Game: Vampire: The Masquerade (first edition – White Wolf, 1991)
My Experience: Oh, dear gods. I was introduced to VtM in late 1992 or early 1993. My first actual play experience was the LARP at RiverCon ’93 at the Holiday Inn Hurstborne. At the same con’s LARP the next year, I met most of the core of what would become the Louisville Gaming Mafia, and we’ve been in and out of each other’s lives ever since. I also was a contributing writer on a number of VtM projects back in the day.
Curtis Baxter, Anarch Vigilante
Curtis was ten when his father left; twelve when his mother remarried; thirteen when the drunken beatings started. He turned fifteen a couple of weeks before his stepfather knocked his mother unconscious with a frying pan, then came for him. Curtis likes to say he doesn’t remember what happened next, but the truth is that he very clearly remembers grabbing the largest knife from the butcher block.
He’d been planning to run away for a long time. The only thing keeping him from carrying out his plan was the fear of what would happen to his mother if she were alone with her husband. Well… no husband, no problem. Curtis called the police, reported a domestic assault, grabbed his backpack, and vanished out the back door.
Two months later, after the third strongarm robbery left him with nothing but the clothes on his back, was when the vampire found him. Curtis likes to say he doesn’t remember what happened next, but the truth is that he very clearly remembers the next four years of being locked inside a boiler in a derelict power plant and regularly used as… dinner. He needed to be healthy, though, to be a reliable source of fresh blood, and that was the problem with the “farm.” Being kept healthy meant he stayed strong. And he had plenty of time to work on his next escape plan, even in pitch darkness.
Curtis was nineteen when the hatch opened and he slammed a spear of rusty rebar through the vampire’s skull. That didn’t kill the creature, but it did slow it down enough for him to grab the keyring from the thing’s hand and release the other “livestock.” What followed wasn’t pretty, and when the screaming stopped, Curtis was the only one still moving.
Whatever Curtis was expecting next, it wasn’t applause from a quintet of pallid, leather-clad punks lounging int he shadows. Their leader stepped forward, smirking, and thanked Curtis for taking care of the hard part for them. They’d been tracking the vampire for some time, and now that he’d beaten it down, they would be more than happy to finish the job permanently. And Curtis’ reward? Well, the leader explained, fangs showing behind his smile… Curtis only deserved a share of the heartsblood.
These nights, Curtis is a fixture of the local Anarch scene. He doesn’t much care for the high points of philosophy or the overthrow of the undead white man’s dominion, but he does have a finely-honed mistrust of power structures that never did anything for him. By and large, he’s not that much of a problem for the powers-that-be – he usually cleans up the messes he makes. And most of those messes are people who remind him of his mother’s second husband. No one will miss them for long.
Traits
Nature: Judge
Demeanor: Bravo
Clan: Caitiff
Attributes
Physical: Strength •••, Dexterity •••, Stamina ••••
Social: Charisma ••, Manipulation •••, Appearance •
Mental: Perception •••, Intelligence ••, Wits •••
Abilities
Talents: Alertness ••, Athletics •, Brawl •••, Dodge ••, Intimidation •••, Streetwise •, Subterfuge •
Skills: Melee •••, Repair •, Security ••, Stealth •••
Knowledges: Investigation ••, Law •, Medicine ••
Advantages
Disciplines: Celerity •, Obfuscate ••, Potence ••
Backgrounds: Allies •• (women’s shelter director, boxing gym trainer), Contacts •• (sex crimes detective, leader in the local homeless population), Resources • (taken from abusers who don’t need money any more)
Virtues: Conscience •••, Self-Control •••, Courage ••••
Willpower: 5
Humanity: 6
Equipment
punk/grunge attire
Walkman and a selection of mix tapes
rusty BMX bike
chain with a padlock on the end
spool of baling wire
set of lockpicks he ground himself, kept in a half-empty cigarette pack
Zippo lighter and half a pack of Marlboros
Notes and Afterthoughts
Technically, I started playing VtM with the second edition hardcover, but I have the first edition in my collection, so I figured I’d use it to maintain a consistent theme. This week, I’m going to build a character for a different World of Darkness game each day, going in roughly chronological order.
For all that I’ve built a lot of vampire characters, this was surprisingly hard to do because of edition drift and the resulting jumble of lore and mechanics inside my head. First edition VtM has some subtle differences in both areas that occasionally tripped me up.
Curtis is exactly the kind of antiauthoritarian but uncommitted PC I would have written up when I first started playing. Mechanically, his Disciplines make him strong, fast, and sneaky, but there’s not much social or political capability there.