Vampire 20th: Beckett's Jyhad Diaries (Learn to play V20)

Creating your character

Before you sit down at this table, I want to have a conversation with you. Not a gatekeeping interview. A conversation. Beckett's Jyhad Diaries begins in Milwaukee, a Camarilla city about to learn how fragile it is, and it begins with you as someone who has only just died. You are a neonate, months or a few years into the Embrace. The person you were is still close enough to touch. You still remember your phone number and the way your mother says your name. So I am not asking you to pick a clan and build backwards from a Discipline spread. I am asking you to build the person who was alive until very recently, and then tell me about the night that ended. Bring me a life, not a build. Who were you before someone decided you were worth keeping forever? A night-shift nurse who saw too much. A bartender who knew everyone's secrets but her own. The smaller and more specific the better. Then tell me about your sire. Why you were chosen, what they taught you, and what they very carefully did not. In this city your sire's name opens doors and closes others. I love long backstories, so do not hold back. Give me three things in particular. One thing the Embrace took from you. Not tragic, just true. Sunlight on a Sunday morning. A person you can no longer safely stand close to. One thing you still hold onto from mortal life. A sister you check on from across the street, or a job you keep pretending to have. Neonates cling to the living, and that is where both their Humanity and their danger live. One thing you want now, without irony. Survival counts, but reach further. Freedom from your sire, a place nobody can take away, or the truth about what you have become. A neonate who wants something takes risks, and in Milwaukee right now, risks get you noticed. Clan is open and you do not need a mechanical plan. If you are new to Vampire, we build your sheet together and I teach the rules as we play. Camarilla clans are the default seat. Your elders expect obedience, and what they give in return is mostly the privilege of not being destroyed. This is an integrated Classic World of Darkness. There are powers in and around this city that are not Kindred, and you do not need to know a single thing about them to play. This table runs on intrigue and slow discovery, with a war building at the edges of every scene. Combat is genuinely deadly for a neonate. The smartest thing a young vampire can learn is when to run. To start, send a message here or find me at saithefae on Discord. Friend me with one line about the mortal you used to be, or the thing you are becoming. The game is forming I hope you join us.

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 Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary corebook. After our one-on-one conversation I will send a campaign primer built for this table that covers the world, the system basics, and what you need to know about Milwaukee to start playing. It will not overwhelm you. A word about the book this chronicle is named for. I would ask you not to read Beckett's Jyhad Diary before or during play unless you are happy to be spoiled. That said, the Diary is full of twists, forks, and stories that run in more than one direction, and I run my own world on top of it. Even if you have read every page, it cannot tell you where this table is going. Vampire 20th Anniversary 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, and the mechanics support them. Your Kindred manages three core resources: your blood, your Willpower, and your Humanity. Blood powers your Disciplines, pushes your body past mortal limits, and keeps the Hunger at bay, and you take it from the living, gently or cruelly. Humanity is what is left of the person you were, and for a neonate that person is still painfully close. When the blood runs low the Beast rises to take what it wants, and the easy way to sate it is the unkind way. Most of the ache in Vampire comes from what you are willing to do to keep going, and what it costs you to have done it. New to Vampire? Welcome. This is the right table to start at. I teach the system at the pace of the table, and your character is learning the rules of the night right alongside you. Veteran of the World of Darkness? Bring what you know, but hold it loosely. You are the young and the expendable, in a city where Ancients have started to move. Your elders keep secrets from you, and some of what you think you know about this setting is exactly what they would like you to believe. The blood here is mechanics, not flavour. Feeding is a scene, not a footnote. Frenzy can take your character out of your hands at the worst possible moment, and sunlight and fire deal wounds that do not simply heal. The Sabbat is coming, but in a city this afraid, the knife is just as likely to come from your own side. Bring your curiosity. You will find more than you came looking for.

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 Kindred elder, every clan envoy, every mortal ghoul, every informant you meet in this city 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 Kindred 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 streets you move through and the courts you enter, in-world handouts, evocative visual assets, and a soundscape that moves between the hum of the city, a candlelit Elysium, a haven torn apart, 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, on the Changing Ways sourcebook. This is not a system I came to as a player. It is one I have helped put on the page. That credit is in Werewolf, but I have played Vampire since the nineties and love it no less.

Homebrew rules

No major house rules during play. What I adjust is character generation. V20 uses a priority system, 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 6 Discipline dots 6 Background points 21 Freebie points: 6 over base Flaws cap raised to 10 points, up from the standard 7 The intent is creative range. A balanced generalist, a specialist who leans hard on one spread, and a concept-driven Kindred carrying heavy flaw baggage all have room to exist here. The V20 line holds more than enough official material to build what you want. If a mechanic or option exists in official V20 material, we can almost certainly make it work in Beckett's. The one exception is high-quality Storytellers Vault clans and bloodlines. I own most of them, but if you want one I do not have, bring it to me during session zero. Note that my V20 compendium has all the Laibon clans in it as well.

How Yuthika 'Fey' creates a safe table

Your safety matters. Beckett's Jyhad Diaries is a horror campaign rooted in the World of Darkness. The darkness is central rather than decorative. You are playing the newly dead, still learning to be predators, in a city sliding into war, and the game takes seriously what that does to a person and to everyone within reach of them. Content Warnings: This campaign contains predatory feeding and the psychology of Kindred as hunters, the slow mechanical erosion of Humanity and what it costs your character to lose it, the loss of mortal family and friends, the treatment of mortals as property and as food, body horror including Vicissitude and fleshcrafting, war between the sects and the atrocities of the Sabbat, violence and its consequences, themes of addiction, coercion and compulsion through the Blood Bond and the ghoul relationship, cults and fanaticism, and the abuse of childer by their sires and elders. Playing neonates sharpens some of this. Your character is young and weak in a society built to use them, and the chronicle will ask what they are willing to become to survive. Some of the answers will be ugly. 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. These are respected without question and without explanation required. If your Lines and Veils mean this chronicle is not right for you, I will talk with you honestly during the one-on-one 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 helps me 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 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.