New Member Experience

Greetings!

Welcome to the Camarilla Fan Clubs Masquerade Chronicle. We are glad you decided to take out of your day to join our story and we want to do everything we can to make your experience as easy and enjoyable as possible.

If you are new to gaming, new to LARP, new to the Camarilla Fan Club, or just new to the Masquerade genre, this is the perfect place for you to get started.

Membership in the Camarilla Fan Club (also referred to as the CFC) can appear daunting at first with endless amount of bureaucracy and barriers to play. While it is absolutely true that there are a whole lot of checks-and-balances, this is a natural evolution to a distributed truly-global chronicle. The CFC is essentially a tabletop game that is run in the Live-Action style, but instead of one tabletop game, there are hundreds in multiple countries where a player at one game can take their character and sit down at another table, playing the same character. Even more impressive – they are playing in the same story.

Of course, it is easy to imagine how, if left un-managed, how things would get complicated, contradictory, and extremely frustrating. To address this need, structures such as the officers of the CFC, the approvals database, and the addenda have been created.

If you are a little lost, don’t sweat! We are going to go through everything together and by the end of this guide you will have everything you need to get the most out of your CFC experience.

Getting Started

By now you should have a Camarilla (possibly Trial) Membership and have contacted a local domain (a domain is the basic organizational unit in the CFC, and generally covers a singly city area). If you need help with either of these, please contact the membership assistance coordinator.

Our next step is to make a character for you to get involved in the Masquerade chronicle. The first thing to remember is that there are limitations on what you can play out of the gate. This is not to keep new players down to start off telling you what you cannot do, but to make sure your character fits well int the ongoing Masquerade chronicle. You wouldn’t sit down at a Tabletop game without talking to the ST and making sure they were okay with your sheet, right? Well, this is no different.

The Storytelling team of the CFC has had a whole lot of experience in the Masquerade Genre. We have been running Masquerade games for a very long time and have collected rules errata, best practices, and mechanics alterations that make the genre work for the CFC. This collection, referred to as the Masquerade Addenda, is a collection of over a decade of learnings. We lay these rules over those presented in the published materials to create the mechanic-world that we can portray our characters in.

The other thing the Masquerade Addenda tells us is what approval level a particular concept, trait, or power might be. Most of the items on a character sheet require only sign-off from your local Domain-level Masquerade Venue Storyteller (also known as the VST). Some, however, also require sign-off from Storytellers who have responsibility of larger geographic areas. These higher sign-off requirements are based solely off of rarity. The rarer the item, the more Storytellers need to sign-off on the item. The reason for this is that the rarer an item, the more important that it is controlled and portrayed in a manner that benefits the chronicle as a whole. For example, there are only a small handful of True Brujah in the entire chronicle. It is absolutely vital that when interacting with a True Brujah, characters and stories have the True Brujah experience that we expect from our chosen source material, the Masquerade settings books.

There are several sources for character sheets, such as the PDF sheets created by Mr. Gone, or ones that are CFC specific, such as those designed by our member-volunteers, or you can select a pre-made character sheet from our character-database.

Once you have your character and the Storyteller (also referred to as the ST) has signed-off on your concept, you are ready to dive in.

The Story So Far…

So… where to begin? What is the story? How can I get involved?

Relax. We are still in this together. We have an abundance of resources to assist you in finding out not only what the CFC’s view on the Masquerade Chronicle is, but where you can fit in that big picture.