01 / EDITORIAL
Why I write Paris la Nuit
A story of tables, characters and Parisian nights
I have never believed that a roleplaying setting should amount to a collection of characters, places and rules. All of that is necessary, of course, but what interests me lies elsewhere. In the relationships that take shape, the decisions we regret, the lies that eventually catch up with us, and those moments when an imaginary character becomes, around a table, strangely human.
Paris is a wonderful setting for telling those stories.
A city carrying more than two thousand years of history has no shortage of ghosts or contradictions. Revolutions rub shoulders with traditions, palaces conceal old compromises, and every generation claims to have reinvented what the previous one already knew. Making Paris a vampire capital does not ultimately take that much imagination. Sometimes you only need to look at its history and ask who might have seized the opportunity.
Paris la Nuit grew out of that idea.
I wanted to build a credible vampire society, with its institutions, ambitions, territories and rivalries. A society where François Villon does not rule merely because his Blood is ancient, but because his authority rests on centuries of loyalty, arrangements and dependencies. Where the Primogen have interests of their own, where the Bourgmestres must actually govern, and where every favour granted may lay the groundwork for a debt nobody should ever have incurred.
But power is only one part of Vampire.
What deeply interests me in Vampire: The Masquerade is the constant confrontation between what a character used to be, what they have become, and what they are still willing to do to survive. Hunger, the Beast, Humanity and Disciplines find their full meaning when they complicate choices rather than simply provide solutions.
I have never wanted to tell stories about superheroes with fangs. I prefer monsters who remember being human and still try, sometimes awkwardly, to convince themselves they are.
Paris la Nuit is the result of many years of gaming, reading, historical research and shared chronicles. It draws heavily on the World of Darkness, takes up the legacy of the earliest French Paris by Night settings and carries it forward through my own vision of fifth edition.
I have no pretensions to replacing the work of those who came before me. I would rather give it continuity, bringing my stories, my characters and the consequences of what my players have lived through.
This website is therefore a chronicle, a reference work in progress and an open workshop. It contains material drawn from official canon, personal developments, original characters and suggestions for Storytellers. None of it is intended to become a truth imposed on every gaming table.
Because, ultimately, a roleplaying world never entirely belongs to the person who writes it.
As soon as players enter it, they begin to change it. They make unexpected decisions, trust the wrong people, grow attached to minor characters and sometimes give an improvised scene an importance its author never imagined.
And that is precisely what I enjoy.
If these pages help a few Storytellers find an idea, players grow attached to a character, or a group experience one of those nights they still talk about twenty years later, they will have done their job.
Welcome to Paris la Nuit.
The city remembers. Give it new reasons to do so.
Joh'K
02 / PREFACE
Why Paris by Night, or rather Paris la Nuit?
A story of gaming tables, characters and Parisian nights.
First, I need to tell you a little about my history as a roleplayer.
I am a fossil, I may as well admit it. My first game was in 1982.
Yes.
1982.
I will spare you the years that followed: D&D, AD&D, AD&D2, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars D6, MERP, Rolemaster and a few other delights. That grand era when you could spend twenty minutes determining precisely whether a blow to the left shoulder had gone through three layers of clothing before severing anything important.
The ultra “simulationist” period.
Then, in 1990, I discovered Cyberpunk 2020.
A slap in the face.
I had completely missed Cyberpunk 2013, released two years earlier. I loved Gibson and Philip K. Dick, so the game hit me immediately. The setting, of course, but also the feeling that you could tell something substantial without reaching for a scientific calculator every time a character opened a door.
After Rolemaster, it did rather change your life.
But I digress.
In 1991, Vampire: The Masquerade arrived.
And that was an enormous slap in the face.
I discovered the game through a bloke I met in a hotel.
Yes.
A hotel.
That is not even a dubious gothic metaphor.
A friend of ours worked nights at a rather strange hotel. The owner apparently saw no problem with a band of roleplayers taking over the breakfast room at night to roll dice and tell stories about monsters.
In hindsight, the setting was rather appropriate.
So, one evening, this bloke suggested that we try Vampire.
I had just finished Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice. I had loved the atmosphere, the melancholy, the fascinating idea of beings moving through the centuries almost as spectators of humanity, present in History without ever truly belonging to it.
We began our first chronicle.
I chose a Gangrel.
It was 1899. He was Irish and found himself thrown into turn-of-the-century Chicago.
Naturally, I ended up buying the rules and began running games myself.
It was not exactly glorious.
One must know when to admit to one's crimes.
I only really began running Vampire seriously with The Last Supper, before discovering Vampire: The Dark Ages. That game marked a genuine change in the way I thought about a chronicle.
Something clicked.
I gradually understood that a roleplaying game could be more than a succession of situations, fights and dice rolls. That a chronicle could have a memory. A breath. That time itself could become a character.
Eight years had passed since the first edition of Vampire.
It was now 1999.
And Paris by Night, published by Kaotic, arrived.
Two magazines, prozines as I remember them, finally giving Paris what it deserved: a true French By Night, following on from Le Monde des Ténèbres : France, published by Ludis.
And that famous friend from the hotel, who after almost nine years had become a true friend, suggested that we play Paris by Night.
We had moved on long before then.
No more strange hotel or breakfast room.
Our tables had found refuge in the local community centre.
And then...
Bliss.
Absolute bliss.
That friend has a rare talent. He knows exactly where to press to create an atmosphere. He knows how to let a scene linger. He knows when to speak and, above all, when to remain silent. He knows how to let a character breathe long enough to begin existing as more than marks on a sheet.
I played Germain.
Germain de Pyerçendre.
Toréador.
At the time, this was how I introduced him.
Germain de Pyerçendre
Who is Germain de Pyerçendre?
A vast subject, the ideal animal.
Perhaps he could be summed up by this line from Virgil's Aeneid, Book IX:
Macte, nova virtute, puer, sic itur ad astra !
Courage, child, this is the way to the heavens!
A graceful young man with the face of an angel, lost in a languid spleen and wonderful solitary thoughts.
You might also try to understand him through these lines by Baudelaire:
The French original is retained here.
Il est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d'hiver,
D'écouter, près du feu qui palpite et qui fume,
Les souvenirs lointains lentement s'élever
Au bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.
Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux
Qui, malgré sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,
Jette fidèlement son cri religieux,
Ainsi qu'un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente !
Moi, mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu'en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l'air froid des nuits,
Il arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie
Semble le râle épais d'un blessé qu'on oublie
Au bord d'un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts,
Et qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d'immenses efforts.
With the sublime difference that Germain would probably analyse the poem like this:
Outline
- I. Rigorous composition
- II. Analysis of spleen
- III. Symbolism
Study
I. Rigorous composition
A sonnet made up of two quatrains and two tercets.
Alexandrines. Crossed rhymes in the quatrains.
The title, La Cloche fêlée, contains the poem's entire symbolic construction.
The image of the bell creates genuine cohesion.
Tragic progression:
Life, decay, agony, death.
II. Analysis of spleen
Obsession with the passing of time.
The memories are distant.
A duality between bitterness, tied to passing time, and sweetness, tied to nostalgia.
Lexical field of old age.
Dread of death.
Lexical field of death.
Alliteration with the letter “m”.
The poem's final image is a hyperbole.
III. Symbolism
The title establishes a correspondence between the material and spiritual worlds.
External matter becomes a reflection of Baudelaire's self.
The opening of the first tercet introduces the soul as a spiritual and vulnerable element.
The crack belongs to matter.
The song therefore becomes the poem.
The second tercet reaches its climax:
The lake of blood expresses the violence of spleen and its degradation.
Conclusion
Rigorous composition, a progression from life to death, spleen marked by the passage of time, and symbolism grounded in correspondences.
A connection between La Cloche fêlée, spleen and the ideal.
The fixed form itself becomes a challenge.
That was Germain.
Because behind the melancholic young man and magnificent Toréador was, above all, a mind capable of turning a Baudelaire poem into a mathematical problem at three in the morning.
That was Germain de Pyerçendre.
A Toréador.
A madman.
An addict.
A social animal.
And probably one of the characters who left the deepest mark on me.
He was also the one who permanently instilled in me this love of the Toréador clan. Not the pretty shirts, not the art galleries, not the cliché of the aesthete vampire sighing before a painting.
What interested me lay elsewhere.
Obsession.
Beauty pushed far enough to become an illness.
The need to understand something that may make no sense, simply because you are incapable of looking away.
The years pass.
The tables change.
The players too.
Chronicles begin, live, and sometimes die.
But Paris by Night remains somewhere.
I get married.
I live.
I dream.
I get divorced.
Ouch.
I stop roleplaying for almost ten years.
In the meantime, I have a son.
I call him Louis.
Armand comes very close.
And my partner at the time almost agreed to Lestat as his third name.
Sometimes victory slips away only a few yards from the finishing line.
Then I return to roleplaying.
This time, only as a game master.
A lot of Vampire.
Again.
Always.
Then the fifth edition of Vampire arrives.
V5.
I look at it from a distance with a sort of:
“Meh...”
I do not even make a real effort to understand what it offers.
White Wolf is no longer truly in charge.
So, obviously, it cannot be good.
Absolutely flawless logic.
I put the books in a corner.
And leave them there.
Then, one day, an idea crosses my mind.
What if I made my own Paris?
My own Paris la Nuit?
So I reopen V5.
I begin to read.
The rules.
The setting.
What they have done with the World of Darkness.
Hunger.
The Second Inquisition.
The Anarchs.
The Camarilla withdrawing into itself.
The old balances beginning to crack.
I devour it all in a single evening.
And I have to admit something that almost annoys me at the time.
I love it.
I love what they have done.
This edition immediately makes me want to write again.
So I begin.
“My” Paris by Night.
Or rather...
Paris la Nuit.
Not to erase what came before.
Certainly not.
On the contrary.
Because everything comes from there.
The books.
The tables.
Characters who died twenty years ago and whom we still talk about.
Bad dice rolls that became legends.
Improvised plots the players were convinced they had uncovered, although they probably had not existed thirty seconds earlier.
And above all, for me, all of this comes from one bloke.
A bloke I met in a slightly strange hotel in the early nineties.
A bloke who became a friend.
The one who truly introduced me to narrative roleplaying.
The one who made me understand that roleplaying was not merely the industrial-scale beating of goblins.
The one who taught me that the role could matter more than the roll.
That rules are there to serve the story, not the other way round.
That silence around a table can sometimes be worth more than a whole page of dialogue.
That a scene does not need to explode to become memorable.
That a character can remain with us for twenty years.
And, above all, that the storyteller's true art may lie in making the players believe everything was planned from the beginning.
When, in reality, behind the screen, you have sometimes just moved three pieces of scenery and hoped nobody would notice.
And yet, when it works, something strange happens.
For a few hours, everything becomes real.
Paris exists.
The characters exist.
The dead have a memory.
Lies have consequences.
And when the game ends, sometimes something remains.
A sentence.
A look.
A scene.
A character like Germain.
A night in Paris that, twenty-five years later, still utterly refuses to disappear.
That is also why I am writing Paris la Nuit today.
There is inevitably a lot of me in it.
My reading.
My obsessions.
My love of Paris.
Vampire.
Baudelaire.
History.
Old stones.
People who lie.
Those who love badly.
Those who survive for too long.
But somewhere behind all of it, that first lesson remains.
A chronicle is not merely a story told by the person behind the screen.
It is a story everyone eventually believes they lived.
And I owe that lesson, in large part, to him.
So if Paris la Nuit exists today, if all these years later I still find myself writing stories of vampires haunting Paris, he has a great deal to do with it.
And I wanted that written down somewhere.
So, Olivier,
thank you.
Thank you for Germain.
Thank you for Paris.
Thank you for all those nights.
And above all, thank you for teaching me how to tell stories.
03 / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A project like Paris la Nuit never comes into being on its own. Even when you spend entire nights writing, revising a timeline or trying to understand why a vampire who has been dead for three centuries should still be causing political problems, you are working with what others have passed on to you.
So it matters to me to thank the people without whom this adventure would never have existed.
Those who created the World of Darkness
First, Mark Rein-Hagen, White Wolf, and all the writers, illustrators, designers and publishers who imagined and developed Vampire: The Masquerade and the World of Darkness.
They created much more than a game about vampires. They gave us a world capable of holding human, political, historical and tragic stories, whose possibilities we are still exploring.
My thanks also go to Paradox Interactive, Onyx Path Publishing, Modiphius Entertainment, Renegade Game Studios and Arkhane Asylum Publishing, and to the many teams who, across editions and translations, have helped keep this world alive and moving forward.
Those who brought vampiric Paris to life
A special place belongs to the French pioneers.
Casus Belli, first of all, which opened the doors of vampiric Paris to many French-speaking players.
Then the teams at Kaotic, whose Paris by Night publications left a lasting impression on me, and Ludis, which was part of that period of the World of Darkness in France.
Your publications sustained years of games and inspired many Storytellers, myself included, to carry the work forward.
I also want to thank the enthusiasts who took over online, often as volunteers, preserving, sharing, expanding and passing on resources that might otherwise have vanished along with their authors' websites.
I am thinking in particular of the contributors to Primogenat, Laurent Larroche, known as "Kobold", and everyone who took up and enriched these archives.
I especially want to thank the contributors to the following websites:
Paris by Night, archives and creations
https://sites.google.com/view/paris-by-night/accueil?authuser=0
Paris by Night, the quelquesmots.fr wiki
https://parisbynight.quelquesmots.fr/index.php?title=Accueil
Les Litanies de Sang, on Bindusara
http://bindusara.free.fr/web/princ.html
To everyone who worked on these resources, thank you. Behind every rescued page, every cross-checked detail and every text made available again, there is time given to others.
This heritage of enthusiasts deserves recognition.
The Storytellers I have met
I thank every Storyteller I have met throughout my life as a roleplayer.
Those whose worlds I shared, whose methods I watched, who surprised me, challenged me or made me want to try something different. The brilliant ones, the beginners, the perfectionists, the improvisers, and even those I disagreed with completely.
You learn a great deal by sitting on the other side of the screen and accepting that you no longer decide what happens next. Each, in their own way, enriched how I tell stories.
And then there are encounters that deserve much more than a few lines.
Chris, "Papy"
Chris was my partner.
And my antagonist.
Often both at once, which was probably the best possible arrangement.
We shared enough sessions, chronicles, characters and bullshit that I cannot begin to make a tidy inventory of them today. With him, a conversation was never quite a conversation. It was a consensual hostage situation.
He had an extraordinary talent.
You could ask him a very simple question.
A tiny little question.
"What do you think?"
And five hours later, Chris would still be talking.
By then we had probably covered three game systems, two metaphysical theories, a film, an absurd rule, the psychology of a character who had not existed when the conversation began, and something that, for reasons now impossible to reconstruct, involved Napoleon.
And the worst part is that I loved it.
Because beneath that endless flow of words there was a monstrous imagination, a deep knowledge of games and, above all, the ability to push an idea until it stopped being comfortable.
With him, disagreeing was almost a form of collaboration.
He made me laugh.
He made me grumble.
He made me defend ideas I had not thought about long enough to know whether I really believed in them.
And somewhere in many of my best gaming memories, his voice is still going, while everyone has known for twenty minutes that we will never finish the scene planned for that evening.
I miss you, Papy.
And for once, I am going to have the last word.
Enjoy it.
Bernard, "Nanard"
With Bernard, it is a different story again.
I owe him a significant part of my passion for computing.
We met at his club, Futura Project.
And there were the Amiga 500s.
Just writing that, I can almost hear the floppy drive again.
Back when computing was not yet an invisible thing you carried in your pocket, you had to understand a little of what you were doing. Test. Tinker. Get it wrong. Try again. Open things you probably should not have opened.
And I loved it.
Bernard was one of the people who made me want to understand the machine rather than simply use it.
A few decades later, I build servers, websites, tools, databases, interactive maps and a Vampire supplement that is seriously starting to look like a small IT infrastructure.
I think it is reasonable to say he had something to do with that.
Without Futura Project, those machines and Nanard, some of this probably would not exist.
He is no longer here to see how far the joke has gone.
I would have liked to show him.
Above all, I think he would have started by asking why I had done it that way.
And he would certainly have had a better idea.
My players
To all my players, past and present, thank you.
You made my stories into something that was no longer entirely mine. You made decisions I had not anticipated, saved characters I thought were doomed, destroyed plots I had spent weeks preparing and turned little improvisations into memories we still talk about years later.
It takes a certain generosity to step into someone else's imagination and give it so much of your time, trust and emotion.
My chronicles came alive because of you. Because of your enthusiasm, your arguments, your laughter, your sometimes unbearable characters, and those moments when nobody around the table wanted the evening to end.
Without you, Paris la Nuit would be nothing but documents, maps and characters waiting indefinitely for their entrance.
So thank you for all those nights.
And for those still to come.
Those who share my life
To Stéphanie, my wife.
Who puts up with the oddball I am every day.
And that is probably not the easiest role of all.
Living with someone who can spend an entire evening settling a political dispute between vampires who do not exist, then move on to configuring a server at three in the morning, takes a particular kind of patience.
Thank you for being here, sharing my life, putting up with my passions, my whims, my sometimes oversized projects and that unfortunate tendency to always want to go a little further.
I know what I owe you.
And I probably do not tell you often enough.
To Louis, my son.
For everything you bring me, your intelligence, your curiosity, your questions, and that rather disconcerting ability to make me rethink what I thought I knew.
We often imagine parents are there to pass something on to their children.
That is true.
But we too easily forget how much children can teach us as well.
And you teach me a great deal.
To Tom, my "son".
For the energy you bring into the house, your presence, and your very own way of being part of our everyday life.
A home is not just walls, furniture and old memories. It also lives through the people in it, the noise they make, the conversations, the laughter and sometimes the cheerful disorder they bring.
You are very much part of ours.
And everyone else
Finally, thank you to everyone who took the time to read, discuss, criticise, suggest or encourage this work.
It would not exist in this form without everything I have received over the years.
Paris la Nuit bears my signature, but it contains a little of each of you.
Thank you.
Joh'K