What better way could there be to explore centuries of history than through the eyes of someone who doesn’t age? 500 Year Old Vampire is a tabletop RPG that challenges players to research historical events and their impact on people across multiple centuries of in-game time while also telling the story of an eternal vampire (and their cohort) as they must find a way to carve out their survival in an ever-changing world.

Jump to: 

• Audience for 500 Year Old Vampire
• Setting for 500 Year Old Vampire
• Characters in 500 Year Old Vampire
• Mechanics in 500 Year Old Vampire
• Overall thoughts on 500 Year Old Vampire
• Find a copy of 500 Year Old Vampire

Audience for 500 Year Old Vampire

500 Year Old Vampire is made for players probably 13 and up just due to the nature of it being about vampires doing vampire things and that it reaches into real world historical research… which can sometimes be more intense than vampire stories.  You’ll definitely want to have a safety tools discussion, and you can of course vary the content based on your safety tools discussion and how you want to flavor your discussions, but this game is one that I tried out playing with adults versus adjusting for kiddo.  

I’m reviewing here on TTRPGkids because this can be used in settings with older youth (i.e. high school or college), and it has REALLY solid educational connections since players will be conducting and presenting historical research throughout the game.

The mechanics require players to conduct historical research in the era and continent of the current phase of the game, complete a short creative writing assignment (a letter to another vampire), and craft or collect an artifact connected to your vampire’s journey.  You roll dice to progress the year, but otherwise, it is focused heavily on the other elements of the game.  This means that, mechanically, players will need to be able to read and write in a way that aligns with most high school level learning goals. 

Setting for 500 Year Old Vampire

500 Year Old Vampire is set in real-world Earth, so, when you’re researching historical facts, you’ll be reading about our world’s actual recorded history over the span of several hundred years.

The premise of the game is that your character, along with 2-4 other player characters, has been turned into a vampire by the same prime vampire, so you are loosely bound together across eternity via this connection and that, especially as time seems to slip away, you are the only ones who understand what that’s like.  

You go about your “lives”, experiencing history on a particular continent (which can sometimes change if your cohort is found out by mortals), and reconvene as a group every so often to share what you’ve seen and experienced during that time.

There’s fantastical events mixed in via card prompts, like a character finding a magical artifact or an encounter with another group of vampires, plus whatever you fill for your stories, but the foundation is on human history.  

For our game, we used one of the pre-gen sets of characters starting in China with a group of 4 vampires, so much of our early research was on 17th century Chinese history, covering the transition from the Ming to Qing dynasties, the effects of the Jesuits and Dutch East India Trading Company, and what was going on in the daily lives of the people (who were impacted by larger events… but may have been more impacted by a cold snap that killed crops).  As time in the game passed, our research extended to other continents and more recent events.

Characters in 500 Year Old Vampire

Your character in 500 Year Old Vampire is, well, a vampire!  They have been turned undead at roughly the same time as several other individuals, so this group has formed a cohort between themselves in order to find some kind of connection. 

They have a set of skills, resources, connections, and memories that change throughout the game.  Skills can grow or dwindle, resources can develop or be left behind, connections can be gained or may perish, and memories can grow or fade.  These are all tracked as story elements, so no stats are assigned to them, but they are crucial in your character being able to handle prompts as they arise, even if they don’t have numbers assigned.

Between meetings with the group, your vampire character is out in the world finding ways to feed and building up resources for their own protection across centuries and, likely, across multiple continents.

They’ll experience the loss of mortals that they cared about in life as family and friends grow old and pass away, and they can lose their memories to time as they themselves age, even if it isn’t physical.  Your character will face challenges related to betrayals or getting caught up in world conflicts, and they will gain new connections or could find new resources and self development.

The main thing is that your vampire will still change over time, even if they are not aging physically.  Memories, the world, and those around them move on and develop as you watch time pass through the eyes of your character.  It creates a feeling of understanding the scope of centuries as you watch the cause and effect of both personal and sweeping global events cascade.

Mechanics in 500 Year Old Vampire

500 Year Old Vampire is a research and keepsake focused game that prioritizes story over tracking numbers (aside from the date).  

A round of the game is going to consist of drawing prompt cards from various decks and transferring them between players to create events in your characters’ stories.  These cards can change your story, connections, resources, memories, and more, having a significant impact on your individual character or the cohort as a whole. 

At this time, you roll dice to see how many years will pass between now and the next meeting so you know what time period to research for the next step.  

During the research phase each player looks up information about the particular location and era that your cohort of vampires operates in. Within that same round, you’ll then write a letter to another member of your group of vampires referencing some of the events that took place during that period and speaking to your character’s time between convenings.  

Lastly, you’ll create an artifact, which could be an art project, an object that you find at home or outside, etc. that connects to your character’s story for that period of time.  This is to represent your vampire’s memory, and give them something to hold onto from their past if and when the actual memory attached to that item starts to fade. 

Once all these are complete, your group (both your player characters and you as the players) will come together to share all of this information amongst themselves, teaching each other what you’ve learned and showcasing your work. 

Now, this was a bit to track, and we had some limits and accommodation needs for the group, so we found that the best way to keep all the information together and to help folks feel comfortable with the amount of writing was with a slide deck, with one example slide shown below:

For each time period, we had two slides, one with our answers to the prompts on the cards and then one, like the example above, with all of our research, notes, and artifacts.  

My character, Chen Hui, was running a smuggling and trading organization, so the operations of the Dutch East India Trading Company were of importance, so that’s what I decided to report on for this time period. 

The letter my character wrote was to another cohort member who was associated with the Jesuits operating in China at the time, so my character sought some information… while I used this as an opportunity to also touch on points about Chen Hui’s aging family and some potential feelings of loss or realization swirling about there. 

The artifact that I chose for this time was a map of trade routes (and I wanted to make a little bit of a joke about where it came from) because this also would be very significant to my character and their memories during these 16 years. In our game, we used our slides to either keep track of photos or use museum records/photos as our keepsakes.

If we lost a resource or memory during the course of the game, instead of putting a physical page into the graveyard envelope, we would highlight our text in black or white (depending on the text color for the character) to “redact” it from the slides without deleting it.

You’ll conduct 10 rounds of the game like this, eventually leading to a final presentation where your vampire has met their end, and ALL of this is now in a museum where you then give a summary of their time.  

The mechanics for this game STRONGLY connect to practicing skills like conducting research, creative writing, and presenting while also teaching about history… and having students teach each other!  It’s collaborative and imaginative and fun, and I will now always remember what the piracy scene in 17th century China was like (along with everything else we researched and shared). 

Overall thoughts on 500 Year Old Vampire

I liked playing this, and I learned SO MUCH.  It was fun and engaging, melancholy and dramatic, dark and intense all in the right ways.  We dove into research on historical topics that we normally would not have, and we enjoyed it immensely because it was both just interesting knowledge to look up AND part of a story that we made together.

I also really liked how this was able to engage a particular player who wasn’t really super into the role-playing part of TTRPGs because the RP was a bit different.  Most of it was written versus verbal and there was time between rounds for thought and research, so they could collect their thoughts and get excited about sharing and interacting without so much pressure to perform on the spot. 

Overall, this is a great game for both having fun role-playing vampires in a surprisingly grounded sense and/or for having an excuse to do some amazing research on world history.  I can see how much intention was put into making this for educational use, and I would definitely be on board to play this again, exploring different origins and world events, because it was fun too.

Find a copy of 500 Year Old Vampire

You can find 500 Year Old Vampire here on the Central Michigan University website!

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