[Open Invitation] The Nocturneverse (A Shared Universe From Solo Tabletop Gaming)

Scribble Hub writers—especially those into horror—I know you're out there, and if you like to cut loose and have fun with dark fiction, I've got something you'll love.

Welcome to The Nocturneverse.

A bit of history: My bro and road dawg, Joe aka RuneKnight and I were talking about Chronicles of Darkness (the New World of Darkness line with Vampire: The Requiem). I was missing some old books, so he convinced me to replace them.

I wanted to port my gothic rocker vampire character (first male Daughter of Cacophony), but no direct plug-and-play.

So I started fresh with Draven Nocturne—and suddenly, nightly conversations between him and an old mentor started playing in my head. "Nothing Lasts Forever" was born as character baseline.

What was meant to be me joining Joe's game turned into separate solo games set in the same shared universe.

I've included my Thousand Year Old Vampire chronicles too, they tie in as it's ancient versions of the same world.

If a world that dark sounds good to you? Keep reading, because this gets so much better.

Do you have to play a vampire, werewolf, or something supernatural? No. In fact, with such a kitbash, your character can be nearly anything within reason but they have to be able to move unnoticed among the mortal world.

Your character exists in a world where Draven Nocturne and his world-renowned gothic rock band Nocturnal Shadows are wrapping a 40-year career. It's our world on the surface—but with secrets hidden underneath, and good reason. Vampires, werewolves, otherworldly horrors, eldritch nightmares, cowboy warlocks riding Harleys investigating the strange... horrors lurk in every shadow, back alley, and even your hometown.

You get to explore it. You get to share your experiences.

This is a world where even if the protagonist wins, and even if they're right and true, it doesn't make the world a better place.

Come check out The Nocturneverse... or maybe join us in The Darkness. Still plenty of cookies to go 'round.

If you have any questions on what materials to get to join in, feel free to ask and I'm happy to discuss.

https://www.scribblehub.com/series/2039715/the-nocturneverse/

#Horror #Supernatural #SharedUniverse #Vampire #Werewolf #WorldBuilding

#RockTheNight #FeedTheDark #MakeAmericaGothicAgain #TheNocturneverse

Man, if I had time to get involved in any more projects this would be in my wheelhouse, but I don't - good luck!

I just join where do we join at

LavanderVodka said:

I just join where do we join at

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Right where you are.

No kidding.

Here's what you'll NEED.

You'll need White Wolf's New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness and whatever core book for whatever it is you want to play. For modern stories, we're using that as the setting.

Some type of Oracle (Fate Mill Die and/or Mythic GM Emulator

Set of Dice

Pen

Composition book or something to write on (Start With A Handwritten Something First!)

Past that, system is all your choice. On our home page, we list a bunch of them that are either being used or will be used. Since this is a series of solo games, you play it all on your own and then set your events in the same world as us.

Suggested Games:

Thousand Year-Old Vampire
World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness (Joe's using Werewolf: The Apocalypse, himself) so anything in that line
Blood Junkies by Phil Stroud,
ShadowCity: Blood & Neon,
Lichdom RPG
Night Shift: Veterans of The Supernatural Wars (Do yourself a favor, get the Night Companion too...really open up the world a bit)

...just to name a few

Once that's done, if you've spun off of a specific story in there, just make sure you link it in an author's note and I can include your story in the table of contents with your name on the by-line.

I recommend starting with Thousand Year Old Vampire as that and Lichdom would fit in super-well with New World of Darkness lore, especially if you want that moral ambiguity or you want to create a villain.

Congratulations, you've just joined The Nocturneverse!

Now, all you have to do is play. Once you've played and you have your notes, go turn that sucker into a story and let us know! That's it. That's all there is to it.

I'm actually using Werewolf: the Forsaken, but due to the trials and tribulations of fate I'll be scrubbing most of that influence and developing some original cheese. It will be so gouda.

Hmm - never heard of Lichdom - is that the updated Mage: The Ascension?
And Night Shift - the old monster hunting game from the 90s or did that name fall out of copyright and someone else is using it?

CharlesEBrown said:

Hmm - never heard of Lichdom - is that the updated Mage: The Ascension?
And Night Shift - the old monster hunting game from the 90s or did that name fall out of copyright and someone else is using it?

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Lichdom is a game where you play a sorcerer attempting to achieve immortality. That makes great villain fodder for other games like Mage: The Awakening, Kal-Arath, Castles & Crusades, Night Shift: Veterans of The Supernatural Wars, Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age, Shadowdark, OSE, or any of the games where you could possibly fit a sorcerer who became a lich or a god in their own right.

Plus, get a gander at that cover. Most Gen-X thing ever, I swear to Crom.

Anywhoozles, this one's a solo game...and PvP if you want to do Nemesis Mode because it does have three modes to it.

Also I've used the Table Fables books, the Fate Mill Die and a ton of other materials at my disposal to flesh out the world around Draven Nocturne, Thrasamund, Neferet-hotep, and Ronnie "Red" Dalton. Like RuneKnight, I'll have to go through and scrub out some stuff because we're eventually thinking of taking those to print. I'm thinking PoD would work best with our own ISBNs that way we just own our work in full.

Night Shift: Veterans of The Supernatural Wars can be found on elflair.com and written by one of the guys who's a staff writer for Troll Lord Games, Jason Vey. He also pulled Tim S. Brannan in on it and they do have some really cool stuff, namely Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age (fantasy), Night Shift: Veterans of The Supernatural Wars (Urban Fantasy) and Thirteen Parsecs: Beyond The Solar Frontier. I have all three of those games and if you get the Night Companion, this is a cool trick which Tim did, you can play the same character across all three games because of The Immortal Class.

The downside of not being able to get to conventions (last one I spent more than a day at was the same year COVID hit... even the same day it became a problem in our area but about fifty miles away from THAT conference). Used to be well-versed on the horror and dark fantasy games out there, and moderately well on superhero ones but now am severely out of date on all of them.

CharlesEBrown said:

The downside of not being able to get to conventions (last one I spent more than a day at was the same year COVID hit... even the same day it became a problem in our area but about fifty miles away from THAT conference). Used to be well-versed on the horror and dark fantasy games out there, and moderately well on superhero ones but now am severely out of date on all of them.

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I have never once attended any convention.

I also have a bunch of newer games but I have some older ones too. The older ones like Classic Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, stuff like that, it's still being played today. Some of the newer games that have dropped like ShadowCity: Blood & Neon are fantastic and I'm gonna be doing a character in that game tying it in to the Nocturneverse at some point but that's later on down the road. A lot of these games are pretty straightforward affairs, solid systems, simply put, if you ever look at my library and don't see something that sparks an idea in your head of what you'd like to play, then I probably have a pretty close approximation and we can just homebrew that sucker.

I mean I did [ Michicon several years, GenCpn from '91 to 99 and twice since, Origins three times (though twice only because it was a traveling con at the time, and merged with MichiCon in '83 and then GenCon in '93), a few Chicago area cons, Winter Fantasy twice, and then after moving here, VeriCon twice, Arisia, Carnage several times, and TotalCon was the last one I made it to. four times so far.

CharlesEBrown said:

I mean I did [ Michicon several years, GenCpn from '91 to 99 and twice since, Origins three times (though twice only because it was a traveling con at the time, and merged with MichiCon in '83 and then GenCon in '93), a few Chicago area cons, Winter Fantasy twice, and then after moving here, VeriCon twice, Arisia, Carnage several times, and TotalCon was the last one I made it to. four times so far.

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I used to be interested in conventions. One is merely a train ride and perhaps an Uber away and in the 17 years I've lived here, I've just never been. After 2020, I refused to go to any.

For starters, I'm not a crowd guy. I've worked in a prison and in a mall, respectively and both of them have turned me off of crowds. I'm happy to play solo games or games with friends. For me, it's just not that deep.

I know what I'm missing and some of it does suck but I also know the rest of what I'm "missing" and, I'm good.

The biggest thing I miss is access to new material and rumors of upcoming products. Though I usually go to run games (I'm a player at home and a GM away). My knowledge of the New World of Darkness is that a lot of long-term fans of the setting were very unhappy with it at release, but it seemed to bring in almost as many new players as it drove away older ones (much like D&D 4e and 5e did) For original WoD I had VtM, the first Werewolf book and one supplement, the first Mage book, the first Fairy book and the first Wraith book, plus the book about Mummies.

CharlesEBrown said:

The biggest thing I miss is access to new material and rumors of upcoming products. Though I usually go to run games (I'm a player at home and a GM away). My knowledge of the New World of Darkness is that a lot of long-term fans of the setting were very unhappy with it at release, but it seemed to bring in almost as many new players as it drove away older ones (much like D&D 4e and 5e did) For original WoD I had VtM, the first Werewolf book and one supplement, the first Mage book, the first Fairy book and the first Wraith book, plus the book about Mummies.

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That is true. Initially, I looked at it and saw what they did with it and didn't care much for it. At the time, I had Mage: The Ascension and a few books for that, a bunch of Wraith: The Oblivion books which again, no one wanted to play for some reason and I thought the concept was absolutely awesome but I've heard reports of people telling me it was too intense and depressing for them and I'm thinking, "Clearly, you've never listened to Emo music...it just lacks the intensity." and I had VtM as well.

nWoD had a major issue for me. There was no direct one-to-one translation of my initial VtM character into VtR. It took time but I finally managed to finagle enough together to create the Vampire Rocker I wanted to create but now he has some extra stuff rather than just being the first ever Male Daughter of Cacophany (yeah we were doing subversive stuff like this in the 90s), he's English, rather than American, got his big break after being turned in the 80s rather than a 90s vampire just starting his career, this character is having to wind it down and I just thought that was a more interesting story to me.

Truth is, these Second Edition White Wolf books are worthwhile reads. They're darker in tone than their predecessors which is great but my suggestion is to stick with the core books and maybe a few mechanical books around whatever sect you might be playing. Personally, aside from a multitude of PDFs, the books you see on The Nocturneverse cover image, those are all mine. nWoD really pushes that dark edge but it stops at trying to be Kult First Edition. The differences between the two are that nWoD makes the darkness tragic, Kult made the darkness pointless. Kult's still a great game but, eh, I'm a little biased, I like Wretched Darkness because I did additional writing on the Tarot Mechanic (The Paymon Tarot).

If you need a WoD replacement or you just don't favor dice pool games, that's why I recommend Night Shift: Veterans of The Supernatural Wars. It's a newer game and uses mechanics that are plug-and-play. You can literally twist the rules into knots and it still won't break it.

Newer stuff though, keeping track is actually kinda easier if you're online. You don't have to go to conventions anymore. I'm on the RPG Elite Element Server and that's a great group of peeps to hang with and Servant of Shiloh and I might be miles apart with some common ground on theology, however, the thing that makes the guy an absolute unit is that he shares what he loves and his reasoning is sound and I'm of the firm belief that the guy wants to share it with people who love it as much as he does. Straight up good guy, that one.

ScribbleHub cover for #TheNocturneverse.

Oh Boooooyyyy, am I one happeh Sawmmagun!

Some Updates:

Most of the stories by RuneKnight have been updated. He's scrubbed out the nWoD lore and replaced it with something more Norse-Inspired and has created the beginnings of a cosmology that kinda explains the monsters that we create, play and then write. Mine still has a lot of the nWoD reference regarding the Gangrel, The Daeva, The Mysterium, The Circle of The Crone, etc so those will have to be changed and replaced with new errata.

Up until now, I haven't considered using too much of the nWoD lore, keeping it light but the stuff around The Circle will definitely have to change, for certain. Everyone, new stories will continue to be churned out but expect revisions to the Mage and Vampire stories coming soon.