...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.

·        

•             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.

·        

•            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.

...A Half Ruined Tower Of Antique Design. At Its Shattered Base You Spy An Alcove Or An Entry - This Is A Fine Place To Hide From The Weather - But It May Be Finer Still For...

A while back I started doing this thing. I started doing what amounts to my own illustrations for my D&D character's spellbook. On its face this project is the outsider art of outsider art. Take a rarefied hobby and combine its internal logic with your own ersatz art skills & this is the kind of thing you end up with. Above you see the old staple - Magic Missile. In D&D and it's likenesses there's the little scribble of a note, that one little mention - a spell in the Wizard's spellbook takes up a number of pages equal to the spell's level. This is one of those legacy rules that you can kind of see having come from a place of trying, desperately trying, to mitigate the overwhelming superiority of the Magic-User.

"Make them have to have expensive books! That'll keep them from overwhelming the entire milieu of monsters with lightning bolt-laden fireballs!"

Carrying around an expensive book grants you unimaginable powers eh?  I see the wish fulfillment in that don't you?  Game books aren't cheap.  They're big and they're sometimes illustrated so insipidly that you'd maybe be ashamed to be seen with one in public.  Maybe.  Something in the illustrations - something in them limits, bounds - it paints the game into a kind of corner of cliche.  But that's a topic for another time.  

Let's talk about spellbooks.  For me the price of entry into the world of the Wizard was never anything short of the great complexity that spellcasting characters were prone to.  Give your game books a look & you'll notice that half of the player's guide is a list of magic spells.  Sometimes more.  That's the steep cost of entry - knowing well all these spells & then meta-gaming the setting & the referee enough to know which of the scores of spells you'd be best learning.    

And nothing is to prevent your magic from failing spectacularly - or from failing to properly anticipate the day's difficulties.  Your Shield spell might be right up on your lips, ready to go, and then no-one casts a magic missile anywhere near you.  This, following your own pretty deep dive into a set of supplemental rules that occupy at least half the book!  

It's easy to be critical, and criticism, even when it comes from an admiring place of love is always redolent of some kind of hostility.  My love is for This Thing Of Ours - my hostility?  It's for failed die-rolls and ugly monster-stat blocks with fine-print spell-lists.  It's for the complexity that these systems offer while still being rote and even prosaic, routine.  

There's something unsettlingly tragic about a system of magic that isn't magical, that's been made mundane.  

So I thought about a spellbook.  Making this was fun.  I ended up considering, while I put together the materials, the ideas that would go into them, I ended up considering - what would it be like to have these spells?  I mean, to know them and to be able to throw them in the world.  Imagination.  That's what This Thing is all about.  What would it be?

The first magic to give me pause was Charm Person.  The old reliable standard that, if you could use, if you could make it work, in this world we live in - you'd be just the worst.  The Worst.  

"Weren't you and your pals just trying to kill me?"  

"Oh, not us, we're your friends, We're not like the Others."

So yes, magical gaslighting is a thing that got invented by the early practitioners of our hobby.  Let's continue onward, past that.  I mean, if I had that ability I don't think I'd use it.  

Maybe for money.  Maybe. 

The first magic spell my character got that actually scared me - that I realized I would never use was See Invisible.  If there were, let's say, magic forces in the world, invisible powers, ghosts, spirits - they're all around aren't they?  Who even knows what type of awful stuff is all around or even what type of invisible spirit things are rubbing all up and on you.  On a bet I wouldn't cast this spell.  If my life depended on it I don't know if I'd take that chance.

This is what's missing.  When you make the game about knowing all the spells in a book and mastering which will be useful in a given scenario.

A lot of things are gained - that's how a lot of people really like to play & I know, I know - something in critical discussion always seems to carry a fragment of contempt - but there's not any here.  We Do This Thing different.  When we do it.  

What I found to be missing was creation.  Making things up - working within a framework of physical laws rather than a framework of strict orthodox rules.  

So I made my own game.  

What I tried addressing in doing so were my complaints with how the fantastic is sometimes made to seem mundane.  I wanted, above all, to have Wonder & Adventure as the foundational experiences beneath the whole project.  Here's how I did some of that.

• Spellbooks - there's a few, I make them.  If you make one I'll probably try and print it for you.  Most of the ones I've made are physical objects that have been handed out to players.  They're intentionally strange, intentionally unique.  
• No Spellbook - I took the long, long list of alphabetically indexed & level organized spells that all my favorite games had and then I discarded them.  What I tried to do instead is form a system for making your own magic.  In 11 pages I was able to pack in a vast variety of magical spells - many more than you'll find in another game.  Because My Game Is Best.
• Letting It Flow - Some ideas are held back at the table, some notions are never approached - the strict laws of the system seem to be a hedge to imagination rather than an aid to its exercise.  So establishing that the book is just a book - that the Players have Agency, power over the game itself - that remains the mountaintop I'm trying to climb to.
• Making the Stories Cooler - And on this topic I've more to say at a later time.  

Of course - this is just Magic.  Not the whole thing by a long way.  But I have a lot to say - about how these things are done & from whence these schemes emerged.