Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Interview
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SFM: In case some of our readers are not familiar with Vampire, how has Vampire: The Masquerade impacted tabletop and the live-action role-playing industry over these last twenty years?
Shane DeFreest: Vampire didn't just change table-top gaming it re-defined it completely. Tabletop gaming used to just be about moving Elves and Orc's around a map and getting experience points and treasure. Vampire took the whole paradigm of how and why you play these types of games and turned it upside down. The story was more important and the (Monsters) were what you played. Right and wrong were really more shades of grey than the simple black and white.
Vampire was a game for a different type of creative mind that challenged people in ways that the medium had never seen before. It was about the journey not the destination. It started with tabletop but when we invented Live Action gaming (of which Vampire was the first) it exploded. Vampire was always a franchise that catered to the theater kid in all of us but with the possibility to actually get up and (become) your character in a more three dimensional sense it basically created a parallel industry in and of itself.
You don't see it quite as much here in the United States, but in Europe Live-Action gaming has become almost as big an industry as video games. I could go on and on about how Vampire changed gaming or effected people's lives and inspired a generation of romantic/horror fiction writers etc. But of all the trends Vampire pioneered, it has left an indelible mark on the mythology of the modern Vampire. In this day and age Vampire: The Masquerade's influence is everywhere in movies, books, & TV. Essentially the modern Vampire myth that everyone takes for granted is something we're very proud to have helped mold and define.
