oxblood

My old gaming group was very into the old World of Darkness tabletop RPGs, but we never played much Vampire – our tastes tended more towards the heroic and optimistic, and we were mostly on the “nerd” side of the nerd vs. goth side of the WoD fandom spectrum. So when I finally had an idea for a one-shot and the rest of the group bit on the pitch, I came up with a house rule to try to prod folks into the right headspace to play one of the damned, which was simply that creating a new vampire wasn’t deterministic: even if you follow all the steps that would lead to someone joining the ranks of the undead, it wouldn’t work for everyone. The ones who did survive the process were the ones who, when faced with the choice between oblivion and life, even a harshly limited form of life centered on predation, in their heart of hearts – or heck, we’re talking about vampire fiction, we can say “soul” here – decided to take the deal. It was a simple tweak, but I thought a fairly idiosyncratic one, given that it was aimed at the specific foibles of my players. So I was completely flummoxed when, upon playing oxblood, I saw this discussion of the kinds of individuals who can become vampires:

"There are people who are… predisposed. They’ve got that sense of perpetual unfulfillment. They float by. They don’t remember much. Essentially, their lives seem to be nothing and they feel themselves as being nothing. They’re a time bomb but they don’t know it yet. One day, something will happen to them — something that will make them feel for the first time. It’s always either profoundly beautiful or profoundly destructive. The outcome is always the same: the thirst for life."

That’s not the game’s other departure from the standard Dracula line: these vamps can walk around in the sunlight, can easily get enough blood without killing anybody, and don’t mind running water so long as it comes from plumbing. Sure, they avoid looking in the mirror, but that’s not because they can’t see their reflections, it’s because they don’t like what they’ll see, due to the tendency of their bodies to seem a bit corpse-like and identity-dissociation most tend to develop over the centuries.

I’m often wary when vampire fiction messes with the traditional formula, not due to a slavish adherence to dogma but just because it tends to undercut the drama – I get it, vampires are fun and they’re a more comfortable vector for exploring difference (especially queerness) if they’re not all mass murderers. But those changes can also mean a story is borrowing the trappings of angst without the actual danger; the human prejudice against vampires is often portrayed as irrational in these kinds of stories, a thoughtless hatred directed at a harmless minority. That’s a fine approach, but as I said, personally, I like my vampires to have more bite.

Fortunately for me, this is another place where oxblood is on my wavelength, because the point of these changes isn’t to let vampires off the hook: just the opposite. Again and again, it’s made clear that vampires don’t have to be monsters who are a threat to anyone who gets close to them. So when they are – and Ethel, the game’s protagonist, definitely is – that’s a choice they’re making, not something they can blame on an impersonal undead condition.

One part of what makes Ethel so compelling is that she goes through incredible mental and moral gymnastics to do exactly that, though. Here’s her Catholic-inflected thought process after she’s accidentally (“accidentally”) harmed her human lover, Erin:

"Of course, she thought she didn’t deserve forgiveness from Erin but it was the only thing she wanted in that moment. It would feel so good to have all of her sins absolved; she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, after all, and biting is just her nature, so how could it be held against her?"

But this doesn’t work out for her, because absolution requires sincere contrition, and Ethel is wallowing in bad faith:

"It wasn’t and she knew it but admitting what it really was would be an admission of guilt. She couldn’t have that, no, she had to pretend to forget until she thought she forgot, until she led enough new lives to bury all her faults beneath them so she doesn’t have to confront herself."

This is the primary conflict of the game – almost everything Ethel does is aimed at escaping herself and sublimating her past. The title is even a reference to her tic of referring to blood as “(ink)” instead, an evasion one of the humans she feeds on even calls her out over. Much of the plot of the game also concerns itself with the process of her creating these “new lives” – we get flashbacks to a much earlier life, when she went be “Ethedread” and did something that appears to be unforgiveable, but also see her abandon being Ethel as she flees from the fallout with Erin, and adopts “Adele” as her new name.

This narrative business is compelling, especially as a psycho-moral menage a trois develops between Adele, the aforementioned willing-blood-source, and another vampire named Virgil, who’s unique among his kind because he has faith that there’s a purpose to life. But ultimately it’s Ethel/Etheldread/Adele’s interior dynamics that make oxblood so successful. Much of the story is told via dialogue between several of her internal voices, with their lines often appearing as links you can click through to get more detail or background (this is where much of the lore is delivered). There’s one voice that’s perennially making excuses or trying to appeal to the audience to sympathize with poor Ethel – but there’s another that doggedly reiterates the rules, refusing to let her off the hook and making clear that at every moment Ethel is making choices. The possibility of accountability is the same thing as the possibility of grace, and it’s always, always present.

oxblood is the kind of choice-based game where I’m happy there’s no branching. It feels quite engaging, don’t get me wrong – if nothing else, there are lots of those optional links to explore – but the story is the story, and the last link on the page will lead you to the next one until you reach the end. That’s the right call, because this is a game about choices: but they’re Ethel’s choices, not yours.