Vampire the Masquerade's origin - is this True???

[GreyLord]

So, I was reading a random article on Yahoo about Vampire Movies.

source 23 years ago...all about how Underworld was voted #1 in an area unrelated to RPGs

It focused on Underworld (the movie), which obviously is not this section (it would be the Geek talk forum instead) except than it had this interesting snippet.

The company created the RPG games Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse based on Collins' 1996 novel Love of Monsters.

I'm like...wait...what? What? Is this true. Was VtM based on a novel? I've never even heard of this novel.

 

[billd91]

So, I was reading a random article on Yahoo about Vampire Movies.

source 23 years ago...all about how Underworld was voted #1 in an area unrelated to RPGs

It focused on Underworld (the movie), which obviously is not this section (it would be the Geek talk forum instead) except than it had this interesting snippet.



I'm like...wait...what? What? Is this true. Was VtM based on a novel? I've never even heard of this novel.

Since Vampire the Masquerade was released in 1991, it's kind of hard for it to be based on a 1996 novel.
Same with Werewolf the Apocalypse which was 1992. Someone's just doing shoddy research (or is generating some of their content via AI and its hallucinations).

 

[GreyLord]

That makes a lot more sense to me. This was something that I was like...WTH? Did I miss something??? Do I have memory hole so large you could drive a cadillac through it???

Weird type of thing for them to type.

Did Collins have any influence on the creation of Vampire the Masquerade, or was she instead inspired (or even wrote for them, I'm not familiar with the novels of VtM fiction...though I do have many of the PC games) by them for her novels?

 

[nyvinter]

Nancy Collins did do some crossover tie-in novels to both Werewolf and Vampire, so I assume the plot might have been following one of the short stories or something.

 

[MGibster]

Sometimes it's crazy how similar different fictional works can be but they're often fishing from the same cultural pool. Delta Green, a game where you play government agents investigating the supernatural, sounds like a ripoff of the X-Files. Delta Green made it's debut in The Unspeakable Oath, a magazine, in 1993 a few months before The X-Files debuted. Both properties touch upon UFO lore like Roswell, Men in Black, and collusion between factions in the government and otherworldly entities.

Even the most cursory research should have shown Vampire was released a few years before Love of Monsters. We all make mistakes, but this one is so glaringly stupid I have to wonder what role AI played in writing the article.

I'm like...wait...what? What? Is this true. Was VtM based on a novel? I've never even heard of this novel.

VtM wasn't based on any single novel, but it was influenced by a wide variety of sources including The Lost Boys (1987) and other movies the work of Anne Rice and other authors.

I strongly disliked Underworld, turning it off at about the half-way point because it was so boring.

 

[Staffan]

Since Vampire the Masquerade was released in 1991, it's kind of hard for it to be based on a 1996 novel.
Same with Werewolf the Apocalypse which was 1992. Someone's just doing shoddy research (or is generating some of their content via AI and its hallucinations).

Probably the Cult of Ecstacy going at it with their Time shenanigans.

 

[Willie the Duck]

For reference, Nancy Collins wrote Sunglasses After Dark (1989), a punk horror novel which feature Sonja Blue. The wikipedia plot synopsis is: "Sonja Blue is a living vampire who still possesses a soul and acts as a vampire slayer, hunting down creatures that prey on the innocent. One[sic] the same night Sonja is turned, heiress Denise Thorne disappeared. Years later, Sonja comes into conflict with televangelist Catherine Wheele, who is exploiting Denise's parents, as well as the Other, the demonic personality trying to control her body." You can see where someone might get the impression that V:tM was influenced by it (at the same time, you can see bits of it in Buffy, or bits of Cabal in it, etc.). Collins is not explicitly mentioned in the original V:tM bibliography as an influence, but it's probably safe to say that she is part of the overall literary movement from which V:TM mined. However...

Since Vampire the Masquerade was released in 1991, it's kind of hard for it to be based on a 1996 novel.
Same with Werewolf the Apocalypse which was 1992. Someone's just doing shoddy research (or is generating some of their content via AI and its hallucinations).

In 1996, Collins wrote A Dozen Black Roses, a crossover novel which features her punk vampire character, Sonja Blue, in the Vampire: the Masquerade universe. Given the matching date, and knowing that any human researcher would have quickly found that the game precedes 1996, I'm relatively confident that this is the result of poor AI scraping.

 

[Mannahnin]

Yup. Lots of related stuff in the cultural pool. Given the timing, the first Sonja Blue novel may have been in the mix of influences for V:tM, but the direct and credited influences (I'm copying from my 1st edition copy, open on my lap), were:

Novels: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (the first three), Dracula, Those Who Hunt* the Night by Barbara Hambly, and Time Enough for Love by Heinlein.

Movies: Near Dark, Vamp, The Hunger, Nosferatu, Dracula, Blue Velvet, Rear Window, Lost Boys, Alien and Aliens.

Games: Ars Magica, Runequest, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulu, Pendragon, GURPS Horror, Corps, Illuminati, D&D

Other: "Everything written by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Milan Kundera, Herman Hesse, Albert Camus, P.B. Shelley**, Mercea Eliade, Ayn Rand & (of course) Vaclav Havel."

*(mispelled as "haunt")
**(misspelled as "Shelly")

 

[Theory of Games]

Found a 2013 interview by Darker Days Radio featuring Nancy Collins.

 

[Charlaquin]

I strongly disliked Underworld, turning it off at about the half-way point because it was so boring.

I like the first one, in the same way one might enjoy trashy fast food - it’s bad, but in just the right way. The second one is just terrible, and not in a fun way. The third one is randomly great, and not even in a guilty pleasure way like the first one. The rest are all terrible, but not quite as terrible as the second one.

This leads me to believe that the quality of an Underworld movie is directly proportional to the amount of screen time Bill Nighy has in it.