Web Video / Seattle By Night

The worst team available.

Seattle by Night is a web video series created by Penny Arcade that follows a group of players during a game of Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition with Jason Carl as the Storyteller. It was originally shown on Twitch before gradually being released on YouTube.

The premise is four vampires are forming an impromptu coterie at the behest of the powerful vampire Fiorenza. After a failed mission in Montreal, they have been sent on a mission involving a mysterious trunk and a sleeping elder.

The player characters consist of:

• Jamison Keen (as played by Jerry Holkins): A snooty Nosferatu gentleman thief with a taste for fine clothes and larceny.
• Amanda Booker (as played by Dora Litterell): A Tremere daddy's girl and eternal student, mistaken by the coterie for a savant and expert on the occult.
• Tom Hollandaise (as played by Mike Krahulik): A recently-Embraced Toreador tattoo artist and junk food addict who hates being a vampire.
• Betty Lancaster (as played by Jasmine Bhullar): A Lasombra, former Prohibition bootlegger that serves as group's leader.

The second season had Amanda Booker Put on a Bus and introduced:

• Enrique "Rico" Suarez (as played by Luis Carazo): A Seattle Brujah that agrees to show them the ropes.

It is the Spiritual Successor to LA By Night and even makes several references to it. It is a good deal sillier with the player characters making many more out of character jokes and pop culture references.

---

Seattle by Night provides examples of the following tropes:

General

• Acrofatic: Tom is a Toreador with Celerity and a bit on the chunky side.
• Blood Magic: All vampiric powers technically utilize the drained blood in the vampire's body, but Blood Sorcery/Thaumaturgy fits the bill best. Amanda possesses the latter as a Tremere, but it rarely comes up.
• Casting a Shadow: The signature power of Lasombra vampires (previously Obtenebration, now folded into the Oblivion Discipline in V5). Betty summons shadows around her to intimidate, including a crawling, undulating mass of shadowy hands.
• Denser and Wackier: Than LA By Night as the actors are much less determined to act in-character at the table
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Giovanni are held in contempt by the Kindred of Tacoma and Seattle.
  • Thin Bloods are treated as second class citizens by the Kindred at large and even hanging around them is taboo.
• Kiss of the Vampire: Subverted with Betty; the reason for her 'Bagger' tendencies is that she hates the intimacy which comes with the Kiss, and prefers blood bags purchased on the black market.
  • In Season One, Jamison uses the pleasurable part of the Kiss to class him draining a waiter dry in the Elysium as a Mercy Kill — claiming that a death from the Kiss is infinitely kinder than a death from after being impaled by multiple shards of glass.
• Harmless Villain: What the protagonists are closer to than Friendly Neighborhood Vampires. They're all cold blooded and selfish but none of them are actively malevolent.
• Naïve Newcomer: Tom is very newly embraced, and is the trigger for many an exposition dump. Amanda is pretty new to the vampire scene as well, but while she hides it better than Tom does at first, Tom adapts more quickly to the cynicism and brutality of the night.
• Ragtag Band of Misfits: They are not nearly as competent as the LA By Night crew.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Jamison never uses two words when seventeen will do according to his player. They're also all of an eloquent intellectual level.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: Jason Carl spends much of every session dealing with the player character's bizarre hobbies and priorities.and more inclined to goof off.
• Super-Senses: A common power among vampires, Heightened Senses being a first-tier Auspex ability. Tom uses Super-Hearing to listen in on a private conversation between Mr Drew and Fiorenza, learning that the Camarilla don't expect the coterie to survive and Fiorenza would in fact rather never hear from Betty again.
• Super-Reflexes: Tom has them, as an early manifestation of the Toreadors' clan Discipline of Celerity.
• Team Mom: Betty serves as this to the group, being a much older Kindred who is still a bit on the naive side.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Tom has an addiction to two-dollar nachos, Oreo milkshakes, and other cheap junk food that has survived the Embrace — thwarted by the fact that he can no longer hold down food anymore, which now tastes like ashes anyway. He eventually manages to centrifuge blood and Taco Bell together.
  • Amanda loves cranberry vodkas as well as maraschino cherries, neither of which she can enjoy anymore.

Season One

• Animated Credits Opening: The series has one of these with an introduction for each character.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: While the offer is very generous, Gravenstein makes it clear that his promotion of the coterie in the final episode is this.
• Batman Gambit: They awaken a torpid Nosferatu Elder that was meant to kill them but lock him out of the room as he's awakening with a bunch of their enemies. It works.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Despite being a Daddy's Girl Amanda is sitting on a whole lot of daddy issues, which only increase after she discovers that he is a ghoul and was probably the main reason she was embraced in the first place. She finally manages to call him out on some of these in the final episode.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Gravenstein is a master at this as Kindred are capable of taking a lot more punishment than normal humans.
• Big Bad: Gravenstein, the former Nosferatu Prince of Tacoma, is set up to be this. And then subverted in the final episode, when the coterie decide to side with him and he rewards them handsomely in return.
• Cool House: Both Amanda and Betty have large palatial mansions that they sleep in during the day.
• Cool Old Guy: Gravenstein is a hundred years old and the most formidable vampire the player characters meet in Season 1.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Betty intending to murder a security guard with a straw because she didn't want to use her fangs.
• Court Mage: Kennedy is technically this, being the head Tremere in Tacoma's Camarilla, although more importance is paid to his duties as Keeper of the Elysium. This is Amanda's new role after Gravenstein promotes her in the final episode, with him explicitly calling her his court wizard.
• Crapsack Only by Comparison: Many jokes are had at Tacoma, Washington's expense. Particularly in relationship with Seattle.
• Daddy's Girl: Amanda is so devoted to her father that she actually hears her Beast as his voice encouraging her to feed.
• Darkest Hour: Played for laughs at the start of Chapter 3, when Tom whiffs a fight against a raccoon and fails to avenge his nachos, and again in Chapter 6, where Betty, who has been living on blood bags for years, wrestles with the idea of having to physically touch a living vessel to feed on them, nearly punching a metal eco-straw into his neck and drinking him "like a Capri Sun." Referenced by Jerry as "your worst moment" when they unstake Betty's prisoner, who, while paralyzed by the stake, was fully conscious and aware for the whole thing.
• Dumb Blonde: Averted with Amanda. Despite looking like a stereotypical Valley Girl college student, she has multiple academic specialties.
• Dynamic Entry: The coterie have their first meeting with Odette after Betty kicks down the door of the room where she's interrogating an Anarch.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: A massive chandelier at the Museum of Glass is dropped on the vampires and their servants.
• Fiery Redhead: Odette the Hound of Tacoma, Washington, a superstrong Brujah in biker leathers.
• Girl Posse: Referenced. When Tom gets together with his fellow Toreador Evangeline, recently promoted primogen and Harpy of the Tacoma court, the two of them immediately begin sniping and gossiping about the other clans. Betty calls him a "mean girl", saying he's like a whole other person with her.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: Happens whenever Jamison and Sergei are in the same scene, both being garrulous vampire sophisticates who make up for their clan's deformities with beautiful menswear and elaborate good manners. Both come from a more polite age — the 1950s and late 19th or early 20th Centuries, respectively.
• Happily Married: Betty and her mortal husband, at least according to her.
• Hates Being Touched: Betty is a rare vampire who loathes drinking directly from a vessel, after so many years spent drinking bagged blood.
• He Is Not My Boyfriend: After spending the night at Antony Giovanni's mansion — alone, in a separate room — Amanda can't get anyone to believe that they didn't sleep together. Word travels fast among vampires, and it becomes a Running Gag, with Volkov and even Gravenstein asking her if it's true.
• Human Popsicle: Vampires in torpor are preserved until they awaken, able to survive for days, even decades, in an unconscious state. It's pointed out that this is not the same as merely being staked, which paralyzes the vampire, but allows them to remain conscious and aware of everything happening around them. The sacrificial diablerist ("vampire cannibal") the coterie finds in the suitcase has been staked and folded up in a suitcase for what seems like decades, but instantly awakens once the stake is removed. Prince Gravenstein, on the other hand, is properly in torpor and staked. For most of the season it's unclear who did it to him. In the final episode it's revealed he had it done to himself in the midst of what seemed like Gehenna, the vampire apocalypse, to ride it out and see if things settled down.
• Human Shield: How Betty manages to survive the Falling Chandelier of Doom: grabbing a hapless waiter and ducking underneath him.
• Interrogation by Vandalism: Betty gets Mr Drew to talk by threatening to let her blood-red lipstick have an intimate meeting with his brilliant white jacket.
• I Love the Dead: The Giovanni bloodline are a tightly-knit family of Necromancers, and it's widely known that they sometimes raise the dead in order to have sex with them. Antony freely admits this is true of some of his clanmates, but doesn't apply to him. The coterie don't really believe him.
• Is There a Doctor in the House?: Amanda screams this after her father is seriously wounded during the attack on the Elysium. Luckily for her, Kennedy does have medical training and is able to provide some assistance.
• Let's You and Him Fight: The coterie's plan to survive the Nosferatu Elder when he awakens is to toss him out into a room full of Anarchs who are competing with the coterie, knowing he'll wake up hungry. It works.
• Lightning Bruiser: Prince Gravenstein's mastery of Potence makes him inhumanly strong, and he carves his way through a room full of younger vampires in under a minute. Betty compares him to a Cuisinart someone once gave her for Christmas.
• Master of None: A character trait for Amanda — she's an eternal student, hopping from one subject to another but never finishing her degrees. The other characters are unaware of this (though the players are), and thanks to some lucky rolls, mistake her for an Omnidisciplinary Scientist. Mechanically, she's more of a Jack of All Trades, and she genuinely does possess a number of useful, albeit niche, specialties which come up on several occasions. She is quite an Inept Mage for a Tremere, however, and knows almost nothing about her clan's signature Discipline of Blood Sorcery, though she tries to fake it.
• Mercy Kill: Jamison sees the act of him draining Betty's not-long-for-this-world Meat Shield dry as this — the Kiss of the Vampire effectively anesthetized him in his final moments. The justification holds up, causing him not to gain a Stain on his Humanity in the mechanics of the game.
• Moral Myopia:
  • Betty is fully capable of murder but finds it wrong to be a loose woman or overly forward about sharing blood. This is even the reason for her Bagger tendencies as she hates the intimacy that comes with the Kiss.
  • Deliberately invoked in the fact that the coterie only cares about who will be Prince based on how it will affect them.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Amanda has this reaction after they unleash the Nosferatu Elder on a bunch of Anarchs.
• Necromancer: The Giovanni clan are infamous among Kindred for their mastery over ghosts and ability to raise the dead (and occasionally sleeping with them). Antony sends a horde of shambling zombies after the coterie after they refuse to give him Gravenstein's location.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Odette is the only one that's not utterly unnerved whenever Betty starts up her Lasombra shadow antics. Her reaction is quite on the opposite end of the spectrum.
• Noodle Incident:
  • The coterie's disastrous first mission in Montreal apparently ended with a bunch of bodies and landed them in hot water with the governing vampires of the Camarilla.
  • The circumstances surrounding Amanda's Embrace. There are some indications that she had no idea the changes were going to be permanent, and her father implies that he though that the one being turned would be him.
• Offered the Crown: Gravenstein is not actively gunning for the title of Prince, but also doesn't turn down the title when the coterie present it to him on a silver platter.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Happens when the coterie discover that the elder they just woke from torpor was the previous Prince of Tacoma. And then again when said former Prince crashes an interrogation session they were performing.
  • Amanda and her father have a simultaneous one after they run into each other in Elysium.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Gravenstein is considered this as he was a "murderous bastard" but "fair," in contrast to the influential but unscrupulous Ventrue Kendrick.
  • The coterie decides to support whichever Prince is least likely to kill them and most likely to reward them. This turns out to be Gravenstein.
• Properly Paranoid: The player characters have the trunk they're meant to deliver X-rayed. It contains a staked vampire body, folded up with the legs broken to fit. It's a snack for the torpid Nosferatu they're meant to be waking up aboard the Comet.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Betty suspects this is the reason the Camarilla wants her dead as she was prone to playing both sides in multiple conflicts.
• Sword Cane: Betty has one, in an umbrella. Though the one time she does use it on someone, she's so flustered that she foregoes the 'sword' part and just starts beating them over the head with the handle.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Jamison is one of these despite the fact that he's a Nosferatu, as is Tacoma's Sergei. The two quickly bond over their shared dapperness.
• Shout-Out:
  • Amanda loves listening to Billie Eilish while the others are making plans.
  • Amanda burns a symbol into her hand a la Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Silver Fox: Amanda's father, Mr Booker. Everyone who sees him has something to say about how good-looking he is, to Amanda's horror.
• A Simple Plan: The mission to awaken a torpid elder aboard a derelict ship turns into a comedy of errors as multiple factions' plans pile up on one another.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Tom hates being a vampire because he can't keep any new tattoos for more than a night.
  • Betty is more worried about her suit being ruined than accomplishing the mission.
• Spoiled Sweet: Amanda is a kind and loving girl who just so happens to be a monstrous creature of the night doted on by her rich father (up to and including supplying vessels). Subverted in that her father was also distant and overbearing, so Amanda inherited none of his force of personality or worldliness.
• String Theory: Betty makes a connection of all the various conspiracy theories and players on a napkin. She calls it her 'Murder Map.' Volkov and Gravenstein recognize it as such: "I love a good murder map!"
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Betty is quick to point out that the decision to set a very hungry Gravenstein on the Anarchs that were closing in on the group was a tactical maneuver that had a great amount of thought put into it, and not a spur-of-the-moment act of cowardice.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: The coterie side with Gravenstein and he rewards them with positions of importance in his royal court, foregoing any need for them to oppose him.
• Touché: In Episode 3, Jamison accuses the Ivory Tower of hypocrisy by claiming that they favour some Anarchs while happily letting others be liquefied. Mr Drew then shoots back that the captive (and presumed favourite) Anarch in the other room will probably meet the same fate as his non-favoured fellows if he stays in Odette's tender clutches for any longer. Jamison doesn't have a comeback for that one.
• Truce Zone: Elysium is a monthly vampire meetup, held in fashionable surroundings and open to Anarchs, Camarilla, and Sabbat (theoretically). No violence or vampire powers are allowed. This month's Elysium is held in the Tacoma Museum of Glass.
• Underestimating Badassery: Betty thinks that Fiorenza is a Sheriff back in Seattle. Lore-wise, she's actually close to the Inner Council of the Ventrue and one of the most powerful vampires in the world.
• Uriah Gambit: Fiorenza is overheard saying that she doesn't expect any of the team to survive their mission but she explicitly hopes never to see Betty again. Tom takes this to mean she wants her dead, and given how generally unwelcome the Lasombra are in the Camarilla, this might well be true.
• Villain in a White Suit: Mr Drew; unfortunately for him, this fashion choice soon proves to be nothing but trouble. The connotation in Vampire is of a person who is sufficiently badass to feed and fight without spilling a drop of blood, but Mr Drew is a cowardly functionary and not much else.
• Wham Line: "And your father walks out," in the middle of Elysium, among half a dozen local vampires.
• What Have I Become?: Played for Laughs. Amanda makes for a pretty mousey vampire, nice, well-meaning, and deeply naïve; Tom is a tattoo artist who can't get any new tattoos, a junk food junkie who can't taste or hold down solid food anymore, and a no-bullshit tough guy thrust into a society of pretentious social backstabbers.
• You Have Failed Me: Implied. There are many indications that the Montreal Job went badly, and the very next task the coterie is asked to undertake is waking a torporous (and very hungry) Elder. Both Fiorenza and Mr Drew see it as a Suicide Mission (with Fiorenza apparently wanting Betty to be taken out most of all).
• You Owe Me: Favours are the major currency of Kindred society, and saving another vampire's life is one way of earning their boon.
  • After the gang bail her out trouble when she's taken by surprise by an Anarch prisoner who escapes his bonds and shoots her twice, Odette offers Tom and Amanda each a boon for saving her life, giving them two of the bullets popped out of her regenerated undead flesh as markers.
  • The Giovanni crime/vampire family did a number of favours to Prince Gravenstein before he disappeared, and want to find him so that they can collect. After collecting Amanda from the hospital his family owns and saving the remaining vampires at Elysium, Antony explicitly notes that he didn't do so out of kindness, but to put her in his debt. Gravenstein is powerful enough that he doesn't care about repaying the Giovanni, who he hates anyway, but is willing to offer the coterie a debt for awakening him from torpor.
  • While she doesn't see the act as boon-worthy, Evangeline is very grateful towards Tom after he pulls her out of the way of a falling chandelier in Elysium. Gravenstein uses the latter to his advantage in the final episode by making Tom a Harpy, with the explicit instruction to get close to her and keep her in line.
  • The attack on Elysium seems to be the result of a complicated web of favours, only the last of which was vampire crime boss Kremenko sending his goons to attack the glass museum. It's pointed out that the use of guns and vampires who could easily be tied back to him made the whole attack transparently foolish, and only the desperation to clear his debt could have made Kremenko order it. The implication is that Kendrick arranged the attack himself, knowing his Super-Toughness would allow him to easily weather the falling glass and bullets and allow him to play the hero as part of his bid for the throne.

Season Two

• Aborted Arc: Amanda and her relationship to her ghoul father cease to be relevant in the campaign.
• Archenemy: Betty declares that Dahvid is this to her in the Seattle smuggling trade.
• Big Bad: Benny the Kindred crime lord serves as this for season two.
• Broken Pedestal: Betty has the fear that Tom will develop this to her and Jamsion when he discovers to what lengths both of them are willing to go in order to survive.
• The Casanova: Episode 3 of season 2, introduces Enrique's predator type as we discover he's a Siren and prefers to lure both men as well as women into his arms for feeding. Then he just leaves them propped up against trees or whatever.
• Cool House:
  • Jamison Keen creates an elaborate lair in a former Masonic lodge. This includes velvet curtains and what amounts to an actual moat around the place in Episode 1 of Season 2.
  • We get to visit Betty's enormous mansion with only two windows (and both of them sealed tightly) that is built around the shores of Seattle's bay in Episode 6 of Season 2.
• Crazy-Prepared: Betty keeps zip ties, blood, plastic tarp, and weapons in her vehicle.
• Drugs Are Good: Thin Blood alchemy has this kind of vibe. Cherry Moon is an incredibly expensive drug that makes Kindred feel human.
• Fat Bastard: Beetle is shaped like an upside triangle according to Jason Carl.
• Harmless Villain: Beetle is a Thin Blood drug dealer that the PCs are more interested in befriending than hurting after his failed attempt to intimidate them.
• Hidden Depths: Betty keeps her mortal husband and son's clothes in her house as a monument to them.
• Hopeless Suitor: Tom has a hopeless one-sided crush on Evangeline, the Toreador Primogen of Tacoma. Jamison isn't much farther behind him in adoring her. Subverted when it becomes clear she is hopelessly infatuated with Tom.
• Hopeless with Tech: Jamison and Betty are both almost a century old and thus their attempts to use a cellphone is a source of hilarity. Not so much that they can't figure out the mechanics but they have no idea how to use it socially.
  "I understand not responding for three days [to a text] is acceptable?"
• Humanoid Abomination: The "thing" in the sewer is an eyeless humanoid naked thing that eats humans and kindred both. None of the heroes have any idea what it is.
• I Ate WHAT?!: Jamison Keane has this when Betsy gives him horse blood.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Enrique uses his Dominate powers, unusual for a Brujah, to affect the memories of mortals he feeds on.
• Living MacGuffin: The quest of Season 2 is to find Evangeline's missing ghoul, Wendell.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The first half-hour of the first session of Season 2 is spent discussing what the area around Jamison's new haven is like, including what sort of tacos and beer they serve, as well as discussing the proper etiquette for texting as a vampire.
• Mundane Utility: Tom wants to experiment with Blood Sorcery and Kindred vitae in hopes of making tattoos that stick to Kindred.
• Mushroom Samba: Taking a full dose of Cherry Moon results in Tom having one of these with him "hugging the moon" among other hallucinations.
• Nausea Dissonance: Betty reacts to Tom eating doughnuts (while on a Thin Blood drug) with horrific disgust. Everyone else is just fascinated.
• Noodle Incident: A session apparently happened before the live stream games which included, among other things, Tom sweating literal blood around Evangeline and getting mauled by a dog.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The monster in the Underground is more terrifying than anything defined because the player characters have no idea what it is.
• No Yay: In-universe. Betty reacts with horror and disgust at the idea of Belligerent Sexual Tension with Dahvid.
• Out-of-Character Moment: Played for humorous effect when Betty attempts to seduce some goons in Episode 2. Everyone reacts to it as her having gone crazy.
• Put on a Bus: Amanda Booker vanishes from the coterie due to Dora Litterell's other commitments.
• Romantic Vampire Boy: Rico has much more of this vibe than the rest of the cast, engaging in Siren feeding with both sexes.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Kindred, despite being heavily rewarded by Prince Gravenstein, have decided to move from Tacoma to Seattle.
• Skewed Priorities: Enrique is fascinated by the concept of whether or not other people ride with Betty in her car.
• Tie-In Novel: This is a tie in to Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 with the game's updated new plot.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Whatever happened to Amanda and why the coterie is choosing to flee Tacoma for Seattle.
• Wretched Hive: The Jungle is a homeless filled underpass community where the Thin Bloods of Seattle hang out.

---