...Some brave soul has done you the favor of prying out the idol's jeweled eyes & they seem to have perished for their trouble. Your trained senses detect the faintest presence of poison but what inflicted this venom? ...

Life & Death.  So this is my third installment of discussing the confluence of these two ideas intersections In Our Hobby.  First – thePhysical with motive force but lacking any anima, and then the Elan-Vital withoutany form.  Zombies & Ghosts. 

I think that there’s a middle ground between the two and that’s where most thoughts of the Undead come from & where it’s easiest to settle into a comfortable groove of ideas relating to stories.  Some of the best stories about living dead people are in this vein – they have the same quality of blood & death & sleep & feeding that people do, just perverted & made macabre.  Naturally we’re talking about Vampires today.

I really like the idea of inherited vampirism, of transmission by biting & generational dilution – all of that.  I really like that but I feel like, also, I don’t have anything to add to that lore beyond approval.  And also – I prefer a different version of the Vampire.  Not the afflicted, not the vaguely biological, and not the hungry dead – rather I like thinking about the Curse. 

There’s the tried & true vampire story – the Mark of Caine & the relevant exposition in Genesis – you’ll be marked & no-one will be able to harm you & so on for being the first murderer.  That’s a solid reason for being a vampire –for The Vampire to come about.

Now, from that you can postulate a fantasyland where sometimes there’s a vampire.  But that’s really in opposition to what I’m interested in considering & talking about.  No Vampire tribes & teams, nosir.  No.  Sometimes there’s not a vampire.  Nope.  Because of That One Catastrophe Now There’s That Vampire.  This is the saga that interests me most. 

(Not to speak against other types of stories, you can have a preference without denigrating the other options – that’s what I’ve got going here.  Communicable vampirism just clings too closely to the physical, and too closely to the prevalent zombie mythos – I don’t need those, not today anyhow.  Today is for cursed people becoming singular & terrible monsters.)

So now I want to think about the terrible things that might occur that could cause there to be something like a Vampire.  I’m working on a list here so maybe I’ll update this as time goes by.

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•   The priests of a god all become some-kind-of-cursed-monster when that god is killed off by an adversarial god following some type of protracted war in heaven.  Let’s say that these Vampires, Undead-Horror-Priests linger in their places of worship & that they are compelled to hunger for the music & praise offered other, still living gods – they must consume the faith & love & hope of the practitioners of other religions.  Let’s say that they do this by stealing & eating children.  That’d just about do it no?  A sect of monstrous clergy all venerating a corpse-god.  So – you see – evocative.  Monstrous. 

•          How about the more solitary individual, a mystic, a wizard.  This person has taken to powering her magic with the vitality of the living - sacrificing animals & sometimes people to a point beyond explicable reason.  Even the simplest of her magics begins to demand the shedding of blood – a crushed frog here, an opened mouse there.  Soon she is just the conduit of blood, a crucible in which is alchemically formed not by her wizardly intention – but by its own magnetic attachment to itself.  So instead of being alive with a mentality & ego, this wizard has become purely instinctual, elemental – in helping blood to seek other blood.  She hungers and seeks & still utilizes her magical practices – but lacks for any autonomy & even the rudiments of life & comfort.  Monstrous.

      Or consider the Lothario – a lustful figure of intrigues & base drives, a man of romance in constant search for more & greater passions.  This man who abides, perpetually in love, in a state of constant youth – fueled by the passions & lusts that he inspires in those he seduces – incubus like.  This predator is blameless, though, and at heart remains innocent, uncorrupted by his antics – he nevertheless visits corruption (maybe like diseases?) to those whom he has preyed upon.  Never aging but leaving a string of wrecked homes, dashed hopes & broken hearts.  Perhaps he sustains himself on the forlorn suicides and relishes the perfume on all the fateful tearsoaked farewell notes that mention him by name.  Monstrous.

• ·        Maybe there’s that one.  That’s never grown up, that is or has always been the devourer, born hungry to a withered mother, it, itself withered beyond recognition, it lived though – a sprite of famine, a token of a pestilent year.  This infant grows & prospers without ever being nurtured.  It begins to steal breath & thus vitality – draining the air of its next parent and then its siblings and eventually the whole village.  The starving waif at the side of the road, permanently shivering, eternally famished.  Taken in, it eats up the smoke in the fireplace, the heat from the flame, the savor of the food and yet never does open its mouth – except at the fatal moment in the night when it drinks the breath of its doomed benefactor.  Monstrous.

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•             Possibly the dancer.  The model of grace & poise, silent in this world, expressing all through movement.  Drifting, confidently, between life & death as another might stride in and out of a room.  The dancer is too fleet, too evasive to ever succumb to death itself, but is too unreal & ethereal to be properly alive either.  This grace is not without its own demands though, and the Dancer Macabre must afflict others with agues & catarrhs – ailments of the joints & breath as they shrug off age they shed infirmity into the prematurely aged.  Disease & misfortune is the coin with which the dancer buys an immortal fame.  Monstrous.

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•            The Warrior.  Essential in this milieu is the one who fights.  This one fights death itself, a knight, killed at war but unwilling to cease the battle, who rises again & again to launch arrows & fire cannon, to cut down the rabble of the opposition.  The blood-covered-warlord whose unlife is made of endless war.  Perhaps guarding eternally against an invader – the city’s last wall & hidden tower, a fortress of a warrior slaked only on repelling the living & destroying them likewise.  Monstrous.

So in my examples I’ve just matched the sorts of monster-vampires to one of the six traditional statistics each.  Just as a guide – a common sensibility that’s reasonably shared among Our Community.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to match each of the examples to the CHA – WIS stats. 

Let’s very briefly hold that the six examples above are sufficient explanation for the why of Vampires.  And Vampire here – well, maybe it’s a loose term bandied with some negligence – but we’ll accept it as the placeholder to encompass – dead things that also have dead souls – that’s the bulls-eye for our discussion and now we’ll look at how distantly we can track from that and still have the thing be the thing.  So that answers the what. 

I think that the how is the best area to focus on now.  How do you persist in living when your body & soul are dead?  Traditionally it’s been the eating of blood & sometimes breath that keep the Vampire going - let’s extend & elaborate on that.  Life, other life.  That’s what you’ve got to live on.  Which is strange because – well, that’s everything alive, except I guess plants – and even plants, well.  They’re pretty mercenary in their own ways too.  Life eats life – so why is the Vampire unwholesome?  Maybe we’ll linger on the stalking & hunting of people (ALWAYS unsavory) and bring that up for closer inspection.  Maybe the Vampire needs to eat something more essential than the life of the people it feeds on.  More than the blood or the breath – let’s use those as markers shall we?  Let’s.  Let’s think that blood & breath represent vitality.

Now – in This Thing We Do – we’ve always or frequently had recourse to the draining & removal of Levels.  People don’t so much have levels in real life, but the system of levels really shines in the RPG as a functional mechanic only when levels are things that can be won & also lost.  Just knowing that around the bend there’s that one creature – you know the one –the WORST ONE –that steals your hard won levels, that bites of your HD and chews up your attack bonuses.  That One’s The Worst. 

Which I think is just right.  It sets the monster up as being truly fearful, menacing.  It’s dangerous in a novel way & a somehow more serious one.  It’ll do things to you that aren’t easily undone.  That’s the most monstrous thing. 

Of course this tracks as a meta-game concept but it’s hard to translate into story – one of those instances where game concepts can fill in blanks that we lack precise language for in storytelling.  There, in that world, you’ve got to use metaphor – The skulking creature fell upon her neck, a broad crimson stripe at its mouth as it eased away from her throat, having slaked its thirst and left her hollow and yet, still alive.  Well, she’s hollow & he’s less hungry?  I mean, there’s so, so many ways to look at this that all refer back to biology – eating, sex, life & death, disease – it’s fine – all of those are fine.  But none of them are metaphysical enough to really rub me as I wish to be rubbed. 

So I think you have to go to sins.  Wickedness – bad-deed-doing.  Let’s make the feeding a component of this – that there has to be a sinister act affiliated – now you’re into sneaking, and eating up innocent people, children if you want, or virgins, or maybe one’s own family members?  Make the killing & eating really Terrible and then you make your monster a Monster and not just a kind of person you might end up being.

Which is the line, in the end, that we’re drawing here – in the sand – between people and Monsters.  We’re making a circle around us and then describing everything on the outside of it as a monster.  In this instance we’ve gone and made concentric rings – In the middle – Us.  People.  So you take something away and end up with a monster – I think, curiously, that the first step of removal is to take away the physicality.  That the ghosts & spirits are closes to people and least monstrous.  Next are the zombies & skeletons, the dead bodies without souls – they’re horrible, sure, but not abstractly alien so much as displeasing, depressing.  Furthest away is the thing with a dead-soul & a dead-body – the predatory monster-person who looks at you not as another & not as a peer – not even as prey.  It looks at you as something to brutalize & defile – and that doing so will grant it some furtherance of its brutal, defiled existence.

A Kind of Vampire.  A Mean One.

This…  To me this story, of the addict, sick with despair & hungry for help – who sees people as mere instruments to aid & feed the addiction – that’s the demeanor of the Vampire, properly expressed.  Who else is so desperate and in turns pitiable & terrifying?  So that’s my who of this monster – the person made monstrous, stripped of persona & agency – left only with unrelatable drives & hopeless wants. 

So that – Is That.  On the three genera of undead monsters this is my assessment.