In case you didn’t know, Vampire: The Masquerade has like a billion sourcebooks. Every clan, every secret society, sourcebooks for everything. There are about a dozen sourcebooks for cities, which are pretty key to running a game. Most of the cities are big, sexy ones, like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. New Orleans, so important to 90s goth culture, got one. Montreal, the New Orleans of the north got one too. And so did…Milkwaukee?

I really, really love the fact that Milwaukee by Night (1992) exists. Not only that it exists, but it was the second city book, after Chicago. It just seems so improbable. I mean, every city has rats, so every city is going to have vampire. And nothing against Milwaukee. It just seems hilarious to me that this came out before New Orleans by Night, you know?

I like the idea of Milwaukee by Night a bit more than the execution. Not a flashy city on the scale of a Chicago or LA, I can see it being the setting for a nice indie movie-style slice of life Vampire campaign (which, honestly, is the sort of game I think VtM is actually suited for but never really embraced [oof, that pun]). But nah, there’s feuding 1500 year old vampires, a werewolf siege and plenty of weird psychodrama. Which is fine! But makes the fact that Milwaukee an even stranger choice. To me, anyway (Milwaukee residents, feel free to drag me).

The sourcebook is only half the book, the second half a lengthy adventure, tied to and fleshing out the source material. Because so much of the source material directly supports the adventure, a lot of Milwaukee remains roughly sketched (unlike Chicago by Night, which has NPCs for days), so once the adventure wraps, maybe you could transition to that Jim Jarmusch vampire campaign after? I dunno.

Sweet Janet Aulisio cover art. This being an early VtM book, the art and layout feels a bit hit or miss, but definitely leaning more toward hit than the stuff from 1991.