Review: Thousand Year Old Vampire
October 2024 Series – check out the rest of the series!
We've been focusing this month on vampires and using vampires in TTRPGs. I've also shared at other times how much I enjoy solo RPG journalling games (see my reviews for Classified! and Quill). This week, we're combining these two things to talk about one of the most famed and popular entries of the Solo Journaling Game genre: Thousand Year Old Vampire, by Tim Hutchings. I'm certainly not breaking any new ground when it comes to this game, which has been out for years and which has won multiple ENnies, but I think it is in keeping with this month's theme and maybe some of you will learn about the game from reading about it here.
You can pick up a copy of Thousand Year Old Vampire on DriveThruRPG. This is an affiliate link, which will give me a small cut of DriveThru's share of the price--the author still gets their full cut. This has not influenced my review.
Mechanics Overview
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a little more mechanically complex than some of the other solo RPGs I've reviewed on this blog, while also being one of the least dictated by random dice rolls.
The bulk of these mechanics lie on your character sheet. You have characters--mortal and immortal--that appear in your story that you have notes written about. You have resources. You have skills. And you have marks of your vampirism, strange and undead things about you that might draw attention from mortals. These elements will constantly fluctuate as you expend resources, use skills, and kill off accompanying characters.
But the bulk of the hefty rulebook is actually pretty rules-lite, consisting just of prompts. So many prompts. You roll a d10 minus a d6 to progress or move backward through these prompts, and then you write your responses to these prompts--modifying your character sheet as instructed by the prompt. For example, I got a prompt that told me that years, decades, even centuries pass by in the blink of an eye--which, for my recently sired vampire, I interpreted as a sort of training montage--that instructed me to kill every mortal on my character sheet. Goodbye, friends that I barely scratched the surface of.
The core record of the game is your Memories. Your response to each prompt gives you an Experience, a short line of text summarizing your story of that prompt (which you can write out in more detail as a sort of journal entry). You assign these experiences into memories, linked sets of up to three experiences. For example, my vampire carried around a silver pendant he won in his mortal life from character creation. Winning it was the first experience, having it stolen by another vampire was the second, and fighting that vampire for the pendant was the third.
And that's basically it, mechanically. We'll talk about one more memory-related mechanic later on because it's cool, but I think it's so crucial to the tone of the game that I want to talk about it with the tone, rather than the mechanics.
There's a lot going on in your character sheet, more than most solo RPGs I've played, but the actual play-by-play experience is mostly just writing--your responses to a truly excellent wealth of prompts.
Tone and Themes
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a game about loneliness, the fallibility of memory, and slowly losing everything that made you human. That's not the vampire experience of Dracula that I've been pushing this month so much, though you can certainly use it to keep yourself mysterious as well as a corrupting "other" in terms of influence on the world.
But the game is not so much set up as a horror game as it is a tragedy. There are violent prompts, absolutely. Your need for blood necessitates that. But it is mere background to what is the tonal core of the game: being upset as all the good vanishes from your life.
The way the game accomplishes this is by having you limited in your memories. After all, as the centuries pass, you forget things– that last mechanic I mentioned. You can only have 5 memories at a time. You can save 4 more by recording them in a diary, but this diary can be stolen and cannot be edited or added to. If a new experience doesn't fit in one of your memory categories, or if you've filled up all five, the only way to record a new experience is to choose a whole memory (up to 3 experiences) and let them slip away. Gone into the oblivion of forgetfulness.
This can be heartbreaking to play at times, which is why I said one of the core themes is loneliness. Forgetting your mortal true love because you want to remember the day you became a vampire hurts. You can feel that loss of humanity, that loss of a tie to your past. Forgetting your past with your creator in order to remember the vampire that you spawned that lives with you now; it is necessary, but it is sad to abandon that tale from your past.
This tone is where the game thrives. You feel the march of time. You feel the way that the past slips away from you. You can try to cling to the happy moments, but each new experience requires new memories, and you cannot remember everything.
In case it wasn't clear, I love this theme. It is a great theme for a story about immortality. The themes of loneliness and seeking connection–even as those connections are fleeting and must eventually be forgotten–tie in really beautifully with the themes of Interview with the Vampire, a really excellent show that you should check out if you haven't yet that I am presently really into (and which was very much on my mind as I was playing my runthrough of Thousand Year Old Vampire).
It's not horror for vampires, but neither is it tame. It is an emotional and extremely tonal game, moreso than any other solo game I've reviewed, where I always felt some level of distance and awareness of the "game" nature of what I was playing. This was... moving.
Scale and Impressions
This game is long. I was writing a prompt each day for about a month, as of the time of writing this post (a little before it actually goes live, admittedly), and I'm still not completely "done" with a complete playthrough. It probably could be shorter depending on your dice rolls, and I'm certainly not playing it for hours and hours at once (it takes me maybe 5-10 minutes for one experience). But there are so many prompts that the game never feels stale or redundant, and if it somehow does, the creator has an appendix filled with still more prompts in the PDF.
I hope my impressions of the game are clear. This is not the most game-y game, though I'd put it somewhere between the "a fun writing prompt generator" nature of Quill and the "this is a game with abundant dice rolling for success" nature of Classified!. But it is atmospheric. It is moving. It is emotional.
And it is brilliantly designed. Every mechanic feels related to and reinforces the theme.
Will you have fun playing this game? Maybe. You might also be upset. You're writing a tragedy, after all.
Will you leave with an interesting vampire narrative about exploring the downsides of immortality? Absolutely.
Will you be engaged? That depends on you, but I sure am. It is easy to be sucked into this game and the story you're writing.
Is it worth $15? Unhesitatingly. Absolutely worth the price. One of the best games I've played recently. There's a reason it has three ENnies. You can pick up Thousand Year Old Vampire on DriveThruRPG!
I hope you all enjoyed this review, as well as the series on vampires as a whole for October. Happy Halloween! I hope everyone spends it thinking about vampires, and all the rich themes that they can be used to explore.
Next week, we put vampires behind us, and return to our regular blend of less thematic and more history-focused content.