Interview with the Vampire RPG Sinks Its Fangs Into BackerKit

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Renegade Game Studios has spent the last six years as the caretaker of the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG. Its time with the World of Darkness, however, is soon coming to an end, with the license returning to White Wolf at the end of 2026. Renegade, however, isn’t leaving the undead behind. Instead, it’s turning to the bloodsuckers who inspired Vampire: The Masquerade in the first place: the beautiful, brooding immortals of Anne Rice’s novels.

First announced in July 2026, Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe Roleplaying Game is a new horror TTRPG based on AMC’s hit Anne Rice TV franchise. Its first entry, the Interview with the Vampire Starter Set, is now being crowdfunded along with the Interview with the Vampire: New Orleans rulebook. The campaign has already blown well past its initial funding goal and ends on November 19, 2026 on BackerKit

So what can fans expect from the new Interview with the Vampire RPG? Below, we accept the Dark Gift and bite into all the details.

What is Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe RPG?

Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe Roleplaying Game is a new system from Renegade Game Studios. Notably, the material is based on AMC’s Immortal Universe TV franchise, which itself is based on the novels of Anne Rice and includes the shows Interview with the Vampire, Mayfair Witches and Talamasca: The Secret Order.

And while Vampire: The Masquerade focuses more on undead power struggles and political intrigue, The Immortal Universe is more about relationships, exploring concepts of love, loyalty, desire, loneliness and memory. The Game Master is known as the Narrator, and a group of player characters is referred to as a Coven.

Mechanically, the game uses a 5d10 dice pool system built around six traits (Cunning, Rapport, Grit, Knowledge, Grace and Might). A few other key gameplay elements include:

• Flashbacks: Your character’s past isn’t just backstory. Flashbacks let the group jump back and play out what really happened, from a brief scene to an entire session, and they can change what your character understands about their own history. Sessions can also hop between decades, so a story that starts in 2020 can easily wind its way back to 1920.
• Rewrite: A limited resource that gives players brief narrative control over a scene. Need to get rid of a body before dawn? Spend a Rewrite, and your character suddenly remembers a shady dockworker who owes them a favor.
• Three kinds of damage: Characters track Wounds, Despair and Torment, covering physical, psychological and emotional harm.
• Fascinations: Each character is defined by their Fascinations, which are the passions and roles at the core of who they are. Fittingly, you heal by roleplaying: leaning into your character’s feelings, calling and identity is how you recover from all three types of damage.

In the world of Interview with the Vampire, Players can choose between three types of characters: Humans can move through daylight and stay tied to their families and neighborhoods (which gives them more ways to Rewrite the story). Fledglings are vampires turned within the last hundred years and may still cling to some of their human connections despite their newfound powers. And Experienced Vampires have had lifetimes to master their gifts, but still haven’t solved the crushing loneliness of immortality. During character creation, you’ll also decide how your character feels about every other member of the Coven, and whether that feeling is mutual or not.

The Interview with the Vampire Starter Set is designed to teach the game to complete newcomers, even if you’ve never played or run an RPG before. It includes:

• Learn-to-Play booklet: Covers the basic rules in terms of mechanics and player roles.
• A Scent of Cloves and Lilac: A full introductory Chronicle (the game’s term for an adventure) set in 1949 New Orleans. Your coven are fledglings who’ve been abandoned by your maker, Lestat de Lioncourt, and left to fend for yourselves. When you wake to find an intruder has been in your home, the hunt for the culprit turns into a murder investigation and a deeply personal confrontation.
• Props, visual aids, dice and maps: Plus additional accessories which Renegade hasn’t revealed yet.

Once you’ve finished the starter set, the Interview with the Vampire: New Orleans hardcover rulebook opens things up considerably. It covers the entire span of New Orleans’ vampiric history from 1910 to 2020 as established in the TV series, with full character creation rules for humans, fledglings and experienced vampires, so you can run your own Chronicles across multiple eras. The rulebook will be available in a Standard hardcover and a Limited Edition Collector’s hardcover with a slipcase that will only be made for the BackerKit campaign.

What is Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe?

Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe is a share television universe based on the late author’s novels and produced by AMC. The flagship TV series is Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which premiered in 2022 and adapts Rice’s 1976 debut novel in her popular Vampire Chronicles book series. Created by Rolin Jones, the series stars Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac and Sam Reid as Lestat de Lioncourt, and reimagines Louis’s story as an interview recorded in the present day, moving his early years in New Orleans to the 1910s.

The show has been a big critical hit, and in the summer of 2026 returned for a third season that was retitled The Vampire Lestat, adapting Rice’s second novel of the same name and focused on Lestat’s career as an undead rock star. AMC has since renewed the Interview with the Vampire series for a fourth season.

The wider AMC Immortals Universe TV franchise also includes Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, based on Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy, which has been renewed for a third season set to arrive in early 2027. In 2025, AMC also launched Talamasca: The Secret Order, an original TV series about the secret society that tracks witches, vampires and other supernatural creatures (although AMC cancelled it after a single season).

Series producer Mark Johnson has also said they have plans to produce more spin offs in the Immortal Universe, including adapations of Rice’s novels The Queen of the Damned and Memnoch the Devil.

Renegade Game Studios is taking a similar approach with the RPG version of the Immortal Universe, with plans to expand from Interview with the Vampire into other corners of the setting, including new tie-in products for the Mayfair Witches series.

What are the BackerKit options?

While the primary draw of the BackerKit is the Interview with the Vampire Starter Set and Interview With the Vampire: New Orleans supplement, the campaign also includes a wide range of bonus accessories. Backer options are:

• Digital ($40): PDF copies of the Starter Set and the New Orleans supplement.
• Fledgling ($55): The Interview with the Vampire Starter Set box set with bonus PDF.
• Companion ($55): The Interview with the Vampire: New Orleans Standard hardcover and bonus PDF.
• Vampire ($130): The Starter Set and New Orleans Standard hardcover (physical and PDF), plus the First Bite dice set and Eternal Archives 2028 bonus content.
• Ancient ($180): Everything in the Vampire tier, but adds deluxe tokens and a Chronicle Journal with journal stickers.
• Immortal Collector ($250): Everything in Ancient, but upgrades the rulebook to the Limited Edition Collector’s hardcover and adds the Narrator Screen and a dice tray.
• Choose Your Maker ($340): The Collector’s hardcover and everything you need to play, plus bookmarks, art prints, and a dice set and dice bag themed to your choice of Lestat, Claudia or Louis.
• All-In Dark Gift ($499): One of everything, including both the Standard and Collector’s hardcovers and the virtual tabletop modules.

Interestingly, the campaign has no stretch goals. Renegade says everything was planned from the start and nothing has been held back to unlock later. Instead, every pledge from Vampire up includes Eternal Archives 2028, a year of bonus digital content released in six installments starting in November 2027. Each installment focuses on one of the game’s six traits and will add things like new locations, antagonists and story seeds for Narrators, along with new Fascinations, assets, items and cursed gifts for players. After the campaign, Eternal Archives 2028 will sell separately for $30.

Shipping and taxes will be charged separately through BackerKit’s pledge manager after the campaign ends, and Renegade is currently estimating delivery in Fall 2027.

Final thoughts

Renegade could have easily yanked the fangs out of Vampire: The Masquerade and jammed them into a new game system. Instead, Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe Roleplaying Game looks like a genuinely different kind of bloodsucker simulation in which relationships, memories and regrets matter more than how many blood points you’ve got left. Whether fans of the AMC series and horror RPGs are willing to sink their teeth into this new game, however, remains to be seen.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on the Immortal Universe RPG in the days ahead. In the meantime, you can back the Interview with the Vampire Starter Set and New Orleans supplement from now until November 19, 2026 on BackerKit.