The premise
It is April 1444, in the hills of Wallachia, a land caught between Christendom and the Ottomans. Three strangers each receive a sealed invitation to a late supper at the manse of Lord Claudius Giovanni, Earl of Stavlachia, a Venetian banker. A coach will collect each guest. The invitation is dated 4 April and says not to arrive early.
The characters begin as mortals. The supper is a feeding, and the guests are the meal. When the Founder Hardestadt attacks the house, the hosts Embrace their prey to buy time, and the three player characters wake as vampires in the middle of an old war between the Giovanni and the Cappadocians, just as the Camarilla is being born.
Book One, The Last Supper, ran from 28 February to 10 May 2026. It ended with the Cappadocian clan destroyed and the Giovanni clan beginning. The table then skipped 222 years. Book Two opened in Rome on 13 February 1666.
The game uses Vampire: The Dark Ages, 20th Anniversary Edition, with theater of the mind and no grid. It follows the published Giovanni Chronicles where the players allow it and leaves the book where they do not. The early acts are deliberately railroaded to show how little power new vampires hold. After that the players steer. The game carries mature content: gore, necromancy, coercion and cruelty. This page summarizes those scenes and keeps the worst of them offstage.
Storyteller: Jason L. Players: Jason N., Oren B. and R.C.
The story so far
Session by session. Dates are real-world dates, with the game date beside them.
Book One: The Last Supper, 1444
Session 1: The invitation
Sat 28 Feb 20263 to 4 April 1444
Each character, followed for a week or two, receives a sealed invitation. Jan is a lute-playing minor noble's son. Dimitrie is a soldier whose family is dead. Lorenz is a Medici scholar-priest. At the Red Lamb Inn they meet the innkeeper Sigismund, a scarred soldier named Paul, an old beggar woman, and a wild-haired monk who warns them that Claudius is the devil. The monk is beaten out of the room. Claudius's steward Lothar arrives, picks the thirteen who will dine, and slaps Lorenz.
The next afternoon they ride in shuttered coaches past three crucified people to a fortified manse. In the dining hall, thirteen strange hosts each take one guest aside. Wenceslas has Jan sing, then cuts him. Lord Casimir paralyzes Lorenz after questioning him about the occult. Lady Theophana breaks Dimitrie's mind with a look. Dinner is announced.
Session 2: The Last Supper
Sat 7 Mar 2026night of 4 April 1444
The hosts show what the guests are for. Claudius drains a girl named Mariana through a tap in a collar, makes Dimitrie kill a sheep, and has Paul beaten for refusing to stab Dimitrie. The characters talk back, and Claudius answers by rotting Dimitrie's shoulder with a touch. Then Hardestadt's men attack. To slow them, Claudius orders his hosts to Embrace their prey. The three player characters die and come back wrong, each with a vision on the way. The hosts flee down a secret passage that a servant seals and burns behind them. The ten other new vampires are destroyed. Hardestadt, with his lieutenant Rodrigo the coachman, has the three chained and carted away. Paul lives. Mariana is gone.
That closes Act One.
Session 3: Castle Deverick
Sun 15 Mar 20264 to 5 April 1444
The three wake in a blacked-out carriage, guarded by men with bleeding sticks, and ride a day and a half to Castle Deverick, Hardestadt's seat while he is away from Germany. At the gate they face their new fear of fire, and Lorenz frenzies for a moment. In the cell Jan uses Presence and Dimitrie uses Dementation on the guards, and the three feed. They kill three of six.
Hardestadt proclaims the Giovanni and their conspirators anathema. Then the players take the Founders' chairs and interrogate each other. Hardestadt questions Jan and Dimitrie. Mistress Fanchon questions Lorenz and offers him a chalice of Tremere elders' blood. An old Romani woman argues that these three would make perfect spies, and at dawn she cracks an egg that bleeds. Hardestadt spares them on a condition: hunt your sires, or join them as anathema. Rodrigo feeds them and tucks them in.
Session 4: Written up later
Sun 22 Mar 2026April 1444
The table played this night. The write-up is still to come.
Session 5: Back among the conspirators
Sun 29 Mar 2026April 1444, the inn
At the inn the thirteen hosts reveal themselves. The three claim they escaped on their own and that Rodrigo defected to them, and Claudius accepts it. Jan plays for the table and wins the room. Claudius names his target: Japheth Cappadocius, a heretic who means to kill God. The three volunteer to carry a sealed letter to him and receive a map to the monastery of St. Timothy. Lorenz tries to charm Lady Jadviga and fails.
The next evening they find Paul beaten almost to death by the fireplace. Lorenz heals him with his own blood and makes him a ghoul.
Session 6: The ambush and the monastery
Sat 4 Apr 2026April 1444, the road to St. Timothy
The three argue about sides. Jan proposes setting the two enemies against each other. On the road a pit trap and flaming arrows hit the carriage. Brother Clement, the raving monk from the inn, leads six Templars. Jan holds Clement under Awe and cuts his throat. Five Templars are blinded and one runs.
At the monastery the monks take them to the abbot, Japheth Cappadocius, who speaks Akkadian. The three confess that the letter is a trap. Japheth confers with his "father" and tells them to bring Claudius in a week. Then a glowing, white-bearded figure appears and says he was once Cappadocius. Claudius had also given the pack a golden watch as a token of thanks. They have found nothing odd about it.
Session 7: The test and the sermon
Sun 12 Apr 2026April 1444, the monastery and the ambush site
Each character tells the glowing figure his story. He sends them back to the Templars to forgive and bless them. They find one mutilated Templar alive. Jan pushes his guts back in and feeds him blood, and the Templar becomes a second ghoul. Blessing the dead raises three more Templars, mute and docile. An invisible force stops Jan at the door.
Dimitrie and Lorenz hear the figure preach a ladder of blood: Kindred feed on man, and he will sacrifice and consume God to become lord of all. He points Lorenz to the Book of Nod. The three plan to report to Hardestadt through their ghouls and then return to Claudius. That closes Act Two.
Session 8: A week to choose
Sun 3 May 2026April 1444, the manse, a Roma village, the monastery
The three tell Claudius that human Templars attacked them, so the timetable has to move up. Claudius is pleased, hints they may become real progeny, and gives Lorenz the manuscripts he came for.
Jan lures Wenceslas onto a ledge, stakes him and drinks him over about forty-five minutes. He rises as a sixth-generation vampire with black veins in his aura and Wenceslas's voice in his head. Dimitrie gets a vision from Cappadocius of the Giovanni as marionettes. Dimitrie and Lorenz visit Durga Syn in a Roma village two hours south. She calls Cappadocius the most dangerous of the antediluvians and tells them how to foil the Giovanni's soul-trap. They also see Japheth. He says no salvation exists for Kindred, calls Golconda "the wickedest trick of the Jyhad", and hands over shrouds and cloth boots against a storm coming to the Deadlands.
Hardestadt reads Jan's aura and freezes him where he stands. The table agrees to side with the Founders.
Session 9: The end of the book
Sun 10 May 2026the night of the meeting, the monastery garden
In the garden Claudius gives Japheth a kiss of peace and diablerizes him, guarded by a ring of retainers. Dimitrie goes for a stake and rolls a disastrous botch. Lord Bajazet Alnazir spits blood that melts his head, and Dimitrie dies. Cappadocius appears, and Claudius's father Augustus Giovanni diablerizes him. A maelstrom of the dead opens. Lorenz throws a rock at Claudius, and Cappadocius's soul escapes as a spark in the spirit of a dove. The Founders capture Claudius, then hand him back when a Giovanni delegation pledges support.
The Storyteller states the result: the Cappadocian clan is gone and the Giovanni clan begins. Mariana, mute now, leaves to destroy the Giovanni. Jan courts Rafael de Corazon.
The interlude: 1444 to 1666
Interlude, first nights
Sun 6 Sep and Sun 13 Sep 2026after 1444
The table played both nights. The write-ups are still to come.
Interlude: the audience and the long years
Sun 27 Sep 2026about 1545 to February 1666
A shark-toothed ferryman carries Jan and Dimitrie through a portal across the realm of the dead to Claudius. He shows them that his family has watched them for a century and asks what they did with the time. Jan says he visited vengeance on his family in Constantinople as the city burned, and keeps quiet that he is Sabbat. Claudius is surprised to find Dimitrie awake, and Jan says Dimitrie has been indisposed for a hundred years. Claudius explains why the Cappadocians had to go: Cappadocius meant to swallow God, which was too much even for the conspirators. The two walk out.
The Storyteller then runs the years in blocks. Jan joins the Sabbat and kills the troupe he once traveled with. In Basel, Lady Melisande, a Toreador of the Sabbat, notices something old living inside him and offers an early start on a Path. Jan takes Cathari, aimed at the Sabbat Inquisition, and plans a career of atrocity to reach Humanity 0. Dimitrie teaches Dementation to about thirty vampires and kills perhaps three people in a century. He also gives up a Malkavian woman he cared for, because his teaching requires him to stay empty. Sabbat leaders want his gift as a weapon, and he calls it too sacred. The Giovanni join neither sect. The Promise of 1528 gives them a truce with the Camarilla.
Meanwhile the world moves. Stavlachia is burned and never lived in again. Claudius retreats to Venice. Plague takes Naples, Rome and London. Autumn 1665, Venice: Ambrogino Giovanni opens a drawer and reads a line in a ledger written 116 years earlier. Burglars strip mage libraries and Tremere chantries for a rumored ritual called the anointing. By the end of the year both Jan and Dimitrie feel a pull toward Rome.
In February 1666, in Mallorca, Paul comes to Jan's door. He is the crippled soldier of 1444, and he has not aged. He says Rome wants Jan.
Book Two: Rome, 1666
Session 1 of Book Two: The gate
Sun 4 Oct 202613 February 1666, Rome
The players spend the experience they earned over 222 years. Dimitrie's Dementation rises to 4, and he takes his first dot of Necromancy. The Storyteller rules that Necromancy is closely guarded by the Giovanni, so Dimitrie knowing it makes him dangerous to them.
The pack is nomadic and out on a raid against the Camarilla when the pull hits, so no one has to explain leaving. They sail from Mallorca, dock at Ostia and ride to Rome. The pull grows as they climb the Capitoline Hill.
The night is cold, with rain on the stones and fog up to the gates. A minuet drifts from the house, and carriages with the crests of half of Europe roll past. The ironwork carries a hidden pair of crossed scepters and two Latin mottos. The lower one is Hardestadt's own, the one from his banner at the Giovanni manse in 1444: "even from the grave I shall conquer". At the gate the pull weakens, and the two wonder how freely they came. The gate does not open for them. The night ends there, with Jan thinking of using Presence on a passing carriage and Dimitrie of reaching someone inside through the Madness Network.