In The Beginning There Were Zombies

Sometime in the middle of 2002, meme addicts on LiveJournal acquired a new way to measure their popularity, and which had the added bonus of involving legions of flesh-eating zombies.

Kevan Davis had created a tiny game -- it scarcely qualifies as a game, really -- which basically involved persuading one's friends to click on a referral link. If they did, they would find themselves at a site announcing that they had just had their brain eaten. The original zombie could check back and see how many brains she had managed to eat since signing up. Of course, the person thus bitten could go on to get other friends to have their brains eaten.

What Happens When Zombies Get Sentient

Ravenblack, a friend of Kevan's, picked up on the idea and created a vampire game that was very similar to the original zombie version. At first, there was no more to it than getting your friends to be "bitten" by you, and then to "bite" their friends in turn. It's the sort of thing that sells like hotcakes in Livejournal, since LJers love coming up with artificial ways to count the number of people who read their posts and click on random links.

By the end of 2002, Ravenblack had, uh, revamped his game completely. Rather than a simple biter-link followed by an equally simple bitten-link, he created a grid that your vampire could move around in.

You Are In A Dark Alleyway...

Ravenblack City is made up of one hundred numbered streets running north to south, and one hundred named streets running west to east. This is all represented abstractly through text -- there are no graphics anywhere in the game, simply a 3x3 grid representing the intersection you currently inhabit.

The streets in the eastern half of the city are named after animals and plants -- one of each for each letter of the alphabet, so they go Aardvark, Alder, Beech, Buzzard, Cedar, Cormorant, and so on, up to Zebra and Zelkova. Then they go through the alphabet again, but this time the streets are named after stones and moods: Amethyst, Anguish, Beryl, Bleak, and so on, until you reach the eastern city limits at Zinc. There are no X's in either half, making an even one hundred streets in all.

So vampires no longer simply reside at a you've-been-bitten link. Rather, they're scattered around the city. Each player gets a fixed number of moves which he can spend hunting down other players (and NPC "humans" too). One can increase one's blood pool by using a movement point to drink from an unlucky victim; higher blood pools don't have too much of an in-game effect, though I imagine that they will earn the admiration of other players (or something). Movement points refresh slowly; the average player will refill completely every day or two.

What? A Grid's Not Enough For You?

Ravenblack went on to add other features to the game too. Vampires can develop powers that allow them to refresh their moves faster, increase their maximum pool of movement points, steal from other vampires, locate a vampire against whom one might have a vendetta, learn another vampire's stats, and so on.

He also added items to the game: potions that can wound other vampires, scrolls that can move you or another vampire into a different square, and useless but pretty "gifts" like flowers and jewellery that one might wish to give a friendly vampire. Players have the ability to "chat" (asynchronously) with a vampire who is in the same square; the power of Telepathy allows one to send messages to vampires elsewhere in the city.

One can store one's money in Omnibank branches, get rumours from bartenders in pubs, buy items in shops, and learn skills at guilds. The game itself does not provide a map to help you find these places, but lots of people have made their own and posted them on the web.

Most recently, Ravenblack added vampire hunters, who look just like humans but who fight back when you try to bite them.

So Why Are You Into This, Again?

The game is delightfully pointless and thoroughly addictive. I log in most days from work if I'm going through a lull, just to walk my vampire around and inflict random violence on innocent city-dwellers. Others have gone much further in their addiction than me, however: there are a huge number of online communities dedicated to role playing in Ravenblack City, and I have seen people get very, very attached to their vampires.

Some folks have gone so far as to set up in-character clans, spending a lot of time IC, swearing blood-oaths and eternal love to other undead, writing elaborate histories of the seven hundred years they've supposedly lived, and so forth. Ravenblack even set up a Hall of Binding for players who want their vampires to "get married" for some reason, and a Hall of Severance for players who've since had fallings-out.

But for me, the violence is satisfaction enough.

Links:
The original zombie game can be seen at http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?. I don't actually remember what my zombie there is called any more.
An introduction to Ravenblack City can be found on this page: http://quiz.ravenblack.net/bloodhowto.html
If you'd like to join up, why not let me bite you? It won't hurt, I promise. In fact it feels kind of nice... http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?biter=MoonLayHidden