Oops, All Draculas!
Unseelie Studios, oh What Music They Make!
I’ve been so excited for the release of Unseelie Studios new vampire game Oops, All Draculas! So excited, that I ran a first session with it the same week my physical copy arrived! Come join me wax poetically on this darkest of entries into The Buddy System…if you DARE!
The original Buddy System by Jessica Marcrum is an incredible rules-lite game that “emphasizes story based, character-driven games where characters are stronger together”. This is supported by your D6 dice pool growing larger the more people help you, although the Dracula twist adds macabre complications into the mix when enough of your friends are helping!
Friendship is magic, eh? It’s a perfect, story based skeleton with which to dress the blood-soaked, spooky dressings that adorn such pop culture staples as What We Do In The Shadows. In fact, if you’re specifically looking for a game to emulate that same kind of vibe, this is it. Trust me. It nails it down to a T.
What’s in a character?
Draculas can play as one of five archetypes, defined by some of the most popular incarnations of vampires across fiction and media. Your dracula archetype makes you good at four of the myriad powers associated with vampires, but any archetype can attempt any of the powers (listed on page 20), just at one die.
It took a few readings of this to fully grok, but I think that’s because I’m used to overly intricate games. Since your pack of vamps already help each other out all the time, attempting an unfamiliar power can go from D6 → 3D6 or even 4D6 at the drop of a hat! As written, it simultaneously makes the archetypes thematic and important, while anyone can at at least attempt the fun!
Draculas can also have a Minion. What villain doesn’t have minions? The sidekick character for your vamp aids them in a specific endeavor, like skills in many other systems. I think this is an inspired choice. Cats help in infiltrating, Foxes in being sly…and of course, Human “Familiars” get two wildcard perks of the player’s choosing, but are subsequently a lot more to handle. Needy humans, with their needs and wants!
Location, Location, Location
What really sold me when this game was running its Crowdfundr was this image, expanding The Buddy System’s idea of a “home base” into the perfect spooky Halloween locale:
This fucks so hard.
Again, Oops, All Draculas! is a rules-light system, so there’s no SIMS-like simulation with a gothic filter over it. The prompts are what you get, but their mileage runs far.
I ran my playgroup of four friends through it and an evocative, thrilling picture immediately came to mind.
Setting our Dracula game in our own city, Pittsburgh, I asked everyone to decide what neighborhood they lived in . They picked Garfield, an unofficially queer-friendly neighborhood known for its art boom, DIY scene and its adjacency to the Allegheny Cemetery.
Pittsburgh is known for many things, one being sheer hills so steep that out-of-towners call them mountains. Previous city administrations countered this with countless staircases, which in the current day have often fallen into disrepair. Thus, we have our vampire pack living in a manse perched atop a craggy hill, guarded by a steep, booby-trapped set of Pittsburgh stairs haunting our fictional version of Garfield.
The best narrative moment to come out of this was the NPC they named Dickhead.
Dickhead, believe it or not, was a gift.
The whole session, really, was an extended game of “make up a guy and then get mad at him”. Dickhead was patient zero for this phenomenon. In their house they have a talking, reanimated skeleton that lives in their closet. The vampire pack have referred to him as “Dickhead” for so long that this poor soul (who later we decided had tragically died in the controlled demolition of The Three-Rivers Stadium?) has no memory of who he truly was in life.
No memory that is, except a Rolodex of terrible stand-up comedy zingers. Then they decided that his bachelor pad is probably the nicest room in the house, has the only working toilet (a Pittsburgh toilet), and spends his undead life as a VTuber. Except of course, he’s not actually V-Tubing, he really IS a skeleton…
Pittsburgh By Night
Ripping off the gothic horror trope of running games in your own backyard, Draculas provided an ecstatically dynamic framework for PITTSBURGH BY NIGHT, our own little corner of gothic ambience meets gut-bursting laughter.
Running vampire ttrpgs around Halloween was a tradition I started in 2021, using an old copy of VtM I got secondhand. 2022 cancelled for folks out with COVID, and we never rescheduled. Eagerly anticipating the arrival of my physical copy, I got the four of us back together in the middle of the Summer, branding it MIDSUMMER NIGHTS!
In my mind, Midsummer being the longest day of the year is a kind of horror for vampires. The way that the living are afflicted with melancholy and dread around Samhain / Halloween, after some reflection I think the undead would feel that way about the shortest period of darkness, the terrible heat of day stifling their slumber.
This provided the story impetus for our very first Oops, All Draculas! It’s the worst time of year for vampires, so the local packs throw a kind of macabre potluck. They roll up to someone’s house, bring dinner, making sure everyone is accounted for and hunters are kept at bay. This allowed for a laid back, easy segue into the system itself since the players - and the house they had just built together - were center stage. All I had to do was come up with three or four quirky vampires, some helpless souls brought in for food, and Midsummer Nights was a hit!
Canonically in the Garfield Vampire Manor, every Midsummer the vampires take a group photo (with their victims) giving a big thumbs up. They all hang in a huge collage in Dickhead’s room, right next to the green-screen and mock-Vtubing setup. For decades, victims have lined up for a group photo only to see just how many line the walls ahead of them, and how the participants in the photos never seem to age…
Mine Own Vintage
It’s a rules-lite game. There’s a part of me that wishes there was a stronger game mechanic tied to drinking blood, or just what drinking blood does to a vampire.
But, with the simplicity and confidence with which the game presents itself, and the sheer sense of fun that radiated off of my friends from one go at this, I don’t think it really matters. I’m certain with some thinking, I can add a few elements here and there as I think I need them, like maybe draining a person of their blood can give the player a reroll.
It’s a far cry from the only other vampire ttrpg I’ve played; and thank Vlad for that!
One addition that I added directly in the course of play was a kind of reaction / oracle system using 2D6. I’ll likely give it some more robust form next time we play, but there wasn’t an easy answer to “Does my character know this?” about the collective Pittsburgh-Vampire-timeline we were building together.
Rather than a character having their access to vampire lore tied to stats, I asked for 2D6 rolls and matched the roll to the spread. (I have it memorized from staring at it for my ttrpg project YADN). They’re vampires living in the hidden, gothic world of vampires, they should damn-well know things. Rather than “gate” knowledge or lore, I think I’ll be tying it to something like this:
Low-range rolls (2-5?) give you a partial bit of lore, at least half of what the PC was asking for.
Median rolls of 6, 7 and 8 give you most of the lore asked.
High-range rolls (11-12?) give you most of the lore, AND a secret! Likely made up on the spot, but rewarding rare rolls makes for fun at the table!
Writing this out, even as GM I want to leave things up to chance and have reinvented an Oracle for us to use at the table.
Fucking Guy
Give Oops, All Draculas! and the other Buddy System games a try. Simple, effective, it blew all of us away how much fun we had! It was really affirming to bust out my capes and assorted candelabras, blasting some Cure, Twin Temple and Cocteau Twins for a good evening with friends.
Check out Unseelie Studios and all the damnable vamps responsible for bringing this terror to our world!
Happy biting, and keep being creative!
P.S
Here’s a peek at my notes as my players described their characters. The special powers were all super interesting, and we had a gamut of old world vamps, a new age techno and an energy vampire who moonlights as a silent partner / musician at Roboto:
