Five Hundred Year Old Vampire

Five Hundred Year Old Vampire is a multi-player keepsake role-playing game that adapts the award-winning Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV) by Tim Hutchings into a new collaborative play experience suitable for both fans of TYOV and students in an educational setting. 

As in TYOV, play in Five Hundred Year Old Vampire progresses semi-randomly through prompts answered with writings from the vampire’s perspective, but Five Hundred Year Old Vampire also includes player-created artifacts and rules for multi-player vampire Cohorts.  

Five Hundred Year Old Vampire will see the players’ Vampires gradually lose their humanity and struggle to adapt to a changing world. The Vampires will do things the players would not, both monstrous and awe-inspiring, and players will record these deeds through journaling and artmaking. 

What is a Keepsake Game?
The term “keepsake game” was coined by game designer Shing Yin Khor to describe some of their games, such as A Mending, and those they co-created with Jeeyon Shim, like Field Guide to Memory. In a keepsake game, players create memorable artifacts, or keepsakes, that they wish to hold on to beyond the end of the game. In Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, keepsakes take the form of artifacts players create and share with each other throughout the game, and which are collected and celebrated together at the conclusion of the game. In the game, players are encouraged to see the artifacts not as “great works of art” so much as unique tokens of an experience.

Player Count and Adaptability
Each cohort of Five Hundred Year Old Vampire is designed for 3-5 players. However, the game has also been designed with classrooms or larger convention play in mind and works well with short campaign and multi-cohort play. In addition, classroom use aligns with both the National Writing Common Core Standards and the National Visual Arts Standards. The game will scale to fit most class sizes, with six cohorts being as easy to facilitate as one. The game is modifiable for many classrooms but is especially strong in visual arts and creative writing spaces.

The Components

• Five (5) decks of prompt cards (237 cards in total), representing the various ages of your Vampires’ existence
• A Prime Vampire deck of sixteen (16) cards, designed by Tim Hutchings, creator of the solo RPG Thousand Year Old Vampire
• A slotted and recessed tray to help keep prompt cards organized for ease of use and storage
• A set of gorgeous dice for advancing your Vampires through the ages (d4, d6, and d8)
• A detailed game manual containing all the rules you’ll need for multiplayer Cohort play
• Six (6) sets of pregenerated characters plus blank character and cohort sheets on a tearaway pad