Skip to content

Welcome to Coterie

It's a free vampire TTRPG! Wowee! :)

What Even Is This?

Great question, so glad you asked. This document is the beginnings of a new Powered by the Apocalypse TTRPG called Coterie, designed by Sam Atwood. It's intended as a pleasant and easy-to-grasp all-vampire game, drawing heavily from Vampire: The Masquerade V5 (and some V20), Urban Shadows 2e (plus a long-running World of Darkness conversion homebrew), Low Stakes, Blades in the Dark, and Monster of the Week.

The game is meant to be serialized OR episodic, with each session covering either part of a night (almost real-time) or a handful of nights, but rarely more than a week at a time, keeping a tight focus on the dusk-to-dawn hours of everynight unlife. It's also completely free, so if you somehow paid for this, you got scammed.

Coterie is meant to be played by 4–7 people, with one acting as the Storyteller (or GM), who maintains some semblance of control over the plot, NPCs, and game world while the rest choose a Playbook and create a single vampiric character to play until something dreadful happens to them. The Storyteller must react to the players' in-game choices, keeping the world dynamic, but it's vital to note that Coterie is NOT a high-level political game (like VTM), nor is it a rules-lite game where only the narrative matters (like Low Stakes). Everything happens on a small group or individual basis, with interactions with the wider world only veering into hard consequences if things get dire.

Crucially, Coterie does NOT rely on everyone knowing V5 lore — it should be straightforward to get anyone even remotely familiar with vampires into a game and playing within a few hours (but don't neglect Session Zero!) Once the basics of the game are built, an appendix will be included with alternatives & replacements for all the World of Darkness jargon ("Auspex" → "Scrying", "Banu Haqim" → "Judges", "Ghouls" → "Thralls", etc.) to allow people to graft the game onto their own settings. It can be played for laughs like What We Do In The Shadows, for creeping horror like Nosferatu, or oscillate between all the dramatic extremes (which is good, messy fun).

Features

  • It's like VTM but actually easy to play, and with a narrower scope.
  • Classic PbtA vibes with a little extra crunch (the tasty kind).
  • Clans represented by Playbooks, each unique in its own right.
  • Modular and distinct Disciplines and Powers translated from VTM.
  • 100% free! To download a fully-functional copy of the game and all its files, just click Coterie.zip up top, print out (or digitally use) the quick reference guides and any relevant PDFs, and play!

Built with MkDocs + Material Theme (heavily customized)