D&D 5E Nananananananaaaa BATMAN! (about vampires in D&D and in general, Ravenloft/Curse of Strahd etc.)

[TheCosmicKid]

In the context of a fantasy setting, it's partially that if you do want beautiful aloof immortal characters, there's the elves right over there.

 

[PMárk]

I'm going to be the contrarian and disagree that a tragic backstory makes a character more interesting. A character lives and dies by their onscreen performance. A villain whose backstory is just "One day I decided to be evil," can be a more interesting character than one whose backstory has a long arc about their fall from grace. The trick is that the "flat" character has a more memorable personality when they're being shown. If your character with a long backstory has no personality when being shown, your players are going to forget about them soon enough.

I get where you're coming from. However, I'd argue back that a specific NPC's and especially an "end boss" and iconic NPCs performance in the story isn't just about his on-screen performance, since the players presumably learned a lot about him through the adventure prior to that point, thus a more interesting backstory indeed adds to the quality of the adventure. Besides, I as a GM could do more work with a more interesting and relatable villain, it adds depth to his personality, to his goals and generally makes me more interested in him. I like when an adventure has interesting background besides the interesting here and now encounters. Makes the whole more lively to me. that, and i like to read stories, I like to read the adventure background in Paizo's APs, because even when the players won't explore the whole of it, it adds to my game.

As to why the other planes were cut out: They're just not relevant to the story. Curse of Strahd doesn't need details on the fact that "normally there's places outside the mists, but today Strahd felt like locking them down," because its story doesn't care about the fact the other places exist. It's not like cutting the Realms out of OoTA; It's more like if they added a line about how "Normally there'd be this section of the underdark that's lead to Cormyr, but today it's blocked off," when the adventure doesn't even make the fact that there's a way to Cormyr relevant. It's just wasted page space. The players will never be able to interact with it, there's not enough detail for the DM to run with it, the adventure wouldn't touch on it beyond that. Why should it bother with it being there?

Because it was advertised as a toe-dip in Ravenloft. Because Ravenloft isn't just the adventure, it's the setting. They would just need to write certain things that was written any way, but not in the way of discarding the setting, but working with it. That and adding a paragraph in the introduction, or in the end as a "how to continue the campaign" section. In a perfect way a short appendix, like in the end of SCAG about how to integrate the class options onto other settings. 1 or two page at best.

Would it have been really that much? That much space, that much effort? Wouldn't have been better to acknowledge the favorite setting of countless fans and one of D&D's most interesting worlds? To really bring it into the new edition, to open gates instead of closing them? Why it worked in the past but wouldn't have work in the present? Would it detract from the adventure?

No, it wasn't made that way because it would have been that hard, or eating up that much page count from the book. It was made that way, because they didn't want to acknowledge the setting. Strahd's story was altered, because the Hickmans wanted to make a point. The adventure rejected the setting, because the Hickamns and/or the D&D staff, or just Perkins doesn't like the Ravenloft setting (I recall something from an interview, or discussion, i definitely remember reading somewhere that Hickman always disliked the setting). Maybe it weren't them, after all RL remained as the 4e paradigm, so might be that someone disliked, or didn't care about the old setting, or just like the 4e version better. Maybe because he/she worked on that, I don't know. I just think it was a bad decision. Maybe it doesn't matter to a lot of new fans, who never knew the setting, or fans who never cared about RL, just wanted to punch Strahd in the face. However, it matters to me and to a lot of people.

 

[Doug McCrae]

To me the key aspect of the vampire concept is immortality at the cost of taking the lives of others. Vampirism is immoral. This is a plausible motivation because eternal life, and youth, is so desirable. We can imagine it being something a selfish person might do. Under this interpretation it's not possible to be a good vampire, at least not for long. A vampire who becomes good will die because they will cease to take life.

Fangs, turning into bats, repelled by holy symbols, sleeping in coffins etc are boring to me. I like monsters to be weird and unexpected (an approach that works particularly well for horror) so I'd prefer it if vampires didn't possess any of these features though I can understand how many would see that as 'not D&D'.

I quite like the approach adopted by Marcus 'Slasher' Rowland's Bloodsuckers (White Dwarf #37), which opens with a quote from the Hammer Horror movie Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, "There are as many species of vampire as there are beasts of prey." Rowland's vampires possess a wide variety of abilities and weaknesses, some traditional and some not. However I'd go even further and avoid traditional features altogether.

The traditional vampire could exist in some form in the game world. For example, members of an organised crime gang might pretend to be classic vampires in order to frighten their victims and enemies. They may even drink blood to make themselves seem more evil. But they'd be riffing off a vampire legend rather than actuality.

 

[I'm A Banana]

So, the topic came up in the Volo's Guide to monsters thread, but it derailed the thread, so.

How do you like your vampires? Pure evil monsters? Moral ambiguity? What do you think about the setting changes (or rather setting non-observance) between CoS and the 2e/3e Ravenloft setting?

Things like that.

Discuss!

Kind of depends on the campaign.

In general, if I'm going to make one NPC the central villain, I want that villain to be both pure evil and sympathetic. That's not moral ambiguity, that's an understanding that the villain isn't necessarily unreasonable or cartoonish, even if they are extreme.

So, no, my blood-sucking rape monster isn't in an area of significant moral ambiguity. However, I think everyone can relate to the anxiety and fear of having to watch something you care about be stolen from you, the shame and grief of failure, all that. Those elements make Strahd a sympathetic villain, so that the players can say, "I know what it's like to feel rejection and loss, but THIS IS NOT HOW YOU COPE!"

It's as important for Strahd to be motivated by understandable desires as it is for him to be wholly cruel and dehumanizing as he pursues those desires.

If I was to do an Anne Rice/World of Darkness/Twilight style campaign, though, that probably wouldn't be the case.

 

[PMárk]

I agree that a tragic backstory is not necessarily more interesting, especially for a non-protagonist. For example, a group of beings that are fundamentally inhuman/alien/monstrous masquerading as humans can be quite interesting without humanizing them, a lot of stories to back this up in sci-fi, folklore, and even fantasy. The idea that something very unhuman could trick us into believing it has humanity can be interesting and emotional, particularly when any sort of intimacy is involved. With a protagonist some degree of humanity is essential to form that connection, but some very interesting stories can and have be told without that on the other side.

However, illiithds are inhuman. True fey are inhuman. Vampires are inhuman, but they were human and a lot of them didn't want to be a vampire, so to me it's plausible that at least a small portion of them want to stay as human (or elf, whatever) as possible. That's just makes their slow descent more tragic and interesting. "The beast I am leas the beast i became." as the Masquerade signature says.

Although I want to stress that I also like truly inhuman vampires and absolutely there is a room for them in my games.

I get where you are coming from entirely, many gamers (male and female) reject romantic or idealized characters (good and bad) out of hand. That being said, the problem is often that the characters and their interactions with others are just not all that believable. Too often IMO they come across Mary/Marty Stu-like and relatively flat. I have zero issues with the rogue-ish character who gets all the ladies, or conversely the femme fatale type, in general. We all know that girls being attracted to "bad guys" exists and so with men, but it is WAY more complicated than that and it is rarely portrayed believably. It often comes across as awkward wish-fulfillment type fan-fic.

Oh agree, I think most of the supernatural-romantic YA or adult novels are just plain silly and their characters are boring.

Laurell K. Hamilton at least wrote interesting characters, in the beginning.

However, I don't think the whole concept of more complex vampires are deserves rejection because of Mr. sparkly-sparkly "I don't know what to do with eternity, let's do high school over and over again" guy.

Case in point: Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch vs. Mila Kunis' Wicked Witch.

Oooh, good point. The main thing why I love Once Upon a Time is the villains in the show are persons. They are plausible. They made wrong decisions, acted on bad instincts, were hungry for power, did terrible things, but I could understand and relate to Regina, Rumple, Hook, even Zelena and Cora and Hades and the Ice Queen and Arthur. They are persons, with emotions, with scars and with totally disfunctional coping mechanisms!

That how they're "finding the light" is often too easy and too fast to me, but hey, it's a Disney-themed tv show!

 

[PMárk]

To me the key aspect of the vampire concept is immortality at the cost of taking the lives of others. Vampirism is immoral. This is a plausible motivation because eternal life, and youth, is so desirable. We can imagine it being something a selfish person might do. Under this interpretation it's not possible to be a good vampire, at least not for long. A vampire who becomes good will die because they will cease to take life.

Fangs, turning into bats, repelled by holy symbols, sleeping in coffins etc are boring to me. I like monsters to be weird and unexpected (an approach that works particularly well for horror) so I'd prefer it if vampires didn't possess any of these features though I can understand how many would see that as 'not D&D'.

I quite like the approach adopted by Marcus 'Slasher' Rowland's Bloodsuckers (White Dwarf #37), which opens with a quote from the Hammer Horror movie Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, "There are as many species of vampire as there are beasts of prey." Rowland's vampires possess a wide variety of abilities and weaknesses, some traditional and some not. However I'd go even further and avoid traditional features altogether.

The traditional vampire could exist in some form in the game world. For example, members of an organised crime gang might pretend to be classic vampires in order to frighten their victims and enemies. They may even drink blood to make themselves seem more evil. But they'd be riffing off a vampire legend rather than actuality.

That's of course assumed in the case that vampires must kill to eat. As far as I'm aware in D&D, they are not. In WoD they are not. In PF they are not. In most of the literature, they are not.

I strongly recommend the recent Bloodbound Pathfinder novel from Wes Schneider. The vampires of Caliphas has a dhampir hit-woman to hunt down the ones who are dumb enough to piss in the feeding bowl. Or take the whole concept of the Masquerade in the WoD games.

Also another point why Vampire was as a huge success as it was is that the vampires in that were fresh. No garlic, no holy water, no symbols, if not used by a true believer, no coffins (ok, not necessarily), not the running water silliness. I don't want WoD vampires in D&D, at least not as the main type, I'm perfectly okay with the classic ones. But still, Masquerade was brilliant and still it is.

Another good, and in more than one way, very Strahd-ish, if not even more tragic "D&D" vampire is Conte Ristomaur Tiriac from PF's Rule of Fear supplement (also written by Wes Schneider). There's a reason why i strongly believe that Ustalav is the real spiritual successor of Ravenloft.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

However, illiithds are inhuman. True fey are inhuman. Vampires are inhuman, but they were human and a lot of them didn't want to be a vampire, so to me it's plausible that at least a small portion of them want to stay as human (or elf, whatever) as possible.

There's a great Buffy line on the subject of vampire identity: "You're not looking at your friend. You're looking at the thing that killed him."

Oooh, good point. The main thing why I love Once Upon a Time is the villains in the show are persons. They are plausible. They made wrong decisions, acted on bad instincts, were hungry for power, did terrible things, but I could understand and relate to Regina, Rumple, Hook, even Zelena and Cora and Hades and the Ice Queen and Arthur. They are persons, with emotions, with scars and with totally disfunctional coping mechanisms!

That how they're "finding the light" is often too easy and too fast to me, but hey, it's a Disney-themed tv show!

Um... Mila Kunis was in Oz the Great and Powerful, not Once Upon a Time. And my point was that she was a much weaker character than pure-evil Margaret Hamilton, simply based on the power of their respective performances.

 

[PMárk]

There's a great Buffy line on the subject of vampire identity: "You're not looking at your friend. You're looking at the thing that killed him."

And yet... Spike, who is one of my favorite vampire characters with his sardonic humor. Angel is also fine, but he got a soul as a deus ex machnia.

"We like to talk big... vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." That's just tough-guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I _like_ this world. You've got...dog racing, Manchester united. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here. But then someone comes along with a vision. With a real... passion for destruction. Angel could pull it off. Good-bye, Picadilly. Farewell, Leicester-bloody-Square."

Love the guy.

Um... Mila Kunis was in Oz the Great and Powerful, not Once Upon a Time. And my point was that she was a much weaker character than pure-evil Margaret Hamilton, simply based on the power of their respective performances.

Apologies, I mean it reminded me to OUAT.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

That's of course assumed in the case that vampires must kill to eat. As far as I'm aware in D&D, they are not. In WoD they are not. In PF they are not. In most of the literature, they are not.

There has to be something evil about what vampires do, or else there's no narrative point to them. If vampirism is a mundane blood dependency that could be fulfilled harmlessly via regular visits to a blood bank, then neither the inhuman monster portrayal nor the conflicted anti-hero portrayal is really tenable. Brooding about a dietary requirement just doesn't have the same edge to it -- "Oh, woe is me, I must shop in the gluten-free aisle, my life is pain!" Now, you're right that in most literature it's not usually necessary for a vampire to kill. But, not to put it too explicitly, that's usually because the monster stands as metaphor for a different kind of predator.

 

[Doug McCrae]

That's of course assumed in the case that vampires must kill to eat. As far as I'm aware in D&D, they are not. In WoD they are not. In PF they are not. In most of the literature, they are not.

You're quite right, vampires are often depicted as harming their victims rather than outright killing them. Gradually draining life over time. However I think in the classic depictions such as Bram Stoker's novel and the Hammer Horror films this is a process that inevitably leads to the victim's death or transformation if something isn't done to stop it. The vampire seems to select a single victim and return night after night.

It's a reasonable extrapolation that a vampire could behave differently. They could attack a different victim each night and not allow their victims to die or become vampires. A particularly good vampire could even drain the blood of consenting hosts only. Those ideas are sensible and logical, and certainly help to humanise the vampire if that is one's aim.

The original vampire legends, Stoker and the Hammer films, seem to treat vampirism as primarily a disease. In Stoker there's a strong emphasis on the idea of it spreading, with Dracula creating a whole harem. If every vampire acted this way then it would be unsustainable as the whole world would become vampires.