[UA] Vampires

[Matthew Rowan Norwood]

I think that the vampire idea was the best one to run 
across this list in a long time.  I've been turning it 
over in my head for a while, and here are my thoughts:

Most of these "vampires" are closer in nature to 
Revenants. In fact, in the interest of tying up loose 
ends and limiting the number of supernatural beasts in 
the world -- avioding the White Wolf syndrome, in other 
words, where every human being in history would have to 
have been some kind of Kinfolk faerie wizard in order to 
cover all the combinatoric possibilities -- I'm inclined 
to just make vampires another flavor of revenant. After 
all, vampire myths are just ghost stories like any 
others -- I've never been a fan of drawing a line 
between the two phenomena. Like ghosts in many stories, 
vampires have bodies. So the revenant grouping seems to 
work.

I see a whole subculture of revenants -- the dead who 
walk -- and social divisions among the different kinds. 
The vampires have access to a ritual that lets them 
steal part of someone's life in exchange for a little 
life of their own. The ritual (or perhaps just ana 
inherent power) involves drinking blood, 
but the effects on the victim are more supernatural than 
simple lightheadedness -- for several hours, the victim 
has trouble affecting the world, becoming less 
noticeable to others and less physically effective.

Most vampires use their power to indulge a need for 
human interaction, but many take it further. Some 
vampires use their ability to move between worlds -- 
and their centuries of experience -- to become powerful 
manipulators while in the human world. This not only 
indulges their egos, but also secures them a stable of 
victims. Since their ability to stay in the human world 
is limited, though, they rely almost exclusively on 
their human agents. 

There are exceptions to this rule. Some vampires become 
addicted to their power to affect the human world. They 
gorge themselves and become even more "alive" than 
humans are: stronger, more charismatic, and sexually 
overpowering. These vampires often leave behind them a 
trail of "dead" victims -- those who have had their life 
force leeched away, turning them into vampires as well, 
not dead but with no remaining vitality of their own.

Now, to point out why these vampires are more 
interesting than the kind presented in every other game 
setting:

-These guys can exist in the daytime. The only reason 
that legends have them avoiding the day is that they are 
most noticeable when there is little "background noise". 
Remember that preindustrial night-time is a pretty 
desolate hour. If you are alone on a country road in the 
pitch black, with no cars rumbling by or lights in the 
distance, you might just be able to see one of these 
lonely fellows walking toward you... especially if 
you're attuned to them by your melancholy nature or your 
own loneliness. The "lonely goth" lifestyle is actually 
a self-fulfilling prophecy for vampire afficionados -- 
real loneliness and fixation on death bring you into the 
vampires' world, making you an ideal target.

(Generally, this means that you can see -- and are 
therefore vulnerable to -- vampires only if you are 
alone and have a few notches, hard or failed, on your 
Isolation meter. Also if you have a very high Soul score 
or some ability like Aura Sight.)

-These vampires are much more involved with weird 
synchronicity stuff than the standard blood-sucking 
corpse. Reality warps around these guys, sending them 
off to hang out with the Ghouls until they get another 
fix from some lonely teenage girl reading Anne Rice 
novels in her room or some homeless guy who hasn't been 
paidattention to for months and who never will as long 
as the reality of his life keeps getting sucked away. 
Some of them disdain interacting with other revenants, 
but some take advantage of their dual nature to build up 
contacts in both worlds.

Their reality-wapring nature also explains why they 
aren't found out more often -- even their victims tend 
to forget about what happened once the vampire's reality 
has faded again. The only time that people start 
really talking about a rash of blood-sucking attacks is 
when a vampire sustains his human reality for extended 
periods of time. Otherwise, reality is edited as with 
lycanthropy -- once the vampire is "dead" again, there 
never was any attack, and the victim's life returns to 
normal.

-These vampires have very few powers other than their 
dual citizenship. Some may be able to pump up their 
effectiveness by gorging on blood, but these should be 
the exceptions to the rule and make good targets for the 
Order of St Cecil, TNI, and the Sleepers -- if their own 
kind doesn't get them first.

I'll probably have more thoughts on this later.
Any comments?

-Matt Norwood

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