[reserved]
Last edited:
urban fantasy
- Thread starter MediumGatoKatr
- Start date
- Pen & Paper
[reserved]
Last edited:
[reserved]
Last edited:
[reserved]
Last edited:
World of Darkness may hold a virtual monopoly on the urban fantasy market, sufficient that it can support around two dozen distinct campaign settings and rules iterations, but it is neither the first nor the last of its kind. It had and has competitors like Nightlife, Nephilim, Immortal: Invisible War, The Everlasting, C.J. Carella's WitchCraft, Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows, Dresden Files, Liminal, etc.
I thought World of Darkness had an interesting premise at first, but the convoluted continuity and innumerable rules iterations turned me away. I am far from the first person to feel this way, as there are a bunch of homebrew wikis in which GMs create their own remixes of the settings they like. I thought to do the same.
I like to think what makes my attempt distinct from all those wikis is that I don't have a preference for any particular iteration of the lore or rules. While I'm happy to recycle lore willy-nilly, I feel the need to take a step and re-evaluate the IP from the ground up. Compare and contrast with the many competitors. Re-evaluate the rules.
I'll start with the "big five" since they seem to be the foundation of the IP. Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Ghost, and Fae.
Sorry, I am being interrupted now. I will come back with my analyses later. In the meantime, feel free to post various brainstorms for your monster-centric urban fantasy games here, or plug various games that have already been published.
I thought World of Darkness had an interesting premise at first, but the convoluted continuity and innumerable rules iterations turned me away. I am far from the first person to feel this way, as there are a bunch of homebrew wikis in which GMs create their own remixes of the settings they like. I thought to do the same.
I like to think what makes my attempt distinct from all those wikis is that I don't have a preference for any particular iteration of the lore or rules. While I'm happy to recycle lore willy-nilly, I feel the need to take a step and re-evaluate the IP from the ground up. Compare and contrast with the many competitors. Re-evaluate the rules.
I'll start with the "big five" since they seem to be the foundation of the IP. Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Ghost, and Fae.
Sorry, I am being interrupted now. I will come back with my analyses later. In the meantime, feel free to post various brainstorms for your monster-centric urban fantasy games here, or plug various games that have already been published.
Writing these analyses is going to be very long and complicated. Right now I'm going to focus on Vampire. Or rather aspects of it.
Vampires are pretty common in the urban fantasy games. They're sexy that way. The White Wolf Vampires games, Nightlife, Nephilim (only in French though), The Everlasting, WitchCraft, Monsterhearts, Feed, Urban Shadows, etc.
Nightlife, the White Wolf Vampire games, The Everlasting, and Feed in particular focus on an inner turmoil drawn from Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. A humanity mechanic is used to measure how much the vampire character has deteriorated. Everlasting calls this mechanic "torment: damnation". This statistic generally affects how well the vampire can interact with humans and various other aspects of appearance and behavior. Everlasting goes really detailed into personality traits, way more mechanistic than something like the intimacy rules in Exalted. In Nightlife, it fluctuates wildly during play because there are many ways to gain or lose it very easily. In White Wolf, losing humanity is uncommon and more dramatic, regaining it is quite rare. In Feed (more freeform in its statistics than more simulationist rules) it literally measures how human or vampiric the character traits are, with loss of humanity translating to replacing human traits with vampiric traits; loss or gain is dramatic rather than routine. Both white wolf and feed add additional complications like "anchors" or "temptations" to heighten the drama; white wolf adds these in more recent editions R2 and V5, and were absent in earlier editions.
Another concept, largely unique to RPGs, is vampire "bloodlines," "clans", "consanguinity", "strain," etc. Let's not kid ourselves: they're character classes. None of the systems I mentioned are level-based, but that's basically what they are. Anyway, every vampire-themed game approaches them a bit differently:
Nightlife has a bunch of creatures or "races" of "kin" you wouldn't typically consider vampires since aside from the "vampyres" they don't drink blood but which are effectively vampires because they all predate on human life force or emotions or whatever (often obligate, sometimes only to heal quickly), have humanity traits, and can sometimes transmit their condition. Nightlife is the first game of its kind and may have inspired White Wolf due to the eerie similarities between their settings.
Anyway, the White Wolf games have "clans" or "bloodlines" that are added on to a quasi-Ricean template to add additional weakness and give a cost break to certain flavors of superpowers. There are a bunch of them, with some instances being stacked on to another clan/bloodline. A number of these are drawn directly from specific vampire fiction, like Necroscope or 3x3 Eyes, or even non-vampire fiction like Conan the Barbarian. In one continuity, Vampire: The Masquerade, vampires are descendants of "Caine."
The Everlasting has "consanguinity," which are similar to White Wolf types except that their differences can be far more pronounced, with some lacking fangs for example, and most have several unique powers; unlike white wolf vamps, most of the examples given in the book are either based on specific folklore like the obayifo or claim descent from deities or historic figures like Qingu, Kali, Vlad Tepes, Elizabeth Bathory, etc rather than vampire fiction. Vampires don't share a common origin, rather, any person who gets damned by the universe for really really big crimes may return from death as the progenitor of their own consanguinity. Pretty much the same rules as Hellsing.
Feed doesn't have a specific set of what it calls "strains." It opens with rules for creating your own, with a number of examples given at various points. It is the most of toolkit of the systems I listed here.
Rules for superpowers vary wildly between systems. Nightlife has a large selection of powers, typically limited to specific character types. White Wolf organizes powers into linear paths, with different character types receiving cost breaks for certain types. Everlasting had a book with guidelines to create your own powers that are loosely organized into themes (but w/o linear progression like White Wolf), with character types receiving variable costs depending what themes they favor (more complicated than White Wolf). Feed describes all traits in a freeform manner, though its strain creation rules include guidelines for limiting vampire traits to be themed after the strain in various ways.
All of these include some variation of vampire hunger rules.
Nightlife forces certain character types to "drain" every so often to stay healthy, and using superpowers costs humanity points.
White Wolf usually tracks a point pool expended for superpowers, called "blood" or "vitae"; V5 uses a different approach where players instead roll to see if the PC accumulates a "hunger" statistic or not. Vampires routinely spend points or gain hunger simply to exist.
Everlasting uses a power point pool, called "animus." Vampires expend points routinely to exist.
Feed uses an accumulative "hunger" statistic. Unlike the other games, it only accumulates when the vampire is stressed or uses vampiric traits. Vampires otherwise don't seem to require any nourishment.
I'm pretty sure that's the gist of what makes your generic Anne Rice-inspired vampire game. In a future post I'll note some ideas I had for my own implementation.
Vampires are pretty common in the urban fantasy games. They're sexy that way. The White Wolf Vampires games, Nightlife, Nephilim (only in French though), The Everlasting, WitchCraft, Monsterhearts, Feed, Urban Shadows, etc.
Nightlife, the White Wolf Vampire games, The Everlasting, and Feed in particular focus on an inner turmoil drawn from Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. A humanity mechanic is used to measure how much the vampire character has deteriorated. Everlasting calls this mechanic "torment: damnation". This statistic generally affects how well the vampire can interact with humans and various other aspects of appearance and behavior. Everlasting goes really detailed into personality traits, way more mechanistic than something like the intimacy rules in Exalted. In Nightlife, it fluctuates wildly during play because there are many ways to gain or lose it very easily. In White Wolf, losing humanity is uncommon and more dramatic, regaining it is quite rare. In Feed (more freeform in its statistics than more simulationist rules) it literally measures how human or vampiric the character traits are, with loss of humanity translating to replacing human traits with vampiric traits; loss or gain is dramatic rather than routine. Both white wolf and feed add additional complications like "anchors" or "temptations" to heighten the drama; white wolf adds these in more recent editions R2 and V5, and were absent in earlier editions.
Another concept, largely unique to RPGs, is vampire "bloodlines," "clans", "consanguinity", "strain," etc. Let's not kid ourselves: they're character classes. None of the systems I mentioned are level-based, but that's basically what they are. Anyway, every vampire-themed game approaches them a bit differently:
Nightlife has a bunch of creatures or "races" of "kin" you wouldn't typically consider vampires since aside from the "vampyres" they don't drink blood but which are effectively vampires because they all predate on human life force or emotions or whatever (often obligate, sometimes only to heal quickly), have humanity traits, and can sometimes transmit their condition. Nightlife is the first game of its kind and may have inspired White Wolf due to the eerie similarities between their settings.
Anyway, the White Wolf games have "clans" or "bloodlines" that are added on to a quasi-Ricean template to add additional weakness and give a cost break to certain flavors of superpowers. There are a bunch of them, with some instances being stacked on to another clan/bloodline. A number of these are drawn directly from specific vampire fiction, like Necroscope or 3x3 Eyes, or even non-vampire fiction like Conan the Barbarian. In one continuity, Vampire: The Masquerade, vampires are descendants of "Caine."
The Everlasting has "consanguinity," which are similar to White Wolf types except that their differences can be far more pronounced, with some lacking fangs for example, and most have several unique powers; unlike white wolf vamps, most of the examples given in the book are either based on specific folklore like the obayifo or claim descent from deities or historic figures like Qingu, Kali, Vlad Tepes, Elizabeth Bathory, etc rather than vampire fiction. Vampires don't share a common origin, rather, any person who gets damned by the universe for really really big crimes may return from death as the progenitor of their own consanguinity. Pretty much the same rules as Hellsing.
Feed doesn't have a specific set of what it calls "strains." It opens with rules for creating your own, with a number of examples given at various points. It is the most of toolkit of the systems I listed here.
Rules for superpowers vary wildly between systems. Nightlife has a large selection of powers, typically limited to specific character types. White Wolf organizes powers into linear paths, with different character types receiving cost breaks for certain types. Everlasting had a book with guidelines to create your own powers that are loosely organized into themes (but w/o linear progression like White Wolf), with character types receiving variable costs depending what themes they favor (more complicated than White Wolf). Feed describes all traits in a freeform manner, though its strain creation rules include guidelines for limiting vampire traits to be themed after the strain in various ways.
All of these include some variation of vampire hunger rules.
Nightlife forces certain character types to "drain" every so often to stay healthy, and using superpowers costs humanity points.
White Wolf usually tracks a point pool expended for superpowers, called "blood" or "vitae"; V5 uses a different approach where players instead roll to see if the PC accumulates a "hunger" statistic or not. Vampires routinely spend points or gain hunger simply to exist.
Everlasting uses a power point pool, called "animus." Vampires expend points routinely to exist.
Feed uses an accumulative "hunger" statistic. Unlike the other games, it only accumulates when the vampire is stressed or uses vampiric traits. Vampires otherwise don't seem to require any nourishment.
I'm pretty sure that's the gist of what makes your generic Anne Rice-inspired vampire game. In a future post I'll note some ideas I had for my own implementation.
So the basic ingredients of an Anne Rice-inspired vampire RPG are the humanity mechanic, the bloodlines, and the hunger. Also cool powers, but I think that's implied.
Another ingredient, perhaps the most important, is lore. And cliques. Which I will focus on here.
White Wolf's Vampire is popular primarily because it has accumulated thirty years of lore and organizes characters into cliques that determine their personality, motivations, beliefs, attitudes toward other cliques, and superpowers. There's a conspiracy theory element in which these secret societies of vampires have been secretly fighting forever and are responsible for all historical events. Edition wars have been fought too.
The cliques are probably the most important part, with the lore existing only to support them. White Wolf presents their own sets of cliques, but there's no reason you can't make an entirely different set. You can make cliques out of anything. Folkloric vampires, historical figures, mythic figures, prior vampire fiction, non-vampire fiction, original ideas, etc. White Wolf accumulated several dozen by doing so, so it's impossible not to replicate a clique they already made.
I'm a bit tired at the moment so I'll stop here. In a follow-up post I'll list some ideas for cliques.
Another ingredient, perhaps the most important, is lore. And cliques. Which I will focus on here.
White Wolf's Vampire is popular primarily because it has accumulated thirty years of lore and organizes characters into cliques that determine their personality, motivations, beliefs, attitudes toward other cliques, and superpowers. There's a conspiracy theory element in which these secret societies of vampires have been secretly fighting forever and are responsible for all historical events. Edition wars have been fought too.
The cliques are probably the most important part, with the lore existing only to support them. White Wolf presents their own sets of cliques, but there's no reason you can't make an entirely different set. You can make cliques out of anything. Folkloric vampires, historical figures, mythic figures, prior vampire fiction, non-vampire fiction, original ideas, etc. White Wolf accumulated several dozen by doing so, so it's impossible not to replicate a clique they already made.
I'm a bit tired at the moment so I'll stop here. In a follow-up post I'll list some ideas for cliques.
I mentioned taking ideas from folklore and fiction, so here's a very very brief rundown of folklore and fiction. Sorry, no cliques included in this post.
Folkloric vampires
I consulted the following books for research:
Vampires or vampiric monsters are common in folklore throughout the world. Europe has various bestial and zombie-like vampires. Africa has adze, asanbosam, and obayifo. Australia has yara-ma-yha-who. Southeast Asia has vampires who detach their heads or torsos as flying monsters and sometimes trail their own entrails behind them. China has zombie-like jiangshi. Japan has tales of vampire cats. The Middle East has tales of ghouls and foot-lickers. India has the baital or vetala. Folklore makes little or no distinction between vampires, werewolves, witches, ogres or malevolent ghosts like modern fantasy fiction does.
The sources I consulted had the most information on European folklore. European vampires are generally imagined as ghostly entities that haunt the living, leaving their graves every night to cause mischief and spread plagues. Sometimes the vampire physically exits its grave as a reanimated corpse, other times it hunts by an astral projection or by casting a curse at range. Vampires are ascribed all sorts of terrible powers depending on the story. From an anthropological perspective, vampires were used as all-purpose scapegoats for general misfortune.
Gothic vampires
Gothic fiction codified what would become the generic image of the vampire in modern popular culture. In the earliest stories of this period the vampirism is psychological, but later blood-drinking would come to the fore as the standard. The Vampyre, Varney the Vampire, Carmilla, and Dracula are the seminal inspirations of the genre in the Anglosphere.
There were several works that were never published in English until the last few decades, such as Knightshade by Paul Féval père and After Ninety Years: The Story of Serbian Vampire Sava Savanovic. The works of Féval demonstrate extreme divergences from the English stereotype.
20th century
The 20th century saw an explosion in the variety of vampires.
Universal and Hammer produced numerous vampire b-movies, most of them based on Dracula or loosely following the same established formula. Up to the 80s, most b-movie vampires imitated the style of the seductive gothic vampires. Few movies depicted vampires as hideous monsters, as in Nosferatu, Salem's Lot, and Life Force, though the concept seemed to be more popular in comic books, such as Tales from the Crypt. Even rarer would movies buck the traditional vampire "rules" set by Universal and Hammer, as seen in Captain Kronos famously declaring "there are as many kinds of vampires as birds of prey."
The novel I Am Legend and its movie adaptations popularized the idea of vampirism as a more of a transmissible disease than a supernatural affliction. The novel also inspired Night of the Living Dead and by extension what would become the zombie genre.
Vampires were rarely depicted sympathetically until the latter half of the 20th century, which saw an explosion of such portrayals. Examples include Marya Zaleska, Alucard, Blacula, Barnabas Collins, Lestat, Saint-Germain, and Dracula himself.
Starting in the 70s and 80s, vampire b-movies benefited extensively from advances in special effects that allowed them to more easily depict vampires as hideous monsters. This carried over to novels, which had greater leeway in depicting vampires as physically monstrous. This reached its logical extreme in the Necroscope series and the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure comics, which placed vampires firmly in the body horror genre.
Present
Vampire fiction hasn't experienced any genuinely new trends in the 20th century. Their sexiness reached its peak in the 20th century, and the Twilight craze did nothing new aside from making vampires sparkling abstinence metaphors.
I don't know if new trends in vampire fiction are even possible at this point. Vampire fiction reached a huge level of diversity in the 90s and 2000s. We have evil vampires, sympathetic vampires, heroic vampires... We have supernatural vampires, alien vampires, pathogenic vampires... Vampires have taken over the world, survived the apocalypse, caused the apocalypse, rebuilt civilization after the apocalypse... We have ugly vampires, sexy vampires, average-looking vampires... We have vampires who change shape, control minds, speak with the dead, control time...
Most vampire fiction depicts all vampires as following the same rules. Rarely a work may depict multiple kinds of vampires existing in the same setting, but even to the present this is highly unusual. Tvtropes call this a "vampire variety pack." Examples include Captain Kronos, Marvel Comics, World of Darkness, American Vampire, Dresden Files, Legacy of Kain, Warhammer Fantasy, and The Witcher.
Modern fiction commonly uses vampires as a metaphor for some real life issue, like immigration, HIV, LGBT, the greed of evil rich people metaphorically sucking life from the poor, and drug addiction. Given that vampires are defined by predating on humans, using them as a metaphor for minorities will easily come across as offensive. Using them as a metaphor for addiction doesn't have that problem: druggies are known to commit murder to satisfy their fix, and anyone can become addicted by having drugs pushed on them by another addict. This easily includes the evil rich metaphor too: what is greed if not an addiction?
End of line.
Folkloric vampires
I consulted the following books for research:
- The vampire book : the encyclopedia of the undead / by J. Gordon Melton. — 3rd ed.
- The encyclopedia of vampires, werewolves, and other monsters / Rosemary Ellen Guiley
- Encyclopedia of vampire mythology / Theresa Bane.
- Encyclopedia of the undead : a field guide to creatures that cannot rest in peace / by Bob Curran.
Vampires or vampiric monsters are common in folklore throughout the world. Europe has various bestial and zombie-like vampires. Africa has adze, asanbosam, and obayifo. Australia has yara-ma-yha-who. Southeast Asia has vampires who detach their heads or torsos as flying monsters and sometimes trail their own entrails behind them. China has zombie-like jiangshi. Japan has tales of vampire cats. The Middle East has tales of ghouls and foot-lickers. India has the baital or vetala. Folklore makes little or no distinction between vampires, werewolves, witches, ogres or malevolent ghosts like modern fantasy fiction does.
The sources I consulted had the most information on European folklore. European vampires are generally imagined as ghostly entities that haunt the living, leaving their graves every night to cause mischief and spread plagues. Sometimes the vampire physically exits its grave as a reanimated corpse, other times it hunts by an astral projection or by casting a curse at range. Vampires are ascribed all sorts of terrible powers depending on the story. From an anthropological perspective, vampires were used as all-purpose scapegoats for general misfortune.
Gothic vampires
Gothic fiction codified what would become the generic image of the vampire in modern popular culture. In the earliest stories of this period the vampirism is psychological, but later blood-drinking would come to the fore as the standard. The Vampyre, Varney the Vampire, Carmilla, and Dracula are the seminal inspirations of the genre in the Anglosphere.
There were several works that were never published in English until the last few decades, such as Knightshade by Paul Féval père and After Ninety Years: The Story of Serbian Vampire Sava Savanovic. The works of Féval demonstrate extreme divergences from the English stereotype.
20th century
The 20th century saw an explosion in the variety of vampires.
Universal and Hammer produced numerous vampire b-movies, most of them based on Dracula or loosely following the same established formula. Up to the 80s, most b-movie vampires imitated the style of the seductive gothic vampires. Few movies depicted vampires as hideous monsters, as in Nosferatu, Salem's Lot, and Life Force, though the concept seemed to be more popular in comic books, such as Tales from the Crypt. Even rarer would movies buck the traditional vampire "rules" set by Universal and Hammer, as seen in Captain Kronos famously declaring "there are as many kinds of vampires as birds of prey."
The novel I Am Legend and its movie adaptations popularized the idea of vampirism as a more of a transmissible disease than a supernatural affliction. The novel also inspired Night of the Living Dead and by extension what would become the zombie genre.
Vampires were rarely depicted sympathetically until the latter half of the 20th century, which saw an explosion of such portrayals. Examples include Marya Zaleska, Alucard, Blacula, Barnabas Collins, Lestat, Saint-Germain, and Dracula himself.
Starting in the 70s and 80s, vampire b-movies benefited extensively from advances in special effects that allowed them to more easily depict vampires as hideous monsters. This carried over to novels, which had greater leeway in depicting vampires as physically monstrous. This reached its logical extreme in the Necroscope series and the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure comics, which placed vampires firmly in the body horror genre.
Present
Vampire fiction hasn't experienced any genuinely new trends in the 20th century. Their sexiness reached its peak in the 20th century, and the Twilight craze did nothing new aside from making vampires sparkling abstinence metaphors.
I don't know if new trends in vampire fiction are even possible at this point. Vampire fiction reached a huge level of diversity in the 90s and 2000s. We have evil vampires, sympathetic vampires, heroic vampires... We have supernatural vampires, alien vampires, pathogenic vampires... Vampires have taken over the world, survived the apocalypse, caused the apocalypse, rebuilt civilization after the apocalypse... We have ugly vampires, sexy vampires, average-looking vampires... We have vampires who change shape, control minds, speak with the dead, control time...
Most vampire fiction depicts all vampires as following the same rules. Rarely a work may depict multiple kinds of vampires existing in the same setting, but even to the present this is highly unusual. Tvtropes call this a "vampire variety pack." Examples include Captain Kronos, Marvel Comics, World of Darkness, American Vampire, Dresden Files, Legacy of Kain, Warhammer Fantasy, and The Witcher.
Modern fiction commonly uses vampires as a metaphor for some real life issue, like immigration, HIV, LGBT, the greed of evil rich people metaphorically sucking life from the poor, and drug addiction. Given that vampires are defined by predating on humans, using them as a metaphor for minorities will easily come across as offensive. Using them as a metaphor for addiction doesn't have that problem: druggies are known to commit murder to satisfy their fix, and anyone can become addicted by having drugs pushed on them by another addict. This easily includes the evil rich metaphor too: what is greed if not an addiction?
End of line.
As I said, it's impossible to devise a listing of vampire cliques without replicating a clique already created by White Wolf at some point. They have fairy vampires and vampires who control time. And several of their cliques were directly based on specific works of existing vampire fiction.
Anyway, I'm going to list a few example cliques for a hypothetical urban fantasy setting. It's your generic Anne Rice-inspired "vampires live hidden in the modern world" setting.
These are only vaguely sketched out at the moment. I'm too tired to do much more with them.
Anyway, I'm going to list a few example cliques for a hypothetical urban fantasy setting. It's your generic Anne Rice-inspired "vampires live hidden in the modern world" setting.
Nosferatus. These are your scary horror movie mainstays, a la Nosferatu, Shadow of the Vampire, Salem's Lot, The Strain, Thirty Days of Night, etc. Their superpowers are themed after pestilence, vermin, terror, aging, deformity, German expressionism, and similarly unpleasant things. They have this whole Phantom of the Opera-themed angst going for them.
Taking a page from Vampire: The Requiem, Nosferatus aren't necessarily physically ugly… at least to start with. They may simply start out as eerie or otherwise off-putting, perhaps having slightly unusual features like abnormal eye colors, pallid skin, long fingernails, sharp teeth, inexplicable creepiness, etc. As time passes, their appearance gets steadily worse, mimicking the aging process. They might be able to pass this off to mortals as deformity, injury, aging, or method acting. Eventually they will need to rely on disguise to look normal: makeup supplies will probably suffice at first, but eventually only paranormal means will do the job. Sometime after that, even paranormal disguise won't be able to close the gap.
If you're using a humanity mechanic, as I assume is the case, I think a great choice is to tie their appearance to their humanity statistic. The more humanity they have, the more human they appear; the less humanity they have, the less human they appear. Note that I say "human" and not "normal." A nosferatu with high humanity might very well look like someone with severe congenital deformities, because I don't want to imply those with deformities look inhuman.
Taking a page from Vampire: The Requiem, Nosferatus aren't necessarily physically ugly… at least to start with. They may simply start out as eerie or otherwise off-putting, perhaps having slightly unusual features like abnormal eye colors, pallid skin, long fingernails, sharp teeth, inexplicable creepiness, etc. As time passes, their appearance gets steadily worse, mimicking the aging process. They might be able to pass this off to mortals as deformity, injury, aging, or method acting. Eventually they will need to rely on disguise to look normal: makeup supplies will probably suffice at first, but eventually only paranormal means will do the job. Sometime after that, even paranormal disguise won't be able to close the gap.
If you're using a humanity mechanic, as I assume is the case, I think a great choice is to tie their appearance to their humanity statistic. The more humanity they have, the more human they appear; the less humanity they have, the less human they appear. Note that I say "human" and not "normal." A nosferatu with high humanity might very well look like someone with severe congenital deformities, because I don't want to imply those with deformities look inhuman.
Shadow Vampires. These are based on German expressionism SFX and expanded from there. Their basic shtick is that they have superpowers related to shadows and darkness. They could control shadows, turn into shadows, create objects or creatures out of paranormal three-dimensional shadow-stuff, teleport by using shadows like doorways, control people like marionettes through their shadow, injuring someone by stabbing their shadow, constructing extra-dimensional chambers out of shadow-stuff, avoid injury by absorbing projectiles into a bottomless pit of darkness, etc. Where you could go from there is open-ended. I have a couple ideas, liberally ripped off from White Wolf because (almost) no other fiction broaches the topic.
Shadow Lords. Your gothic-style aristocrats with an emphasis on darkness. They specialize in mind-controlling people through their shadows, and similar forms of paranormal espionage. Basically off-brand WW's Lasombra.
Shadow Hunters. These dudes use their shadow powers to hunt other monsters, like dark superheroes. Basically off-brand WW's Khaibit.
Mirror Vampires. The logical flipside to the shadow vampires, mirror vampires have power over reflections and reflective surfaces. Among many other ideas, they can walk into reflective surfaces to visit the reflection world. If you wanted to, then you could let them jump into pictures too like in that old children's show Out of the Box.
Drinking blood seems too passé for these guys in my opinion. Luckily, Masked Rider Kiva helped me out with that. These vamps feed on life force in the form of color, causing their victims to turn transparent and even shatter like glass.
Shadow Lords. Your gothic-style aristocrats with an emphasis on darkness. They specialize in mind-controlling people through their shadows, and similar forms of paranormal espionage. Basically off-brand WW's Lasombra.
Shadow Hunters. These dudes use their shadow powers to hunt other monsters, like dark superheroes. Basically off-brand WW's Khaibit.
Mirror Vampires. The logical flipside to the shadow vampires, mirror vampires have power over reflections and reflective surfaces. Among many other ideas, they can walk into reflective surfaces to visit the reflection world. If you wanted to, then you could let them jump into pictures too like in that old children's show Out of the Box.
Drinking blood seems too passé for these guys in my opinion. Luckily, Masked Rider Kiva helped me out with that. These vamps feed on life force in the form of color, causing their victims to turn transparent and even shatter like glass.
Nekomata ("forked cat"). These are two-tailed cat yokai (or fairy) of Japanese folklore. This rendition is based on the folktale "The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima." Vampire cats aren't transformed humans but started life as ordinary cats. For whatever reason, like living too long or being possessed by the vengeful ghost of their dead owner, they changed into monsters that prey on humans. They enter human society by killing a human being and assuming their appearance and identity. If you're using a humanity mechanic, then this explains where they got it from. Vampire cats made brief appearances in some editions of World of Darkness.
Yuki-onna ("snow woman"). Another Japanese yokai. Snow women appear as beautiful women who prey on travelers in cold climates, draining their body heat and leaving frozen corpses. Sometimes they decide to marry mortal men and live as human beings for a time, but this eventually fails apart due to their ageless nature.
Fox Fairy. This East Asian fairy was mentioned in the vampire books I read. They appear in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean folklore, though their behavior varies dramatically between these. All of them share the basic description of intelligent foxes that assume human appearance to enter human society unnoticed. You are probably familiar Japanese fox fairies, or kitsune, from anime or urban fantasy novels. They seemed harmless, right? Chinese huli-jing and Korean gumiho are known for eating human organs: huli-jing eat the heart, gumiho eat the liver.
These are only vaguely sketched out at the moment. I'm too tired to do much more with them.
Last edited:
Looks good. Are you going to write up an Anne Rice Vampire too?
Thank you for your positive response.
There are homebrew rules for Anne Rice using World of Darkness.
Aside from a few subtle features, Ricean vampires aren't all that different from the generic image of the vampire in most (non-horror) vampire fiction. They aren't all that different from Stoker's vampires in the basics either.
If you're using generic descriptive names for vampire strains, then you could accurately call them "romantic vampires."
Perhaps one of the biggest barriers to overcome when imagining vampires more creatively is the blood dependency. Vampires don't necessarily need to feed on human blood, out of all the things that compose humans, to still exemplify all the baggage associated with vampires. A vampire could consume flesh, emotion, sanity, memories, social relationships, etc.
Emotion in particular is ripe for exploration because there are many kinds of emotions and inducing more complex emotions requires effort and creativity. Nephilim and WitchCraft depicted vampires as feeding on human emotions, like fear, faith, or greed. It promotes manipulating people into creating the emotions the vampire craves.
Also, referencing World of Darkness again, I think the idea of vampires who suffer from insanity and have a superpower to mess with other people's sanity feels a lot more thematic if they feed on sanity rather than blood.
And I haven't even touched on werewolves, witches, ghosts, and fairies yet. In some cases there can be significant overlap.
Last edited:
There is nothing new I can say about vampires. They are sexy so they have been run into the ground by authors.
Not so for werewolves. Popular culture generally pigeonholes werewolves into the stereotype set by Universal's Wolf-Man. It's a curse that causes the afflicted to turn into a wolf or wolf-like monster under the full moon that is driven by bloodlust.
Some essay from 2006 claims werewolves can be organized into a handful of archetypes. These include medieval, cursed, diabolical, heroic, sympathetic, etc. The essay goes into the most detail.
Vampires have acquired a laundry list of superpowers due to their depictions in popular culture. Stoker gave them mind control. Anne Rice gave them pyrokinesis. Brian Lumley gave them body horror. Mark Rein•Hagen gave them time travel and weirder things. Etc.
By comparison, werewolves are generally still limited to turning into wolves under full moons. The 2010s Teen Wolf TV series gives werewolves the most superpowers of any work of fiction short of the World of Darkness games.
Becoming wolves in particular is arbitrary. A lycanthrope's animal aspect could be any animal, or multiple animals. Various urban fantasy stories introduces werecats, werehyenas, and so forth. Exalted is based on World of Darkness and introduced Lunars as the equivalent of werewolves, although they could assume any animal forms.
World of Darkness was the first RPG to flesh out werewolves in excruciating detail, and was naturally followed by WitchCraft and The Everlasting. These lycanthropes are generally depicted as dualistic beings, existing in both the mortal and spiritual worlds. They're generally depicted as guardians of this duality, defending the world against pollution, demons, aliens, and/or its own excesses.
If you're writing about werewolves and want to be original, then you have your work cut out for you. I'll post a few ideas in a following post, drawing from folklore and fiction.
Not so for werewolves. Popular culture generally pigeonholes werewolves into the stereotype set by Universal's Wolf-Man. It's a curse that causes the afflicted to turn into a wolf or wolf-like monster under the full moon that is driven by bloodlust.
Some essay from 2006 claims werewolves can be organized into a handful of archetypes. These include medieval, cursed, diabolical, heroic, sympathetic, etc. The essay goes into the most detail.
Vampires have acquired a laundry list of superpowers due to their depictions in popular culture. Stoker gave them mind control. Anne Rice gave them pyrokinesis. Brian Lumley gave them body horror. Mark Rein•Hagen gave them time travel and weirder things. Etc.
By comparison, werewolves are generally still limited to turning into wolves under full moons. The 2010s Teen Wolf TV series gives werewolves the most superpowers of any work of fiction short of the World of Darkness games.
Becoming wolves in particular is arbitrary. A lycanthrope's animal aspect could be any animal, or multiple animals. Various urban fantasy stories introduces werecats, werehyenas, and so forth. Exalted is based on World of Darkness and introduced Lunars as the equivalent of werewolves, although they could assume any animal forms.
World of Darkness was the first RPG to flesh out werewolves in excruciating detail, and was naturally followed by WitchCraft and The Everlasting. These lycanthropes are generally depicted as dualistic beings, existing in both the mortal and spiritual worlds. They're generally depicted as guardians of this duality, defending the world against pollution, demons, aliens, and/or its own excesses.
If you're writing about werewolves and want to be original, then you have your work cut out for you. I'll post a few ideas in a following post, drawing from folklore and fiction.
In folklore, werewolves (and other shapeshifters) were not distinguished from witches and vampires. Modern fiction is unique in that it makes such distinctions.
Stories of werewolves has been around in Europe for maybe millennia. Very little information survives from the pre-Christian traditions.
In medieval European folklore, werewolves were generally depicted as people with access to magic that let them assume the forms of wolves, typically because they made a pact with the Devil. Other times werewolves were unfortunates cursed by accident of birth or unknowingly performing a taboo like plucking cursed flowers or drinking from cursed water.
In Norse culture, berserkers were believed to assume the forms of bears by wearing bearskins to make them stronger in battle.
In Greek myth, King Lycaeon was cursed to become a wolf after murdering his own son and trying to feed it to Zeus.
In Ireland, a story goes that a tribe in Ossory mocked a saint trying to convert them and were cursed to alternate every seven years of their lives in the forms of wolves while retaining their minds.
In Livonia, witch trials uncovered an innocuous cult who called themselves the "hounds of God." These people believed they turned into wolves and descended into hell to fight the forces of darkness.
The Slavic krsnik assumed the form of a white animal, such as a wolf, in order to fight the forces of evil.
A number of these tales explain the transformation as astral projection rather than physical. These presumably descend from pre-Christian animistic beliefs in which tribal priests would do battle with evil spirits.
So we can already see that lycanthropy in folklore included a variety of heroes, villains, and so forth.
So it is pretty odd for modern popular culture to consist largely of the stereotype set by Universal. There are some exceptions.
Dresden Files has several different kinds of "lupine theriomorphs" in its setting. In simple English, it has several types of werewolves with different rules. None of them are transmissible.
Anne Rice's The Wolf Gift depicts werewolves as being compelled to hunt down evil-doers. Lycanthropy is transmitted by the classic bite.
The Order, a series on Netflix, depicts werewolves as being compelled to hunt down abuses of magic. Lycanthropy is not transmissible: instead, you get fused to a magical sentient wolf pelt. (It's a reference to the folklore about werewolves wearing wolf skins to transform.)
The idea of heroic werewolves being hunters appears to be a recurring premise. It's not that wild an idea since wolves are hunters, and it dates back to the animistic religions when priests would fight evil by assuming animal forms.
In mythology, wolves and other canines generally fall into one of four basic archetypes: portents, guardians, hunters, and parents.
Portents, as the name implies, foretell future events by their encounter. The various spectral dogs of the British Isles fall firmly into the portent category most often. Seeing one may be a sign of good or bad luck depending on the tale.
Guardians are seen in pan-Indo-European mythology: Cerberus, Garm, and Yamraj hounds are guardians of the gates to the underworld. Dog-headed underworld deities appear in Mayan and Egyptian myth. Other times, owing to dogs being domesticated, paranormal dogs appear shepherding flocks like Orthrus (Cerberus' sibling).
Hunters appear quite common, given that wolves are hunters and dogs are employed to help hunt. In Greek myth there was a dog that never lost its quarry. In Welsh myth, the hounds of Annwn hunt people and take them to the Otherworld.
Parents generally appear in creation myths. The founders of Rome were supposedly raised by a wolf, and this was celebrated in the festival Lupercalia. The Quilette tribe in the Pacific Northwest is supposedly descended from a pack of wolves that a traveling wizard turned into men. The Turkic people are supposedly descended from the she-wolf Asena.
Even with canines alone, there is a lot of material to work with in folklore and fiction.
Stories of werewolves has been around in Europe for maybe millennia. Very little information survives from the pre-Christian traditions.
In medieval European folklore, werewolves were generally depicted as people with access to magic that let them assume the forms of wolves, typically because they made a pact with the Devil. Other times werewolves were unfortunates cursed by accident of birth or unknowingly performing a taboo like plucking cursed flowers or drinking from cursed water.
In Norse culture, berserkers were believed to assume the forms of bears by wearing bearskins to make them stronger in battle.
In Greek myth, King Lycaeon was cursed to become a wolf after murdering his own son and trying to feed it to Zeus.
In Ireland, a story goes that a tribe in Ossory mocked a saint trying to convert them and were cursed to alternate every seven years of their lives in the forms of wolves while retaining their minds.
In Livonia, witch trials uncovered an innocuous cult who called themselves the "hounds of God." These people believed they turned into wolves and descended into hell to fight the forces of darkness.
The Slavic krsnik assumed the form of a white animal, such as a wolf, in order to fight the forces of evil.
A number of these tales explain the transformation as astral projection rather than physical. These presumably descend from pre-Christian animistic beliefs in which tribal priests would do battle with evil spirits.
So we can already see that lycanthropy in folklore included a variety of heroes, villains, and so forth.
So it is pretty odd for modern popular culture to consist largely of the stereotype set by Universal. There are some exceptions.
Dresden Files has several different kinds of "lupine theriomorphs" in its setting. In simple English, it has several types of werewolves with different rules. None of them are transmissible.
Anne Rice's The Wolf Gift depicts werewolves as being compelled to hunt down evil-doers. Lycanthropy is transmitted by the classic bite.
The Order, a series on Netflix, depicts werewolves as being compelled to hunt down abuses of magic. Lycanthropy is not transmissible: instead, you get fused to a magical sentient wolf pelt. (It's a reference to the folklore about werewolves wearing wolf skins to transform.)
The idea of heroic werewolves being hunters appears to be a recurring premise. It's not that wild an idea since wolves are hunters, and it dates back to the animistic religions when priests would fight evil by assuming animal forms.
In mythology, wolves and other canines generally fall into one of four basic archetypes: portents, guardians, hunters, and parents.
Portents, as the name implies, foretell future events by their encounter. The various spectral dogs of the British Isles fall firmly into the portent category most often. Seeing one may be a sign of good or bad luck depending on the tale.
Guardians are seen in pan-Indo-European mythology: Cerberus, Garm, and Yamraj hounds are guardians of the gates to the underworld. Dog-headed underworld deities appear in Mayan and Egyptian myth. Other times, owing to dogs being domesticated, paranormal dogs appear shepherding flocks like Orthrus (Cerberus' sibling).
Hunters appear quite common, given that wolves are hunters and dogs are employed to help hunt. In Greek myth there was a dog that never lost its quarry. In Welsh myth, the hounds of Annwn hunt people and take them to the Otherworld.
Parents generally appear in creation myths. The founders of Rome were supposedly raised by a wolf, and this was celebrated in the festival Lupercalia. The Quilette tribe in the Pacific Northwest is supposedly descended from a pack of wolves that a traveling wizard turned into men. The Turkic people are supposedly descended from the she-wolf Asena.
Even with canines alone, there is a lot of material to work with in folklore and fiction.
Urban fantasy
The urban fantasy genre is really diverse, depending on how you define it. Another name for it would be modern fantasy.
Your average urban fantasy setting typically resembles our world, except with fantasy elements. These may be widely known, perhaps recently revealed or part of an elaborate alternate history. Alternately, these elements may be hidden from the public by a vast conspiracy or a paranormal concealment.
One could focus on the urban element while relaxing on the modern element. An urban fantasy could take place in Victorian England or the Wild West. Or even in the future, perhaps crossing over with cyberpunk or post-apocalypse genres.
Long story short, urban fantasy is diverse. Really diverse.
With regard to tabletop games, perhaps the first major world building choice is whether the PCs will be generally normal people investigating paranormal events... or whether the PCs will be supernatural monsters committing paranormal crimes.
The 80s saw the rise of the former genre, including Call of Cthulhu and Chill. The 90s saw the rise of the latter genre, including Nightlife and World of Darkness. Shadowrun created a mix of urban fantasy and cyberpunk.
There is a lot of material to work with.
Your average urban fantasy setting typically resembles our world, except with fantasy elements. These may be widely known, perhaps recently revealed or part of an elaborate alternate history. Alternately, these elements may be hidden from the public by a vast conspiracy or a paranormal concealment.
One could focus on the urban element while relaxing on the modern element. An urban fantasy could take place in Victorian England or the Wild West. Or even in the future, perhaps crossing over with cyberpunk or post-apocalypse genres.
Long story short, urban fantasy is diverse. Really diverse.
With regard to tabletop games, perhaps the first major world building choice is whether the PCs will be generally normal people investigating paranormal events... or whether the PCs will be supernatural monsters committing paranormal crimes.
The 80s saw the rise of the former genre, including Call of Cthulhu and Chill. The 90s saw the rise of the latter genre, including Nightlife and World of Darkness. Shadowrun created a mix of urban fantasy and cyberpunk.
There is a lot of material to work with.
I don't have any new words on werewolves, so the next is wizards. Magicians. Witches. They have a ton of names.
Magic has always been tied in religion throughout history. Priests used magic to deal with spiritual phenomena. Evil priests used magic to visit misfortune on the people.
Even modern prayer may be seen as a form of magic. You pray to God (or whoever), and your prayer is later answered. Prior to fantasy fiction treating magic as an impersonal science, religions saw magic as essentially praying or wishing for things to happen and then those things happening. This phenomenon is called "magical thinking" by anthropologists.
Magic is so prevalent in urban fantasy and gaming that there are tons of essays on how to design and use it. I'm not going to try recapping those here. Instead, I'm going to touch on the aesthetics of magic.
At least in the Western world, most people's knowledge of magic is limited to Halloween witches, fairy tales, and maybe some trivia from occultism. Writers' knowledge generally comes from Tolkien, D&D, or other writers. In roleplaying games, we got syntactic magic and magical traditions.
First pioneered by Ars Magica, syntactic magic treats magic as being limited only by the mage's skills and player imagination rather than fixed spell lists. It is extremely versatile.
"Magical traditions" are what I call attempts to limit the capabilities of a mage based on their belief regarding their magic. Basically, it's the difference between a druid and a medieval alchemist.
These two aspects work very well together. Since universal guidelines are used to adjudicate for magical effects, it is very easy to change the magic skills for a mage based on their tradition without disrupting the overall balance.
Some roleplaying games, like (again) World of Darkness and The Everlasting, go so far as to use magical traditions to cover mad science and The Matrix-style reality hacking.
Magical practitioners are just as diverse as the magic itself. You have your dabblers who do subtle stuff like homeopathic remedies that actually work, monsters who also practice magic, a special class of magicians who practice the meta-magic underlying all magic, and others.
I've just run out of steam, so I guess that's all for now.
Magic has always been tied in religion throughout history. Priests used magic to deal with spiritual phenomena. Evil priests used magic to visit misfortune on the people.
Even modern prayer may be seen as a form of magic. You pray to God (or whoever), and your prayer is later answered. Prior to fantasy fiction treating magic as an impersonal science, religions saw magic as essentially praying or wishing for things to happen and then those things happening. This phenomenon is called "magical thinking" by anthropologists.
Magic is so prevalent in urban fantasy and gaming that there are tons of essays on how to design and use it. I'm not going to try recapping those here. Instead, I'm going to touch on the aesthetics of magic.
At least in the Western world, most people's knowledge of magic is limited to Halloween witches, fairy tales, and maybe some trivia from occultism. Writers' knowledge generally comes from Tolkien, D&D, or other writers. In roleplaying games, we got syntactic magic and magical traditions.
First pioneered by Ars Magica, syntactic magic treats magic as being limited only by the mage's skills and player imagination rather than fixed spell lists. It is extremely versatile.
"Magical traditions" are what I call attempts to limit the capabilities of a mage based on their belief regarding their magic. Basically, it's the difference between a druid and a medieval alchemist.
These two aspects work very well together. Since universal guidelines are used to adjudicate for magical effects, it is very easy to change the magic skills for a mage based on their tradition without disrupting the overall balance.
Some roleplaying games, like (again) World of Darkness and The Everlasting, go so far as to use magical traditions to cover mad science and The Matrix-style reality hacking.
Magical practitioners are just as diverse as the magic itself. You have your dabblers who do subtle stuff like homeopathic remedies that actually work, monsters who also practice magic, a special class of magicians who practice the meta-magic underlying all magic, and others.
I've just run out of steam, so I guess that's all for now.
I don't have anything further to add on wizards, so I'm moving on to ghosts.
Ghost stories are insanely popular in popular culture, so it's pretty odd that there aren't all that many RPGs with the premise.
There's Lost Souls, Spooks, Spooks! (note the exclamation point), InSpectres, Reaper Madness, Ghostwalk, World of Darkness, and not much else I can name.
Ghosts are pretty versatile. As NPCs, they can power a ghost-busting investigation game all by themselves without ever involving other types of paranormal beasts. We know this from the multiple Ghost Busters cartoons, Ghost Whisperer-type shows, ghost hunter reality shows where no ghosts appear, and the bazillion ghost horror movies that are terrible but keep getting made.
As PCs, ghosts can still be used for ghost hunting (being a ghost should naturally make it easy to hunt other ghosts, right?), they can be used for espionage (being invisible, intangible and able to fly comes in really handy here), and even haunting their past life reminders can still be used for long-form campaigns of darkly serious and comedic tones. People who can see ghosts or otherwise deal with them can appear too, like mediums, reapers, necromancers, etc. You could get mileage out of people who can astral project into ghostly form through whatever means.
I haven't found any fiction that touches on it that isn't World of Darkness (which has a lot of unique baggage that makes it unsuitable for general discussion of the genre), but you could get mileage out of ghost politics. If there are enough ghosts in a particular town or city or whatever, then doesn't it stand to reason they would band together for protection? Ghost hunters could accidentally burn down your haunted house, a priest might try to exorcise you, or you might have to deal with an evil ghost that wants to hurt you. By extension, doesn't it stand to reason that the ghosts might have developed secret societies whose knowledge is passed down through membership?
Not to mention all of the superpowers and afterlife stuff that might come into play. Ghost fiction has gone through a huge gamut of such things.
I'll leave this here for anyone reading to muddle over.
Ghost stories are insanely popular in popular culture, so it's pretty odd that there aren't all that many RPGs with the premise.
There's Lost Souls, Spooks, Spooks! (note the exclamation point), InSpectres, Reaper Madness, Ghostwalk, World of Darkness, and not much else I can name.
Ghosts are pretty versatile. As NPCs, they can power a ghost-busting investigation game all by themselves without ever involving other types of paranormal beasts. We know this from the multiple Ghost Busters cartoons, Ghost Whisperer-type shows, ghost hunter reality shows where no ghosts appear, and the bazillion ghost horror movies that are terrible but keep getting made.
As PCs, ghosts can still be used for ghost hunting (being a ghost should naturally make it easy to hunt other ghosts, right?), they can be used for espionage (being invisible, intangible and able to fly comes in really handy here), and even haunting their past life reminders can still be used for long-form campaigns of darkly serious and comedic tones. People who can see ghosts or otherwise deal with them can appear too, like mediums, reapers, necromancers, etc. You could get mileage out of people who can astral project into ghostly form through whatever means.
I haven't found any fiction that touches on it that isn't World of Darkness (which has a lot of unique baggage that makes it unsuitable for general discussion of the genre), but you could get mileage out of ghost politics. If there are enough ghosts in a particular town or city or whatever, then doesn't it stand to reason they would band together for protection? Ghost hunters could accidentally burn down your haunted house, a priest might try to exorcise you, or you might have to deal with an evil ghost that wants to hurt you. By extension, doesn't it stand to reason that the ghosts might have developed secret societies whose knowledge is passed down through membership?
Not to mention all of the superpowers and afterlife stuff that might come into play. Ghost fiction has gone through a huge gamut of such things.
I'll leave this here for anyone reading to muddle over.
- Location
- United States
I think a lot depends on the type of ghost you want to portray. Most ghosts fall into two very rough categories: nonsentient or semi-sentient phantasms who act irrationally or reenact specific patterns or ghosts who are fully aware that they are dead and largely retain their ability to think coherently. The first is more common when ghosts are antagonists, the second where ghosts are protagonists, for obvious reasons.
For ghost secret societies you'd need the second option to some degree.
I imagine the two could coexist. Maybe the former sometimes, I don't know, "awaken" as the latter.
Which reminds me... something I find annoying is the assumption by RPGs (in particular) that ghosts have these ethereal bodies resembling human beings. Looking at ghost stories in general (books, movies, reports, etc), there are vast swathes where this clearly isn't the case. Urban legends about vanishing houses (e.g. "The Guests" from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark), reports of ghost animals, numerous reported hauntings where the paranormal phenomena consists of weird sensations/smells/sounds/sights/etc, clouds of ominous fog, wispy orbs, masses of something unidentifiable, all that horror fiction where the haunted house is sentient and malevolent, and the creative ghosts seen in the video game Ghost Master. Ghosts can appear as pretty much any phenomenon, terrain, etc.
Ghost PCs look human because of their "residual self-image" (as The Matrix puts it), and because it's a game convention that is easier for human players to understand.
Another thing that seems to be a common complaint is that ghosts generally have difficulty interacting with the living. Given that we're talking about games here, that can be rectified with character options for things like revenants (the ghost has repaired and reanimated a corpse, letting them infiltrate living society) or vanishing hitchhikers (the ghost can create a convincing disguise with their ghost powers, letting them infiltrate living society).
Really, I could go on forever about this stuff. I have no idea why nobody ever wrote a sitcom starring Patrick Swayze, Ellen Muth, Eliza Dushku, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Bill Murray.
- Location
- United States
I also like the idea I've seen elsewhere that ghosts start sentient but over time their lack of a body causes them to fade and become repetitive shades. They're just old ghosts who have forgotten that they're dead.
Or both. Maybe they start off non-sentient (maybe with lucid periods), may gain sentience (perhaps skipping the non-sentient stage entirely), and maybe lose that sentience again.
Or it could be entirely inconsistent what happens if you're going for a ghost story kitchen sink setting. Every ghost story (and supposed ghost hunters in real life who claim ghosts are verified with Science!) invents its own arbitrary rules for these things. Protagonist ghosts like Casper, Sam Wheat, Elliot Hopper, the Maitlands, Elizabeth Henshaw, Lisa Johnson, Annie Sawyer, Elise Rainier, and Sally Malik clearly don't follow any of the same rules. (Although I can't determine how much of that is artistic license and how much is the SFX budget.) Antagonist ghosts operate on the rule of scary, doing whatever the plot requires at that moment.
Obviously only ghosts who have unfinished business too complicated (or unwilling) to solve in a single episode of Ghost Whisperer or Medium, and who can leave the confines of their house, will be able to build any sort of society. You also need a reason, probably multiple reasons, for them to do so. Dealing with external threats like unwitting interlopers, ghost hunters, and the evil dead are one thing, but do they have anything else? Psychological issues? Belief systems? An economy?
Sally Malik in Being Human (North American) developed new inner demons every season as part of her character arcs and during her moments of crazy her superpowers went haywire. If all sentient ghosts can develop those kinds of problems, then that's a good reason to develop a society that can deal with them. Either with therapy or exorcisms.
I saw a proposal in which ghosts were quite literally made of emotion (it comes with the territory, right?) and got emotionally tired by using their powers (which could vary immensely from ghost to ghost, and could be learned like skills) and had to recharge their emotional juice at their unfinished business nouns (a person, place, or thing that tied them to Earth). Other ghosts could recharge their emotional juice at another ghost's haunted house if the emotional flavor was the same as one of their own unfinished business nouns, and some ghosts had powers to convert the emotional flavor, so territorial gangs with pretentious belief systems popped up to farm their own economy and trade favors. (The emotional resonance of places seems a common theme in ghost stories, so it makes sense to take advantage of that in a game setting.)
In such a setting ghosts are scientifically verifiable, so there would have to be a reason why this hasn't affected the development of human civilization as Limyaael's Rant on Ghosts wonders. Especially if ghost busting is an actual business, because that raises huge philosophical and moral quandaries. Does Fate (with a capital F) conspire to maintain a horror movie status quo that superficially resembles the real world in which, paradoxically, the overwhelming majority of people consistently disbelieve genuine evidence of the paranormal (and its attendant philosophical and cultural implications) even while many in reality are quite willing to believe fake evidence?
Actually, that ties pretty easily into the "ghosts being harassed by ghost hunters" plot hook. These ghost hunters are unable to recognize real evidence except where it is inconvenient for actual ghosts, but seem quite happy to chase complete nonsense like typical horror movie fodder, leading to them harassing innocent ghosts or getting butchered when they harass one of the evil dead.
- Location
- my house
Could you give an example of recharging at a non? It sounds really cool
I imagine that it works like photosynthesis. They just rest in proximity to it (or inside it, or with it in spirit, or however a non-corporeal entity experiences space-time) and bask in the emotional tie they have. Might not be fun if it's a negative emotional tie like "terror and pain regarding the knife that killed me."
On a related note, there could be any number of other ways that ghosts could recharge. Maybe ghosts like to scare people because a fear of ghosts recharges their emotional batteries (a la the Ghost Master video game, which bases its mechanics around haunting hapless victims). Maybe leaving flowers on their grave, or similar traditions of remembering the dead throughout history, recharges their batteries; in a number of cultures these offerings are believed to nourish the dead.
A number of cultures also believe in burying things with the dead, known as "grave goods." If ghosts exist to begin with, then maybe these grave goods actually provide some kind of benefit. To say nothing of ghosts creating stuff themselves out of ectoplasm or whatever.
I skipped over fairies a while back. There isn't anything I can say that hasn't been covered quite adequately by World of Darkness or The Everlasting.
One could invent any number of other character options, but I won't talk about those here. None of them have the cultural cache or the sexiness that makes, say, vampires popular.
Long story short, urban fantasy para-humans can be really diverse when you dig into them. Vampire bloodlines, lupine theriomorphs, etc. Unfortunately, the leading urban fantasy game (World of Darkness) fails to capture this diversity for reasons that elude me. I seem to be one of few people who care.
Too bad, so sad.
One could invent any number of other character options, but I won't talk about those here. None of them have the cultural cache or the sexiness that makes, say, vampires popular.
Long story short, urban fantasy para-humans can be really diverse when you dig into them. Vampire bloodlines, lupine theriomorphs, etc. Unfortunately, the leading urban fantasy game (World of Darkness) fails to capture this diversity for reasons that elude me. I seem to be one of few people who care.
Too bad, so sad.
- Location
- United States
I think it really is just familiarity for the most part. To most people fairies are Tinkerbell and jinn live in lamps and grant wishes.
In my case, familiarity bred contempt.
There's no shortage of paranormal investigation games like Call of Cthulhu, Cryptworld, Monster of the Week... but there don't seem to be as many monster PC games, and fewer still with campaign settings. World of Darkness holds a virtual monopoly, yet remains arbitrarily restrictive and convoluted in its rules and setting. With rare exceptions, like Changeling: The Lost and Hunter: The Vigil that are praised for that reason. I find it unfortunate that similar design principles were not applied to vampires, werewolves, et al.
I'm sure you could get plenty of mileage from a party of vampires or werewolves who follow non-traditional rules. Like vampires that can walk in sunlight, but have other classic weaknesses like sleeping in the soil of their grave and being unable to enter private residences uninvited. Like werewolves who could change shape from birth, or a person was born with a caul and learned lycanthropy as a skill from a secret society.
Etc
- Location
- United States
Yeah, I feel the same way about most fantasy these days. It really takes a unique premise to grab my attention, especially if t's obvious the writer did their homework.