This chapter looks at the evolving Gothic of the Vampire role playing games created by Mark Rein-Hagen et al. It offers a brief explanation of role-playing games for the uninitiated, defining their textuality in Bakhtinian terms – as chronotopes. It will lay out the relationship that role playing enjoys with the Gothic, drawing on Spooner’s postmodern ‘ludogothic’, and Kryzwynska’s sense of genre as defined by coordinates. It will then summarise of Vampire’s complex design history, and offer a swift tour through Vampire’s various editions, charting how the game’s Gothic has evolved and, eventually, come to transcend itself over nearly thirty years.
Jon Garrad, The evolving Gothic of White Wolf's Vampire games, published in The Palgrave Handbook of the Contemporary Gothic edited by Clive Bloom, 2020, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan
