While at Gamehole Con, I got the chance to try the new Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe: Interview with the Vampire RPG. This was exciting, as I am a long-time Vampire: The Masquerade player and, honestly, this was the first time playing a game surrounded by vampires that wasn’t in the World of Darkness. When stepping up to play a game like this, however, it immediately begins to play on the ideas you have formed over the years (or in my case, decades) of playing other games. So, let me talk about my experience, how the game plays, and how close I feel it is to the source material.

For some background, I’ve been a vampire player for almost my entire life. I grew up watching Interview with the Vampire and Kindred: The Embraced. Vampires, in general, are kind of part and parcel of the 90s kid experience. We were steeped in it, and it formed a lot of our earliest memories and opinions. That being said, I am very particular about how I want my vampire games to go.

When I was young, it was all about the power of the creature. Learning disciplines (vampire powers from V:tM), spending blood on various physical improvements, and most importantly, healing from impossible injuries. The draw of that power tends to immediately go to the player’s head. It wasn’t until later that I got into the idea of exploring the life, and the day-to-day (or night-to-night) of the vampires themselves. Exploring the personal horror of becoming the monster is one of the central themes of Vampire: The Masquerade, and I feel like for the longest time I never saw that.

The System

When playing Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe, every single roll plays into your vampire nature and how easy it is to accidentally “break” fragile humans. The system is very simple: every roll is 5d10, with a difficulty of seven. 10s add more dice into your pool and count as a success; 1s remove one success. The GM will set the amount of successes you need to succeed. Your character’s attributes allow you to reroll dice, including successes. This is where your vampiric nature comes in. Every time you make your tests, you want to hit the exact amount of successes needed. Trying to hit the number exactly becomes the story. Miss the number and you fail; succeed too much and you will overdo it, potentially ruining whatever you were doing with a kind of vampiric nature. This is similar to the newest Vampire’s system of “messy criticals,” only it happens whether you’re hungry or not.

Speaking of hunger, wounds, and such: this game uses a few interesting mechanics in that regard. Immortals tracks three different “health” metrics, as well as Thirst. These are Despair, Torment, and Wounds. As you take damage, you become weakened and begin to lose dice from your pool of five. This is either you falling to Despair, Torment, or becoming wounded. When you spend Thirst, you begin to lock in success dice. So, usually, you can reroll any dice that isn’t a 10 or a 1 with your stat points. The deeper into your Thirst you get, 9s, then 8s, and then 7s become locked with successes, making your vampiric blood lust force you to overreact, or apply too much pressure to the situation to be done with it. These can then sometimes feed into your Despair and Torment, as you begin to lose control and destroy the things you love.

The Dark Gifts that vampires receive in this game are also very interesting. We won’t know yet how characters are built, or the depth of a lot of these systems (and of course a lot of this is subject to change as playtesting continues!), but currently, a lot of these powers are devastatingly powerful. Some are passive. For instance, my character could reroll 1s on anything involving coordination or physical accuracy, once per test. Another allowed me to ignore the 1s eating my hits when using my appearance to seduce others. Those are solid, and help mitigate the 1s eating someone’s lunch for something they are good at, but my active power was what got me. It was a vampiric suggestion — the standard vampire mental domination — but the kicker was it automatically succeeded against anyone without a protected mind, or a vampire. No roll needed, pass Go, collect your $200. That felt wildly powerful compared to fledgling Vampire: The Masquerade characters learning Dominate or Presence for the first time. What was also interesting about these powers was that none of mine cost Thirst to activate. Around the table I noticed several players had slightly more powerful versions of my gifts that DID cost Thirst, but otherwise this was a free lunch.

There are also Fascinations, which seem like Merits or Feats that make your character special from their background. Things like Socialite and Fame/Infamy, but also emotional traits, like Quick to Anger. These gave benefits and burdens, where your character gets something but becomes vulnerable in the opposite circumstances. So, Quick to Anger means when a fight breaks out, I roll an additional die in my pool, but might end up Escalating (which seems to be a mechanic I’d love to know more about) during that fight. Interestingly, these can also be ways you heal your Torment and Despair. When you indulge in them during a scene, you may be able to heal up some of your emotional trackers.

The Feel

Now that you have a good feel for how the system plays once the dice get flying, the feeling of the scenario we played was unlike anything I’ve played before in a V:tM game. Characters are created (or at least our pregens were) with backstories and direct connections to each other. You will have complicated feelings, joys, and regrets baked into your characters directly. There will be jealousy, guilt, fear, and desire between the characters at the table (with safety tools discussed before play, of course!). We were all tied together over an oath to protect a mortal. We had separated over something we wouldn’t talk about. This was super interesting because everyone at the table didn’t actually know what had happened beyond “Things happened that couldn’t be undone,” but we all had scars and resentments from it. It gave everyone an emotional beat right off the cuff. Then, as we played, we did something I’ve never actually done at a table for a one-shot.

Halfway into the adventure, we played out the night none of us would speak of. In true Anne Rice style, an object was presented to our characters which triggered us to relive our memory of that night. During this, we played out the scene fully, and then brought the consequences of that night immediately back into the present scene. It was a fascinating experience to have this horrible thing hanging over us that we were angry about, and when we finally needed to address it directly, we got to go back in time, experience it, and then immediately come back to the table — like readers of the book — with the horrors of that night fresh in our memories. I’ve used flashbacks in the past at my tables, but something about how this was presented just felt different and hit at our table. It felt very Anne Rice, for lack of a better explanation. Also, incredibly faithful to vampires seeing something that triggers a horrible flashback, as we see in the movies.

Rough Spots

For all of the praise I have thrown at this, there are one or two things that did make me pause. The first is the 10s adding dice to the pool which, in turn, can come up as 1s. This happened at our table multiple times. Someone needed 3 successes, rolled three successes, two were 10s, they rolled the extra dice, and got two 1s — causing them to fail their roll by getting the “bonus” dice. As I understand it, you cannot refuse to take these dice, so sometimes rolling very well can cause you to fail by several degrees. It may be that they were looking at their sheets to see what powers or passives might cancel those 1s, but for a one-shot it definitely hit us more than once, and it felt awful. Something that allowed you to decline the extra dice when you’ve already hit your target would be fantastic. Then you can gamble when you want, but not shoot yourself in the foot on a good roll.

The other thing that struck me as odd — and to be fair, I’ve only read Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, so maybe this is explained in some of the other books — was that every vampire at our table had telepathy with other vampires. I don’t really remember this being a thing. Maybe it’s a part of the new TV series I haven’t sunk my teeth into yet (wakka wakka), but that led to some very strange table moments where characters were immobilized and were able to call for help telepathically. Perhaps it’s also a bit more limited than full telepathic communication between vampires who aren’t either their maker or progeny. Time will tell when I get my hands on the book!

Finally, on that note — the BackerKit campaign is going live this Tuesday, October 27th, 2026! If you want to see more about this game and form your own opinions, the information should be available here as soon as it drops: Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe RPG on BackerKit

-D