Here's a look at the Storyteller Chronicles that I've run in the past. I'm doing this because I'm a sad strange little man, who gets too deep into his role-playing games and probably suffers from some kind of obsession complex. You know the type. There's probably at least one in your gaming group. It might even be you. Scary, huh? Note benem: "Salad" refers to a mix of character types (q.v. House Ex Miscellania).
Least said, soonest mended. It was my first try at running White Wolf, and it was first edition Werewolf. I was young, the players were young, we'd been brought up on Dungeons & Dragons™. What can I say? The guys made their characters, I used the Central Park setting in the back of the book. Player conflicts became character conflicts, and they tried to kill each other. So much for pack ties. That's basically how I remember it. Put it this way, of the two guys who had this conflict, one took a Get of Fenris and the other a Black Fury. Need I say more?
Much better; my own setting in a place I was familiar with and NPC's I'd constructed myself. I set the chronicle in Newcastle, in the north east of England. We were all from Newcastle so we all knew the place. I made a large range of NPC's, and had some good long term plans. Newcastle was basically set up as a "no questions asked" stop off point between Edinburgh and London. It worked very well; I could see my political machinations being born from this beginning. Although we eventually stopped playing, shortly after the overthrow and death of the Nosferatu Prince, I've always kept this as my idea of how Newcastle works in the World of Darkness, and have reused the setting in subsequent chronicles.
The same group of players again. I don't remember a lot of the details of this series of stories, although I do remember some of the characters. There was definitely an anti-Wyrm feel to the campaign, and they had adventures on both sides of the velvet curtain. They also ran most of the Valkenburg Foundation stories, meeting Samuel Haight for the first time.
For a bit of a change, I took the players in Newcastle, let them take above average Sabbat characters, and threw them into the two Diablerie adventures set in Mexico and Britain. It gave them a break from the usual moral hero stuff and let me run a dungeon bash without having to think at all. There were plenty of humorous moments, many of which were so memorable that they've practically become catch phrases since ("My God... it's full of fish..."). It was fun.
Realising the dangers of character conflicts, everyone started out as Fianna. What started out as your average kiind of tales (although I wrote them all myself) extended into very complex web of intrigue. Old characters left and new ones arrived, and soon we had a very mixed party. To give you an idea: the Silent Strider betrayed the party, joining forces with the Black Spiral Dancer ancient enemy of the past life of the Fianna hero, and that player instead brought in a Corax character, who was friends with the Mummy that helped the party defeat the Infernalist Lasombra child, who was a minion of a demon that had targetted a powerful Marauder for possession, whose sister was the party's Galliard, whose past girlfriend (now a wraith) was corrupted by the demon, and the Galliard ended up with her girlfriend's soul and her own within the one body.
It was very scary, because everything made sense (even when one of the party revealed himself to be an angel) and the plot lines were spinning themselves without any intervention from me. Things would just happen, and I was there to tell them, not to push the story in any particular direction. I did use the Samuel Haight stories to an extent, and even that tied in, with the demon Shaitan eventually being freed, and setting off to free the other Ba'ali, so that all the party had learned about demons became their key focus for the future story. At around this point, though, we abandoned that party to legend, and I wasn't able to spend the time on the Newcastle group, being that I was at university in Edinburgh.
From a beginning of a Camarilla vampire coterie in Chicago, doing Under a Blood Red Moon, I again expanded in unforeseen directions. Using skills and ideas honed through the Newcastle salad campaign, the party and story evolved together and I let them follow their own path. By the time the party were in Vancouver, they also included a Balam and another Marauder (or was she an Immortal? I never did say for certain...) and vampires from a variety of clans (as wide-ranging as Ravnos, Tzimisce, and Assamite, considering they were a Camarilla group).
My greatest regret with this group was the amount of note-passing that went on. I've nothing against a bit of healthy paranoia, but this went above and beyond the call of duty. I think it was the first real opportunity for any of us to try playing this way, and it was certainly interesting, but I feel that too much time was taken up dealing with individual plot points rather than with the party as a whole. At least the Newcastle group always acted as a group, instead of fueling internal conflicts above all else.
Back with my Newcastle friends, this was mostly Greg's brainchild, he ran the details and I was in charge of the White Wolf side of things (mainly creating all of the characters in such a way as they would work with each other and still have plot-building conflicts). We were doing one of the book adventures, I believe. Something to do with a prodigal child called Numan? I guess a Cyberpunk goober could tell you.
Currently in the works. If I get the time, it should be good. No promises, though! Set entirely in the Umbra, and mostly the Deep Umbra at that, with a fixed cast of seven. I'm writing it up in full first (sourcebook style) whenever I think about it, and I'll test it out some time after I've finished. Expect more details before I die.
I've played in five different LARPs in Scotland and two in England, and I usually end up Reffing due to my knowledge of the settings and systems. I helped run a Vampire LARP in Salisbury, connected to another game in Andover. Although I do enjoy LARPs immensely, I think that I'm a table-top person first and always. I've even tried the woodlands fantasy rubber swording, but that was definitely not my receptacle of heated beverage.