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Blood Sport

Vampire games lure geeks out of their basements. The results aren't always pretty.

By Stephen Siff 

Most people have no reason to notice Vega Avenue. The one-way street swoops into a highway entrance ramp, and drivers barely glimpse the huge, decaying homes before merging into 75-mile-an-hour traffic.

Vampires prefer it that way.

On the lawn of a home at Vega and West 25th, Peter Wells holds forth on the undead. He looks like one who would know about such things: tall, with a scrappy goatee, and wearing the requisite black jeans and a rumpled black T-shirt under a motorcycle jacket.

He stops mid-sentence when the front door bangs open, and a long-haired young man sticks his head out. "Your mother was a bitch!" the man bellows at unseen werewolves known to be lurking nearby. "Who wants a doggy bag?"

Wells informs him matter-of-factly that a flaming arrow is streaking toward his head. Amid a flurry of hand gestures, the man disappears behind the door. Wells resumes his discourse on vampires.

Vampire gaming, to be precise. Live-action role-playing, or LARP, is like a Dungeons & Dragons game that's been freed from basement tables and combined with the performance aspects of historical reenactment. Wells, a 35-year-old artist and teacher, is elder statesman and spiritual leader to the mostly twentysomething vampire gamers who descended on the Vega Avenue house last summer, after some of their coven bought the place and turned it into geek headquarters.

And that's what Wells and company are -- geeks. Self-described geeks. So it's only natural that their games involve pretending to be predatory immortals, the coolest, baddest monsters ever conceived. Vampires are about as far from geeks as you can get -- which is exactly the point. Those who struggle in the real world can reign supreme in the netherworld.

"Most live-action role-players, at some point, had lives that sucked six days a week," says Wells, who wrote his graduate school thesis on "collaboratively created alternative reality." "The seventh was game day." One local game's informal slogan used to be "We turn geeks into assholes."

For the better part of a decade, on most Friday and Saturday nights, dozens of people have gathered somewhere in Cleveland to embody vampire alter egos. For four hours, they are free-wheeling princes and princesses of darkness. Over endless cigarettes and cans of pop, they scheme to overcome werewolves, feed off the human herd, and stab each other in the back.

No one really gets hurt; essentially, it's improv community theater. Problems that vampires can't work out by talking can be solved by fighting, through a system that boils down to rock-paper-scissors.

Since introducing its vision of feuding vampire clans, Vampire: The Masquerade, in 1991, White Wolf Publishing has sold more than 5.5 million games and books. The company's first release was a role-playing game similar to Dungeons & Dragons: Players sat around a table, and the storyteller -- usually the person who bought the game first -- led them through a homemade plot. The other players described how their characters reacted.

The live-action version, introduced two years later in a box complete with plastic fangs and blood capsules, takes role-playing into actual acting. Players dress in costumes, affect accents, and use a vocabulary of hand gestures to signal superpowers. The characters inhabit a parallel universe of sorts; the story lines that grow out of their interactions are set wherever the players live.

There are still storytellers -- up to half a dozen of them at a larger game. But their role is reduced to merely suggesting plot; vampires seem more interested in politicking among themselves and creating their own drama. Left to their own devices, the immortals gossip like teenagers.

The games are more than just dark flights of fancy. They're the central event of this secretive community. One of the two major Cleveland games, Carpe Noctum, is networked by e-mail to games in 70 cities around the world. Events in Cleveland affect what goes on in Pittsburgh or Chicago, and players can take their vampires on the road.

"We are truly part of an underground world," says Jenna Wolfberg, a round-faced 21-year-old from Willoughby Hills. "The underground geek society."

Three young men and a woman in a short skirt stand in flickering candlelight in the living room of the Vega house, speaking in hushed tones. Two of their number are missing. The storytellers say that one of them, a woman, can be seen tied to the steeple of a church across town. The players discuss their options for saving her.

The somber mood is broken when a dark-haired vampire with heavily lidded eyes lurches into the room. "Dude, anybody want to go on a beer run?" he asks loudly. But he's not oblivious to the unfolding drama; in fact, he has a suggestion. "Dude, I'll go talk to the werewolves, man. I've partied with them before."

The other players watch as the vampiric Cheech stumbles outside to confront the werewolves. "Come on, man, you know me," he cajoles the imaginary lycanthropes. "We've partied together. Here, smoke some of this."

Amused, the storytellers play along. The stoner returns with one of the captives, a thirtyish vampire dressed as a priest (who'd been whiling away his "captivity" seated on the lawn, tapping on a laptop). The rescued vampire lets everyone know that his leg was chewed off in the ordeal.

"Don't worry about it, man," counsels his stoned savior. "Just think real hard, and it will come back."

By day, Wells is a studio-arts professor at CSU. By night, he is a prominent player in Carpe Noctum. He also runs the other major game, Cleveland by Night. He was the principal architect of a plan that ended years of gamers' wandering between nightclubs, community centers, homes, and public parks.

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