Vampires, Pop Culture, and Your Game

[ferratus]

I haven't seen the movie yet, but this trailer seems to give the right sort of vibe for what I want out of my vampires.

Trailers & Clips: Let the Right One In - Exclusive Red Band Trailer

I don't mind angst or sexuality, but vampires better be an unnatural mockery of life that can only come from evil and only cause evil.

 

[Drowbane]

I like my vampires Evil (not diet-evil, and certainly not misunderstood). I prefer a mix of "The Aristocratic" and the "Cold War".

 

[Starglim]

The Cold War sounds closest: the nosferatu, the vile walking corpse, the plague and corruption that has nothing remaining in common with humankind. I'm not a fan of vampires as characters of any kind.

 

[Imp]

Honestly I've never liked having vampires in D&D games. It's probably residual repulsion towards level drains...

I think if you made me put them in a setting, I'd make them into the ruling class of a distant, ancient, horrible empire, and keep their nature a secret for a while.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I haven't seen the movie yet, but this trailer seems to give the right sort of vibe for what I want out of my vampires.

Trailers & Clips: Let the Right One In - Exclusive Red Band Trailer

I don't mind angst or sexuality, but vampires better be an unnatural mockery of life that can only come from evil and only cause evil.

I just watched this actually, and let me tell you it was very good. Especially in how they gave off this vampiric feel to the girl.

 

[Achan hiArusa]

Personally, I never went into vampiric sexuality. I assumed it was a thing of the past for vampires and that what really mattered was the blood. In any modern game intelligent monsters have integrated themselves in society to hide better especially ones that are long lived. I find the vampire as a target monster to be shallow and if they have any vestige of intelligence the best place to hide would be a crowd, especially one you can manipulate. There will be monsters on the fringe, but their lives will be short, nasty, and brutish.

 

[Afrodyte]

Sure, you're misunderstood. But you are an addict to a drug. You are an abuser of humanity. You are an immortal menace without the dignity to kill yourself to spare those around you. You are unnatural, not necessarily bestial, not necessarily in control of your cravings, but pathetic, violent, unpredictable. The only people who idolize you are those who crave immediate pleasure, and don't care what they're giving up.

THANK YOU!

From how people describe it these days, vampirism seems closer to addiction than sexuality (unless it's sexual addiction).

Vampires are both scarier and more tragic when paralleled with drug addicts than with social misfits. Think about it. You have a condition that makes you crave something inherently harmful and destructive. When you're craving, you can't control yourself (you're more like a zombie at this point than a person). You'll literally do anything to get your fix. When you're high, you feel all-powerful, invincible, tuned in to everything, fully alive and aware down to the cellular level. When you crash, you're consumed with guilt and self-hatred for all the carnage you've caused and the joy you experienced while doing it.

If you're decent, you'll likely kill yourself eventually. If not . . . you get older and stop giving a damn, which makes you even more of a monster. This makes the older ones (the ones who had the self-control and lack of conscience to live for centuries) that much more frightening. They're sort of like serial killers or mass murderers with superpowers than tortured souls of the night.

 

[Mercule]

I can't vote. Vampires are cursed. They are a study of temptation versus virtue. They don't lose their souls by becoming vampires. The survival needs of vampirism strips away their souls/humanity by the deeds it encourages. I guess the closest IMO would be the goth vampire stripped of all the sexual, emo, and "misunderstood" undertones and replacing those with the Cold War Vampire's inherent evil.

Pure and simple, you aren't being dragged to Hell. The curse of vampirism is that it opens the door for you to walk there yourself.

 

[mmadsen]

You have a condition that makes you crave something inherently harmful and destructive.

I think a key distinction is that a drug addict is self-destructive, doing something that feels good now, even if it has terrible consequences down the line. A drug addict is largely pathetic.

A vampire drinks people's blood. That's not self-destructive; it's parasitic or predatory. A vampire is scary -- and not just in a "I hope I don't end up like that" way.