Vampire is set in the modern day. Participants take the part of the immortal blood-drinkers of legend, book and film; the feel of VtM's "kindred" is reminiscent of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. They are not cape-wearing, bat-flapping Sesame Street caricatures; no, these immortals are stylish and seductive, using their prey as toys or puppets.
The intended focus of Vampire is the roleplay, rather than an AD&D-like hack and slash or quest for adventure and riches. Characters often start as neonate, or newly-undead, characters, who must deal with the alienation they feel from their old lives and their introduction to the often-confusing world of the Kindred.
Several vehicles exist to aid the player in roleplay. The first tool is the character's clan, which consists of all Kindred descended from a given antediluvian vampire. They are an extended family of a twisted sort, and they serve to provide strong archetypes for character development; Ventrue tend to be obsessed with political machinations and moneymaking, Nosferatu are hideously ugly and lurk in the shadows, and so forth. Characters may also choose to play one of the Caitiff, the clanless, if they feel that their conception does not fit any of the given clans or if they would like to play an outcast.
A number of other simple mechanics aid roleplay. Characters have a Humanity attribute, which ranges from 10 (so saintly that most ordinary people never acheive it) to 1 (psychotic mass-murderer). Vampires lose some power with lower Humanity scores (they are less able to function if, god forbid, they are caught during the daylight), so it is somewhat in the player's best interest to retain a higher Humanity stat, but if nothing else it makes an excellent gauge of precisely how depraved or saintly your character is -- what acts will or won't be commit under the right circumstances?
Vampires also have access to a number of mystical Disciplines, which are different for different Clans: the Ventrue, for instance, tend to be more hardy (the Fortitude Discipline), and as well have the power to sway emotions (Presence) and control men's minds (Dominate). The Disciplines typically match the clans very well, and while there is overlap from Clan to Clan among the Disciplines, the variety is wide enough that each character can feel as though he or she has a unique set of "powers", to help set him or her off from the others.
There is a rather simple political structure to the world's vampires, and they must obey a few simple rules. The structure is called the Camarilla, and it is the largest group of vampires in the world, numbering far more than half of them (the other main group, the Sabbat, is a sadistic collection of psychotics bent on enslaving humanity -- or so the Camarilla claims). The two main laws of the Camarilla are: Obey the Prince of your city (generally the oldest and most powerful vampire), and protect the Masquerade, concealing vampiric activity from humans lest they rise up with another Inquisition. There are other laws, but these two drive most activity. Within these limitations, however, the Kindred are able to come up with some incredibly intricate power-struggling and plotting.
I first played it at Gen Con '91, some years ago now, when it first came out. It had a neat cover, and the White Wolf people were running a series of demos of the game. Ellen and I sat down to play it, and less than twenty minutes after we started making characters for the demo I wandered over to the "front" of the booth and bought the game, a t-shirt and the gamemaster's screen. The setting was just inspirational. I was having adventure ideas while sitting there making my character -- Jonathan Winston Raleigh, by the way, a Ventrue. The game had some production-value problems; it wasn't well bound and it had too much of the "page XX" problem; but the artwork was marvelous and the ideas were near-revolutionary. I joined the Vampire Mailing List, and was one of the first contributors to it.
And to cap it off, the first sourcebook, Chicago by Night, was a near-masterwork. There were two or three scenario ideas on each page. It was intricate, detailed, and I would say beautiful. The Player's Guide and Storyteller's Guide were also well-done, though all three of these books continued to suffer from what became known as the White Wolf Publication Problem, described above.
But the real problem is that the game started to attract so many pretentious Goth gits that it left a bad taste in my mouth. Yes, Vampire brought more adults into the RPG hobby than any game before or since. A few people that I had not previously gamed with were very interested in Vampire and joined that game alone, and they were great players and I was glad to have them. But there were an awful lot of gits wandering around. People who dressed all in black, wore white makeup and acted like they really were vampires really worried me. They also tended to be self-important, pretentious, "deeper-feeling-than-thou" types who didn't have anything going for them.
Probably I'm offending anyone who ever wears black.
This was not solely the case, please understand, but I saw enough of it that I got tired of it and left. I also began to worry about the number of sourcebooks that were coming out. Part of the appeal of Vampire originally is that there were so many mysteries, so many things for the gamemaster to work out for his own Chronicle, so many things that the players didn't know. But with all of these sourcebooks coming out, secret after secret was revealed. They published the Book of Nod, for goodness sakes, and though it and the Player's Guide to the Sabbat were extremely well-written, they were shedding huge spotlight beams all over the World of Darkness.
So, I quit buying Vampire for a while. Played a lot of FASA and TSR stuff.
Lately things have been on a bit of an uptick, though; intelligent people who aren't as interested in the "heavy metal warriors" shtick are running the line now: Hatch, Achilli and Dansky have a good feel for the game and I think they're going to do well by it.
Also, 1996 saw the release of Vampire: the Dark Ages, the first of WW's historical books. VDA is outstanding. It's a whole 'nother game from VtM, and is better executed from start to finish. I'm currently running a VDA game set in the Dark Ages, using the Transylvania Chronicles, which run from 1198 to the modern day. It's an ambitious game, but we're having fun. Here's a look at a real-world timeline of the 1240 Mongol invasion of Europe that I worked up for use in this game. Go nuts.