Four Days of Vampire

We had been playing for four days. There were pizza boxes on the floor. I was working on my second two-liter of Mountain Dew. About five guys were sprawled around the floor. Three more were in the kitchen eating cereal, chips, or anything else that could be salvaged. The entire room smelled like nine teenage boys who hadn’t showered in four days in the middle of a Missouri summer. Suffice it to say, girls were not lining up to hang out with us.

The year was 1993. The game was Vampire: The Masquerade. I was fifteen years old.

And life was perfect.

I was not one of the players. I never was a player. I was the Storyteller, the Game Master. And at fifteen years old, I was already a veteran. I had been running role-playing games weekly ever since I got my hands on the D&D Red Box set when I was ten. I had traded a blowgun for it.

My friends liked to imagine they were characters inside of a grand story. I liked to tell the story.

Everyone who played knew I was the best game master around. Others tried. Others failed. I was very proud of my status. I was something of a celebrity. The older guys would drive to my house to pick me up. They bought me pizza and Mountain Dew. Without me, the game couldn’t happen. And once they stepped inside the tale I wove, they always wanted more.

On this particular occasion there were eight players in the house. For many game masters that would already be chaos. No, I did not have any assistants. The guys in the kitchen scrounging for food were also having a conference where they were plotting to kill one of the other characters. The food run was just a ruse.

To say I was obsessive about running role-playing games would have been an understatement. I was failing all of my classes in high school except English, in which I had an A. I was even failing gym because I read game books rather than change out for basketball.

I was a super nerd with horrible clothing and no athleticism. A fat kid who did not get dates to school dances. Most of the guys who showed up for my games were seventeen or eighteen. All of them high school dropouts.

In high school I was a loser.

On game nights, I was a local hero.

My dad was obviously concerned about my failing grades and my obsession with role-playing games. Hell, in his place I probably would have come down much harder. But my dad was old, and I was a very late child. After he and Mom split up, I don’t think he had the energy to fight that particular battle.

The house where we were playing belonged to two of the players, Sam and Levi. They had a single mom who worked most of the time, but when she was around she would make us guacamole or frozen pizza. She was pretty cool. She didn’t seem to mind that a horde of teenage boys had taken over her house. I guess she figured we could be out doing worse things.

The eight players in the house were not all of my players. Over the course of those four days, about fourteen people cycled through the game. Guys would drift in and out.

I remained.

This was before computer games, before MMOs. I was essentially a human server, running the entire world, keeping multiple plotlines moving, mentally tracking around twenty NPCs, and holding it all together inside the vampire politics and lore of the city.

After four days I felt a bit torn. A natural introvert, I was feeling oversocialized and worn out. Part of me wanted to go home, eat real food, and take a break. Maybe a day off before starting again.

But I knew once we stopped, the spell would be broken.

Earlier I had caught one guy coming out of the bathroom with his character sheet and a pencil. He had added two points to his strength.

I didn’t kick him out.

Instead, two hours later he ran into a werewolf.

A werewolf that ripped both his arms off.

He would heal eventually. He was a vampire after all. In the meantime he had to figure out how to operate with no arms.

The players from the kitchen finalized their plan and ambushed Sam’s character in an alley. They staked him and left him on a rooftop.

I didn’t intervene.

I was David Attenborough narrating Darwinism.

The hyenas had taken down a lion.

Sam was not amused.

He came up to me and told me I was the worst Storyteller ever. No one was buying it. I smirked at him and probably said something cocky.

Then he punched me in the head.

Not in the face. It was more of a hook that caught me in the left cheek. I was sitting there with a game book in my lap.

I was a boxer at the time and had probably taken more headshots than were healthy. But that was the only time I have ever been punched during a gaming session.

He stood over me, furious, daring me with his eyes to get up and fight him.

I just sat there, sort of dumbfounded that he had actually punched me.

His brother Levi jumped up and started yelling at both of us not to fight in the house. The whole room erupted into chaos.

I packed up my books and went outside and started walking. I wasn’t really sure where I was going. I was about twenty miles from my house.

As I walked down the street, one of the guys, Christian, pulled up next to me in his red Fiero. Judas Priest was screaming out of the windows. He offered me a ride, and I squeezed myself and my books into the front seat.

“Sam’s a real dick, man,” Christian said. Christian had been part of the group that killed Sam’s character. “It really sucks things ended like that. Are we going to play again? I really need to find out who that girl in the bookstore was. There is something crazy about her. I don’t guess you’ll tell me?”

“No,” I said. “A gamemaster never reveals his secrets. You’ll just have to find out.”

“What are you doing this Thursday? I could come pick you up and we could play at my house.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds good.”

Christian pulled up to my house way out in the country.

“You know, man,” he said, “all these stories and stuff… it’s like a movie series or something. Or… I don’t know. It’s really cool though. You should write them down. Maybe make them into a book or something.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, getting out of the car.

I did end up going over to his house and we played for several days. During that time it felt like we became best friends.

Then after that I never saw him again.

I don’t even know what happened to him. I don’t even know his last name. He owned a red Fiero and loved Judas Priest.

I eventually made up with Sam, but I never really trusted him after that day. I would see him during our big gaming weekends because he had the best house.

A few years ago he died of an overdose.

Some stories end while others continue.

I no longer run gaming sessions for days on end. I eventually got a girl to like me, so now I’m a husband and a father. Responsibilities and all that. Life changes.

Christian thought all the stories we told were lost.

But they weren’t. Not really.

I still hold them. And they shaped the man who became a mythic storyteller and a professor of literature.

I never did pass math in high school.