Highrollers Games

Category: Meta

  • The “Historical Document”

    One of the main sources for this revision is a PDF I have taken to calling The Historical Document. Originally titled House Games Player’s Guide, it is a 122 page PDF containing the rules of House Games, largely “revised” from the original House Games wiki. Much like this website, it aims to be a comprehensive guide to House Games. The Historical document itself likely from around 2007-20111 and the original author only has an email credit, with the handle Eterry.

    On top of that the Document has two revisions. The first dated February 1st, 2013, and types in Yellow highlighted text. The second revision is dated May 29th, 2018, and types in Green highlighted text. As far as I can tell, both revision authors are different people2 and I will be refering to them as ‘Yellow’ and ‘Green’.

    The Historical Document is a fucking mess to read. The original document itself is long, poorly laid out and without a table of contents. Yellow and Green do not help. There are entire pages added or stricken by either of them, and the pages contain a lot of marginalia arguments between the three authors. In addition much of the text by the revision authors is written in what can only be described as “channer dialect”; style of writing filled with edge, hyperbole and slurs popular on sites such as 4chan or Something Awful.

    While it makes for fascinating reading overall, the Historical Document is a very poor tool as a games rulebook. Between this and the other main resource for House Games being a PDF of screenshots of an abandoned wiki (with zero text data) was the main motivating factor behind the 8th Gen revision.)

    That being said, I felt it prudent to at the very least host and preserve the Historical document on this website. Some of the three authors’ revisions are used in ours, some are not.

    Please note there are contained with in names and emails of real people. DO NOT BOTHER THESE PEOPLE. This PDF is at least 14 years old. Do not bother people over a game they played long ago. I condemn and disown any attempts to do so.

    Click here to view and download the original PDF.

    I at some point plan to add my own commentary to the Historical Document. Watch this space for updates.

    1. Evidenced by the linking of a defunct Myspace page. ↩︎
    2. Who they are ultimately does not matter and I have no interest in learning. It should also be noted that while there are a few lines that suggest that Yellow and Green are the same people I have been told by my Protegenator that they are in fact separate. ↩︎

  • Work Resumes

    Hello there! To any that may still be interested in the Website, I’m proud to announce that I will be starting work on it once more. As discussed previously, a great personal loss caused me to step back from this project. Several months have since passed and I have had to grieve, reflect and mourn. I am happy to announce that I will be resuming work on the 8th Gen Revision Project. Thank you all for your patience.

    Additionally, not to fall victims to scope creep but I wish to begin running one-shots for my friends once more. This is part of the catalyst for my return. I plan on hosting One-shot Materials on the site, in their own separate sections. These will be privy to review and scrutiny, if enough people feel they are too low quality I will host them elsewhere. Otherwise, I feel they may be a good repository for information and examples.

    Many thanks for all your understandings.

    Eve’s Signature

  • State of the Project

    To my dear friends,
    Many of you have asked me about the current state of this project. In truth I do plan on eventually finishing this project. I have no plans to abandon this effort. However this project is on hiatus for the foreseeable future.

    About a month ago in July my girlfriend passed away. I knew it was going to happen but in truth it is hitting me much harder than I expected. I am extremely upset about this. I have been descending into a depressive spiral over her death and have had little to no energy to do much of anything. I have always struggled with chronically awful mental health. Her death has been the catalyst for some of the worst episodes Ive experienced in years.

    As Im sure you could imagine, I am not in the proper mindset to work on this project right now. For one, I am struggling just to survive and function normally in my day to day life. Moreover, I am not currently in the mood to play a game so poigntly themed around death, decay and other macrbe themes. It serves only to rub my misery in my face.

    I promise this project is not being abandoned. I simply cannot work on it for the foreseeable future I thank you for your understanding.

    Eve’s Signature

  • Evolving Scope of this Project

    I came up with the idea for this project a few weeks ago to try and convince some of my friends to play House Games with me. I just missed playing the game system and honestly the idea of playing DnD in order to play TTRPGs was not appealing. I think DnD is a great system and all but it is not my cup of tea so to say.

    So here I was, walking some of my friends through character creation. And I quickly realized just how fucking poorly written and inaccessible the documentation was for House Games.

    For one, the documents are not easily accessible. It should be acknowledged that this is a Homebrew system that has spread via word of mouth. But the main repository for information about House Games lives in discord servers and a rotting, incomplete wikidot page. These are not good long term file storage solutions.

    This is not that big of an issue. It would be a simple matter of making a website with the documents available for download on a privately owned domain. Indeed, that was the original intent for this website. A simple, accessible and stable storage solution.

    However something began itching at me. I had walked two of my neonates through the process of character creation. The main PDF resource for House Games 1.5 was just fucking awful. A PDF merely It was even text, just screenshots of a seemingly lost version wikidot site. So I figured as part of this site I would pay for a computer program that could transcribe it to text.

    However, it was poorly laid out and worded. If one was unfamiliar with White Wolf systems it didn’t explain anything about the mechanics. It also really poorly explained various high concepts things, such as character ambitions.

    This means that House games had a fundamentally hostile documentation to new players. It would be extremely difficult for someone unfamiliar with the system to go through character creation solo. It demands a veteran player be there to assist. I had to be assisted by my site through my first character. And I had to assist my Childers in creation too. In one instance it took me nearly 3 hours to go through character creation with a friend only familiar with DnD and the Star Wars RPG.

    So I initially began with rewriting the Character creation portions, so that my brood could more easily create their characters. However, the more I looked, the more I realized this game was in desperate need of a revision. These concepts were easy to grasp if explained well.

    So what began as a simple information aggregation project has quickly ballooned into an entire new House Games edition: House Games 8th Gen revision. Just as the 5th generation before me tried to (and in my opinion failed) to revise our Macabre tradition so shall I.

    There is one main goal I have my revision: to make House Games as accessible as a possible. The revision is being written with new players in mind. I have over 2 years of work experience as a scientific educator, and so have some skill in explaining the abstract.

    This website will assume the reader knows nothing of the storyteller system. Ive taken great care to give detailed explanations of various abstract concepts (such as ambitions) whilst keeping my prose simple and easily understood. To this end I have been following Orwell’s 6 rules for writing.

    I plan on putting a mirror of the site on Neocities to expose it to a new audience. I have been implementing ADA accessibility such as having all images containing alt text in their meta data. The site automatically switches to black and white to make printing out copies easier. The website is being designed to work on mobile and desktop and have navigation features. I’ve even been toying around with the idea of advertising it locally or putting it up on RPG drive through and 1d6chan. But this will not be considered until the project reaches completion…

    Additionally, I strive to make it useable for veteran players as well. If an explanation is long and mostly only useful for a neonate, then I shall put in a drop down box, it’s own page, or after an anchor link to skip it. I want this to be a definitive version of House Games for a few years to come.

    One thing I should note is I am hesitant to make any sweeping mechanical changes. Most of my planned changes are editorial in nature. There are a few very obvious changes I making. For one implementing the community used combat patch as official combat rules.

    However most of the changes that come to mind are merely codifying already practiced rules in my chantry. For example, the restriction of not being to take Charmed Existence and Luck merit on one character. There are some interesting debate to be found within the Gen 5 off that I might considered. But it should go without saying that any big mechanical revisions will be thoroughly discussed in the Balefire Chantry, whose members have graciously agreed to assist in this revision.

    One more thing to note. I’m gonna make the website have a web one aesthetic. There’s no real reason for this. I just think it’s a cool aesthetic. If you have read through all my ramblings then I thank you. I am writing this very early into this project and I’m excited to see it through. It’s entirely possible this will fail and House Games will fall into obscurity. But I don’t care either way, I’m enjoying this project.

    Eve’s Signature

    8th Generation Harbinger, Appreciance of the Balefire Chantry, Prince of Phoenix

  • A Note on Generations and LARP slang

    You might see throughout this website reference to someone’s generation. For example, I, Harbinger Eve, the creator of this website am a 8th Generation player. The woman who embraced me into house games was a 7th generation. The creator of the player sheet was a 4th generation player named Christian (who as far as I have been told is a deranged Malkavain psycho). If you have been introduced to this game by me, then you would be a 9th generation player. If you, as a presumably 9th gen, were to get your friends to play this game, they would be a Tenth gen.

    What exactly does all this mean?

    Well World of Darkness, and in particular Vampire the Masquerade, has a storied tradition of LARP1. If you’ve seen some Goth kids larping vampires, chances are they were probably playing VTM. This is encouraged by White Wolf themselves, who included LARP rules in the core rule book as well as separately published LARP rulesets. For years the main core audience of VTM were LARPers and gaming nerds.

    The whole concept of generations is a little bit of VTM lore and gameplay. TLDR; Caine was the first vampire. The people he turned into vampires, Enoch, Irad and Zillah were the second generation. The people they turned into vampires were the third generation and so on and so forth.

    So in essence, whoever started this whole tradition of House Games is “Caine” and your generation just represents how many players were in the chain of players before you. It doesnt signify anything other than that. Some people may be tempted to treat it as more but dont its just a fun little larping thing. Its very 5 degrees of Kevin Bacon.

    Side note, I know very little about the overall history of this game other than it sprung up somewhere in Cali during the 2000s and I got introduced to through some friends on Discord. Theres a bunch of, frankly, ancient drama between the various cells I really don’t want to be apart of.

    Anyways it can be fun to play into LARP a little bit when talking about this game. Thus all the talk of me being a Harbinger, my og play group being a Treme Chantry, etc. There used to be multiple play groups of House Games all over the US, but as far as I know its just ours (if I can even get this thing off the ground) and the Los Angles cell that are still active (which knowing the kind of people who play there I want nothing to do with.) 2Thus the title of Prince, since we would be technically the Arizona play cell; and in VTM the Camarilla leaders who rule over cities are Princes.

    Anyways just remember its all just a bit of optional fun and don’t take any of it too seriously. At the end of the day we are a bunch of gay nerds playing make pretend with dice together.

    Eve’s Signature

    8th generation Harbinger, Childe of the Balefire Chantry, Prince of Phoenix

    1. LARP is short for Live Action Roleplay. ↩︎
    2. [Addendum (DEC 2025): Since writing this I have learned of the Contract the RPG, a game that is part of the same tradition that we are selves belong too, created by some of the original people behind the House Games. Their system seems cool and is entirely free from the copyrightable WOD. We will continue to create our own revision. However but we wish nothing but success upon our brotherly storytellers.] ↩︎

  • Musing

    This page is a sorta of manifesto of the theory and aims behind the project.

    I am but a small member of the long tradition known as the House Games. I will freely admit I am but an 8th generation player from an isolated chantry. I will freely admit I am working with a limited piece of the tapestry of this great tradition. I know not even who the Caine of our tradition even is. All I know is that some years ago the sires of my chantry fled to establish their own coven from the main society of Highrollers in the modern age. This is a drama I am not privy to and want no part in.

    I have decided to undertake the creation of this site to have a more efficient and effective means of viewing the information of our macabre tradition. For with the approval of the sires of my chantry I have gone forth into my own city to establish my own Princedom. I aim to sire a brood of 9th generation of Highrollers, and further the goals of the Harbingers and the House through my Princehood. 

    (In other words, my old play group kinda died and I wanna convince a bunch of my irl friends to play with me. )

    But first, allow me to muse on the state of our tradition. 

    I thoroughly believe House Games is one of the greatest methods of Table Top Roleplaying out there right now. We live in a Golden Age of Table top gaming. For better or worse, our hobby is now mainstream. (This is a good thing, in my opinion.) House Games are so radically different from anything else being offered. For better or worse, most people view our hobby through the lens of Dungeons and Dragons. DND is great, and is the mainstream favorite for a reason. If you want to play in a high fantasy system with a myriad of structured classes; and a combat heavy, dungeon crawling focus to gameplay; DND is amazing. It is highly modular and highly customizable. 

    But as many many people have observed, it is a severely flawed masterpiece. I’ve seen so , SO MANY posts, videos, discourse and even published about people museing how to “fix” Dungeons and Dragons. How to implement Modern setting rules for Dungeons and Dragons. How to make it more story telling focused. How to make the game less of a combat slog. There are several successful brands whose entire initial sell was “its DND but better”.

     I internally scream in frustration every time I see this sort of discourse. To the consensus of the masses, D20 systems like DnD and TTRPGs are efficiently one and the same. DnD isn’t necessarily flawed, but it has a focus on high fantasy combat and dungeon crawling. It is very, very good at the specific genre it is geared for. But this is not a universal goal for role playing. Not every story lends itself to this genre. Not every roleplay group wishes to engage with such hard, crunchy combat. And because of that, so much effort is put towards trying to solve the problems of this mainstream system; rather than simply trying different systems.

    The people yearn for White Wolf. 

    To me,  House Games is the most entertaining way of engaging with World of Darkness.  It solves many of the issues I see people have with DND style TTRPGS. Its round robin, semi serialized and communal aspects of the game are so unique. Its Creative Common licensing is also desirable. There has been some drama in recent years about the monetization and copyright of our hobby. House Games is a community game. It breeds and encourages community interaction and creativity and collective story telling. 

    The problem is this game is not exactly an easy sell. Its name is generic, and the information is hard to grasp. The World of Darkness IP itself hasn’t been culturally relevant in two decades. All of the documents I personally have access to is in a repository of information in a Discord channel. I can speak from first hand experience that Discord is a very poor choice for file distribution. Furthermore with how generic the name is it is exceedingly difficult to find information about this game on search engines. 

    You will be hard pressed to find any information about this game online unless you are taught and informed by someone else. (In this way it almost beautifully mirrors the real plight of the Canaanites in the real games we love to play. ) Even if you do have the current information, it is difficult and frustrating to use. It is spread across these long, sprawling PDFs, many of which are formatted strangely or even incomplete. Character creation can be obtuse and confusing to a first time player. 

    This is why I aim to create this website. I wish to aggregate all of the information for House Games I have access to into a single easily digestible source. I want it to be easier for new players to begin playing, and I want it to be easier for veteran high rollers to check information. I hope you enjoy this archive I have set forth to create. 

    Eve’s Signature

    8th generation Highroller, childe of the Balefire Chantry, Prince of Phoenix.