Highrollers Games

Category: New Players

  • Lines and Veils

    Housegames is inherently a horror game. It is a homebrew system for the World of Darkness systems, and is both Horror and Alternative in its themes. Themes of death, violence, oppression, extremism,  sexuality, morality and overall horror are all on the table. As a result, it can deal with mature content and themes. Minor discomfort can result from dealing with these themes, and this is a normal experience. Using story telling exploring mature themes can be a fun and cathartic experience.  

    This is, however, a game. Games are meant to be fun. If the contents of the game are too much for any given participant, then it is no longer fun. This is meant to be a collaborative storytelling game, and if one player is overly upset by the game then it is no longer fun for anyone. As such I will use a number of safety systems aimed to keep the game fun for everyone involved. The systems aim to steer the story away from topics of extreme discomfort. Failing that, they also give every member of the troupe means to pause or end roleplay if they become overwhelmed. 

    The primary system I will be employing is known as lines and veils. This is not something original to our tradition, but developed elsewhere. A line is any subject that will not be touched at all. It is a hard line and will not be crossed. A veil is something that can be discussed and broached, but will never be explicitly shown. For example, if the veil is domestic violence, then we would simply “fade to black” and skip forward if such a scene were to be otherwise shown. 

    When filling out this sheet, do not make them too broad, i.e.-  “general horror”, “any violence”, “mentions of blood” as a line. Veils and Lines do not exist to cut out the inherent themes of horror from the game, but to push them in a manageable direction. Feel free to update these at any point. You can move items from lines to veils, veils to lines, add new items or remove them entirely. This is a game after all. Games are meant to be fun, for everyone involved. 

    If you’re a new player, please fill out this sheet and send it to whoever is managing your cell. Feel free to place things on the list. Feel free to place nothing on the list. It is totally up to you.

  • A Primer for House Games

    Hello Young Neonate, 

    If this letter finds itself in your hands then you have been selected to partake in a dark tradition whose practice spans decades and many generations of players. I myself am of the 8th generation of players. By embracing you, you shall be of the 9th. This macabre tradition is known simply as House Games. 

    To suspend the Kayfab for a few paragraphs , House Games is an informal system of table top roleplaying. You may be familiar with popular High Fantasy RPG systems such as Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder. We are currently in a Golden Age of Table Top gaming; and even I must admit these systems are the most popular systems for a reason.  However House Games is a very different beast than systems you may be familiar with. 

    A World of Darkness

    House games is by and large built on the classic White Wolf’s roleplaying systems from the 90s and early 2000s. These include systems such as Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Hunter the Reckoning, and Mage the Ascension. Collectively, these various source books make up a shared world known as the World of Darkness (WOD). WOD is thoroughly low fantasy. It is about the forces that drive our world, of the things that go bump in the night, of the sinister intentions behind the stranger who keeps staring at you.

    Though today WOD is not popular as their high fantasy D20 system competitors, it nonetheless have a strong cult following. Mechanically it is extremely different from a D20 system as well. A set of at least a few d10s are the only thing needed to play WOD (and by extension House Games). There are no classes, only skills and attributes; and skill checks involve rolling both. The goal of the games is to tell a collaborative story.

    What are House Games?

    House Games are a set of homebrew rules to play in the World of Darkness. You play as High Rollers, people of incredible determination and grit. They can best be described as a Snowflake of Carnage. They are recruited by the Harbingers to play the House Games, who reward gifts upon success.

    All House Games follow the same basic structure. A group of characters are rounded up and presented with a deadly task which they must attempt to complete. Each session is a self contained story, with the player characters being all that carry over from session to session. Upon success characters are given rewards by the harbingers, XP, and various traumas from their experiences.

    The Procedural Format

    You may be wondering how any character progression is possible without an intertwining campaign. Enter the Precession and Side Sessions. Before each game you and an agreed upon Storyteller will do some role playing to advance the story of your character. Side sessions in turn allow you to roleplay out more impactful moments. Between the two, this gives you a chance to role play your character in their day to day life, facilitating a story of personal growth and change. The story trajectory and progress of your highroller is entirely up to you. Fleshing out your character is both encouraged and rewarded mechanically.

    A great analogy is House Games is a procedural show. House MD is a great example. (In fact Dr. House is the perfect type of character who would be in House Games.) The bulk of an episode is dedicated to the ‘mystery of the week’, the patient with the disease. But threaded throughout the episode are also small moments used to flesh out the characters, to give them overarching character arcs and story lines. The best storytelling with this method will subtly intertwine the two story beats.

    No Gods, No Masters, No Perma-GMs

    There is no perma-GM in House Games. Storytelling in House Games is conducted Round-Robin style. A healthy playgroup will have multiple people As every session is self contained, anyone can volunteer to host and run a game. If you are normally a player and you wish to try Storytelling, give it a go. You will be rewarded with additional XP for doing so that can be put towards your characters. This is a mechanical incentive to pick up the responsibility, and make up for missing a game as a player. House Games is not a campaign level commitment. You are free to come and go as you please. 

    Why House Games

    Lets review the gameplay loop that we just discussed real quick. The loop of House Games is as follows:

    1. Each character will conduct a Pression with the Storyteller of the Week.
    2. The Storyteller will conduct the Session, playing out the story for the week.
    3. Upon completion, the Storyteller will hand out earned rewards, tramuas and XP to each character, as well as earning XP as a reward for conducting the session.
    4. Players will use this down time to roll for progression and calculate skill progression.
    5. In-between sessions, a player and a agreed upon Storyteller will conduct side sessions, giving

    This type of non-conventional gameplay loop does not occur by mistake. The system is designed to encourage a system of collaborative story telling, in which every player shares a bit of the burden, rather then a single game master responsible for running the game. This is to solve a common problem in tabletop roleplay, the need to keep a consistent campaign together.

    People get busy, sick or have schedule changes. This includes the Game Master. How to account for a missing player is always a thorny issue in any system. But in House Games, missing a session is no problem at all for any player, because the responsibility is more spread out among the troupe.

    Now that you know the what and the why of the system, you can learn more about the how. For further introductory reading, see New Players Start Here

  • Willpower

    Willpower is a powerful Stat that lets you do lots of things. It is also a measure of your character’s dinner drive and will. It also measures their ability to handle trauma and dominant the will of others.

    Willpower is both a rating and a pool. Willpower is measured on a scale of 1-10. You may spend Willpower points from your pool during the game. Your pool is determined by your Rating. For example, a character with a Willpower rating of 7 has a pool of 7 Willpower Points.

    Uses of Willpower Pool

    • Gain an Automatic Success on Single Action, cannot be counteracted by a botch and is Guaranteed. Makes it possible to succeed simply through effort, must be declared before hand. Storyteller can declare that an action cannot be will-powered.
    • Sometimes the Storyteller may compel a Highroller to preform an action from instinct. Backing down from a high ledge, the alluring draw of a cursed artifact, or other instinctual draws. These can be avoided with Willpower.
    • Willpower can be used to fight off derangement.
    • Willpower is used to activate certain Powers
    • Willpower can be used to ignore wound penalties .

    Regaining Willpower

    Willpower can be regained in two ways. Firstly, your Willpower pool automatically regenerates in between sessions. You will always go into a Housegame with a full pool of Willpower.

    The second source of Willpower is to play towards your character’s Nature. A Highroller’s Nature (not Demeanor) is a true reflection of their self. By playing towards this true reflection in how you play the character, you may regain Willpower during a session. You may declare that you are playing to your character’s Nature during session and the Storyteller should reward you with Willpower.

    Willpower Rolls

    Willpower is often rolled for as a Rating.

  • 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.