Vampires

If you’re new to the blog, there are a couple of things you should know. First, I don’t come up with my own topics, my wife, Cupcake/Melanie, gives me a topic and I write about it. Second, I kind of make a little game out of it where I try to find a way to work the topic into upcoming installments of my Dungeons and Dragons game. My wife plays in my game as one of the player characters… so, you’d think she’d think of fun fluffy topics like princesses and ponies, but no, she gave me vampires instead.

Vampires are a staple in paranormal fiction (not just horror anymore) and I have to admit they’re probably my second favorite fictional creature (the first being dragons), so I feel like I’m pretty up to speed on how the whole vampire thing works.

Vampires, first and foremost, are bad guys. In the folk tales that gave them life they were villains, and when Bram Stoker penned Dracula he turned the vampire into an archetypal villain. Simply put, the vampire (and Count Dracula in particular) have been copied over and over and over again in all forms of media. They’ve been in books (duh), movies, comic books, paintings, songs, they’ve crossed genres and have been in space and became the centerpiece of the paranormal romance fiction. But, they’ve never really lost that edge, that “I am the bad guy” feeling. Hell, even Stephanie Meyer tried to convey that feeling in the Twilight books. (I don’t have a lot of positive things to say about those books, but her treatment of vampires as villains—James, Aro, Jane—is one of those positive things.)

So, when it comes to working vampires into my Dungeons and Dragons game that’s not a problem at all. I can see my world filled with these monsters that stalk the night, and beyond that there have already been vampires in my game.

Well…

Not in this game in particular, but there was in the last game. Though, it was a half-vampire/dhampire (whatever you want to cal it), and the PCs never came across it. I put the monster (a rogue and assassin named Guildenstern) in the game for later on in the campaign. He ran the mortuary in New Windhaven  (the starting town for the last game) and was going to become a recurring antagonist when the PCs hit level ten or so.

I was going to have it that he was hired to attack the PCs. I don’t remember what it was I had him hired to do besides playing antagonist, but it’s really not important now.

Life happens, things change, and for reasons I won’t mention we’re not playing that campaign anymore. But, I will keep in mind. Maybe our current PCs will piss some powerful lord off, and they’ll have a monstrous half-vampire knocking on their door in the middle of the night.

Anywho, I’m checking out for the night. Later kids.

Ryan

2-12-14