Demographics and Urban Fantasy

[Username17]

...subjective reality is a great central conceit to wrap a game about magic around.

No it's not. It's a cool conceit for single author fiction, but it's terrible for a cooperative game.

Yeah, I literally cannot think of a worse conceit for a cooperative storytelling game than "solipsism is true." How is any group supposed to agree on the progress of a story if there isn't a consistent reality for the narrative to take place in? What the fuck?

-Username17

[Daniel]

(First of all sorry for derailing the thread)

Having 5 forms gives your illustrators options. A big deal in a style over substance operation like White Wolf.
Those 5 forms also all do show up in werewolf fiction. If you want to emulate different types of werewolf fiction you'll want them.
I think in practice a lot of players did not use all of them much, but which ones they did use differed between players.

As for subjective reality. I think it is clear (that at least at one point) White Wolf was angling for different subcultures to adopt their different games. So it makes no sense if you are doing yet another game for hot goth chicks, but if you are making a game for college kids who took "Postmodern Philosophy 101" and were blown away by it, it does make sense.
And if you think:"Hey wait a minute, there aren't enough of those to make that work.", well that's why it was not the huge success Masquerade was.

[Daniel]

What the fuck?

-Username17

I'm pretty certain WW never got beyond the 'this is a cool explanation why Gandalf, a magic Shaolin monk and a cyborg are using the same rules set' stage.
Which is why they never even wrote an essay on the question, 'How do your player characters cause a paradigm to shift in a location?'.

I'm surprised there are people out there who think a game about super powered beings who can rewrite reality at will, who are having a conflict about what should be the preferred lens to use to perceive reality is the worst idea ever.

[Omegonthesane]

What the fuck?

-Username17

I'm pretty certain WW never got beyond the 'this is a cool explanation why Gandalf, a magic Shaolin monk and a cyborg are using the same rules set' stage.
Which is why they never even wrote an essay on the question, 'How do your player characters cause a paradigm to shift in a location?'.

I'm surprised there are people out there who think a game about super powered beings who can rewrite reality at will, who are having a conflict about what should be the preferred lens to use to perceive reality is the worst idea ever.

It doesn't matter what the first half of your sentence is, if the latter is "what should be the preferred lens to use to perceive reality" in the sense that literally perceiving it differently makes your magic work or not work your idea is trash and you should throw it in the trash. Because you cannot have a collaborative story where the whole point is no one actually agrees how the universe works.

[Daniel]

You are using perceive wrong.

Actually doing magic is via a common set of rules*.
What it looks like in setting follows the personal prejudices of the spellcaster.
And if a spellcaster's personal prejudices weren't dominant in the area he got screwed, unless he was very discrete.



*Well it was supposed to, Ascension rules were rather vague and inconsistent.

[Username17]

I know that when I play a Role Playing Game, I definitely want it to go like this:

• Steve: I go to the corner store.
  Storyteller: What do you mean?
  Steve: The Seven Eleven on the corner. I'm going there.
  Immanuel K: I don't think predicates exist. Every thing is a thing in itself, not a member of any group. There is Seven Eleven, and it has relationships to other things, such as Filbert Street and Apple Lane, which it is at the juncture of. But it is not a "corner store" because that would imply that there was a set of stores and that Seven Eleven was within that set and able to take a predicate identifying it within that set.
  Michael D: I object to your categorization of objects within a spatial framework, because distance and direction are only in your mind. You can no more go to the store than the store can be at the corner, because time and space are entirely illusory. You want "to go" to "the corner" because you believe that time will pass and you will transit from a place that has no Seven Eleven to a different place that does. But there are no places - Seven Eleven and all of its contents are "here" and "now" in precisely the same way as they are "there" and "soon." Not only should you not "go," you can't go. Going requires you to subserviate yourself to the tyranny of distance.
  David H.: Acknowledging Steve and the Seven Eleven as things that can be brought together, it's important that there is understanding that the Steve who doesn't have a slurpee and the Steve that does are not the same person. It is not that "I" or "You" go to the store, but that Steve exists first without a slurpee in a space that is not at the corner and then there is a Steve who is at the Seven Eleven and has a slurpee. But these two Steves have different experiences. Beyond the fact that they are in different places and exist at different times, they have different memories and different desires. The slurpeeless Steve is doubtless thirsty and has desire for a slurpee. While the Steve on Filbert Street can no longer fully remember what it felt like to be thirsty and is instead experiencing a "brain freeze." By any measure, these are different men, and the connotations of using "I" with a progressive verb to link the two is at best inadequate.

-Username17

[Jason]

As for subjective reality. I think it is clear (that at least at one point) White Wolf was angling for different subcultures to adopt their different games. So it makes no sense if you are doing yet another game for hot goth chicks, but if you are making a game for college kids who took "Postmodern Philosophy 101" and were blown away by it, it does make sense.

There is only one product I know of that is best suited for a niche market of postmodern philosophy enthusiasts:

It is the single most regressive approach in epistemology since the inception of philosophy. It basically throws epistemology out the window.

I know that when I play a Role Playing Game, I definitely want it to go like this:

• Steve: I go to the corner store.
  Storyteller: What do you mean?
  Steve: The Seven Eleven on the corner. I'm going there.
  Immanuel K: I don't think predicates exist. Every thing is a thing in itself, not a member of any group. There is Seven Eleven, and it has relationships to other things, such as Filbert Street and Apple Lane, which it is at the juncture of. But it is not a "corner store" because that would imply that there was a set of stores and that Seven Eleven was within that set and able to take a predicate identifying it within that set.
  Michael D: I object to your categorization of objects within a spatial framework, because distance and direction are only in your mind. You can no more go to the store than the store can be at the corner, because time and space are entirely illusory. You want "to go" to "the corner" because you believe that time will pass and you will transit from a place that has no Seven Eleven to a different place that does. But there are no places - Seven Eleven and all of its contents are "here" and "now" in precisely the same way as they are "there" and "soon." Not only should you not "go," you can't go. Going requires you to subserviate yourself to the tyranny of distance.
  David H.: Acknowledging Steve and the Seven Eleven as things that can be brought together, it's important that there is understanding that the Steve who doesn't have a slurpee and the Steve that does are not the same person. It is not that "I" or "You" go to the store, but that Steve exists first without a slurpee in a space that is not at the corner and then there is a Steve who is at the Seven Eleven and has a slurpee. But these two Steves have different experiences. Beyond the fact that they are in different places and exist at different times, they have different memories and different desires. The slurpeeless Steve is doubtless thirsty and has desire for a slurpee. While the Steve on Filbert Street can no longer fully remember what it felt like to be thirsty and is instead experiencing a "brain freeze." By any measure, these are different men, and the connotations of using "I" with a progressive verb to link the two is at best inadequate.

-Username17

You've been listening in to my wednesday group, haven't you?

[Username17]

Those 5 forms also all do show up in werewolf fiction. If you want to emulate different types of werewolf fiction you'll want them.
I think in practice a lot of players did not use all of them much, but which ones they did use differed between players.

That's an argument for having the different "clans" of Werewolves have different alternate forms. Like, just as there are people who are drawn to Vampire because of different kinds of Vampire movies and fiction, there are people drawn to play Werewolf because they are drawn to different kinds of Werewolf fiction.

If you had Talbots becoming Lon Cheney wolfmen who could pass as strong hairy guys by wearing baggy clothes and Quists becoming giant wolf monsters with retrograde legs, and Kesslers becoming giant quadruped monsters that would be something to hang your hat on. People could say "I like The Howling" or "I like American Werewolf" and pick one of those types. By giving every Werewolf access to every form available in the game they trivialized the differences between Werewolves. Saying that every Werewolf has some of the aspects of Teenwolf and some of the aspects of The Howling and some of the aspects of American Werewolf meant that no Werewolf fan actually got a reasonable facsimile of anything they actually wanted.

And because the types were instead weird somewhat racist things that no one can even remember, no one gave a shit about any of them. The Red Talons only appeal to people you don't want in your town let alone in your game. Because it was a completely empty attempt to cargo cult the trappings of Vampire, it didn't do any of the things that made Vampire work in the first place. The different clans sell the game because they appeal to people who want to play characters patterned off of different entries in the genre. The Werewolf tribes just... they just don't do that.

-Username17

[Daniel]

If you had Talbots becoming Lon Cheney wolfmen who could pass as strong hairy guys by wearing baggy clothes and Quists becoming giant wolf monsters with retrograde legs, and Kesslers becoming giant quadruped monsters that would be something to hang your hat on.

Considering White Wolf's skill at game balance, the only thing you would have gotten was the tribe that looked the strongest at first glance being overrepresented.

Because it was a completely empty attempt to cargo cult the trappings of Vampire,

Not empty. They knew part of the reason their Vampire game was a hit was because they had tapped into a new market segment*. The Goths. So for Apocalypse they made a conscious play for a different subculture. The tribes don't map onto werewolf archetypes like Vampire clans map onto vampire archetypes. Half of them map onto counterculture archetypes related to new age spirituality. That is why there are 3 indian tribes (1 extinct), because there were plenty new agers out there in the 90's who had a hard on for generic indian spirituality. The crossover space between environmentalism and New Age, that was going to be their new market segment.
So it's not what flavour of werewolf are you, but play a Heavy Metal version of a worldview that interests you and you are a werewolf.
And yes it never worked as well as vampire, but considering how much Werewolf stuff they published I doubt it was a massive failure.


*Probably by accident, I suspect they just wanted to syphon of some of the older Ravenloft AD&D players from TSR.

[Username17]

So for Apocalypse they made a conscious play for a different subculture. The tribes don't map onto werewolf archetypes like Vampire clans map onto vampire archetypes. Half of them map onto counterculture archetypes related to new age spirituality.

I don't buy that precisely because you can't even make the claim that they map onto new age spirituality archetypes. Your claim is that "half" of them do, which is basically the same as claiming there's no correlation at all - and I agree.

While you could claim that the Silent Striders and the Uktena are in there because of some newage spirituality rant about Egyptians or Native Americans respectively, you can't even draw that sort of tenuous line to the Silver Fangs or the Star Gazers. You just... can't do that. The Silver Fangs and the Stargazers are self referential, concerned not with referencing any fiction or social movement, but with referencing esoteric crap about the world of Werewolf: the Apocalypse itself. The Silver Fangs exist in conflict for leadership with the Shadow Lords because the Ventrue were in conflict with the Brujah and for no other reason.

The simple fact is that Vampires had Clans so they busted out a thesaurus and decided to split the Werewolves into Tribes. It really is that simple. And the Vampires were split into 13 clans, so they decided to slot in more tribes than that. But since they had no real ideas for what the tribes are supposed to represent, it's just Mad Libs all the way down. Sadly, the fact is that the tribes in Werewolf are exactly as poorly thought out as they appear. It's literally just the results of a brainstorming session where the only thing at the top of the whiteboard was "Clan Tribe List". The reason that so many of them seem redundant or pointless is that fucking none of them have a purpose in story or marketing beyond the empty recapitulation of having a bunch of Clans like Masquerade did.

Now obviously groups like the Fianna and the Black Furies are pointless, because I can't even remember what they fucking do or why I'm supposed to care and neither can anyone else because obviously those were ideas that were spitballed in less than five minutes and no one spent any real time polishing that turd before it went to print. But it's interesting to consider what groups of lycanthropes actually would serve some kind of purpose.

The core issue I think is that there is a real market for people who want to be Weretigers and Wereboars and shit. But it's equally true that Werewolves are massively more popular than the other options. So probably you'd want to have a couple flavors of Wolves and like one flavor of Bears, Sharks, or fucking whatever you chose to support.

-Username17

[Daniel]

The Fianna, Black Furies and Stargazers are New Age archetypes.
Celtic spirituality, radical feminist collective and oriental spirituality.

The ones that aren't, Silver Fangs, Glasswalkers, Shadow Lords, are there for traditional rpg players who would presumably also buy the game, or because they needed to be there for the metaplot to make sense.

I think a better example of thoughtless redesign are the tribes in Werewolf the Forsaken. That was: "We had tribes the last time, so we need them again, but this time they can't be cartoonish!".
We both can rattle of a list of Apocalypse tribes, but I can't remember a single Forsaken tribename. I think thematically they tried to carry over tribes that weren't ethnic, or directly tied to the Apocalypse metaplot, but I'm not sure and can't be bothered to find out.

[Omegonthesane]

If you can't make your metaplot make sense with just the tribes that are meant as marketing, you can't make your metaplot make sense, period, end of story.

If you can't get "traditional rpg players" to buy into just the tribes that are meant as marketing, you're not fit to design an RPG.

[Daniel]

From a business standpoint if it sells, it does not matter much if 10 years from now your buyers ask themselves: "How the hell did we delude ourselves into thinking this was remotely good for a few years?".

[Omegonthesane]

*cough* *cough* repeat sales

Also you're accusing White Wolf of a level of business acumen that is not supported by the evidence you have brought to the jury.

[Username17]

The WtF Tribes are, like the nWoD Mage groups, absolutely no more or less than someone filling in Mad Libs. They decided that there was a five by five model that they used for Requiem, and then they pulled random words out of a fucking hat to fill a five by five model for Werewolf and Mage and that was terrible.

But that doesn't mean that the Werewolf Tribes were anything more than just people shouting out ideas in a brainstorming session at a whiteboard in Atlanta. Clearly someone said "we need a bunch of Clan equivalents, let's throw some ideas out there." I mean, to this day I don't know if there are more than 13 because they decided they wanted to have more than thirteen in order to have more space for expansion than Masquerade did or whether they were trying to make a list of thirteen and just lost count. Even with the benefit of hindsight, I can't even tell if the tribe layout was the result of people submitting the minimum required by the design specs or the result of people submitting a first draft that no one bothered to edit down. That's how fucking lazy it is. It's so lazy and uninspired that I can't even tell what the design criteria were supposed to be.

The fact that you have "ethnic" tribes like the Fianna and you have "world society" tribes like the Bone Gnawers and you got "werewolf society" clans like the Shadow Lords means that you had at least three different ideas in the design team about what a tribe was supposed to be about. The Fianna are about being vaguely racist to Irish people and cavorting with Leprechauns and drinking too much (seriously!), while the Bone Gnawers are ethnicity agnostic and represent the lower ends of the economic spectrum in capitalist society generally. These two tribes don't have anything to talk about because they represent completely different frameworks of dividing up human society - it's totally possible to be Irish and a hobo. Meanwhile, the Shadow Lords only exist to play a role in their made-up Werewolf society and don't represent any facet of human society at all. You could seriously make a nWoD style five by five model where a single character was a Fianna and a Bone Gnawer and a Shadow Lord at the same time, because they aren't exclusive concepts.

From a business standpoint if it sells, it does not matter much if 10 years from now your buyers ask themselves: "How the hell did we delude ourselves into thinking this was remotely good for a few years?".

Other than Masquerade, there's no particular evidence that any of the other lines ever sold especially well. Indeed, while the wild tonal shifts of various Werewolf products are consistent with the original book's lazy and contradictory design, it's also consistent with a game line that was never doing all that well and constantly fiddling with things trying to find a market beyond "Vampire fans who wanted to buy more World of Darkness books that month".

The initial blurb promised "Savage Horror" and that never went anywhere or had much of an audience. Various Werewolf books tried to sell themselves as activist gaming or superhero stories or really gross fetish porn. The attempt of part of the original book to sell itself as a "Game of Savage Horror" clearly didn't work, because if it did they would have spent more effort in supporting that.

As is, they didn't even bother whining that people were playing the game wrong because "It's supposed to be a game of savage horror" or some shit. They straight up didn't bother to commit to what the underlying themes were supposed to be because they never found an audience for any of them that was worth chasing.

-Username17

[Daniel]

They've produced a 100+ different Werewolf the Apocalypse books in about a decade of time. That suggests a consistent seller, but for all I know the line was kept afloat by syphoning of Vampire sales money the entire time.

Was the Savage Horror tagline ever more than a marketing slogan?
And those tonal shifts, is that a gameline struggling to find success, or just inconsistent writing and a line developer without a coherent vision?
(don't bother answering those are rhetorical questions)

(answer this one instead)
Why were they complaining about people playing their games wrong??
Because it is not just Vampire, they were also angry about the way folks played Mage.
Your customers love your Vampire the Masquerade game. Many even play it like many vampires in setting behave. But no, not good enough.

[Username17]

Why were they complaining about people playing their games wrong??

Vampire: the Masquerade had a significant cross genre appeal. Much more so than any of their other titles. The fanbase was much larger than the group of people who made it. A significant group of the people who made Vampire felt invaded by these newcomers. Similar to how various people lose their shit about fake geek girls or whatever.

So yes, obviously the "rational" thing to do upon discovering that the thing you wrote is wildly more popular than you expected it to be and sells millions of books would be to embrace this, find out what your adoring public actually wants, make more of that, and retire to a fancy house with a few million in the bank at 34. But people rarely work that way, and creative types even less so.

So a bunch of the people who were in on the early White Wolf train spent their entire time there fighting for the purity of their vision, whatever the fuck it was. Fighting off other authors who wanted to take the game in different directions, and fighting off segments of the fanbase who wanted to take the game in different directions as well. It's not rational (at least if you assume it's rational to try to make as much money as possible), but authors do this kind of shit all the time. When I was writing Shadowrun I spent way too much time fighting for my vision rather than just quickly hacking out drafts of whatever the fuck Rob and Peter wanted at the time. From the rational standpoint of making money by writing that obviously didn't make sense - but I'm a fucking doctor, I make plenty of money not writing. I write because I want to, and at the time I wanted Shadowrun to go in certain directions. To the point that when I lost out, I walked away and pursued medicine rather than continuing to chase writing paychecks.

Even successful writers shoot themselves in the foot in this way all the time. Like how GRRMartin spends his every waking moment trying to come up with plot twists that none of the fans have predicted. Or like how JKRowling wrote an entire epilogue just to tell various shippers that they were wrong in canon.

I have every reason to believe that Justin Achilli was sincere about having strong opinions about how Vampire was supposed to be. And I have every reason to believe that Bill Bridges was sincere about having strong opinions about how Mage was supposed to be. And the fact that both of them repeatedly chose paths that alienated chunks of the fanbase in pursuit of some sort of gate keeping purity pony bullshit seems entirely consistent with everything else they've done and said.

Mage, for all I harp on it being a grotesquery of unplayability and a hot mess of contradictory themes, it is sincere. The people who wrote up Mage in the first place do in fact appear to actually be crazy people in precisely the sort of way you'd expect them to be given that they wrote that stuff. Werewolf isn't that. Werewolf is the product of a product development brainstorming session. Every part of Werewolf is just the empty scaffold of Vampire: the Masquerade filled up Mad Libs style with stuff that has been deliberately twisted or inverted to create product identity. Werewolf is basically Poochy the fucking Dog.

But yes, the fact that White Wolf deliberately pissed off their own fanbase in pursuit of an artistic vision that was itself pretty stupid is not really a paradox. That's the part of White Wolf's rise and fall that makes perfect sense.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

I think it’s important to look at the overall goal. Here that means producing a vibrant and interesting multi-faceted vampire society that is hidden behind a masquerade. That’s what VtM claims to do (but really doesn’t) and it’s also what your average urban fantasy series featuring vampires (nearly all of them) claims to do, often with less verisimilitude than VtM itself did. So what you’re doing is attempting to reverse engineer this situation such that it has the highest verisimilitude possible.
This involves more than just vampire/human population ratios and it has more complications than just the murder rate.

City Variance
VtM has vampires as expressly urban creatures, which makes sense in a modern setting. Predators go where the prey is at. However, ‘urban’ areas vary vastly in size. A small urban metro might be around 100,000 people, while a modern mega-city can easily hit 10+ million, so you’re talking about a range of over two orders of magnitude. Just as cities across those ranges tend to be very different, it is likely that vampire society, and consequently the stories that you tell, probably varies across that range as well.

To pull out an example from modern media, compare The Vampire Diaries to its spin-off The Originals. Dairies happens in the fictional large town/small city of Mystic Falls, and it has a core group of resident supernaturals of about a dozen. The Originals is set in New Orleans and regularly includes wide shots of supernatural mobs including dozens of vampires or witches or whatever. The former series operates as a paranormal romance and soap opera, while the latter is an epic dynastic struggle.

So regardless of whether your ratio is 1/100,000 or 1/10,000 or 1/1000, the Vampire experience is going to be different depending on location and the game needs to acknowledge this and decide what the generic model is going to be. What you probably want is a model that fits the 500,000-2,000,000 zone, which will allow the use of the big nearby metro to pretty much anyone in the world, with explanatory options for how life in smaller or much larger cities works. Your core group to sustain a vibrant vampire society is about thirty vampires, plus a much larger associated group of ghouls, herd members, and other minions. At the same time you probably don’t want the number to get much above 100, since then it becomes complicated. A ratio of around 1/20,000 handles this fairly well.
The real issue is that you have to produce some explicit reason why vampires remain only in large urban areas and don’t disperse to rural areas once those areas become large enough to accommodate them. Even if you assume a vampire needs a population of 20,000 people to comfortably hide within (already difficult), such places have proliferated across the globe in the last century and are now everywhere. So you need to either say that something keeps the vampires out of small towns and rural areas (in VtM this was supposed to be werewolves, but that didn’t work), or you have to cede a huge portion of the globe as the domain of isolated vampires who report only to the Prince in charge of the nearest metro irregularly, but this makes the masquerade almost impossible to sustain because now there’s no enforcement mechanism.

History
VtM has a history problem, in that a lot of what works in the modern nights works poorly in pre-industrial times and becomes comical in the ancient world. This has profound and almost universally bad impacts on the world-building. This is, however, is a self-inflicted wound. White Wolf chose to make the biblical Caine the first vampire and not only did this infect a nominally global game with a Christian worldview, it created all sorts of issues because they had to justify everything going back to the dawn of time.

There’s no need to keep this and actually good reasons not to. Instead, it is vastly beneficial to begin Vampire society in a much more modern reference frame. I favor making the first modern vampire Vlad the Impaler – Dracula – since this obviously has the appropriate tropes locked down. This allows for vampire society to emerge in the 15th century, much closer to the present. There certainly can have been vampires before that – as a handful of nocturnal predators – but Dracula produces their integration into modern society and gets to be responsible for the modern lineages (whatever they may be). This helps handle the inevitable Euro and Western centrism of VtM as a game by having the progenitor be a European and Vampirism spreading more rapidly and easily through Christendom as a consequence, with it taking longer for it to get a hold elsewhere. This also means that any local bloodlines in far-flung places emerged very recently, which prevents them from wrecking the game.

The vampire population then simply expands to a ratio close to the modern one over time, gradually spreading to smaller and smaller cities as those become big enough to handle hosting a vampire population.

A positive effect of this is also that the eldest of elders are only around five hundred years old, meaning their power – while certainly substantial – need not be world-ending or insurmountable. The vampire revolution should be really hard, but at least conceivable.

Power, or the Danger of Having Too Much
The game is Vampire the Masquerade, and the Masquerade is very, very important to not only retaining the wikifacts aspect of the game, but also to evade the ‘vampire world’ problem wherein vampires either rule all and/or you end up in the world of Daybreakers. This is a good reason to keep the overall number of vampires as low as you can, because every vampire is, in some sense, a superhero. VtM characters didn’t have a lot of starting dots, but it was certainly possible for a character reach the point where they could star on a Marvel Netflix show, and most century-old characters more or less start there. If you have too many vampires, you quickly reach the point where they are no longer outgunned, especially in ancient times (this is another reason for starting much closer to the modern day, in the Dracula-as-progenitor scenario, no Vampire ever lived in a world without guns).

Once you start to add in mind control and other supernatural methods of social authority, it quickly becomes difficult to limit the influence of the vampires even when they are very thin on the ground. That’s a good reason to keep their numbers as low as you can while still managing to assemble a society of the night. I’d push down to 1/25000 for this, maybe lower in some areas, and it becomes imperative to find a way to keep vampires from gaining control of authoritarian states and acquiring the nuclear codes. In classic WoD this came from other supernaturals (mages mostly), but I think a better solution is warranted since that simply turns the world into the pawns of some other faction.

Feeding and Murders
Vampires obviously need to be able to feed without killing and without being detected. It’s pretty much a base requirement of vampirism. I think the best solution is to modify the inherent nature of the feeding action such that it induces short-term memory loss 99.999% of the time. People know something freaky happened to them, but they can’t recall what and attribute it to the aftereffects of drugs, or sex, or partying too hard, or whatever. Combine this with the ‘lick the wounds clean’ effect that VtM vampires actually possessed already, and the only way you’d notice vampire feeding is by tracking anemia in a localized area. Dropping a body, while feeding, would be a huge masquerade violation and might mean exile and potentially the death of the current persona.

Vampires can, of course, kill people for non-feeding purposes all the time (within normal boundaries of fantasy violence) and it’s not a problem so long as most Vampires aren’t doing this and that vampire activity is replacing an otherwise human element of the violence statistics. For example, redoing pretty much any Marvel Netflix show only the main character is a vampire doesn’t cause problems.

Summary
So long as you set the vampire/human ratio between 1/10,000 and 1/30,000 you’ll have enough vampires in most cities worth bothering with. If you provide a safe feeding mechanism you avoid feeding-related murders. If you curtail the timeline you avoid a bunch of geopolitical historical issues.

The remaining problems are you need a reason why vampires congregate in cities and avoid the countryside and why the vampires don’t rule the world. This reason also needs to function within the boundaries of the Masquerade. Werewolves, done right, might work. Certainly they’re rural. They could have a bloodhound like ability to detect those recently fed upon not yet reproducible by science. They could also make sure to keep a few members well placed within the military-industrial complex so no one gets any crazy ideas about the nuke codes. However, it’s not ideal because it means adding a second supernatural faction that you also have to get right. Hunters might be able to fill the role, but it’s hard to imagine a hunter organization that is both informed, effective, and hasn’t broken the Masquerade to launch and win World War V. So I don’t really know.

[Username17]

So you need to either say that something keeps the vampires out of small towns and rural areas (in VtM this was supposed to be werewolves, but that didn’t work), or you have to cede a huge portion of the globe as the domain of isolated vampires who report only to the Prince in charge of the nearest metro irregularly, but this makes the masquerade almost impossible to sustain because now there’s no enforcement mechanism.

There doesn't have to be no enforcement mechanism. One of the better setups for small groups of characters to have serialized supernatural adventures is the Scooby Doo model. If the player characters are the enforcement mechanism, traveling to small rural areas where local supernatural creatures are not following the rules and bringing the harsh justice of imperial law, that justifies all kinds of things.

Heck, it even justifies the kinds of massively unsustainable body counts that supernatural stories like to have. You are going after Leatherface because he's killing an unsustainably large number of people. And the next time you're going after the mutants from The Hills Have Eyes because they are also killing an unsustainably large number of people - but also you're doing quite a bit of research and traveling in between, so you aren't depopulating Cabot Cove with all your adventures.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

There doesn't have to be no enforcement mechanism. One of the better setups for small groups of characters to have serialized supernatural adventures is the Scooby Doo model. If the player characters are the enforcement mechanism, traveling to small rural areas where local supernatural creatures are not following the rules and bringing the harsh justice of imperial law, that justifies all kinds of things.

Heck, it even justifies the kinds of massively unsustainable body counts that supernatural stories like to have. You are going after Leatherface because he's killing an unsustainably large number of people. And the next time you're going after the mutants from The Hills Have Eyes because they are also killing an unsustainably large number of people - but also you're doing quite a bit of research and traveling in between, so you aren't depopulating Cabot Cove with all your adventures.

-Username17

That's a really good point. Actually, VtM even had people in this sort of role - though they were all big dick NPCs you didn't get to play, but that should certainly be adjusted. This even helps justify the existence of some sort of overarching Camarilla-type organization - it retains control over all the territory not claimed by individual Princes and receives a tithe suitable for maintaining the Masquerade there. This would make the Camarilla equivalent to an organization that controls government owned land like the BLM. Such agencies do indeed have their own law enforcement.

You could even codify this into Cam law. "In order to be granted the title of Prince, you must obtain acknowledgement of your suzerainty of not less than ten of the kindred and encompassing an area populated by not less than one hundred thousand of the kine." Or something similar. In the middle ages and renaissance that would have represented a territorial unit at the principality level (how many people lived in Wallachia in 1450?), which would justify the title. The shift to cities could simply be a natural development over time because rural unlife is boring and because the church - your natural source of hunters whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or otherwise - was weaker in urban areas.

You could also potentially do this to provide a non-War of Ages justification for geopolitics above the city level. If the Camarilla is receiving a tithe (meaning taxes) from various Princes, this is presumably subject to negotiation, and each Prince, or coalitions of Princes in a given region will obviously contest the various levels of taxation (literal blood and treasure) being used for Cam operations if they can't see results. If one region goes bad and can't keep things under control such that additional amounts have to be levied you then have a motive for powerful Princes to try and annex those regions or install minions as their subordinates in order to reduce their taxes and earn favors from the Cam. This even helps to provide a financial motive for the vampiric establishment to preserve the Masquerade (there's a great scene in The Wire where Stringer explains how expensive cover-ups and courtroom bribes are and how it's better to just not randomly murder people).

For example, if a wily sociopathic vampire moves in to Fresno, CA and starts a nasty gang war and drops a lot of bodies, it serves as an excuse for the Prince of San Francisco to send out his own kill squad in the name of preserving the Masquerade, murder the Prince of Fresno, and install his/her childe as the new Prince. That way you can have conflicts without needing a sect of psychos and you can also have false flag operations, character assassination campaigns, and also sorts of other nasty methods to build an empire of influence across a region through vampiric nepotism.

And if this sort of conflict plays out heavily through proxies like ghouls and other mortal minions, it can be disguised as gang wars, political assassinations, and other normal criminality without putting too much pressure on the Masquerade. I mean, this involves the vampires controlling a good portion of the world's criminal element, but that's obviously going to happen anyway.

[kzt]

Or the PCs arrive on a 787 from Chicago at LAX and get met by the young woman who hands them their new CHP detective credentials, a target folder and the keys to the armored black SUVs full of guns.

[Chamomile]

You could even codify this into Cam law. "In order to be granted the title of Prince, you must obtain acknowledgement of your suzerainty of not less than ten of the kindred and encompassing an area populated by not less than one hundred thousand of the kine." Or something similar. In the middle ages and renaissance that would have represented a territorial unit at the principality level (how many people lived in Wallachia in 1450?),

According to Wikipedia, 500,000. Which works out perfectly, because it creates that transition from vampire lords reigning over moderately sized countries in the late middle ages to modern princes ruling over small city states.

I like the idea of Dracula as the first modern vampire, if not the first vampire period. I think witches and werewolves can safely predate vampires and go back clear to the bronze age, witches because they have no particular incentive to ever murder anyone except for regular old political or personal reasons that people already murder each other over, and werewolves because they're out in a hostile wilderness that already kills a lot of the people who enter it, so it's not a big deal if we take a few deaths out of "gored by boar" column and place them under "mauled by werewolf."

Similarly, it makes sense that witch population density scales with the availability of education (including just plain old literacy), which means you'd expect it to be much more sparse right up until public education started becoming a thing in the 19th century, which, wouldn't you know it, is also not too far off from when occult fads began periodically taking hold of not just the upper class, but the general population. Werewolves live off the edges of the map and do not have any need for human populations of any size to sustain themselves - just the opposite, in fact - so you'd actually expect there to have been significantly higher werewolf populations back in the day, with a recent crash brought on in the last few centuries by a couple of factors: Cities are expanding more rapidly leaving werewolves with less room to safely wolf out, and being spotted in wolf form is less and less safe as human ability to kill werewolves grows from requiring a monster hunting party drastically outnumbering the target pack equipped with specialized silver spears to requiring a single monster hunter per werewolf with specialized silver bullets to requiring one spotter and one guy with the silver-shooting LMG for a pack of almost any size, and if you have a third guy to haul ammo you can skip the silver and bring a bazooka instead and it'll probably work out for packs sized 3-6, depending on range of engagement.

[Username17]

While there's little to be gained by having vampire society dominated by ancient evils from thousands of years ago, I think there is narrative value in those things existing. Sleeping monsters that are so old that they care nothing for the niceties of modern supernatural society and rise to try to conquer the world or eat all the protagonists or issue in a thousand years of darkness or whatever is a classic trope for a reason. It fits well into the urban fantasy milieu, it's awesome, and it's a good source of up-scaled antagonists.

The idea of having Wallachia as the first vampire principality is one which has a lot of legs. And indeed, the idea of a vampire to have to control an area with half a million humans to call themselves Prince is one which is fairly useful for modern times. It means that you can just barely be Prince of Lafayette, Louisiana if you include Opelousas and Morgan City. More generally it means that there are more than a hundred potential Principalities in the United States, which is enough that players can go make their own easily enough.

But there's no reason that we have to get rid of Ancient Egyptian Vampires and Imperial Roman Vampires to do that. They can just be very small in number and mostly used as big bads.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

I think witches and werewolves can safely predate vampires and go back clear to the bronze age

Hypothetically, you could work it that Vampires are ultimately just a highly specialized kind of witch - or what a witch becomes after practicing too much blood magic and related dark deals. Then Dracula simply becomes the guy who figured out a ritual means to turn otherwise non-mystics into vampires using the right ritual/curse combination in order to give himself an army to fight the Ottomans with ('hey, it turns out if you drain all their blood fast enough and then prime the tissue with just a little vampiric essence before the brain dies, then transfuse a massive amount of blood, that catalyzes vampirism, occultist of the year here I come'). That way various other ancients wouldn't have been able to easily create a society because every time they wanted to make a new vampire it meant finding an apprentice and training them for decades.

There's a parallel here in The First Law universe. The wizard Klalul figures out how to mass-produce mystical Eaters through industrializing cannibalism. The results are inferior to wizards produced through tried-and-true apprenticeship such as used by his opponents like Bayaz, but the numbers largely make up for it.

I think tying vampirism to magic also has ancillary benefits. You want magic in your urban fantasy game - because it allows for all sorts of additional plot permutations, which is why most vampire-based universes include them - but you want your witches/warlocks/mages to accept vampires enough to not instantly try to fight a war with them. If a vampire is ultimately just a highly specialized form of witch or even the equivalent of a lich, then the societies can blur together and you only need one Masquerade, not several. You could even do something similar with werewolves. If lycanthropy originated as a mystical transformation - and shape-shifting is absolutely on the list of classic shamanic arts - only to become an inherited-via-injury curse later on then were-people are just specialized witches too and can also operate within the same mystic society and using roughly the same rules.

Heck, if human blood generally is the universal magical catalyst - and I think in a 'world of darkness' you can totally justify 'all magic is blood magic' - then witches and were-people can also fit into the blood economy of vampiric society.


Edit: It occurs to me now that the Vampires-as-converted-witches paradigm also helps to solve the bloodline issue. Since in this situation you can have your small group of core bloodlines that are the descendants of the spawn of Dracula, but you can also have all the freaky weird individualized and regional bloodlines you want because those emerged from individual witches doing their own vampiric conversion all over the world at various times and increasing their numbers very slowly. You could even - in the modern times as the Dracula Embrace process propagates across the world via colonialism and such - allow some of those groups to become regionally abundant if you wanted by switching to the process that allows lots of progeny.

[Username17]

I don't think having vampires be a subset of Witches is a particularly good idea. First of all, Vampires are a bigger deal than Witches. Dracula gets a higher billing than Dr. Sandra Mornay in Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Bill Compton gets higher billing than Lafayette in True Blood. Buffy is still a "show about vampires" when Willow gets powered up. And so on.

But while Witches are a secondary and optional supernatural creature type, they are individually ensemble protagonists. Willow is a main character. Lafayette is a main character. So telling the players that they are pre-prestige class Vampires is also not a thing that's going to be OK.

Vampires are too important relative to Witches to accept being a pie slice of Witchcraft. But Witches are too playable to accept being downgrades of Vampires. It just doesn't work for one to be a pokevolution of the other.

-Username17