recognize from session to session. A teaching GM with thirty-four years behind the screen. I started at age twelve in Asia and have never stopped. I hold a PhD in Psychology and work professionally as an educator. That background is how I pace a conversation with an elder, how I hold a table's tension across a long campaign arc, and how I run a safety framework for a game this dark. New players are welcome here. Curiosity is the only prerequisite. A practical effects background applied to Cainite horror. I spent years as a costume designer and VFX artist on NBC's Grimm, and I taught foam latex and silicone prosthetic work, and stage makeup blending, on the convention circuit. When I describe a Nosferatu stepping out of shadow, a Tzimisce mid-Vicissitude, or a Cainite three nights past their last feeding, those descriptions come from someone who has built the real version with her own hands. Full Foundry VTT production. Custom maps of the roads you travel and the courts you enter, in-world handouts, period-appropriate visual assets, and a soundscape that moves between the noise of a crowded road, a candlelit hall, a burning village, and whatever the scene calls for. Every court, every haven, and every feeding ground has its own prepared environment. Published in the World of Darkness. I hold a design credit in the W20 line, Changing Ways, the book on the Auspices. This is not a system I came to as a player. It is one I have helped put on the page, albeit in Werewolf, though I love Vampire no less for it and have been playing since the 90s.

Homebrew rules

No major house rules during play. What I adjust is character generation. V20 uses a priority system during character creation where you rank Attributes and Abilities as primary, secondary, and tertiary, and that ranking locks the dots you can spend in each category. At this table, priorities are removed. You get the same total pools, but you decide where they go. Build template: 15 Attribute dots, distributed freely 27 Ability dots, distributed freely 21 Freebie points (6 above the standard 15) Flaws cap raised to 10 points (from the standard 7) The intent is creative range. Players who want to build balanced generalists, specialists who lean hard on one stat spread, or concept-driven Cainites with heavy flaw baggage all have room to do it here. The V20 Dark Ages line contains more than enough official material to build what you want. If a mechanic or option exists in official Dark Ages material, we can almost certainly make it work in Europa by Night. The only exception is for high quality STV Published Dark Ages Clans/Bloodlines, I have most, but if you want to use one I do not have, you will need to bring that to me during session 0.

How Yuthika 'Fey' creates a safe table

Your safety matters. Europa by Night is a horror campaign rooted in the World of Darkness. The darkness is central rather than decorative. At this time in history the Inquisition is active and a crusade is mustering. People will be killed for crimes they didn't commit, for being born looking strange, and worse. Religious fervor will be rampant. Predjudices will be high. Content Warnings: This campaign contains predatory feeding and the psychology of Cainites as apex hunters, the slow mechanical erosion of Humanity and what it costs your character to lose it, body horror including Vicissitude and fleshcrafting, political corruption and organized crime in a real city depicted with accuracy, violence and its consequences, themes of addiction and compulsion through the Blood Bond, cult structure and fanaticism, religious power dynamics and their legacy in Europe, and the particular horror of watching something that was once a person decide it no longer needs to be. The supernatural horror and the human horror are not separate categories at this table. Both are taken seriously. Lines and Veils before we begin. You will set hard limits on content that must never appear at the table, and topics you would rather have kept off-screen instead of depicted directly. These are respected without question and without explanation required. If your Lines and Veils preclude you from being comfortable with Europa by Night at all, I will speak with you honestly during the 1:1 about what can be adjusted, or accept your departure with grace. Open Door Policy. If at any point the content becomes too much, you are free to step away, take a break, or leave the session entirely. No judgement. Real people come before the game. Check-ins during play. Over our three to four hour sessions I run regular temperature checks, especially after intense scenes. If things get heavy, we pause. No pushing through. Roses and Thorns at session close. We end every session with a short debrief on what landed and what did not. This keeps the table collaborative and gives me what I need to run better. Private follow-up after the session. I send a personal message to each player to check in one-on-one. Some things hit differently once you are off the VTT and decompressed, and I want you to have space to raise anything you did not want to bring up at the table. This is a dark game. It should never feel unsafe. When in doubt, say the word.