We were talking about organizations and those who worked for them. And Yes the CEO ubermensch will of course be able to defeat a vampire who can mind control you and has networks all over the city and blackmail your ass to kingdom come all without you knowing they are a vampire, right
?
The problem with using vampiric mind control on the Tony Franzetta, CEO of EvilCorp, Inc (the world's leading supplier of evil-related products and services...not to mention the owner of Heroes.com), is that Tony doesn't approve of deals straight up. He approves of deals in principle, and than has people get together to work out the details. And then, once they're worked out, more people go over the details, in private, to make sure that nothing goes against EvilCorp's best interests. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether EvilCorp is worried about mind control, blackmail, bribes, or some other means of subversion. What matters is that, even without knowing that mind control or some other supernatural means can be used to influence their actions, the company
is worried about their people's decisions and/or actions being influenced...and they take steps to make sure it doesn't happen. This is standard practice in our world--I can't see why it would not be on other worlds.
And even if you
do manage to slide an unprofitable deal through all this scrutiny...remember, the CEO can be replaced at any time, if either the stockholders, or the Board of Directors decides to do so. You don't see this happen very often, because CEOs know this is possible, and tend to limit their actions to make sure it doesn't happen, but it
does happen...and a CEO who is being controlled won't last too long once his actions come to light, because their deals will show less than maximum profit, and no CEO can afford that.
His replacement's first job, naturally, will be to find out why his unfortunate predecessor agreed to such bad deals, and then to change the procedures to make sure it doesn't happen again. Hence, the reason why you have major business leaders poking around in places where your average globe-spanning conspiracy of any type really doesn't want them poking.
At any rate, I actually have no idea how newly made vampires function and get money being honest.
Neither do I, and that's sort of what I meant--how does a young vampire get money, and contacts, and what he needs to get by? I mean, honestly, as a novelist, or as a gamer, I don't really care about the old guys, because I'm not going to be one of them. How do the young ones do it?
Cause you say so rather then being running for centuries of existence, they have lots of wealth they have not used they can then funnel into stuff to create more money
.
Are
you going to trust somebody to handle seventy plus billion dollars, without having some means to determine whether he or she is doing a good job? And without having some means to remove a manager who does a bad job, and find a replacement?
If your answer is "yes," then please...I have some experience in these things, and would be happy to manage your money for you. Please, get in touch. I promise you, it is at least 60% safer than responding to a Nigerian email scam.
Seriously--even if they do hire a money manager, which would be the smart thing to do, they will still find themselves having a full-time job just...well...being rich. There's a lot more to wealth than you'd think, and making sure that you stay in control of all that money very rapidly gets to be a full-time job. There is a reason why most big fortunes rarely last for more than 3 generations. It is known as "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves," and it is very real.
Yes. The Vampire the Masquerade bloodlines had someone who is a ghoul working in a hospital doing stuff for his vampire masters and why the hell do you think the carpenters and plumbers need to know anything? They come in fix whats needed and get out.
Said ghoul is a standard nurse, however--his ability to help you if you got brought into the emergency room would be much more limited. Even for just that clinic, you'd need at
least two more ghouls to successfully maintain the masquerade, out of a staff of probably no more than twenty to thirty people. At that rate, you would need a minimum of 2,000 ghouls in the medical industry alone to cover the LA area, and even then you'd be running a pretty severe risk of exposure. Personally, I'd want more...but that's just me.
Being wealthy means they can buy lots of these things.
No, actually, it doesn't. What being wealthy means is that you've got a lot of assets. But to see assets capable of generating a $50,000 income (which is the median for the USA) on a 5% annual return on investment, you'd need at least $1,000,000 in invested assets. If you want to see those numbers grow at a rate concurrent with inflation, you'd need somewhere north of $1,500,000. This is just for an average(ish) family, by the way--if you have somebody who is to express power and influence, you'd need a lot more money.
The tower you saw in Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines? The one that La Croix owns/lives in? That cost him north of $500,000,000, meaning that for him to have purchased it without making a heavy sacrifice in terms of his long-term money-making ability, he would have to be worth anywhere from $5,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 at a minimum, and probably worth a good deal more than that. The Camarilla which backs him could likely have afforded the tower with much less effort, but even then, they have multiple demands on their resources, so they will only shell out that kind of money if he is seriously powerful, and has significant influence within the group.
Being rich doesn't mean that you have lots of money, I'm afraid. It means that you can
come up with lots of money in a hurry, if you're willing to throw away everything. Maintaining your assets for the expected centuries of existence, unfortunately, is not easy, and it costs heavily. The Camarilla may be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but the simple effort of maintaining that money means that they will still have a surprisingly limited budget for things like safehouses, and the like. Shelling out a half-billion to get rid of La Croix isn't going to be worth it unless their American holdings are worth literally hundreds of billions of dollars.
Given the size of the US economy, that would mean that the Camarilla in the United States would be worth about 1% of the American economy, which I would suspect would be well beyond what you could expect to hide in the shadows. In effect, that kind of money
automatically breaks the masquerade, just because of the tax and political implications.
There was a nice little quote of some mafia guy bragging about how having a family member as a werewolf made things so much easier and money for all. Sounds like they are doing just fine.
Yeah? And said werewolf is still around? I would have thought that his rivals would have taken steps to eliminate his werewolf family member as soon as he was dumb enough to say something about it. Of course, that's just me. Maybe most mafia guys are perfectly happy to see an eight-foot furry killing machine at their rival's beck and call.
You do realize that you can just go to the rest of the garou right? The Garou have moon bridges that allow them to travel the world and there is the umbra travel. And again, regenerators. have your forgotten?
Yeah? How close is the nearest friendly pack? This goes back to the previous comment about population, you see--if there's enough werewolves in the area for that to be viable, there's enough that the odds of detection start rising dramatically.
And keep in mind that werewolves don't just mind the area around the caerns--not all werewolves have immediate and ready access to moon bridges. Which is a problem, because there's not a huge amount of stuff that can threaten an entire werewolf pack that doesn't live
within the Umbra...which means that Umbra travel may or may not be practical.
And all of this assumes that the healing rituals required to regrow your freaking
arm don't take more than two or three hours--if they do, you're going to be late again (assuming you can make it at all), and you can't do that but so many times before your boss fires you anyway.
And why would an inhuman monster want any of this? what if the inhuman monsters food is people?
Why wouldn't they? They're intelligent, right? Intelligence means the ability to get bored. Best cure for boredom? Other intelligence. And, in today's world, that means money, or some other means to measure value, so that you have a viable medium of exchange. But the problem is that, for the more humanoid supernaturals, money is a medium of exchange that they can use when dealing with humans, as well as non-humans, which means that they have little incentive to use anything else.
Plus...you know...YouTube. I mean, come on. How can anything resist videos of cute kittens?
Technocracy for example is a world spanning and beyond conspiracy. And why do you assume that they need the entire resources of the organization to fix up these little messes?
In Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, the blown up warehouse is still mentioned by the news come the end of the game. Admittedly, there is reason to believe that things are rapidly going to hell as the game progresses, and that the Camarilla's ability (or possibly desire) to suppress the news is edging towards the non-existent.
And the problem isn't how much resources are required for a single incident. The problem lies with the sheer number of incidents. As noted above, there is an upwards limit on how many resources the organization can have available, and, again, as mentioned, they have other demands on their time and resources (which is why they kill you if you become too much of a threat to the masquerade).
Aside from the Technocracy, which has literally
rewritten the laws of reality, I really don't see any other group managing to operate on this kind of scale.