Urban Fantasy Mythic Resonance v Branding

[Josh_Kablack]

In the United States, there are over a hundred cities with half a million inhabitants.

Um, sort of.

That's not true if you count strictly by the population within the city:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U ... population


But it is true if you count the greater metropolitan areas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... ical_areas


Which just goes to illustrate your larger point -- the nuances in the real world are so complex that even your offhand example has a caveat of multiple ways to count things.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm going to quibble.

The fantasy elements are going to be featured in the game a lot. The 9th Canadian province will probably be featured in very few games - maybe none. Even if the game takes place 'in the real world', accessing enough useful real information to support the game versus 'just making it up' isn't always a clear-cut answer. How many movies nominally set in DC are actually filmed in Toronto? Sometimes what's easy and convenient is better than true accuracy.

I don't know whether I'd bother figuring out a useful mall in Calgary with an associated hotel and neighboring meat locker rather than just pretending they exist where I want them to.

The fine details of the setting are never going to be as complex as the individual lives of 9+ billion actual people but you should also be free to ignore what deadDMwalking ate for breakfast this morning when planning your adventure.

As far as settings go, pretending that each unit is made up of one culture and one environment is lazy; but describing the dominant one but implying the existence of others that can be fleshed out later is fine.

The real advantage of the real world is not the wealth of information - it's the general ease of conveying it. Often, in fantasy worlds people say 'it's like Vikings but they ride horses' which is a lot easier than trying to explain who the Rohirrim without reference to anything else. Even if the people at your table have a poorly conceived image of 'China' or 'Africa', they at least know they're real places and they might have some ideas about what that means. Unfortunately, it also means that one table's Africa is entirely tribes people in unspoiled wilderness and another is entirely revolutionary armies and very few of them are actually reflective of the real place.

So depending on how important the 'real details' are and how many of them you're actually using, there is a point where setting it in a fantasy world is fine. The real world is mostly best when you set everything in a single place you and your players are relatively familiar with - your hometown or a relatively major city in your area.

[Mechalich]

Thing is, it is much easier to make up a completely new world at a lower technological level, because the sphere of things the average person knows, and the amount of information the average person could reasonably access, is so much lower. Even the most knowledgeable persons of the ancient world probably had not more than a few words worth of information about anything beyond the boundaries of a known empire. People could make up entire continents an no one could disprove their existence.

Meanwhile in the 21st century people in impoverished rural nations have smart phones and can search Wikipedia.

As a result, if you're setting a fantasy at a modern tech level - or even in the future - it makes sense to utilize the real world as a base, because that way if the players look something up the GM can default to the real-world backdrop. You can even look at the literature and observe a sort of soft boundary that hits right around the mid-19th century where fantasy set in new worlds shifts towards fantasy set in a version of our own.

[Username17]

you can't write a whole sourcebook with ten different player-appropriate tribes of Mummies because there aren't ten different Mummy movies with ten different player-character-appropriate Mummy archetypes to choose from. You have Imhotep, and whatever mishmash of other bandaid-flavored zombie assholes you can think of are only there as a result of an Imhotep doing Imhotep stuff. As you have observed, it only pans out to one Egyptian style of necromancy. That means there is exactly one "clan" of Mummies, and they are a clan of Witches. The other eleven twelfths of the book they come in are absolutely not going to be devoted to competing eras of Egyptian mysticism, nor will they be devoted to whatever Incan or Tibetan mummies you can dumpster-dive for in the history of desiccated corpses; they're going to be devoted to the Lords of Salem, Aztec Tlamacazqui, Voodoo Priests, Cathar Hierophants, and Kung-Fu Masters.

You probably could get a couple of Mummies in there if you wanted to. You got your Imhotep sorcerers and your Kharis lurching zombies. And um... that's pretty much it. Bubba Hotep is very much a desiccated Wizard from the Imhotep school, while the Aztec Mummy who fights robots and luchadores is very much of the Kharis school. I can't actually think of a single Mummy that doesn't fit into one of those two archetypes.

The base issue is that there's not much reason to classify those things as variations on Mummies rather than Egyptian versions of other things. The base type could be Witch for Imhotep and Kharis could be an Egyptian variant on Zombie or Animate. Like, if you said that Lon Cheney's lurching mummy was characterized in your system as the same base type as Frankenstein's Monster, that would be reasonable.

Ultimately, outside of Dungeons & Dragons it's rarely clear where one "type" of monster begins and ends. Frankenstein's Monster could be a Zombie or an Animate, being a flavor of the same thing that a Wight is or a flavor of the same thing that a Golem is. Both constructions would be reasonable. The White Wolf style "clans" are popular precisely because different people think of different things when you say the names of monsters. And the fact that later iterations didn't offer substantively different options is pretty much problem number one for all of those games.

The big issue then is what you can offer people in terms of options that feel different within the context of a single monster umbrella. Obviously the all-star here is the Vampires. Vampires have a lot of different presentations in different media and different potential players have wildly different expectations when it comes to "vampires." You can see that on the demographic thread with people coming out of the woodwork to claim that vampires who don't kill with some specific frequency "don't count" or whatever. The number of possible vampire interpretations is beyond counting. Werewolves are not like that. There's actually a fairly narrow range of Werewolves that people are looking for. There are still werewolfy questions you can ask like "Can Wolfman drive a car?" or "Can you kill Wolfman with anything other than silver bullets?" and those are valid questions that have been answered differently in different movies, books, and TV shows. But these are questions of game balance as much as presentation, and it's difficult to see how you could get more than a few splats worth of Werewolves out of them.

Going through the list of monster types that White Wolf tried to make splats out of, you can see a tremendous variance in how many "clans" they'd support.

• Vampires: As many Clans as you want to write. Your game will run out of conceptual space before you run out of Vampire presentations people might want. Spider themed vampires, snake themed vampires, sparkling vampires, and so on and so on.
• Witches: Like Vampires, you could write in as many as you wanted to, with the added caveat that making your Witches actually different requires you to have meaningfully different kinds of magic for them to do, meaning that each flavor of Witch takes up a really significant amount of mechanical and conceptual space. So while it's infinitely extensible like Vampires, the return on conceptual space is much worse and you're almost certainly going to run out of steam after writing in just a few.
• Werewolves: I can't see more than 3 flavors of Werewolf getting any traction. You can extend that by bringing in non-Wolf lycanthropes and there are a really large number of those you could potentially do, but remember that the demand for non-Wolf Lycanthropes falls off really fast. The drop from Wolves to Bears and Cats is pretty huge and the drop from Bears and Cats to Rats, Boars, and Sharks is bigger than that. I'm not sure anyone actually wants to play Swanmays or Selkies at all, and players might literally only ever select those things for game mechanical reasons - meaning that including them might seriously provide negative play experience value.
• Mummies: There are at most two flavors of Mummy.
• Ghosts: Ghosts are interesting in that while there are virtually limitless variants of Ghost in literature and indeed a complete overlap between Ghosts and Vampires, that the afterlife is actually pretty huge in terms of conceptual space and there probably isn't room for more than one "kind" of Ghost unless you go the full Disgaea and set your whole game in the Netherworld.
• Fairies: Like Vampires, there is truly an enormous amount of space to work with here. The Fey cover everything from the Alfar to Goblins to Dwarves to Trolls. There are Nature Spirits, Forest Demons, Fertility Avatars, Prankster Sprites, Industrious Dwarves, and so on and so on. Heck, in Lost Girl they just classify Succubi (often classified as Demons) and Dulahan (often classified as Undead) as Fey, and no one gives a shit. Now this is where White Wolf really shat the bed, because they made all the Fey be avatars of childlike outlooks even the sex spirits.
• Animates: There are a number of ways to divide these up. Living statues, Frankenstein's Monster, Killer Robots, and possibly a few others like Holograms and Swamp Things could get you to five or six if that's what you wanted to do.
• Hunters: I don't think there's room for even one splat of "Hunters." It's just a bankrupt notion to try to make that a "type." It's a career that people can and specifically do take if they don't have super powers at all. That being said, there is room for people who have super powers. You have dudes like The Invisible Man and Mr. Hyde. It's a common enough trope that you could fit that in somewhere if you wanted. Super heroes is a genre that includes most mythology created since the 1930s, so it's as big as you want it to be - though like Witches each flavor of superhero you bring in brings a lot of setting baggage.
• Demons: Like Fey, this is pretty much a grab bag term meaning "magical monster" and you could plausibly bring in as many of these fuckers as you felt like. One issue that Demons have is that of the many many kinds of Demons people imagine, only a couple of them can remotely manage to keep up a masquerade in an Urban Fantasy setting. There's the occasional dude who looks good in a suit and makes bargains with people, but most of the Demons people want to play have snake tails, horns, wings, red scales, goat heads, cloven hooves, or some combination. I'm not sure a Demon splat can possibly be anything other than a massive disappointment to the people who would want to play things from it. The needs of playability in an Urban Fantasy setting are so at odds with the list of "must haves" that it's hard to think of how you could make these a playable character type at all.

And while we're on the subject, let's talk about a couple of obvious categories that White Wolf never made:

• Leviathans: Why did White Wolf never make playable Fishman? There are a shit tonne of cryptids in the world, and movies like The Shape of Water show that cryptid people still have it. It wouldn't be unreasonable to make five or six of these things without getting too weird, but Creature From the Black Lagoon is obviously much more popular than all the other options put together.
• Zombies: These could be lumped in with Vampires or Witches or Animates, but there are actually quite a few kinds of straight up Zombies, and this would probably be a better base splat than Mummy.
  
  -Username17

[Ancient History]

The thing to consider for a lot of these is that the idea of a monster crossover is largely a very recent concept. The idea of a werewolf dying and coming back as a vampire is old, but not "what if a werewolf became a vampire omg let's call it an abomination" or "what if a vampire fought a werewolf?"

So a lot of the side-by-side comparisons you get for zombies vs. mummies is really recent - a product of the kind of scientific classification imposed on folklore to generate the kind of comparative mythology which was really popular around the turn of the century and highly influential on pulp fiction in the 30s and RPGs in the 70s. Whether or not an animated corpse counts as "undead" is only really significant if you have a sword +1, +2 vs. undead, etc.

Which is to say, part of the branding vs. mythic resonance problem is that the "mythic resonance" is itself subject to invisible manipulation. We think of mummies and zombies as different monsters because they are presented to us differently: if a mummy was encountered by a houdoun in Haiti, would he see it as something fundamentally different from a zombie? (Well, yes, because the very notion of a zombie as a "reanimated corpse" as opposed to "dude I drugged with a neurotoxin" is itself a product of branding so successful that it generated mythic resonance.)

But you get the point: part of the problem with our definitions is that we're looking at things from a very different perspective than the original cultures that held those beliefs did.

Ironically, at some level White Wolf realized the inherent difficulty of trying to kitchen sink monsters in this fashion, which is why they mad a persistent yet half-assed effort to build a common theme for their critters in later editions: the idea of many monsters as humans + supernatural element bonded to their soul (which works pretty much for Eastern vampires, Mages, Hunters, Demons, Mummies, and sometimes Changelings), with Kindred, Changing Breeds, and Wraiths grandfathered in (and Wraiths being the backbone of Eastern Vampires and the Risen anyway). They were, without pushing this explicitly, trying to work up a Grand Unified Theory of Monsterness.

It failed hard, for a couple reasons, but mostly because a lot of people don't want their monsters to be indistinct. Another version of this mindset is vampires and lycans in Underworld: they're both variants of the same virus, so one explanation works for both. Likewise, in Marvel comics both vampires an werewolves are the result of the Elder God Cthon (well, werewolves also get more complicated because they have like 3-4 origins at different times which just sorta got rolled in together, but you get the idea.)

And the Grand Theory approach is a version of branding, and something a lot of people need to consider. If zombies are distinct from mummies, even though they're both animated corpses, they need to be distinct in some meaningful way...and that's a challenge, because the source material on both is pretty slim, especially at the shambler-level.

[Username17]

They were, without pushing this explicitly, trying to work up a Grand Unified Theory of Monsterness.

While a general theory of Monsterness is not actually required, but a general theory of what kinds of themes your world is going to support genuinely is.

So you don't have to come up with a unified background for Werewolves and Vampires. Heck, you don't need to have a unified background for all the Vampires. It's totally alright if some of the Vampires were created by Phoenician blood sorcery and others were created by an Aztec demonic pact.

They don't even need to be able to use the same kinds of magic. It's alright if the Fairies in your world use Cthonic magic and the Vampires use Blood sorcery. Heck, it's possible (although usually a bad idea) for the different kinds of magic to use radically different rulesets. There's nothing stopping you from designing a system in which the mechanical process for resisting Elf Sleep was largely or wholly unrelated to the process for resisting Vampire Domination.

What needs to be unified is the acceptable range of tones. It wasn't a problem for White Wolf that Werewolves and Vampires had different rules and different powers and different origin stories; but it was a problem for White Wolf that they wrote Clanbook Giovanni and Clanbook Malkavian. It's really hard to imagine someone being OK with the edgelord misery tourism of Clanbook Giovanni and the fourth-wall breaking flippant wackiness of Clanbook Malkavian at the same time.

Law and Order Special Victims Unit does not, as far as I know, ever call time for a humorous musical slapstick routine. And last I checked there aren't any episodes of Glee where the audience is asked to confront the autopsy findings of the rape and murder of a child. While there are shows that do attempt a significant breadth of tone like Buffy/Angel and Hercules/Xena, this is actually quite hard to do and often doesn't work. See the Evil Cordelia plotline from Angel Season 4 or really the entire Dahak plotline from Xena to see how terrible it can be when you try to shift back into full melodrama.

White Wolf obviously suffered from poor use of conceptual space. And their insistence on doing fractal design for expansions meant that they were constantly getting into the weeds with tiny groups that you didn't care about getting way too much fucking text lavished on them while things you were supposed to care about got left off the page entirely. For fuck's sake, the Changing Breeds book has fourteen flavors of non-standard lycanthrope including Wereaurochs. You will never encounter a fucking Werewaurochs, fuck you! It turns into a kind of cow that is extinct. Fuck! And then on top of that, there are sub-types of these fuckers, because obviously. Meanwhile, there are nearly nine hundred thousand people living in Albuquerque and I have legit no idea what kind of supernatural power structure is there or whatever. But I wouldn't say that any particular thing in World of Darkness (except maybe Wereaurochs) that couldn't be fit into an Urban Fantasy kitchen sink campaign that was a bit more judicial with their use of conceptual space. You'd just have to figure out a place in the world for your various stuff.

Kitchen Sink Urban Fantasy has room for potentially a lot of different stuff in it. It's OK to have Camazotz and Onaqui, even though both of those things are Aztec Bat Monsters. You could compare and contrast them. In your world, one of them could be the protagonist faction and the other be the antagonist faction of Bat Monster from Mexico City. Or they could be Bat Monsters that differ by power source. Or the Onaqui could be humanoid bat monsters who ride around on the more bestial Camazotz. Fucking whatever. It's Kitchen Sink Urban Fantasy and as the author you can write in whatever you want.

But you should still block out what parts of the conceptual space you are using for various things. White Wolf fucked the chicken not because it was wrong to include any particular thing, but because many of their flavors went together like innocent children and sex magic.

-Username17

[K]

i
[*] Zombies: These could be lumped in with Vampires or Witches or Animates, but there are actually quite a few kinds of straight up Zombies, and this would probably be a better base splat than Mummy.

-Username17

Risen was a splat for Wraith where you played a zombie-guy or maybe The Crow.

Everything else supernatural got dropped into Freak Legion: Fomori where it used a surprisingly vigorous point-buy system to emulate everything from fishmen to Jason Voorhees.

[Wiseman]

[*] Demons: Like Fey, this is pretty much a grab bag term meaning "magical monster" and you could plausibly bring in as many of these fuckers as you felt like. One issue that Demons have is that of the many many kinds of Demons people imagine, only a couple of them can remotely manage to keep up a masquerade in an Urban Fantasy setting. There's the occasional dude who looks good in a suit and makes bargains with people, but most of the Demons people want to play have snake tails, horns, wings, red scales, goat heads, cloven hooves, or some combination. I'm not sure a Demon splat can possibly be anything other than a massive disappointment to the people who would want to play things from it. The needs of playability in an Urban Fantasy setting are so at odds with the list of "must haves" that it's hard to think of how you could make these a playable character type at all. [/list]



-Username17

The best possible option i can think of is shapeshifting? Demons can shift between a human(oid) form and a their monstrous form.

EDIT: Fixed tags

[Iduno]

I'd go with demons being some type of tortured spirit, as that fits the folklore better.

[Hicks]

Possession spirits as demons also don't explosively break the masquerade.

[Chamomile]

If it is, for some reason, desirable to have a demon splatbook even if it would be disappointing to people who want to play it, you have several viable options. The tempter who looks human except for maybe one tell that Frank brought up is just one example, but there's lots of others. The problem is that none of them have snake tails, horns, wings, red scales, goat heads, cloven hooves, or some combination thereof. If you have a demon splat, some significant number of people who read it will do so hoping to play Hellboy, and it doesn't matter how many non-Hellboy options you have to disappoint them with.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Hellboy option is that you totally do have explicitly nonhuman demonic features and everyone is okay with it to a degree that is itself unsettling. Probably some sort of weirdness censor effect that other supernaturals envy.

[Pedantic]

Maybe instead of doing a demon splatbook, you include demons as a new playable option in a "recently broken masquerade" alternate setting book. Something like Mike Carey's Felix Castor series or at the more extreme end Illona Andrew's Kate Daniels.

[hyzmarca]

Personally, I find having a "no one believes in magic and monsters" masquarade is less and less useful compared to "no one understands magic and monsters, and they're the Illuminiti/Hollywood Elite/NWO Shadow Government/International Bankers anyway so they control both legislation and media presentation."

An "Everyone knows vampires exist but no one knows what vampires really do" soft masquarade is more playable and more managable than the "no one knows vampires exist" hard masquarade.

[Username17]

The current state of affairs where a super majority of the population believes in the supernatural but:

• There isn't general agreement on what supernatural things are real.
• Media and law enforcement treats people who ascribe any events to supernatural forces as crazy people.
• People aren't supposed to talk about their supernatural beliefs in polite society except in the most vague and circuitous terms.

...works pretty well. It certainly works well for making a low fantasy world that is recognizable as Earth. Because our world pretty much actually works like that.

So you have senate candidates state unequivocally that they believe in witches, and if the media or government interacts with this at all, it will be to make fun of them. But 55% of people in Africa believe in witches, and in the United States that number is twenty one percent. That's more than one out of five Americans who are pretty sure that some women have the power to invoke real curses and shit.

The actual world is simply fully compatible with there being a 1:10,000 ratio of supernatural creatures and those supernatural creatures have 2-20 Renfields apiece. Heck, those Renfields could even confide to their co-workers sometimes that they were the slave of a vampire or part of an Osirian cult. That simply wouldn't be much different from the way things actually are in the real world in terms of average experience. I work in a hospital that has around 900 beds. If an average of one of our patients was the personal assistant of a Werewolf or part of the scooby gang of a reincarnated monster slayer or something, I don't think I'd even notice. We had a patient who had the uncontrollable urge to eat batteries this week, and that was a different patient from the patient who had the uncontrollable urge to eat batteries from a couple weeks ago.

0.1% of the population are actual Wiccans, and yet 21% of Americans believe that there are Witches. 0.1% of the population could be actual Renfields of creatures with real powers and that could easily fit into the background of people who believe weird shit.

But this is all predicated on monsters and sorcerers not appearing as 3 meter tall shaggy beasts on national television or filling the sky with flaming runes or anything like that. There aren't many kinds of Demon that people who want to play Demons would want to play that would be able to fit into that paradigm.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

So you have senate candidates state unequivocally that they believe in witches

Or a governor of a certain state (and presidential candidate) that believed in exorcism
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldn ... rcism.html

[Username17]

Exactly. Rick Perry used his position as governor of Texas to advocate for people to do Rain Dances to try to make it rain. Now, that did not work. But it's important to note that his political career wasn't ended by attempting to change the weather through sorcery, it was ended when he forgot what federal agencies he was trying to dismantle live on TV during a candidates debate where he was trying to explain his program. And even though his political career is over, he is still appointed to lead the very department he forgot that he was trying to dismantle because people literally cannot believe how awful Trump is as a person and as a leader.

Now an interesting counter factual is what might have happened had Rick Perry's Rain Dance actually worked. Like, if he or someone he worked for was an actual weather wizard who genuinely could have made it rain in Texas and broken the drought shortly after or during his performance. The news media would have pish poshed the idea that invocations of supernatural weather intervention had literally changed the weather, and Rick Perry would have probably gone on TV and humble bragged about how he's glad that the faith of Texans had held strong until the rains returned and wink wink it wasn't necessarily his personal rapport with Jesus that brought the rains - and while he would have been made fun of in the press a bit he probably would be a lot more popular. I'm not sure it would have been enough to get him past the "Oops" gaffe, but he probably would be popular enough in Texas that he could make a political comeback about now.

In any case, calls for large scale magic rituals are not outside the boundaries for what public officials can do. They just have to cover it with a fig leaf of secularism. Rick Perry wasn't allowed to put a specific prayer into his rain dance declaration, but he was allowed to start it on Good Friday, which a lot of people in Texas think is a holy day.

-Username17