When Characters Encounter the Players

Last June I finished my V-tR campaign. It ended pretty much in the way that I intended it to happen, although only one of the Players were killed in the process. WTF?

Let me start from the beginning, won't you? It was after a few months of game sessions, pretty long and eventful ones, when we finally entered the final stages of the story. We had three characters in the game: Tina, a Daeva, who was beautiful as the legends, and deadly as the rest of them; Louis, a Ventrue, whose powers of command was the source of legends; and finally Jack, a Mekhet who was an artist in at seeing and not being seen.

The game was set in New Orleans, the default setting, with a little twist: To add another level of complexity, I included in the city the three main characters of the novel "Interview with the Vampire", who were the string pullers of New Orleans, being part of another level of secret intrigues and alliances.

In the sessions preceding the final one, Tina started to get close to Louis of the novel, and also to a Mage called Robert Geldof; Louis entered the world of vamp politics and tried to rise higher and higher; and Jack? Jack tried to understand the truth about the situation they were in.

Also of note: A bystander found Tina in a blood frenzy, Tina vampirized a person of great power, the 2 enemies of Prince Vidal thought about of forces, Jack succeeded in killing a werewolf, and Louis agreed to a strange term with Louis of the novel about a favour for standing in society.

At the end of the preceding session, Prince Vidal was murdered. Then we started the final one. It started with the group being escorted to a "cave", which was ran in a Nordic-freeform fashion (a combination between LARP and tabletop), till we got to the gaming table. The session then continued, with the group and the city trying to cope with the death of the prince.

We had a break as they awoke from a dream scene. Then, they ran away from the three new contestants for the job.

Then, the soundtrack finally started, with 15 minutes of thriller's themes. Louis was caught by a vamp group, and the others tried to free him. Then, after the cue, Jack was freed, and I made someone dress as a stranger. He went downstairs, and after a text that he said, about life of misery and about a way to solve it. He told the characters that they were only characters in a game, aimed at making them feel misery, gave them the rulebook and character sheets, and then opened a portal to a dimension where the Players and the GM were tied up. "Killing them is the only way to get free", he said, and gave them a knife.

Tina killed her player, Jack let his player ran away, and Louis brought the player with him back to the world. The world that they came into was different; it was by the rulebook edition of New Orleans.

This is what I recall as my crowning moment of GMing, when they found the truth. It was, as John Wick called it, breaking the fifth wall- making the audience be the event, be the feeling, the happening.