Come together this holiday season in the spirit of community and games! Embrace your friends and consume your enemies in Five Hundred Year Old Vampire! Fiercely debate the value of art and humanity in Monumental Consequence!
As the days grow short, we all grow hungry... perhaps for good conversation, perhaps for good food, and perhaps for a bit of both.
Central Michigan University Press (not actually run by vampires... allegedly) presents Gifts for Gothic Gatherings, offering the games Five Hundred Year Old Vampire and Monumental Consequence for your consumption this wintry season.
Featuring Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, a storytelling game of memory, loss, and time.
What's in the Bundle?
Five Hundred Year Old Vampire(FYOV), a multi-player keepsake role-playing game by designer Jason Cox and artist Jabari Weathers that adapts the award-winning Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV) by Tim Hutchings into a new collaborative play experience for 3–5 players ages 14 and up. Players become vampires chronicling centuries of existence. Play unfolds across five ages, each represented by a deck of cards. The Vampires will do things the players would not, both monstrous and awe-inspiring, and players will record these deeds through journaling and creating artifacts.
Beguiling Whispers, an 36-card expansion pack for FYOV that facilitates multi-group play.
Liber Generis Sui, a themed, hardcover, 6" x 9" keepsake journal created for FYOV reflections.
At $65, the Gothic Gathering bundle is over 45% off these games' regular prices!
This Bloody Holiday Bundle is a great gift for that artsy, creative, special someone in your life: artists, storytellers, history buffs, your moody teen down with vampires and journaling, and folks who love vampire-themed roleplaying games.
Also, FYOV is a great game for that educator in your life, as the game was originally designed with classrooms and larger convention play in mind. (Classroom use aligns with both the National Writing Common Core Standards and the National Visual Arts Standards and is detailed in the FYOV Curriculum Guide, available on the CMich Press website.)
Finally, for two-player Convocations or a vampire interested in a solo storytelling experience, FYOV: The Cracked Mirror is an epistolary duet mod perfect for such scenarios, which is currently available as part of a fundraising campaign on the CMich Press website linked above.
Featuring Monumental Consequence, a live-action game of art, sacrifice, and persuasion which asks: is art ever worth dying for?
What's in the Bundle? In addition to Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, detailed above in the Bloody Holiday bundle, this Gothic Gathering bundle also includes:
Monumental Consequence, designed by Mary Beth Looney with art by Bill Spytma, where players become villagers in the occupied town of La Ville that face an impossible choice: destroy their centuries-old church to save lives, or risk everything to preserve the art within. Similar to a murder mystery party, Monumental Consequence is a single-session, live action game for 9–38 players ages 14 and up. Gameplay is simple: players assume their village identity, engage in lively discussion and passionate debate, then vote on the central question: save the art or bomb the church? This game complements not only casual gaming but also educational and team building settings. For educators, there is a companion Monumental Consequence Curriculum Guide.
At $60, the Gothic Gathering bundle is over 50% off these games' regular prices!
This Gothic Gatherings bundle is great for folks looking for some engaging gameplay during a party or celebration, for educators seeking educationally sound games that are also fun to play, and for theater- and improv-minded friends who like to do deep dives into the guts of a character.
We will be using Backerkit to collect shipping costs, send out surveys, and manage fulfillment after the campaign has ended. For this project, we will only be shipping to the backers in the United States; there will be no international shipping on this project.
Shipping costs for both bundle are currently set at $12. Adding more games to your order will raise the shipping costs, depending on what is added.
All Holiday Market projects end on December 1, 2025. Then within 24 hours, Backerkit will charge cards for pledges/orders and route successful backers into the Pledge Manager.
Our plan is to have surveys out and shipping charges collected no later than Monday, December 8, 2025. Then we'll route orders to either our Michigan or New York warehouses for fulfillment. The holidays might be a busy time for our warehouses, but unless the volume of orders is overwhelming, they should be able to turn them around pretty quickly. Everything is in stock and waiting to be packaged up and sent to you!
Through all of this, we will strive to have orders delivered prior to December 25, but there's a lot of circumstances not in our direct control on that, so we'll do our best.
