# Thousand Year Old Vampire tags: #game/rpg/thousand-year-old-vampire ![[Thousand Year Old Vampire (cover).jpg|600]] **Thousand Year Old Vampire** is the rare solo game whose cruelest mechanic is also its whole thesis: you write out a vampire's centuries, and the book keeps making you cross the best parts out. Created by gallery artist **Tim Hutchings** and published under Petit Guignol, it's a prompt-journaling RPG about the crush of memory across a millennium — the creature you're chronicling is slowly losing everything it ever loved, and the erasing is the point. It walked away from the 2020 ENNIE Awards with golds for Best Rules and Best Production Values and silver for Product of the Year, which is the hobby finally rewarding a book that makes you wreck your own story on purpose. ## Setting You begin by imagining a person who lived in the distant past — a Roman emperor, a Mesopotamian midwife, a French knight — and conjuring the life they abandoned before something turned them into a thing of the night. Then you follow that vampire across the centuries: feeding, hiding, forging and then outliving every relationship they make, watching the people they love grow old and die or turn to dust. The book's own flavor text casts you as "a creaking hunter among dust and cobwebs" prowling the places where you feed, a creature with no memory of living as a man-thing — yet whose fingers still trace clever arabesques in the dirt and hum songs in a forgotten language when no one is watching. Mortal society grinds on around you, and the quiet horror is that keeping up with it means shedding the past that shaped you. The game leans on the vampire-as-tragedy rather than the vampire-as-power-fantasy. Prompts thread you through themes of predation, selfishness, and loss, and the book is blunt about the terrain ahead: your vampire will be injured, trapped, or killed; will murder and victimize people of all sorts; and will certainly forget important things. This is not a game about elegant undead politics — it's about the mess of being ancient, isolated, and running out of reasons to remember. ## Mechanics The rules are almost insultingly light, which is the design working as intended: the machinery exists only to move you between numbered Prompts and to spend your traits. To resolve a Prompt you roll your d10 and d6 and subtract the d6 from the d10 — a positive result moves you forward that many Prompts, a negative result backward, and a 0 lands you on the same Prompt again. Each Prompt carries multiple entries, so re-landing on a number isn't a reroll but a deepening of the same scene. Almost every Prompt forces a change to one of your five traits, and those changes are the whole game. ### Character Creation You build the vampire in a few quick passes, all of it grounded in the era and place you chose: - **A starting Memory** (one Experience) capturing their mortal life as a broad summary — *I am Henri, son of Jon, born near the Loire Valley in the 13th Century; I am a poor knight swindled out of my inheritance.* - **At least three Mortals** — the people who will be important to them and will not be around for long. - **Three Skills and three Resources** fitting their lot in life. - **Three more Experiences**, each entered into a separate Memory and each combining two traits. - **One Immortal** — the creature who gifted (or cursed) them with unlife — plus **a Mark**, the visible sign that sets them apart, and the Experience of how they became a creature of the night. A finished vampire has three Skills, three Resources, at least three Mortals, one Immortal, one Mark, and one Experience in each of their five Memories. ### The Memory Economy The vampire's identity hangs on **Memories** — each a themed container of up to three **Experiences**, each Experience a single evocative sentence distilling what happened and why it mattered. There is only ever room for five Memories, and the game's teeth are in that limit. When a new Experience shows up and there's no space, *you* — not the vampire, who is making no conscious choice at all — decide which existing Memory to strike out and lose, forgetting the whole collection of Experiences it held. The harder your vampire lives, the more of itself it throws away to keep going. There is exactly one way to cheat the amnesia: the **Diary**, a physical Resource that can hold up to four Memories in ink instead of memory. A Memory moved to the Diary is no longer in the vampire's head — they accept whatever is written as truth — and can't be added to. But the Diary is a thing, and things get lost; when it goes, everything recorded in it goes with it. The book's own note on the design is that the mechanic grew out of Hutchings's dread as an artist and archivist: if it isn't written down, it will be forgotten, and if it is written down, the writing can be lost. ### The End Skills and Resources are the only traits that can stand in for each other — if a Prompt wants one and you're out, you may spend the other, and each such substitution signals that things have gone very badly for your vampire. The final stop comes when a Prompt asks you to check or lose a Skill or Resource and you have nothing left: the game is over, and you narrate your vampire's destruction. Between that mechanical famine and the Prompts that simply tell you the game has ended, both roads lead to the same quiet place — and the game is perfectly happy to let you take a few hours or a few weeks getting there. ## Editions **Thousand Year Old Vampire** is by **Tim Hutchings**, self-published under **Petit Guignol**, and effectively a single edition whose text has drifted through minor revisions. Begun in 2018, completed in 2019, and distributed in 2020 after a Kickstarter funded the print run: - **v1.0x text (2019/2020)** — the self-published PDF. The library holds **ver 1.04**. *In the library.* - **Print hardcover (2020)** — the Kickstarter-funded, digest-sized, 188-page color book made to look like an old library find with a leather spine, marbled endpapers, and collages of genuine ephemera. Currently in its 4th printing; the official store sells it as Book+PDF or PDF-only. Same content as the text edition, just a much lovelier object. Related to the core but not editions of it: the **Secret Companion** volume, the in-progress sequel **So You've Met A Thousand Year Old Vampire**, and the third-party hack **Five Hundred Year Old Vampire**. ## References - [Thousand Year Old Vampire - Official Site (Tim Hutchings Makes Games)](https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/) - [Thousand Year Old Vampire (Book+PDF) - Official Store](https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/products/thousand-year-old-vampire) - [Thousand Year Old Vampire on DriveThruRPG - Where to Buy](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/306279/thousand-year-old-vampire) - [Thousand Year Old Vampire on Itch.io - PDF and community copies](https://timhutchings.itch.io/tyov) - [Thousand Year Old Vampire - Kickstarter Campaign](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timh/thousand-year-old-vampire-a-roleplaying-game) - [Review: Thousand Year Old Vampire - Shut Up & Sit Down](https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos/review-thousand-year-old-vampire/) - [Thousand Year Old Vampire - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Year_Old_Vampire) - [2020 ENNIE Awards Nominees and Winners - ENNIE Awards](https://ennie-awards.com/portfolio-item/2020-nominees-and-winners/)