Once, back in the hazy, forgotten era of 1991 a table top roleplaying game named Vampire: The Masquerade came out to some acclaim. It, and the World of Darkness game lines it spawned, would go on to enthrall and entertain its player base for more than a decade with an intricate, sprawling goth-punk take on our world. Given its placement in the modern world and the simple fact that time keeps on passing it's no real surprise that a larger metaplot emerged. The Camarilla warred with the Sabbat, elders killed and were killed, and the stakes escalated until ... 2004, the year of judgement. Four books came out offering ways the World of Darkness could end. The Vampire eschaton was named Gehenna and was detailed in a book by the same name. All of the Time of Judgement books were choose your own apocalypse and Gehenna provided several options: from the antediluvian vampires awakening, to the whole mortal world seeing through the masquerade, to crap with Lilith killing Caine. Regardless of the exact scenario this was meant to be a send off for the whole setting. Of course the publishers, White Wolf Game Studio, had a lot of fans and weren't about to just pack up and quit, hence ...
Vampire: the Requiem is a sequel/remake/re-imagining of Vampire: The Masquerade. Instead of thirteen clans with overly detailed histories, it has five clans with multiple vague origins. Instead of steadily weakening generations from an original sire there is simply age and potency. Instead of the war between the Camarilla and the Sabbat there are five major factions with shifting alliances and variable levels of hostility. Where Masquerade saw fit to slowly and meticulously craft a towering edifice of canon and thousands of years of kindred history Requiem spins dozens of origin stories and side plots and never tells you if any or all of them are true or if any of it matters.
For all of the differences the core concept is unmistakably the same. You play as an undead monster that feeds on the blood of the living to fuel its existence, cursed to fear the sun and fire, host to a battle between craven instincts and the vestiges of human conscience. The clans still pass specific powers and weaknesses from sire to child. Vampire society still upholds the masquerade and forbids diablerie. Elder vampire still fall into and wake up from centuries long slumbers. Kindred society is still a mess of spiteful, narcissistic, control freaks under medieval princedoms. And just like Masquerade the player characters are as likely to be the villains as the heroes.
Requiem was meant to shore up several problems endemic to Masquerade. Masquerade was meant as a game of personal horror where players take on the role of a damned soul tied to its mortal coil long after death by a curse of blood. The grand arc of the history established by the curse of Caine and the centuries long war between the Camarilla and Sabbat tended to shift the focus outward and made it a game of global conspiratorial intrigue and warfare. While none of that is mutually exclusive with personal horror one tends to overshadow the other; especially in the lead up to Gehenna. Requiem did away with all of that. There is no original vampire, no grand conflict, and no metaplot. In this way Requiem guards itself against the trap of escalation by taking a profoundly postmodern attitude towards its world and provides no omphalos for narratives to orbit. The White Wolf fandom rejected this shift and the new World of Darkness in general; preferring to retain the world they'd poured hundreds of hours researching trivia over. The releases of the twentieth anniversary and fifth editions of Masquerade have more or less marked Requiem as the second string setting and while it's done well enough to get a second edition it seems like it will remain "that other vampire game" for the foreseeable future.
IRON NODER XIV: THE RETURN OF THE IRON NODER