# The Vampire Prisoner tags: #game/rpg/the-vampire-prisoner #game/rpg/thousand-year-old-vampire ![[The Vampire Prisoner (cover).jpg|600]] **The Vampire Prisoner** is the second of the two sequels **Tim Hutchings** released together in October 2026 under **Petit Guignol**, and it's the one that leans hardest on the "less-lonely" promise being a trap. Where **[[So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire]]** plays out a friendship and **[[Thousand Year Old Vampire]]** plays out an unlife, this one is built entirely on conversation: your character keeps talking to a mysterious, possibly ancient being that is currently under somebody else's thumb. It's a game about asking questions of a captive who may be lying, charming, or both, and about how hard it is to stop. Self-contained, needs only a d10, a d6, and writing tools. ## Setting The setup is a triangle: a **Character** who has some business with the **Authority**, the force that contains or controls the **Vampire** — a jailer, a domineering descendant, someone to whom the Vampire has sworn a binding pledge. The character has a relationship with the Authority but does not rule over it; most play happens inside Authority-controlled space. The Vampire doesn't have to actually be a vampire — it's rewarding to let its nature emerge through play. The book's framing sketches a stranger in durance vile: a captive condemned to the Queen's oubliette, a relapso taken by the Inquisition, or merely a fellow guest at an interminable dinner party. A short Setting Questionnaire fleshes things out before the dice come out: who the Authority is and how it keeps the Vampire controlled, how the Vampire came to be its subject, what fate the Authority plans, and what your character knows or suspects. You also draft the Questions you want answered — both ones the Authority wants the Vampire to answer and ones you're privately afraid to ask. The game is flexible enough for almost any period or setting, though the further it drifts from "a vampire locked in a cage," the more you'll have to bend the Prompts. ## Mechanics You'll write a great deal, and the loop is elegantly simple: roll, read a Prompt, combine it with collage elements, write. To roll, subtract a d6 from a d10 starting at Prompt 5, forward or back. The book holds 80 Prompts, each stacked with three entries — you strike the Exchange first, and an Interlude or Shift when the dice push you there. ### Exchanges, Interludes, and Shifts Each Prompt page holds three entries. The top, an **Exchange**, drives the Vampire during a round of conversation. The middle, an **Interlude**, describes your time away from the Vampire — people act and problems arise, and rolling an Interlude ends your current Conversation (you start a new one the next time you roll an Exchange). The bottom, a **Shift**, describes a dramatic change in the world or the game itself; the book tells you to go big and roll with it. You'll mostly roll Exchanges, sometimes Interludes, and seldom or never a Shift. An Exchange works like this: read the Prompt about the Vampire's current concerns, choose a **Question** to ask it (or skip if the Prompt is proactive enough), then flip into the collages and randomly grab three snippets — text and pictures — to inform your response. Then you write the conversation, work the snippets in if you can or ignore them, find the next Question, strike out the one you just asked, and roll again. It's deliberately frictionless, and the book reassures you to just let the Vampire be earnest and direct when you're stuck. ### Outcomes and the Ending As you play you accumulate a list of possible **Outcomes** — attached to almost every Interlude and Shift, and some Exchanges. An "Add Outcome" instruction means you resolve the Prompt first, then add the Outcome to your list. You build this private ledger of how things could end: does the Vampire escape the Authority, sacrifice the Character to do it, get interred under its own tombstone, get destroyed, or get elevated to godhood? Only you can see the possibilities. When the game ends, you roll the dice as usual and count down that many entries on your Outcome list, circling what you land on (a zero or negative lands on the top). Do this a few times and you have a handful of Outcomes to weave into an epilogue — or skip the epilogue entirely and let the Outcomes imply what happened. Because the list accrues "Roll Again" outcomes at the top and "The End" outcomes at the bottom, the ending drifts toward finality as you play, but which exact fates you're dealt stays a mystery until the last roll. ### The prisoner's weight The game is upfront about its terrain: themes can include death, abuse, gaslighting, mind control, suicide, self-harm, memory loss, and dehumanization, and exploitative or abusive relationships can emerge. The safety tools are strong and explicit — you can say no to anything, ignore or rewrite rules, tape over Prompts you don't want, tear out a collage page, or have your Character exit the story entirely. The prisoner premise, the book notes wryly, is loaded and is "inextricably baked into the system." ## Editions **The Vampire Prisoner** is by **Tim Hutchings**, published under **Petit Guignol, LLC**, a self-contained "less-lonely sequel" needing no ownership of **Thousand Year Old Vampire**. It was offered as a bonus to backers of the **So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire** campaign, then sold separately on release: - **First printing PDF (October 2026)** — the held edition, ~320 pages with 400+ Prompts and 200+ pages of collages; the download also ships a separate Collages PDF and a Plaintext edition. ISBN 979-8-9973912-1-8. *In the library.* - **Hardback (December 2026)** — the matching fancy hardcover, shipping alongside **So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire** in December 2026. ## References - [The Vampire Prisoner (PDF) - Official Store (thousandyearoldvampire.com)](https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/collections/basic-book-selection/products/the-vampire-prisoner) - [So You've Met A Thousand Year Old Vampire - BackerKit Campaign (which bundled The Vampire Prisoner)](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/) - [Official flip-through video: The Vampire Prisoner (producer, Tim Hutchings) - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPk3zeEqNfs)