Vampire: The Masquerade

  • Developer: Mark Rein-Hagen Graeme Davis Tom Dowd Lisa Stevens Stewart Wieck Troika Games Draw Distance
  • Publisher: White Wolf Publishing Activision Draw Distance
  • Year: 1991 – 2019
  • Genre: RPG Tabletop
  • Platform/s: Physical game, PC

Vampire: The Masquerade—and all games in the World of Darkness game franchise—provided players with examples of how to incorporate sex and sexuality into their games. Vampire: The Masquerade included options for players to have sexual encounters, generally sex between vampires, and these aren't restricted by gender.

Montreal by Night, a supplement for the game, features a Sabbat group called 'Queens of Mercy', the members of which are gay. They fight straight people, and organise ridiculous rituals.

The digital interpretation of the game, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, features Pisha, a character whose true name is never revealed; the name 'Pisha' belonged to her lover, who died, which reveals her previous participation in a same-gender relationship.

There are also some same-gender flirtation options available to player-characters who are women, including an instance where the player-character can have sex with a same-gender NPC, but same-gender flirtation options are mostly unavailable to player-characters who are men. Player-characters who are women can seduce women in a bar when seeking blood, and can have sex with a same-gender vampire character, as can player-characters who are men. There is one instance early in the game where a man could seduce a male NPC, but the player-character needs a high charisma stat to be successful.

Romero, the gravekeeper, has some dialogue with the player-character where he suggests that he has 'needs' that he would like taken care of. A player-character who is a woman can agree to assist with this, and in an unofficial patch, men were also allowed to respond to the dialogue in the same way.

The main character of Coteries of New York is referred to using they/them pronouns, despite the player needing to choose a binary-gendered character at the beginning of the game. As with the other games, there are same-gender flirtation options available to the player, but they rarely move past innocent flirtation. One character, a 'mysterious man', does admit to being openly bisexual/plurisexual, saying that his past involved 'drugs, parties, men, women...'.