The Darker Side of Vampires
March 22nd, 2010
Hello everyone. As we move deeper into the non-existant vampire month, I’d like to take the opportunity to talk to you about that little sidebar you’ll no doubt have seen in the introduction part of the Liber Vampyr. As a warning, this article contains some adult themes, and if sociopathic vampires aren’t your idea of a good time, you might want to just wait until next week.
As a game designer, one of the things I enjoy most is the challenge of taking something insubstantial and esoteric: a concept, a theme, a feeling, etc., and trying to express that through game mechanics. In the same way that a painter might change his color scheme or brush pattern to convey an emotion, thought, or idea, so must a game designer change the style of their design to convey the feelings they want to convey. I especially wanted our first piece out the door to be an impressive piece of design, in part because I wanted to show the rest of the industry that we mean business, but mostly because I want you, the reader, the consumer, and, ultimately, the player, to walk away from our first product thinking it was well made. I know that for most of you, I have an uphill battle to face in that regard, on account of being a third party publisher (a story for another day, I think).
It was for this reason that I, and my team, went out of our way to make sure that the vampire base classes (originally Vampire Warrior, Vampire Rogue, and Vampire Sorcerer. Boy, did they ever change!) really felt different from the sort of character you were used to playing. And boy, oh boy, did we succeed. To my knowledge, these classes are the first ever Dungeons and Dragons classes who recover their abilities not with time (and rest) but by draining the blood of their prey. A vampire in our book has to constantly be on the lookout for blood wherever he can find it, because otherwise he’ll soon find himself without most of his class abilities. If he goes for too long without it, he’ll die. This means that the vampire classes can, theoretically, go on ad infinitum without rest, and it also means that a vampire who goes too long without blood may eventually find himself too weak to acquire more. These are small concerns, at the end of the day: fighters, barbarians, and anything from the Book of Nine Swords can go all day without tiring, if they buy enough potions. Assuming he’s shielded from the sun, a ‘standard’ vampire can go 24/7 without need for healing. And if a vampire finds himself in a position where he’s too weak to drain any blood, well, I don’t know what he was doing for the past three or more days.
No, the problem created by these mechanics was an entirely different can of worms: utter, soulless depravity. Now, I should preface this by saying that I know every member of our playtest team personally, and they’re all nice guys. Very quiet. The last kind of person you’d expect to see on the six o’clock news for triple homicide. In all seriousness, though, our playtest group is perfectly average for D&D players.
They were already planning their atrocities before we even started play. Not a one of them didn’t begin play with a sap and a pair of manacles for taking prisoners. Their plan was apparently to keep the prisoners in their big, black, shiny coach, which is a mystery to me, because, well, coaches aren’t soundproof. Either way, it took them all of about a quarter of an hour to start looking for sleeping townsfolk they could start draining blood from. I distinctly remember at one point, after they had gone into the dungeon and discovered a young girl who had been locked in a tomb, that, much to my surprise and chagrin, rather than save her, they passed her around until everyone had had a share of the blood (which, someone commented, was quite sweet), and then proceeded to lock her back where she had been. A few argued that instead they should take her along to feed on later, rather than just kill her now and be done with it. I’ll let you guess what they did.
But, you know what they say about absolute power, and the high-level playtest was even more disturbing, if only because our playtesters had more options to work with. One of them, who had taken the early version of the “Create Thrall” power, decided to keep his thralls in a portable hole, with a single bottle of air and decanter of endless water to go around. I remember him asking me “How many can I fit inside if I make them all stand up?” As though that weren’t enough, the inside of the hole was fit with a platform which could be raised and lowered, so that he could have them clean their floor out each night, as well as for ease of feeding. In case you missed that, he kept his followers in standing-room-only darkness, passing a bottle of air between them to stay alive, taking them out only to feed on them before returning them to the darkness.
They were, in short, somewhat less than heroic.
So, did we succeed in our goal of creating a new kind of experience for Dungeons and Dragons? I would say yes. With these new blood rules, players can explore their darker side, for one (and, really, what are vampires for, if not to explore the darker sides of human nature?), but there’s more that these mechanics lend themselves to: it’s pathetically easy for a ‘standard’ vampire to suddenly reform, never again to drink blood. In fact, he really has no reason to drink it. Though it’s fun and satisfying in the short term to play the vampire who views everyone around him as either a resource or competition for resources, and treats them accordingly, I think that real, long-term fulfillment with these new vampires is to be found in the vampire anti-hero (Or maybe just hero. That’s one thing that’s always bothered me about White Wolf vampires: apparently, the best they can ever hope to be is a brooding anti-hero.) who fights his inner demon and only drains blood from animals or from those willing to offer it to him.
Still, the temptation is always there, lurking in the background, to simply start preying on townsfolk, taking them with you for an extra boost in class features and hit points later. And that’s why the warning is there in the book, because, as a longtime DM, I know that it can be…frustrating when your players take such a…pragmatic view of NPCs. I strongly believe that there’s a lot of fun to be had with the new vampires, but I also recognize that some games just aren’t interested in exploring the themes that those vampires are built for. In the same way that the works of H. P. Lovecraft don’t belong in a children’s book, neither do these vampires—or at least the behavior that they encourage—belong in a game where PCs are virtuous heroes and evil is a monolithic force.
Join me next week, when I’ll be sharing some stories about how Liber Vampyr came to be the way it is today. Until next time, may your heroes be virtuous, and your anti-heroes gritty.