# So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire tags: #game/rpg/so-youve-met-a-thousand-year-old-vampire #game/rpg/thousand-year-old-vampire ![[So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire (cover).jpg|600]] **So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire** is the sequel nobody asked the game to be, and it's better for it. Where **[[Thousand Year Old Vampire]]** makes you the immortal slowly shedding everything you loved, this one hands you the other end of the leash: you're the ordinary mortal who made friends with the ancient thing. It's the "less-lonely" game in a family whose whole trick used to be how lonely it could make you feel — you finally get a companion, and the horror is that you were better off alone. Self-contained, first printing 2026, by **Tim Hutchings** under **Petit Guignol**, and the better-behaved sibling in a pair of sequels released together with **[[The Vampire Prisoner]]**. ## Setting Your Character is a regular person having a regular life, which is precisely what makes them the wrong person to meet the Vampire. Play begins with you spying on a mysterious, ancient, dangerous being from a safe distance, then letting it creep into your days whether you want it to or not. The relationship unfurls at mortal scale — a few days, a decade, maybe two — not across centuries. Time and geography don't dramatically shift; you won't gain a new language every other session, and your character can genuinely just go home and make dinner after a troubling evening. The Vampire is discovered through play, not dictated at the start. It should pass for human and be able to communicate; it should need to feed on, exploit, or otherwise endanger humans even if it doesn't want to give in to that part of its nature. It can be a ghost, an angel, an occult abstraction, or just a very motivated monster that is never clearly anything — the book nudges you not to pin it down. It should be a stranger, or someone your character hasn't spoken to in a long time, and it should be a master manipulator, full of subtlety. You might even resurrect a vampire from an earlier game of **Thousand Year Old Vampire** and let it surprise you with fresh wickedness — a nice hook for anyone who's been grieving their last one. ## Mechanics The machinery is familiar to **Thousand Year Old Vampire** players, but the emphasis has swung from erasing to misunderstanding. To move, you roll a d10 and a d6 and subtract the d6 from the d10, starting at Prompt 5. Each Prompt page stacks three entries — you take a, then b, then c on successive landings, moving to the next Prompt when you run out. The top two entries each offer a choice of two options; the choice tells you to Change an Experience from one type to another, and that Changing is the heart of the game. ### Arcs, Experiences, and Changing Your Character is built from **Arcs** (stacks of Experiences), **Relationships**, and **Skulls**. There are five types of Experience — **Life, Trust, Secret, Strength, and Betrayal** — and your four starting Arcs hold five Experiences between them. The core action is writing: choose a Prompt option and match it to an Experience sitting at the bottom of an Arc, then write the new Experience it becomes. The twist is that the new Experience must carry forward some element of the old one — you are forced to find a thread between "my parents' basement in Pacific Heights" and whatever terrible secret you just learned, and the game is counting on that forced stitching to surprise you. Arcs exist only to feed older Experiences back into the story; read one top to bottom and it will make little narrative sense, and that's fine. The deliberately cruel twist is that Experiences **aren't truth**. Every Experience is what your Character believes, from their own viewpoint — and the mechanics are tuned so your character can be confidently, catastrophically wrong. Betrayals recontextualize and cast doubt on earlier Experiences; at any moment the bottommost Experience in an Arc counts as "most true." The Vampire lies about lies, forgets things, muddles humans it has met, and the game wants you to discover you gravely misunderstood what was happening all along. It's the memory-losing thesis of **Thousand Year Old Vampire**, reworked: instead of forgetting, you find out you were deceived. ### Relationships and Skulls Relationships are every non-Vampire, non-Character person in the game — Mundane (friends, sheriffs, mail carriers), Unusual (people who know the supernatural is real, a vampire hunter on holiday, an FBI agent investigating estate-tax fraud), and Supernatural (other vampires, ghosts, disembodied heads, saints), the last creatable only when a Prompt says so. Each starts with two Skulls, and the more Skulls a Character or Relationship racks up, the more danger they're in — whether they know it or not. Soap-opera rules apply: you can absolutely bring the dead back if it feels right. ### The Coffin and the Death Die At setup you conceal one d10 under a cup or in a container — the **Death Die**, sitting in **The Coffin**. You Check the Coffin when a Prompt tells you to: reveal the die, and if it shows a number less than your Skull count, your character perishes and the game ends. You can check at any point while answering a Prompt, either to plan your writing around the result or as a cliffhanger reveal afterward. Alternatively, if an Arc ends in a Trust, you can choose to betray the Vampire and destroy it instead of checking the Coffin — Change a Trust to any Experience, describe ending the beast, and Return to Normal. ### Endings and Return to Normal The game ends when a Prompt says so, when a Coffin check perishes you, or when you decide the moment is right — and the book explicitly blesses ending on a cliffhanger. **Return to Normal** is the denouement: you change the bottommost Experience of each Arc into a Life Experience, in any order, some or none — tying off loose ends as your Character reflects on the Vampire's absence. Or things refuse to Return to Normal and you promote a Relationship into the Vampire's role and keep going. There's even an optional becoming-a-vampire rule, with the explicit suggestion that you could switch over to the **Thousand Year Old Vampire** rules and continue the unlife. ## Editions **So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire** is by **Tim Hutchings**, published under **Petit Guignol, LLC**, self-contained and needing no prior TYOV ownership. Founded on a BackerKit campaign (Aug–Sep 2024, ~$284k, well past its $45k goal), which bundled a copy of **The Vampire Prisoner** for every backer of SYMA: - **First printing PDF (October 2026)** — the held edition, ~320 pages of rules and Prompts plus 100+ pages of collages, 600+ Prompts; the download also ships a separate Collages PDF and a Plaintext edition. ISBN 979-8-9973912-0-1. *In the library.* - **Hardback (December 2026)** — the fancy 320-ish page color hardcover built to match the **Thousand Year Old Vampire** book, with ribbon page markers and gold-and-red foil. Prints for both 2026 sequels ship concurrently in December 2026. ## References - [So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire (PDF) - Official Store (thousandyearoldvampire.com)](https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/collections/basic-book-selection/products/so-youve-met-a-thousand-year-old-vampire-pdf-15-book-credit-in-december) - [So You've Met A Thousand Year Old Vampire - BackerKit Campaign](https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/tim-hutchings/so-you-ve-met-a-thousand-year-old-vampire) - [Thousand Year Old Vampire - Official Site (Tim Hutchings Makes Games)](https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/)