Vampire: Elder Kindred Network Newsletter March 2017

Greetings fellow Methuselahs
Spring is in the air, but who cares in a World of Darkness, right? Who needs flowers and love when you have V:TES cards, preys and predators? Sunlight is for mortals! 


IMPORTANT NEWS ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY SET
The V:EKN is happy to announce that all the cards from the Anthology set will be legal for play on their release date (May 11, 2017). We expect players to be enthusiastic about swapping their PDF cards with genuine cards as soon as they get them or tweaking their decks with the new cards, and restricting this to reprints only made little sense.

The tournament rule 2.1 is therefore amended as follows: “All new cards and game rules go immediately into effect for V:EKN tournaments.” until further notice.

To make things fair, we'll be disclosing the new cards as well as wording changes each Monday, starting on April 3rd, for 5 weeks: http://www.vekn.net/vampire-elder-kindred-network/370-anthology

Tickets for the European Championships and the whole World of Darkness Berlin event are available at www.worldofdarkness.berlin


TWO STORYLINE TOURNAMENTS COMING UP
Some words from Mike Nudd, V:EKN Storyline Coordinator:

In May fans of the World of Darkness all around the world will be gathering in Berlin at the event World of Darkness Berlin organised by the newly invigorated White Wolf. Not only is it important for the Vampire: The Eternal Struggle game to be represented at the event, but it is also important to show that the card game can still play a part in the greater, ongoing narrative of the World of the Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade. I was glad to be asked to come up with some Storyline game ideas for the Berlin event.

For the main Storyline tournament to be held on Friday 12th I have chosen to pay homage to a story that was originally included in the Berlin by Night sourcebook for the 1st edition Vampire RPG. While the sourcebook was controversial (for a few reasons I won’t dwell on here) it did serve to introduce several key characters to the Vampire narrative and metaplot. In the Ascension of Caine Storyline, the Kindred of Berlin are confronted with a powerful being claiming to be Caine, who threatens to disband both the Camarilla and the Sabbat, to enforce a new rule of law with the world as its domain. Many influential vampires, including the Tremere Justicar Karl Schrekt, were drawn to the city to investigate this mysterious being and its claims. Ultimately this “Caine” was found to be ruse – a compelling illusion borne of the combined powers of a Bane Mummy and two Methuselahs: the Ravnos Ankla Hotep and the Setite Nefertiti.

To complement the End of the Line LARP being enacted at World of Darkness Berlin, and to facilitate more casual ‘drop in’ play by convention attendees, we will also be promoting a second, shorter, End of the Line Storyline single game format that can be played throughout the weekend.

The full rules and additional cards for both game formats will be published shortly. If you are attending World of Darkness Berlin then please make sure you prepare for these Storylines accordingly. If you are willing, please also bring at least one spare deck suitable for play which could be loaned to another convention attendee who might want to play on the day.

Note that even if you cannot attend World of Darkness Berlin, we would like to invite you to play the same Storylines with your own play groups during the same weekend of 12th-14th May (or soon after).

Regards,
Mike


DESIGN TEAM NEWS
From Ben Peal, Design Team Leader:
We're still reviewing the playtest report for Round One of the next V:EKN created set, and we've had some personal scheduling issues with setting up a meeting to prepare Round Two.  We've also just received the pdf file for Lore of the Bloodlines, a new book from Onyx Path Publishing that has a lot of new material for the bloodlines clans. We'll very likely be adding new cards to the set based on the material in the book.  Our apologies for the delay in getting Round Two out the door, but we'll get that done soon.

We've received permission White Wolf to do previews of the new cards in the Anthology set! You'll start seeing those in the next few days. Stay tuned! (See “Important news about Anthology” above)


CONTRIBUTE TO THE TOURNAMENT WINNING DECK ARCHIVE
From Vincent Ripoll, Ratings Coordinator:
The Tournament Winning Deck Archive (TWDA) is a chronological archive of decks that have won tournaments that were sanctioned by the Vampire: Elder Kindred Network and had 10 or more players. National and Continental Championship are included as well, irrelatively to their attendance. To be included in this list, a tournament report had to be made on the official V:EKN Player's Forum: http://www.vekn.net/index.php/forum/9-event-reports-and-twd

If you want to participate to the update of the archive, you'll need to create pull requests for this repository: github.com/GiottoVerducci/TWD (The instructions are in the README.md file.)

If you wish to learn the basics about pull requests, you can watch this 7-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTbRzhQju4c


ARCHON 1.5F IS AVAILABLE
From Vincent Ripoll, Ratings Coordinator: 
There was a flaw in the validation of the new seatings, and some manual mistakes when reporting the results. As a consequence, some of the seatings used in Archon 1.5e were sub-optimal and have been fixed in the version 1.5f. From now on, we strongly recommand not to use the version 1.5e but version 1.5f :
Excel: www.vekn.net/images/stories/downloads/thearchon1.5f.xlsx 
LibreOffice: www.vekn.net/images/stories/downloads/thearchon1.5f.ods


CALENDAR
Upcoming events:
Apr 1 – Campina Grande, Brazil: Standard constructed
Apr 1 – Reus, Catalunya, Spain: Standard constructed
Apr 1 – Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico: Standard constructed
Apr 8 – Seattle, USA: Continental Qualifier
Apr 8 – Amadora, Portugal: Standard constructed
Apr 9 – Manaus, Brazil: Standard constructed
Apr 9 – Parma, Italy: Standard constructed
Apr 14 – Helsinki, Finland: Unsanctioned tournament (multi-deck)
Apr 15 – Lille, France: Standard constructed
Apr 21 – Manaus, Brazil: Standard constructed
Apr 22 – Stockholm, Sweden: Standard constructed
Apr 30 – Macapá, Brazil: Continental Qualifier

For more information on upcoming events see the V:EKN Event Calendar.


CONTACT V:EKN
You can contact the V:EKN Inner Circle members using contact forms at V:EKN.net. Also follow the official V:TES Facebook page Vampire: The Eternal Struggle and the official V:EKN Twitter account @VEKN_VTES

Happy ousting!

Vampire: Elder Kindred Network Newsletter February 2017

Greetings fellow Methuselahs
It´s been a short month, so we settle for a short newsletter this time. Both Design Team and Rules Team work on with their stuff and have no statements, well, apart from the BIG ONE:


ANTHOLOGY CARD LIST REVEALED!
Earlier this month the complete list of the EC 2017 Anthology set was made public. Apart from ten World of Darkness Berlin-themed cards and many never before printed V:EKN-created cards, the set also includes a selection of much desired reprints, for example Enkil Cog, Eyes of Argus, Deep Song, Ashur Tablets and Monastery of Shadows. Read the full list in the original message here


ANTHOLOGY FOR NON-EUROPEANS
Berlin-arrangers PDA and White Wolf are working on some kind of way to make the Anthology set a little less exclusive, so that players that can´t make it to the EC can get hold of the new cards sometime in the future. This is not finalized yet, but read what what has been said so far here.


EC 2017 UPDATE
The safest way to get hold of those Anthology sets within shortly is to go to the European Championships 2017, held at the World of Darkness Berlin event 11-14 May. Apart from shopping V:TES cards and playing V:TES tournaments, you can also participate in several LARPS and RPG scenarios, attend workshops, panels, parties and much more.

Right now we´re particulary excited about the latest trailer for the World of Darkness documentary that will premiere at the Berlin event:

Sign up for all this greatness at www.worldofdarkness.berlin


INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH: GINÉS QUIÑONERO ABOUT THE ART OF V:TES

Ginés, apart from being an art teacher and the V:EKN chairman, you are also the artwork coordinator for new V:EKN cards AND a V:TES illustrator yourself. How do you find time for all this?

- Normally I have time for all that, because my duties as an art director and as an illustrator (which are the most time-consuming VEKN activities I carry out) usually happen during my summer and/or Easter holidays. 

However, for the last few months it has been impossible to balance my job, my VEKN duties and my life since the Anthology set project was green-lighted, because there was a lot to be done in a very short time. Therefore I chose to leave my life out of the equation for the time being in order to have enough time for both teaching and VEKN.

You illustrated some V:TES cards also under the “old” White Wolf period. How was the art direction back then? Has it changed in the V:EKN period?

- The way I see it, the main differenciating factor is the amount of time given to the illustrators to complete their pieces of artwork.

For obvious reasons, White Wolf could not give artists as much time as V:EKN can, because they had pressing deadlines to meet, whereas V:EKN has been providing the illustrators with more time than usual for doing the art for the PDF sets, thus allowing us to give our feedback (for as long as needed) on the submitted illustrations and suggest as many modifications as deemed necessary to improve the quality of the pieces until they met our standards.

In my opinion, this fact has made the overall quality of the artwork in the VEKN PDF sets better than that in many White Wolf sets.

Generally what artists are interesting for V:TES? And who is not appropriate?

- Those who are good at depicting arresting realistic and/or believable dark-themed scenes and portraits of the various creatures of the World of Darkness are in my opinion interesting for V:TES.

The artists I regard as less appropriate for V:TES are those who stray from that, and those who still have much to learn about human figure drawing.

We cannot discuss details about the future of V:TES, but “new” White Wolf have reviewed the art for the Anthology set. Do they have new guidelines that you can say something about?

- They have not shared their guidelines with us so far, but it appears to me that "new" White Wolf want to stick more closely than "old" White Wolf to the supernatural horror theme of V:TES.

And yes, we are always looking for artists for new cards - contact Ginés Quiñonero about that.


CALENDAR
Upcoming events:

Mar 4 – Lisboa, Portugal: Standard constructed
Mar 5 – Campina Grande, Brazil: Standard constructed
Mar 5 – Badía del Vallés, Spain: Standard constructed
Mar 11 – Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico: Demo
Mar 12 – Macapá, Brazil: Standard constructed
Mar 12 – Moscow, Russia: Standard constructed
Mar 12 – Newark, USA: Standard constructed
Mar 18 – Juiz de Fora, Brazil: Standard constructed
Mar 18 – Bad Nauheim, Germany: Standard constructed
Mar 19 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Standard constructed
Mar 25 – Gent, Belgium: Standard constructed (ECQ!)

For more information on upcoming events see the V:EKN Event Calendar.


CONTACT V:EKN
You can contact the V:EKN Inner Circle members using contact forms at V:EKN.net. Also follow the official V:TES Facebook page Vampire: The Eternal Struggle and the official V:EKN Twitter account @VEKN_VTES

BLOOD AND SOULS!