Actual-play series Dimension 20 is partnering with White Wolf for a Vampire: The Masquerade show

Dimension 20: City Council of Darkness Trailer [Dropout Exclusive Series] - YouTube

Like most TTRPG actual-play series, Dimension 20 usually runs Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition—though they have recorded seasons where they roleplay using the Kids on Bikes and Kids on Broomsticks rules, as well as their own homebrew system. Their next season marks the first time they've partnered with a publisher to make official use of someone else's ruleset and setting, as they collaborate with White Wolf and Vampire: The Masquerade for a show called City Council of Darkness.

GMed by Brennan Lee Mulligan, the hardest-working man in actual-play, it's got an outstanding plot hook. The cast are all outcast vampires sent to the sticks to assert dominion over a town that's only just large enough to need its own undead representatives: Purpee, Oregon (population 18,000). "Between zoning disputes, bloodthirsty urges, and mandatory bake sales," says the official summary, "it's undead chaos in the quaintest hellscape imaginable."

Taking modern vampires out of their comfortable city habitat, where they have ready access to dark alleys, nightclubs, and well-stocked fetishwear outlets, is a promising premise for a fish-out-of water campaign. I see a lot of difficulties when it comes to finding highrises to brood on top of, and just generally living as a bloodsucking parasite without the faceless anonymity of a big city to hide in. "I dwell in the darkness" is all well and good, but not if you live in a town where everybody knows everybody. What We Do in the Shadows (the movie), squeezed a lot of juice out of the basic idea "what if vampires, but in little old New Zealand," and that's the vibe I get here.

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City Council of Darkness will feature the core cast of Dimension 20 as players: Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson. It starts on April 8 and runs for 14 episodes on subscription service Dropout, which you should already be paying for just to watch Game Changer if nothing else.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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