Blood Sport

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."

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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.

Last summer, Wells and four other hardcore gamers formed Undead Ltd. and bought the Vega house, the vacant lots around it, and a former rooming house next door. The partners plan to live in the hulking rooming house, built 100 years ago for the drivers making horse-and-buggy deliveries for a pie factory.

According to their calculations, income from three other rental properties will cover their mortgage. The five partners will live rent-free. The decaying mansion next door, constructed for the pie factory's owner, will be all games, all the time.

Vega is the first house in the city to be purchased by gamers and dedicated exclusively for their use. It may well be the only one in the country.

"The idea of having a house exclusively dedicated to gaming is the pipe dream of thousands of gamers," says Wells, sitting on a dirty couch in the living room of the former rooming house. "It's just that we did it."

Wells and his partners followed the well-worn trajectory from Dungeons & Dragons to harder stuff. Wells says he was introduced to D&D by his father, a math professor who wrote a science-fiction fanzine in the 1950s and '60s, when he was growing up in Cleveland Heights. While other children were still watching Dukes of Hazzard, Wells was playing Dungeons & Dragons. "I'm a geek, like my father before me," he brags.

Wells was still something of a wallflower when he began haunting vampire games at graduate school in Indiana. He started attending gatherings of Carpe Noctum, run by Undead partner Blair Heiserman, when he returned to Cleveland. There he met the other Undead partners -- loan officer Ken Crawford, autoworker Steve Donley, and contractor Mark Stern -- all of whom went to Elyria High.

Crawford, 36, started with D&D in high school, then continued playing through long nights on watch duty during a two-year enlistment in the Navy. After his discharge, he stumbled across a rule book for White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade in a gaming store in Las Vegas.

"It was when the goth look was in full bloom," says Crawford, a short, soft-looking man. "I picked it up and looked at it and thought, 'Chicks might actually play this.'"

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"What I like about this is you get to experience things you don't in real life," says Fred Garber, a computer operator with Howard Stern hair, as he leads a woman by leash and dog collar through a game. She was presented to him as a gift.

"This doesn't happen to me in real life," he says, still incredulous two hours later.

Over the years, psychologists have repeatedly found that gamers are no more likely to be unstable than the rest of us. A study on Vampire: The Masquerade was published in the journal Psychological Reports in 1998. But the murder of a Florida couple in 1996 by a cult of Kentucky teens who got their start playing Vampire: The Masquerade is more memorable.

So gamers sometimes bear the burden of their hobby's bad rap. Last year, Justin Quigley, a quiet, waifish player in Carpe Noctum, was called into his boss's office at the Cleveland State University library, where he works, after his picture was spotted in an online gallery of Wells's art. The boss wanted to know if he was one of those creeps who think they are vampires. "Some people have trouble with reality, and it is usually not the gamers," says his girlfriend, Anya Slaven.

In fact, longtime players say the game is healthy.

"We have a lot of interesting people who are kind of undersocialized. Basement dwellers," says Cass Whittington, former coordinator of One World by Night, an organization that keeps track of plot developments at 70 vampire games worldwide.

Whittington, 37, was the head storyteller of Carpe Noctum for six years. As top coordinator for One World by Night, she received about 1,000 e-mails a day. She wears her bangs short, leads with her chin when she strides, and looks you in the eye while answering questions about her day job on the forefront of "theoretical accounting" at a Cleveland bank. She wasn't always so sure of herself.

"In high school, I was unbelievably shy," she says. "I was so shy, I was the kid that didn't look up and say 'hi' when she passed you in the halls."