60 minutes of thoughts: My Childhood Vampires

This image was one of my only pictures of a vampire as a child, glimpsed very briefly in a video edit of We Are the Village Green Preservation Society then hastily covered by a parent. It mutated in my mind. It scared the shit out of me.


This comes from two places.

First: The other posts I'm writing right now are taking ages for reasons inc. work, RSI recovery. One of them is about a pair of games I wrote somewhere between the ages of 9 and 12, before experiencing any other TTRPG via more than cultural osmosis. But I noticed, when writing them, that the vampires they contain don't resemble what I recall of my childhood conception of them much, if at all. They're closest to being Warhammer vampires. I want to share with you a very different conception, one that I held from the ages of c.5 (when the concept was first introduced to me via one of those 'children's book of hollywood monsters' books) to 7 (when I started getting more into Warhammer and fantasy fiction), but the fear of which lingered until I was at least 9 or 10. Arguably it persists in certain ways to this day.

These are not conventional vampires, the kind I and others mostly use in games. These are the imagined vampires of a fairly sheltered slightly autistic child, piecing together a coherent picture that rolls misunderstood descriptions together with the experience of sensory overstimulation. You could use them as something that isn't called a vampire, but...

Second: I, like everyone else with or without a pulse, watched Eggers' Nosferatu. I found it provocative (not like that): I didn't like it, or not all of it, but I thought it could have been truly great and immediately started thinking about how I would do it differently, then about the theory of vampires in general. This produced one interesting outcome, derived from the 'I am an appetite' line and critical commentary on how Nosferatu (in any incarnation) is an incarnate plague.

I have concluded that almost all (monstrous) fictional vampires essentially share a space with (monstrous) fictional dragons. Not just because of Dracul-a and the dragon-crested Erszebet Bathory! All are the fear of some apocalypse - plague or famine or conquest for vampires usually, war or conquest or famine or the fifth horseman of storm for dragons, but there's overlap and variance - crossed with the fear of some sort of human desire (procreative or self-preservative or social-inclusive for vampires, self-preservative or (usually) accumulative for dragons) amped to monstrous/sinful extremes. Sure, there are other things that fit into this space, but they're all secretly vampires or dragons or they have another major thematic component that makes them not those things.

i.e. Orlok = plague & conquest + social-inclusive desire turned to endless lust for intimacy. (Yes, I know, 'I am an appetite' but it's not literal food, right? Vampiric gluttony is a theme sometimes, it's a perversion of self-preservation, that's not Orlok given the way he goes). 
Smaug = famine & conquest + accumulative desire maximized
Dracula = conquest + procreative desire turned to promiscuous moral perversion (to the victims) and maximization of his brood
The Beowulf dragon = plague + self-preservative desire turned to vengeful destructuion

So anyway, regular vampires should be able to turn into dragons, not bats, and dragons should drink blood. This much is obvious. Secondarily, we should make a table of these and work out which spaces aren't filled. But what's interesting to me about my childhood vampires is they really don't fit this model. They're like creatures from a dark fairy-tale or an urban legend, fae-like and bloody-mary-like and etc. They still feel a bit like vampires because they drink blood with fangs, but they're vampires through the glass darkly of very limited exposure to anything 'scary.' If they refer to an apocalypse, it's the little-apocalypse of 'having to talk to people who make you uncomfortable in an environment ill-suited to your sensory needs'; if they invoke a desire, it's an awkward grappling with fluctuating ambiversion. So they're... weird. Entertainingly so, to me at least.


Vampire

  • They're not undead necessarily. They're … entities. They simply exist. As well question the tides or the colour yellow or social embarrassment. 
    • Predators through and through. Don't have a life outside of hunting and sleeping, though they can feign it. The kill is an incredible, animalistic high.
  • Sheet-white humanoids, when they're visible. Bloodshot red eyes.
    • Can become invisible and intangible at will, but must manifest in order to feed.
    • Long thin hollow fangs, like daggers crossed with hypodermic needles. Forget struggling to talk - they make it hard to close their mouths, though aren't so bulky as to make them look brutish. They drink blood by sucking it through the hollow interior of the fangs like a straw.
  • Can sense any invocation of them. If you look at a picture of one, or even say the word 'vampire', they will hear and come. They move very fast when this happens, crossing continents in seconds.
  • They can't exactly fly, but can at least levitate or climb walls as easily as a spider, since they can definitely get to upstairs windows.
  • Their kiss is certain death. This is entirely literal: if they kiss you with their lips, you will die. They generally do this to targets before feeding. They will try to persuade you to let them kiss you through romantic advances, impersonating family members etc.
  • Lack of stated consent creates a ward against them. For example, they need to persuade you to let them kiss you because they can't normally physically touch you without your consent. Likewise, they can't enter a dwelling-place without the consent of the occupants. HOWEVER... 
    • This ward relies on the subject's own senses identifying what the vampire is. As such, when the subject is exposed to a strong sensory experience in one of it's primary senses - crowded, rapidly-moving visuals or loud grating sound for humans, intense physical pain may also qualify - they are unprotected and the vampire may kiss them or simply grab them and begin drinking. (As lots of humans may protect a fellow or help them see through the vampire's ruses, they tend to prey on those who are exposed to a loud sound whilst alone, manifesting from incorporeality to make the kill.)
    • Sufficient fear, full-blown panic attack levels, can do this. If not offered an opportunity to feed, they may simply... watch a vulnerable target silently from a distance, letting them know they're there, hoping the fear will cause them to slip up or panic so completely that their defences fall.

    • Daylight causes them to totally disappear and die instantly. Likewise physical contact with garlic, or a stake of rosewood through the heart.  Any other physical damage may wound them and force them to discorporate to recover, but will not permanently destroy them.
    • Holy symbols have no effect; they have NOTHING to do with God.
    • They have no reflections, of course.

    The annoying thing about not having a singular system of choice is that it's always tough to know what to go to to make any particular idea, but if they had a D&D statline it'd probably be about:

    STR 15 (stronger than most humans, not so strong that multiple humans aren't a threat)
    DEX 20 (can lunge across a room in a split-second)
    CON 12
    INT 10
    WIS 12
    CHA 12

    Otherwise, you probably know better than I how to turn the described features above into your system of choice. They likely hunt alone, groups of 2 or 3 at most.
    The plot hook is pretty simple: one is hunting a PC who spends a lot of time alone, or a group of vulnerable people the PCs care about. They have to A) work out what's going on, B) locate the rather slippery creature and C) destroy it. Beware of letting them become too clear what the beings are, or giving them too strong a motivation. If possible, have those in the know always say 'such spirits' and other innuendos. See if the players can be led by this rather odd beastie to say the V-word - and if they can, well, it comes when its name is said :)

    Sleep tight, and don't let the bed bugs bite, 

    Jago

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