Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
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- Crossover Fantasy
Eh. I'd argue monstrosity is a way of life and not a species. Some supernatural species have monster built in with varying abilities to actually overcome it, but humans can walk the walk as well as anyone. Kemmler isn't less of a monster than a blamp just because he was human when he violated innocent souls.
The red court actually shares a lot of weaknesses with the black one in a watered down state. If you tried to use pop culture ideas of vampire banes basic stuff like holy symbols would work. You'd get in trouble with garlic and stakes, but the problem for our purposes is that we can't take tropes out of people's minds. We can add stuff, but anyone using our material as a source is going to be taking a mix of ideas in regardless.
Another thing to be careful of here is the DF global culture of willful ignorance and how people will react to permeating pop culture with real supernatural knowledge.
You recall the first time you read crossover over fiction where one franchise existed in the other as media? How ridiculous and weird the reactions tend to be and how crazy it makes people sound when they try to explain it? As readers we get used to the trope to some degree eventually, but IC a dialed up version of that seems like a real risk.
I mean, imagine you're a minor talent and you have a friend who you think is about to get themselves in trouble with the spooky side of the street. Eventually you try to clue them in to keep them safe, but as you get into it they suddenly realize you're describing something they've seen on TV.
It'd go about as well as if you got on a bus right now in real life and tried to convince people that DnD was actually an accurate picture of the world.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do something media related, but we probably need to put some more thought into how it's framed to mitigate these problems.
We're effectively lowering the credibility of anyone giving direct answers on how the world works to people on the wrong side of the Masquerade in exchange for raising the likelihood that people in desperate situations will make a better guess about how to save themselves. The more expansive we are about the DF setting the more significant the penalty, so we need to strike a careful balance to maximize effectiveness.
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We might be able to mitigate this by showing our work, if you will. Make press releases where we state that that we got the ideas for X vampire weaknesses from Y legends/ancient sources. Cherry pick, but don't make any up, and it'll be easier to say that we didn't just guess randomly but used a source that happened to be accurate. Make sure our marketing is really big on being "inspired" by various legends and medieval texts or whatever.
I doubt it. People don't have equal knowledge of press releases as they do the franchises they apply to, and a technical possible explanation isn't going to feel as real as most alternate explanations.
To give a different example, imagine doing this with the Percy Jackson series. All of that stuff nominally draws inspiration from old mythology, but if someone tried to convince you that it was a stealth biography and the world really worked that way where would you think they got the idea? A mental illness mixing with a media fixation or some common basis in the truth?
The truly desperate faced with undeniable evidence with nothing else to lose or ideas to try will benefit, but we're setting some hostile conditions for people that haven't crossed the Rubicon yet.
My view is that this is still worth doing, but we need to think about what this would be like from the ground level and take it into account when designing our approach. Throwing as much stuff as we can into the effort right from the start seems unlikely to be the most effective option.
Let's pick a test case to start with, just to get in the frame of mind.
Suppose you have a character like Olivia prior to our involvement, say high school. Subtle powers that make them a bit weird and isolated from their peers but can't really provide a good demo themselves. One of their few activities is drama club, and on a random Tuesday they see the signs that a gribbly is stalking the leads of their next show.
How does their attempt to convince the future victims go?
Put yourself in the shoes of the other party. If someone like that came up to you and had a serious discussion where they tried to convince you that something you know matches an entry in a new dnd monster manual actually exists and is after you.
The needle we need to thread is information is useful in the case where it will most commonly be believed, but is narrow enough that it minimizes how crazy it sounds and therefore hinders people trying to share/apply it.
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Tbh if someone tried to convince me Greek myths were real, I would find that more plausible than Harry Potter being real. Would I find Percy Jackson being a real story credible. No. Would I have less questions about the Minotaur being real than Hogwarts. Yeah, actually.
That's fair, but the context a claim is made in effects it's credibility.
I knew a guy in high school who read that series and started to claim he'd converted to Hellenic paganism. It was as basically just something he did to annoy his parents for a semester, but no matter how much he insisted it was because he'd been researching mythology and had a revelation everyone saw him with that book and knew where he got the idea.
The existence of a real religion that once believed what he claimed to believe didn't improve his credibility in the moment.
There's also the fact that DF humans have a specific bias to disbelieve the evidence of their eyes if favor of burying these ideas. You have even more inertia to overcome than you might in irl people.
[X] Media Blitz
And yet it somehow worked for Dracula. I mean, I agree with you, your logic is solid. But the same logic applies to Dracula, and yet it was instrumental in breaking Black Court. Somehow.
The "minor talent wants to warn their friends" is a bad case though - minor talent can show their friends magic if needed. Even Olivia could demonstrate stealth to some degree at least.
BoredMan
Dinosaurs came in many flavors. Like potato chips.
We weren't given much details there but I always thought that it was something like-
This thing that obviously isn't human may be a threat to my life or whomever they are attacking. Oh it reminds me a hell of a lot of those vampires from those books. It's got the powers and appearance and everything...
Maybe if I don't want to die or want to protect the person that's being attacked I can try using one of its weaknesses from that same folklore on the off chance it actually works?
Basically that information being out there at all and so well known means that people may end up using it if obviously supernatural vampiric stuff starts happening in front of them and it's a threat to their life or someone they care about and they think back to where they've seen it before as survival instincts and adrenaline kick in. Pick up a wooden stake and try using it, get some garlic from the kitchen, pull out your cross necklace, maybe run out into the sunlight etc.
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Dracula was published in 1897. It was literally a different world,
BoredMan
Dinosaurs came in many flavors. Like potato chips.
Yeah like that Abigail of the Salem Witch Trails. Nowadays if you claimed to be seeing and hearing demons when you look at people in a modern country, you'd go to a doctor with it, they'd diagnose you with schizophrenia and prescribe you medication.
Which means the much much smaller population that read the book at most say 30%, was enough to break the Black court. A good movie done with supernatural skill, could achieve well over 90% of the population becoming trained to combat the Red court.
I think you massively underestimate both media fragmentation and low long it takes for such things to sink into folk memory so people 'know' vampires are repelled garlic rather than just associating it with a particular piece of media.
Dracula happened in a different era, and part of what it did was share details the bulk of the supernatural world didn't have with them using the mortal world as a transmission medium. Blamps were ludicrously hard to deal with because for a long time even the average wizard didn't know most of their vulnerabilities.
The culture, media saturation, and supernatural politics of the parts of Europe the blamps really occupied in the 1890s can't reasonably be equated to the modern world's.
The minor talent warning their friends isn't a bad case, it's a common one. Most minor talents do not have an easily demonstrated ability*. Even people like the ordo members are pretty strong as far as little fish go. Plenty of clued in people have even less talent than that and are stuck on the fringes of both worlds because they got dragged in one way or another.
Even with it, there's a difference between proving you have telekinesis and that Sith Lords specifically walk the earth. You can see the unhelpful way this can play out in how Daedalus treats the supernatural like it's full of primitives who just don't understand their own nature in dire need of enlightenment and categorization.
To an extent I think there's a benefit to doing this, but if we publish the DF RPG in character I'd expect it to make things somewhat easier for people already in the know and much harder to convince anyone new of the truth.
* Olivia's power was to make people pay less attention to her, and prior to our spiritual steroid enhancement she would have had a very hard time pushing it far enough to actually serve as inarguable proof of anything. The canon Ordo members mostly have similar issues with presenting their work. Like how Helen's work mostly involved what appear to be incredibly potent hallucinogens and long form sex rituals.
The thing to keep in mind about vampires is they have moments when they are very vulnerable. During the day when they are sleeping so if you catch them then they are dead, you win GG, but that isn't worth anything if you do not know what's a vampire. The more important moment to get information into isn't when some poor mortal is faced with an animate corpse with the strength of ten men or a slavering bat monster. Most people in that situation are screwed no matter what, but if someone figures out there have been a lot of people dying of exsanguination around and has the pull in the local area to get an angry mob going (or just some friends with stakes) the ability to figure out where the vampire might be is the difference between a dead vampire and some more human bodies on the pile. Dracula said 'look for corpses pretesting to be alive weak to XYZ' this move would say 'look for warm, living people who aren't acting quite like themselves, quite human, the transformation looks like bouts of anger and passion, there has to be a murder to get them over the edge etc...'
And when it comes to the red court, they use a lot of mortal proxies, most of which do not know what they are serving. If the Red Court's support network in a region suddenly came down with a suspicion that vampires are real they would most likely kill some younger vampires, but much worse than that they would stop doing their jobs. The Red Court has come to be dependent on those mortal proxies.
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This was applicable to wizards too like any real wizard talent basically word of butcher sorta dominated generally before guns became prevalent. But that doesn't mean mobs don't eventually beat them or brute force their way past wards when sleeping or poison to kill wizards. This is one of the reasons canonically black court has been decimated over time.
Yup, it is true for wizards too, though it should be noted that a sufficiently paranoid wizard could most likely find a place isolated enough that the mobs could not get to them. They would just have miserable quality of life to pay for the privilege. The hidden halls didn't used to be as comfortable to live as they are now. The words 'damp hole in the ground' come to mind.
Good night guys.
Stoker isn't the only book written on vampires, and reds share a lot with the pop culture spectrum of vampires that Butcher drew on to write them.
While IC there isn't a specific source bringing it all together, anyone inclined to take a movie as reason to be suspicious of vampiric infiltration already has modern sources that are 80% of the way there.
I'm not saying it should do nothing, but that it would be muted compared to the existing media and wouldn't be used in exclusively by almost anyone. By definition people willing to use movies as sources are willing to take movies as sources and the credibility of one over the other isn't exactly obvious.
Much of the rest of my point was that this would make dealing with reds at least a little easier for people who believe but simultaneously make it harder for people to do so because of the way it presents information.
It seems to me that this would be extremely relevant to early stages of recognizing reds. If you know that vampires exist you largely don't need the movie, though it could be helpful in some places. If you don't then anyone trying to convince you there's a problem has to demonstrate that vampires are real and happen to match a highly popular movie that came out recently.
Which is much harder because it sounds much crazier and presents easier to swallow alternatives packaged in the argument itself.
It's like if you had high certainty information about an asteroid heading towards earth and chose to share it via sandwich board sign at an intersection in a major city. Maybe an astronomer will see your sign and think to check just to be safe or something, but the medium of your message is an attack on its credibility.
You are right. And thank you for making me think about it. The more I think about it, the more I think we can be ambitious with the movie. It shouldn't really be about the dangers of of individual Rhampires. Not primarily at least. Because they basically share the same ones as Blampires do. Well, the movie / media should have those, of course - if only for graphical reasons.
But there's another unique layer we can play with, and an indirect route to crippling the strategic political power of Red Court. To break them long-term, like Black Court was broken. Specifically, I am talking about half reds and those addicted to rhampire saliva. Those are unique mechanisms of control that red court is using to recruit people, and to control people and institutions. If we can deprive Red Court of their unwilling mortal slaves, we can do a lot of good strategically. So:
1) Have the movie demonstrate that the Rhampire produced from the mortal is not the mortal itself - this would decrease the number of people willing to go from half-red to full-on Rhampire willingly
2) Demonstrate that the addiction can be fought and controlled. If there are any rituals normal people can do to help with the addiction (not half-red state, the addiction), include and encode those. This cripples or at least combats the networks of influence rhampires have among mortals. We might have to develop something there, some manner of common person magic / ritual / faith invocation maybe to help with it.
3) Encode Mercy In Servitude into the movie as a way for half-reds to get control over their hunger and avoid becoming full on rhampires. This is straight up a trick from Age of Legends, where a Solar developed a language which had prayer to their name encoded in it as part of everyday speech in order to farm cult-generated motes. Something along those lines could probably be done here. And it can be done in a movie - have the half-red hero, for example, find an ancient tome describing a simple ritualistic offering to "Radiant Pearl of Sorcery Pure and Impure", where they enter a pact, promising to follow X precepts and in exchange the ancient goddess grants them control over their curse, though not the freedom from it, not until the last vampire is dust in the wind.
Actually, yeah, this works. Have the main hero end up as a half-red at some point of the movie, enslaved by their rhampire master. Pit of Despair and all. Have them get in contact with the resistance (heavily coded to be Fellowship of St. Giles or White Council), look for cure and methods to combat their curse. In the end they discover the ritual described above, perform it, which grants them power over their hunger and strength enough to kill their sire (a young rhampire). Cut to sequel / TV show as the half-red paladin (because yes, the ritual in question would basically be a paladin's oath) of the Radiant Pearl explores the supernatural world, fighting evil.
In the next movies / establishments in the franshise we could do stuff with Prayer Eating, possibly, and soul trade, both the warnings of, and getting people to trade with us, instead of hells.
Yes, I really like this idea in general.
Also, such a movie in general could be a gateway to a series of media products, all meant to slowly prepare the world for the lifting of the masquerade.
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It might work, but I'm pointing out that we would be using popular media as a method of convincing people to sell thier souls to a demon lord via arcane ritual.
People might be alarmed.
Soul trade would come up later, much later, as inevitable power creep happens, and our hero would need additional powers to fight their enemies. If nothing else, I am fairly sure we would need to purchase prayer eating first. The main thing is encode Mercy in Servitude into the movie, so newly turned reds (and maybe ghouls? Actually, yeah, ghouls too, definitely) have an alternative option.
BoredMan
Dinosaurs came in many flavors. Like potato chips.
That is still telling those people that trading your soul to demons and such is a good idea though. That seems like a bad message to give people.
Goldfish
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That's already a concept, and people have been doing it in DF since time immemorial.
Best thing we can do is to make it seem really, really unpalatable for any but the most depraved.