Demographics and Urban Fantasy

[kzt]

Saberhagan's version was basically that Vlad was really angry when he got himself murdered and awoke as a vampire some time later to take his revenge.

No devil, etc.

[Omegonthesane]

Dracula's story can't be vague in a setting where it's a key part of the setting's history. Although frankly I'm basically convinced that allowing humans to temporarily have access to monster powers so long as their sugar daddy monstrous master is supplying power points without having to commit to turning them allows stories we want and doesn't allow stories we don't want. I mean, that is basically how Ghouls worked in V:tM and the basic concept of having retainers with some of the benefits of vampirism isn't something I've seen condemned on this forum.

I reiterate that this whole tangent about luminary sorcerers came up because of the suggestion that we justify the inevitable eurocentrism of any vampire writing by saying that becoming a vampire used to require performing a sorcerous ritual to create a blood elixir that when drunk turns the drinker into a vampire, in a way that is far slower and more expensive than just exsanguinating the victim and feeding them vampire blood. If you're allowing any old monster to learn how to perform that sorcerous ritua if they decide that's the best use of their timel, then you don't have to have any concerns about witch-vampires or whatever the fuck.

[Username17]

Dracula's story can't be vague in a setting where it's a key part of the setting's history.

Sure it can. I mean, it just factually is vague in a lot of vampire fiction that uses Dracula as an antagonist. But beyond that, if Dracula is a major player in your setting, it's important to note some important earliest work of his. But that early work could be 10, 20 or 200 years after he became a vampire. Or even just five minutes after he became a vampire.

It's entirely reasonable for great heroes or great villains that are crucial to your setting to appear from obscurity. Sometimes you want characters like Batman whose childhoods are well mapped out, but sometimes you just want to have a character whose origin story is wrapped in mystery. It's actually totally OK to introduce major characters as adults and not go into whatever happened or didn't happen when they were eight.

If you have Dracula's Declaration of Wallachia where he declares himself Prince over the other fifty Kin in Wallachia be a major event in your Urban Fantasy Timeline, then it would be nice to nail down when and where that happened. But you actually don't have to nail down any of the previous major events in Dracula's life. You don't even have to nail down when he became a Vampire. Was it during his time in Turkey? Was it after he had been imprisoned in in Visegrád under false pretenses? Was it during the battle in Bosnia where he supposedly died? He was recognized as the ruler of Wallachia and deposed three different times, and he could have become a vampire during, before, or after any of them.

But beyond the fact that as setting creator you have the ability to declare his transformation into a vampire to have happened at any of those times without it making much difference to the setting, you can leave it as an open question within the setting and it still won't make much difference. If Dracula's Declaration of Wallachia was made in 1495, he could have become a Vampire any time between 1442 and 1477, and that could have happened pretty much anywhere in the Ottoman Empire or Hungaria or the disputed provinces of the Balkans. There are a lot of historical holes in Vlad Dracula's life - in 1452 he goes to Moldavia and then there are no records of him that have survived for the next four years and then in 1456 he is in Hungary accepting a military position in Transylvania. He could have plausibly traveled pretty much anywhere during those four years and become a vampire. If it was for some reason important to your setting that he had been made a Vampire in Egypt or Rome or the hinterlands of the Ukraine, those are all places he plausibly could have traveled while he went dark for four years and next appeared in mortal history one thousand kilometers away.

The bottom line is that Urban Fantasy secret history doesn't need to answer every question you might have. Just as mortal history does not know what continent Dracula was on back in 1455, the Kindred don't need to know either. They know that he was able to declare himself Prince of the Night in 1495 - but they don't need to know whether he'd been a Vampire for 18 years or 40 years at that point. Either way by the time he makes an attempt to take over London in the 1890s he is over four hundred years old.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

Dracula's story can indeed be vague, what cannot be vague is the nature of vampirism, and if we're operating in a paradigm wherein Dracula triggered a change from how vampires operated historically in the bronze age through the middle ages to how they operated in the modern era, how in the hell he did that.

VtM did possess an explanation for the origin of Vampirism: it was a divine curse by the God of Abraham set upon Caine as a consequence of the first murder. This explanation was a good hook, actually, only it had the problem of being culturally deterministic as fuck and that simply isn't a viable approach for a game with at least a theoretically global scope and led to the oWoD having multiple kinds of vampires, which was horrifically bad. Any explanation for the origin of vampirism needs to be culturally neutral and to avoid making any given religion 'correct' for the values of your fictional world. In fact it's probably best to have vampirism be like agriculture - something that originated multiple times independently and is linked to the foundation of society (being a vampire is an awfully tough road to hoe in a pre-agricultural world).

There are several ways you could do this. Vampirism could be the result of a contract with 'demons' (powerful negative spiritual entities of whatever stripe). It could be the result of an alchemical bid for immortality. You could even go fully in on the disease model and have it be triggered by a parasitic infection that developed after humans first tamed livestock. The choices are variable, though it's a very important choice because it has significant consequences for how vampirism functions, what metaphors you've got going on, and what sort of change might be triggered to launch the modern era. Personally I favor the alchemical model, but then I'm not very fond of demons and if demonic conspiracies and lords of the outer dark seem like something you want as a major part of your urban fantasy then it makes sense to go that route.

Regardless of exactly how it works this initial method needs to be extremely difficult, extremely rare, and probably significantly more likely to kill the potential vampire than result in a successful turning. This is a consequence of design mandates to keep the number of cosmically powerful elder horrors low - plot device level low - so they aren't active players on the modern stage. You want the number to be low enough so that in 1491 the Americas hosted maybe a few dozen vampires total.

A key point of the Dracula paradigm is that how becoming a vampire used to work - and honestly however it works now - Dracula flipped the script sometime in the 15th century and made it much, much easier to do, allowing vampires to proliferate from that point forward. And it is very important to know how that was accomplished. It is not necessarily something that characters in the setting should know, and in fact there's good reasons to make that an in-setting secret, but it's an important fact in the design framework.

This provides the massive benefit of dividing your urban fantasy history into two parts: the current era that starts ~1450 and the legendary era that predates it and does not require any details as a consequence. Working with 500 years of history is roughly 100 times easier than working with 5000. This conversation has also indicated that there are ancillary benefits to having Dracula's control over Wallachia serve as a political model and having the vampires spread out from Wallachia starting around 1500 to gradually take over the world helps significantly with the inevitable cultural difficulties (it effectively maps vampiric racism into human racism because Europe comes to dominate the supernatural world for the same reason it did the physical one - key technological and social developments during the Renaissance period).

[Omegonthesane]

Dracula's story can't be vague in a setting where it's a key part of the setting's history.

<skipping the important thing to talk about the preamble>

As Mechalich says you cannot be vague about how Dracula became a vampire if going with the route where he personally changed the rules of how to turn someone into a vampire so that any vamp society can emanate from how he ran Wallachia.

[Username17]

As Mechalich says you cannot be vague about how Dracula became a vampire if going with the route where he personally changed the rules of how to turn someone into a vampire so that any vamp society can emanate from how he ran Wallachia.

No. You actually totally can. If you live within a new paradigm, you don't have to explain very much about the old paradigm. Forgotten Realms doesn't have to explain what the political or economic systems of Lost Netheril were like. Legend of the Five Rings doesn't have to get into the division of power between the tribes that existed before the Empire of Rokugan subjugated them. Greyhawk doesn't need to tell you what the ideological differences were between the nations of the Great War.

When your setting has a major sea change at a specific point in time that ushered in the modern era that the narrative takes place in, the stuff that came before it genuinely can be just legends and innuendo. When making a setting you don't have to fill in all the details of previous regimes because they mostly don't matter.

Now the specifics of the Dracula declaration is that you don't need to posit any kind of massive change in the ratio of Kin to Kine. When that declaration was made, the global human population was about four hundred million. Now it's over seven thousand million. Even if every single supernatural creature from then was still alive tonight, the creatures from after that would constitute over 94% of the supernatural population. With a more realistic attrition model over five centuries, probably less than 1% of the supernatural population remembers a night before Dracula's political reforms. For perspective: more than 1% of the world population was over the age of ten when the People's Republic of China came into existence. For even more perspective, we're positing princedoms that generally have 50-100 Kin in them, which means that the average number of total creatures in your city who remember a time before Dracula's political reforms is less than one.

It's completely reasonable for the controversies surrounding Dracula's political reforms to be as foreign to modern discussion as the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the dissolution of the Whig party.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

As Mechalich says you cannot be vague about how Dracula became a vampire if going with the route where he personally changed the rules of how to turn someone into a vampire so that any vamp society can emanate from how he ran Wallachia.

No. You actually totally can. <proceeds to miss the point>

The political reforms are not the point. The scientific breakthrough is the point.

The important change is not from David Koresh cults to Wallachia knockoffs. The important change is from creating vampires through once-in-a-blue-moon sacrificial rituals with a low success rate and a huge outlay, to Embracing every suitable candidate at no real cost.

The entire reason to have Dracula be the sea change is to justify a massive change in kin to kine ratios, because we want a massive change in kin to kine ratios to justify why a society of immortals is only really dominated by people a few centuries old. That is the primary goal. The fact it lets Dracula decide the political regime is fucking filler text compared to the fact it lets you have a vampire society that is not ruled by ancient blood gods from a time before human comprehension.

[Username17]

The entire reason to have Dracula be the sea change is to justify a massive change in kin to kine ratios, because we want a massive change in kin to kine ratios to justify why a society of immortals is only really dominated by people a few centuries old. That is the primary goal. The fact it lets Dracula decide the political regime is fucking filler text compared to the fact it lets you have a vampire society that is not ruled by ancient blood gods from a time before human comprehension.

But there's no need for the Kin to Kine ratios to have meaningfully changed. The human population has changed.
Five hundred years ago, the global population was 17 times lower than it is today. If the last half millenium was violent enough that half the supernatural population died every hundred years, then it would be reasonable to posit that less than one Kin out of thirty that was around in 1500 is still around tonight.

At a ratio of 1:10,000, which is workable to create the kind of supernatural factions that Urban Fantasy wants, the supernatural population of 1500 was 42,000 for the whole world. Tonight it's a bit over seven hundred thousand. With even modest and generous attrition statistics, there are probably less than two thousand supernatural creatures active tonight who were active five hundred years ago.

Kin from the last couple hundred years run things without much interference from creatures of the first half of the last millennium because modern Kin outnumber the ancient creatures by more than four hundred to one. You're thrashing about looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You don't need to explain why there are more suitable candidates for vampire transformation tonight than there were in the 13th century. All you need is to say that there aren't dramatically less. The passage of time and the relentless birth of new generations of humans handles all the numbers absolutely fine without any additional setting elements at all.

Now where you are going to want to do some explaining is on monsters from over a thousand years ago. In the thousand years before Dracula made his declaration, global populations only doubled. During that period, attrition of humans was pretty similar to birth of humans for much of the planet, and it seems like Vampires from that era either reproduced very slowly (perhaps rarely finding what suitable candidates existed because they had no means of screening large numbers of people) or got killed comparatively often. Probably some combination of both. In any case, the beginning of the common era had about twenty thousand supernatural creatures in it, and most of them had died by the time Dracula was doing his thing a millennium and a half later. The question of how many of them persist into the modern nights is open I think - and numbers between a few dozen and a few hundred would be reasonable.

But such creatures would obviously have little political power, since they are few enough in number to be apocryphal even in Kindred society.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Let's assume we're not doing a kitchen sink setting.

When I recently proposed witches &#8776; vampires in a theoretical cyberpunk-vampire mashup, the idea was to not do Buffy the Vampire slayer kitchen-sink: so Willow isn't an issue. That said, Willow is a good illustration of why this may be a good idea. Yes, the show was still called Buffy the Vampire Slayer but it kinda was the Willow the Witch show for a while...

That said, Buffy does engage in some narrative-space cleanup by making vampires just a flavor of demon.

So consider the benefits of witches &#8776; vampires &#8776; dragons in terms of not making every supernatural a Steve.

[Omegonthesane]

Making a lot of assumptions there. Most explicitly on the attrition rate of "half the immortal super monsters don't last the century" of immortal super monsters who can only die violently and against whom only the violence of other immortal super monsters is particularly likely to stick and who can also just flee far more effectively than any human. Particularly given the implicit assumption that age correlates with power, so any vampire who has lasted one century is going to last ten centuries absent, I don't know, some Wallachian upstart gaining the ability to mass produce vampires in such numbers as to destroy any Antediluvians who opposed him despite them being more powerful than he.

If you want the benefits of a society emanating from Dracula it is not enough to just say "muh demographics" you have to explain why only Dracula had the power to unilaterally force a vampire society model that was adopted by the world, instead of Kublai Khan or Suleiman the Magnificent or Hiawatha or Moctezuma I or Nyatsimba Mutota or "literally anyone from anywhere that the writers inevitably will not have the cultural context required to guess at the assumptions of a society this person would form".

And if you want to oppose the Dracula proposal - which you clearly do from the amount of time you've hammered on about how it isn't necessary instead of going "sure that sounds cool" - it is not enough to prove it unnecessary, you're going to need to go on about how having vampiric society emanate from something the writers can understand in time scales the players can understand is actively detrimental to the game.

[Username17]

Making a lot of assumptions there.

Sure. The point is that the assumptions don't matter very much.

At 1:10,000 supernaturals, or 1:100,000 or fucking any ratio you care to talk about the fact is still that the global population of 500 years ago is 6% of the global population today. If you demanded an attrition model where zero of the monsters from 500 years ago had been eliminated, you're still at a point in history where 94% of the monsters of tonight were born since then. That's the absolute ceiling of how demographically significant the pre-Dracula ancients are: six percent. If you imagine that literally any of them didn't make it through the Inquisition, the Age of Exploration, the Industrial Revolution, the World Wars, the Cold War, or the Information Age, then they are less than 6%. With even a relatively modest rate of attrition, they could easily amount to significantly less than 1%.

And of course, your floor is zero percent. It would be entirely reasonable to say that all of the monsters from 1450 were dead by 1950. But of course, such creatures are narratively useful whether or not they are demographically significant, so I posit that you're going to want some non-zero number of them to have persisted to the modern nights.

Now the most likely demographic projection you're going to have is some sort of power rule where monsters that have persisted longer are less likely to die off. Where by the time a monster makes it to 1000 years old, they pretty much just keep keeping on to the present nights. Something I'm making up while I'm writing this down is where like half the new creatures are dead in 50 years, and the half life doubles each time. So you lose half the new monsters of the 1500s by 1550, half of the remaining by 1650, half of the remaining by 1850, and half the remainder would be gone by 2250. So tonight, there'd have been three and a half half-lives, meaning that roughly one in 11 of the monsters from that period would still be alive. But it would be more than that, because in 1500, almost half the monsters would have already made it to their 50th year, meaning that their half lives would be longer.

That would make there be roughly 2000 survivors from that era's "new crop" plus another 2000 survivors from the period's slightly older monsters, and that period's roughly 8000 significantly older monsters would have about half survived to the present night, leaving a total of 8000 monsters tonight. That seems pretty reasonable and generous, but you still have ancient horrors of all types clocking in at about 1% of the monster population. Which is substantially less than the approximately 20% they represented when Dracula was a lad in Turkey.

The explosion of population is so large that even if you posit that ancient monsters are more likely to survive each century than younger monsters, the proportion of monsters who are "ancient" has fallen precipitously over the last five hundred years. Remember that the ceiling of how many monsters could be over five hundred years old in the 21st century is six percent. Five hundred years ago the ceiling was closer to seventy percent.

Your assumptions give you a lot of wiggle room. I just pulled some numbers out of my ass that led to a fall of ancient monster percentages from 20% in 1500 to 1.1% today. But that's the kind of demographic shift you're going to be seeing no matter what your attrition numbers look like.

-Username17

[kzt]

The assumption that that Bram Stoker accurately told what happened is easy to undermine. The people involved were not exactly well-balanced dispassionate observers making careful notes. "The Dracula Tape" is an example. So beyond the existence of a vampire who people call Dracula there aren't many "facts" there that you have to hold to.

Even if you assume that power correlates with age, a vampire whose most recent spoken language is some dialect of Etruscan or Akkadian (because he got tired of learning new languages thousands of years) ago isn't going to running NYC or even Damascus. People may stay out of his way because he's scary as hell, but he's not involved in society and has figured out how to stay unnoticed.

[Mechalich]

Assumptions matter regarding the ancient world do matter - because the ancient world happened. If you change the ancient world in any significant way you do not get the modern world that resembles our own. You have to keep the supernaturals from dramatically changing the course of history. As a result, however many of them their are, the influence of supernaturals in the ancient world has to be very tightly constrained. This is doubly so because as you go back in time the tech level falls and the power of the supernaturals (assuming it remains constant) becomes proportionally much greater.

If a 100 year old vampire has the physical capabilities of Captain America (which seems about right), that's nice but not game-changing in the modern era. Minus his super-tech shield, Cap is just a very strong, very fast, very durable guy. If you fire a main battle tank shell at his face, he's still dead. A hit squad of vampire super-soldiers (like the one in Blade II) is awesome and potent, but still only a tactical level weapon in the modern world. Go back in time and a hit squad of vampire super soldiers is The Knights of the Round Table, only immortal. That's a force dominant at the strategic level.

At 1:10,000, the ancient world has too many supernaturals. In 0 CE the population of China is estimated at ~60 million. That would mean it has 6,000 vampires. 6,000 vampires are not hiding in the background of rural China. 6,000 is the entire Han government and Liu Bang has been ruling as God-Emperor for two hundred years.

If you have vampire god emperors (or witch god-emperors, or anything else), then the modern world never happens and you lose all low fantasy element benefits anyway. If at any point the vampires can win World War V - they do so - so you have to rig the ancient world to prevent this from happening. The easiest way to do this is to have them be much less common once upon a time - like a hundred times less. 60 supernaturals would be enough to inspire all kinds of Han Era legends (and sub in for a handful of historical figures), but wouldn't be enough to overthrow the state.

You can only let the number of supernaturals increase to modern levels, and develop the supernatural society you want, after humanity has passed a point on the tech tree where fighting and winning World War V is no longer an option for the vampires. The 1400s is, conveniently, in the correct timeframe. In fact you could even have Dracula stage his own private version of World War V in a regionalized way against the Ottomans and lose, with he or his successors formulating the Camarilla and the various rules of the Masquerade immediately thereafter.

In pre-modern periods you can certainly have supernaturals running about, and some minute fraction of them can have persisted to the present, because that is useful, but there can't have been enough of them to dominate the world. In the case of vampires this means you have to but a block in place against ease conversion of people into new vampires. We can assume the vampiric populace is smart enough to not unsustainably Daybreakers itself into a population crash, but we can't make the assumption that a desperate vampire doesn't use the embrace to make dozens of other vampires and instantly field a super-army and dramatically change history (this was one of the awful parts of Dracula Untold). This is an aspect of vampirism that has to move from the impossible to the possible column at some point in history. Dracula doesn't have to be responsible, you could set the emergence of 'modern' vampire embraces and the subsequent vampire society to a much later date if you wanted, or you could pick a different historical figure. For instance, Elizabeth Bathory could serve the same role and pushes the date up by a century.

[Username17]

Even if you assume that power correlates with age, a vampire whose most recent spoken language is some dialect of Etruscan or Akkadian (because he got tired of learning new languages thousands of years) ago isn't going to running NYC or even Damascus. People may stay out of his way because he's scary as hell, but he's not involved in society and has figured out how to stay unnoticed.

A lot of the really ancient monsters are going to be essentially giant crocodiles that have convinced villagers to throw goats into their pit. The reach of powerful individuals in the ancient world was often merely as far as their arms could reach or as far as they could see. Many forests and mountains were terrorized by man eating beasts, but this did not translate to political power in any meaningful way.

At 1:10,000, the ancient world has too many supernaturals. In 0 CE the population of China is estimated at ~60 million. That would mean it has 6,000 vampires. 6,000 vampires are not hiding in the background of rural China. 6,000 is the entire Han government and Liu Bang has been ruling as God-Emperor for two hundred years.

6000 supernatural monsters is a lot, but it's spread across a huge area. A lot of them literally are hidden in the background of rural China. Han China covered a land area of six million square kilometers, almost ten times the land area of Texas. That puts the average number of Vampires at 1 per thousand square kilometers, which is enough for about six in an area the size of Delaware. As for that being the entire government of Han China... no. Not even fucking close. Han China had 1200 counties, and each County had representatives from each of the nine ministries. Before getting into the Army, the Imperial Bureaucracy, the Kingdom level Bureaucracy, or the Excellencies (dukes). The county level government alone is significantly more than 6000 people.

Han China was a really big place, and accounted for 30% of the world's population. 6000 supernatural creatures isn't at all unreasonable for that time and region. You figure that the 8 Immortals are real, various monsters like Zhu and the White Boned Demon are also real, and all the really weird shit discussed in Classic of Mountains and Seas is a reasonably faithful description of what was going on at the time. The Queen Mother of the West had a Nine-Tailed Fox, and all 450 described gods and sorcerers in that book were contemporaneous historical figures.

If you have vampire god emperors (or witch god-emperors, or anything else), then the modern world never happens and you lose all low fantasy element benefits anyway.

Squaring the existence of the supernatural with the ancient records is actually very easy, because the ancient records casually claim that supernatural events, people, creatures, and places were all over the place. What we know didn't happen is the creation of lasting direct rule by immortal god emperors. Lots of countries claimed to have god emperors with magic powers, but we know that none of them lasted all that long. I mean, supposedly Pepi II Neferkare was god emperor of Egypt for 94 years, and King Gukjo of Korea died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 118, but we don't have any records of 200 year monarchies. Sure, Gilgamesh may have reigned for 250 years, but we have no records of two century monarchies from about 2000 BCE onwards.

And honestly, I don't think you get any closer to that by making supernatural creatures rare. Historically every empire eventually fell, every great king eventually died, every mighty warlord was eventually usurped. If immortal badasses were extremely rare but factually existed, you'd think that there would have been some place where some Vampire or Mummy held on for five hundred years with no regional opposition. Most of the historical candidates for people who had Spiderman levels of strength were at some point assassinated - often by other people reported to have superpowers of their own.

The big explanation that Urban Fantasy has to make is not why dynastic changes in the ancient world involved various people with super powers killing each other - the ancient record is fairly clear on that point that this is exactly what was happening. The big explanation you have to come up with is why that seemed to mostly stop around 500 CE.

-Username17

[Username17]

Let's get a little bit away from Chinese magic history because I figure none of us are all that familiar with it. Let's go to Troy, because the battle of Troy is one of the most well documented historical events from before the Common Era. And sure, we all recall that Achilles had bronze-hard skin and was literally immune to non-magical weapons and ultimately got killed with an enchanted dart to the foot. But let's talk about Sarpedon.

Sarpedon was king Lycea, and named after the first Sarpedon who conquered Lycea and ruled it as king for three generations. But he was also personally the grandson of Bellerophon, who was a mighty champion that had a flying horse and killed Chimera. Sarpedon was a son of Zeus and in addition to having the strength of ten men, when he died the skies rained blood.

So we have some key eras:

• 2200 BCE and Before: Age of Gods In this era there are ample reports of 300 year reigns and giant monsters being slain in full view of hundreds of people. Modern archaeologists treat these events as myth, the result of telling and retelling of stories until they are enlarged beyond the most tenuous connection to real world events. But if magic actually happened, these could be fairly faithful accounts of what was going on. Supernatural creatures were around, but populations of all sorts were low enough that they rarely ran into each other and you had regions dominated by powerful wizards and vampires and shit for a long time.
  
  2200 BCE to 500 BCE: Age of Heroes In this era, you have contemporaneous reports of various people having magical and superhuman physical powers. And they are numerous enough that they come into conflict kind of frequently. The Trojan War has multiple godsons on both sides, and it's relatively easy to imagine that these people are like Werewolves and Vampires and shit. Global population was in the tens of millions and rising rapidly, with kingdoms often having the numbers to have more than one supernatural creature on-side.
  
  500 BCE to 500 CE: Age of Empires In this era, there are historical reports of various wizards and monsters controlling small regions persist in the historical record, and there are some mighty champions who are supposedly the equal of a thousand soldiers, but while there are a few rulers who have somewhat implausibly long lives none of the god kings last more than 120 years. There are still rains of blood and walking corpses in the official records, but the armies of the Han and the Caesars only get repulsed by monsters a few times. Mostly very large numbers of iron-clad soldiers emerge triumphant over whatever local heroes or demons they are confronted with. If we assume that the magic stuff is simply true rather than lame excuses thought up by poorly performing generals, we have reached a turning point where the combination of there being enough supernatural creatures to come into frequent conflict and major empires being able to give enough iron weapons to enough soldiers to seriously threaten fairy princes and vampire lords that no supernatural creature managed to maintain control over any large area for a terribly long time. This creates a list of kings and battles that archaeologists can accept as accurate if they just pretend that all the references to dragons and sorcerers and shit were literary embellishments.
  
  500 - 1100: The Dark Ages It's called the Dark Ages because our records are extremely shit for this whole period. Large sections of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas have no accurate lists of rulers at all. The first ten rulers of Bohemia are legendary, with no historical records as to when they were born or died (or if they died), and many of them are claimed to have had various magical powers in the scraps of records we do have. Urban Fantasy can claim pretty much anything happened during this period and not get gainsayed by the historical record because there mostly isn't one.

So all of those periods are consistent with there being roughly 1:10,000 supernatural creatures. You can see how when the population of the world was 15 million that some guy who could claim to be 2/3 god could rule over a citystate for two hundred and fifty years. Who is going to stop them? And you could also see that when the world population rises to 30 million and technology is a little better that you get supernatural creatures with cadres of armsmen clashing frequently enough that you don't have any remaining multi-century periods of stability under the rule of singular vampire lords. At least, not for any particularly large area. And when populations rise to 200 million, there are simply way too many supernatural creatures and armies capable of defeating supernatural creatures for any supernatural rule to solidify under one monster for any length of time. And of course, the Dark Ages are consistent with whatever the fuck you want, since they are the Dark Ages and you have whole kingdoms having unknown leadership for hundreds of years at a time.

Where things start getting into "explanations needed" territory is the 12th century. The historical record starts getting good again in the middle ages, but the amount of supernatural events goes way down. It doesn't go down to zero, you still have whole villages getting struck with the Dancing Plague and dancing off into the woods never to be seen again. You still have Kings collecting dragon-slaying swords and relics of saints are claimed to do all kinds of crazy crap. But very notably, the number of champions described as being able to personally bounce spears off their chest or have the strength of twenty men or whatever is much lower than it is in previous eras. Now it doesn't seem that weird to me that an era where armies were transitioning to grenades and cannons would be one in which vampire champions personally took to the field of battle much less than they did in ages past. But that is a thing you have to say.

What there isn't room for in history is the kind of reality melting vampire gods that White Wolf posited existing in the ancient past. It's completely cromulent with the historical record for Adrastus the Inescapable to have had the powers of Captain America, but not for him to have had the powers of Green Lantern.

But the bottom line is that the kinds of supernatural creature ratios that are required to make Urban Fantasy night markets work are completely compatible with the historical record from about 1100 back as far as you want to go. It's only the last thousand years or so that you have to invoke any particular secret history. Some kind of coverups needed to go down in the last 500 years to erase the historical record of supernatural activities in the previous 400, but before that history is simply written as if a small but significant number of people and monsters had magic powers.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Perhaps supernaturals who ruled from the shadows were more successful than openly supernatural supernaturals who got assassinated by the shadowed supernaturals, so hiding became the norm


... even in the 1400's you've got those alchemists communing with angels and so on. I heard QUeen Elizabeth's math teacher was doing that.

[Omegonthesane]

Was gonna say, my first thought was that a lasting supernatural dictator would do so by Dominating a succession of puppet rulers and providing the mojo where mojo needed providing.

[Username17]

Perhaps supernaturals who ruled from the shadows were more successful than openly supernatural supernaturals who got assassinated by the shadowed supernaturals, so hiding became the norm

Certainly an advantage you have when writing Urban Fantasy is that the near universal decision to go into hiding happens during a six hundred year period of very poor record keeping. 6th Century Prussian history we have today comes from books written one thousand years later that are probably full of bullshit and hearsay - so pretty much anything could have gone down during that period without modern historians knowing about it.

So if you want to write in a demon invasion or a global conspiracy of vampire hunters or something that drove the supernatural Kindred underground at the turn of the millennium, that could totally fit into the holes of the historical record. An advantage to the demon invasion version is that it lets you have a single event that prompts Vampires in France and China to both go into hiding. But you also have six hundred years to work with, so if you wanted a movement that started in China and moved to France or started in France and moved to China, that would be fine.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, the only annoying thing is that some people will claim shit is implausible despite also believing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

[kzt]

There is a highly successful vampire book series in which the general public knows that religious symbols are capable of destroying vampires (whose existence is universally known) if used by someone who believes. Whether or not the vampire knows that it is there. Which is not exactly identical to proof that those religions are right, but it's a whole lot closer to scientific proof than exists in the real world.

If you can produce an measurable effect in the real world on demand (like say setting a vampire on fire) it's vastly closer to science than faith.

Naturally that society still has oodles of atheists, because logic is hard. And because there is no there there. But heck, she sells lots of books.

[Username17]

There is a highly successful vampire book series in which the general public knows that religious symbols are capable of destroying vampires (whose existence is universally known) if used by someone who believes. Whether or not the vampire knows that it is there. Which is not exactly identical to proof that those religions are right, but it's a whole lot closer to scientific proof than exists in the real world.

If you can produce an measurable effect in the real world on demand (like say setting a vampire on fire) it's vastly closer to science than faith.

Naturally that society still has oodles of atheists, because logic is hard. And because there is no there there. But heck, she sells lots of books.

That would be very weird. If a Crucifix, an Ankh, and a Yomi can all be used by various priests to set vampires on fire, that is reasonably solid evidence that Jesus, Osiris, and Kali are all in some sense "real." But it also proves that Christian cosmology is wrong. To the extent that Jesus is provably real, Kali is also provably real. So the Christian claim that Jesus is Lord and no other gods exist is demonstrably falsified. If there's a Heaven, there's also a Preta Loka.

Atheism would then be something more like Discworld Atheism. You know that there are gods, but that's no reason to encourage them by believing in them. A world that definitely has Buddha and Thor in it is one where Jehova is definitely less impressive than Christians claim he is. And if that's the case, you might not consider any of those gods as being worthy of worship - despite knowing for certain that they are all present and capable of granting magic powers to their followers. If the only power they can grant is setting vampires on fire, the work of believing in gods would be seen like the work you put in to learn Kung Fu or something - an art form and hobby that could theoretically be used in self defense at some point if you were attacked in a very specific way. Someone might say "I worship Zeus" in the same way that someone might say "I do Tae Kwon Do."

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, given the range of cosmologies that have been put forth I'd be inclined to believe that the common denominator is actually just thinking something hard enough and that we should start reading the Secret just in case that shit works now.

[Grek]

I mean, practicing Buddhism gives you actual, scientifically verified mental benefits (from meditation) that are approximately as useful as "protection from vampiric attackers" and you don't see mass conversion there. If vampirism isn't a big threat, people will shrug their shoulders and continue not giving a fuck.

[Omegonthesane]

wasn't there a Doctor Who episode where a Soviet soldier could repel vampires using the symbol of a hammer and sickle?

EDIT: Google has people referencing the idea that it was an old story, but I can't find the name of it and The Vampires of Venice makes it harder to Google than it's worth. Still there's clearly some people who think "any symbol of zealous belief even if that belief is not really something most would describe as religious" should have an impact on vampires.

"Guys it's really important we agree on a logo for the anime club now. It could literally save my life if vampires attack"

EDIT 2:

I mean, practicing Buddhism gives you actual, scientifically verified mental benefits (from meditation) that are approximately as useful as "protection from vampiric attackers" and you don't see mass conversion there. If vampirism isn't a big threat, people will shrug their shoulders and continue not giving a fuck.

Mass conversion no, even mass uptake of the practice no, but it's not entirely comparable if you can simply meditate without first believing in Buddhism. But yes, the point is noted that a niche utility will not even get most people to take up a secular appropriation of a religious practice let alone convert to a religion.

[Dean]

If scientologists start making movies where zombies are naturally repelled by copies of Dianetics you shouldn't struggle to figure out how you can get that really great piece of worldbuilding in more of your stories.

The idea that christian symbols protect you from vampires because christianity is good for you should obviously be chucked. It's a valueless idea that was written into vampire myths by zealous christians which was then expanded by more accepting modern christians to the idea that all religion is good for you. It's a stupid notion that has never added anything to the concept of vampires because its only purpose in the narrative was demagoguery.