Demographics and Urban Fantasy

[Thaluikhain]

The garlic fan page mentioned that mosquitoes flee from the smell of garlic. So there's that. Most vampires aren't mosquito themed admittedly.

Blood-sucking monster, mankind's oldest and most dangerous enemy (if you don't count waterborne diseases)...it'd fit a lot better than most depictions of vampires.

[Omegonthesane]

The garlic fan page mentioned that mosquitoes flee from the smell of garlic. So there's that. Most vampires aren't mosquito themed admittedly.

Blood-sucking monster, mankind's oldest and most dangerous enemy (if you don't count waterborne diseases)...it'd fit a lot better than most depictions of vampires.

The Crimson Court DLC for Darkest Dungeon added mosquito themed vampires, actually. Only as enemies though, no party members "infected by the Crimson Curse" got mosquito features and there wasn't a set of fuckups you could make that would have the player version of the infection advance to the point where you mutate into a mosquito monster.

They even bundled a new class with the DLC with an emphasis on bleed effects and a super move that did heavy damage and healed the user, and didn't make it vampire themed.

[phlapjackage]

The garlic fan page mentioned that mosquitoes flee from the smell of garlic. So there's that. Most vampires aren't mosquito themed admittedly.

Blood-sucking monster, mankind's oldest and most dangerous enemy (if you don't count waterborne diseases)...it'd fit a lot better than most depictions of vampires.

Holy shit !!! I just thought about the running water thing too, in relation to mosquitos - they only lay eggs in stagnant water!

Now to see if mosquitos are repelled by a holy symbol...

[Mord]

That being said, Garlic is native to Central Asia and obviously is completely absent from traditional North and South American culture before the arrival of the Spanish.

This reminds me of something that was mentioned a few pages ago while we were still riffing on Dracula as the progenitor of modern vampirism - what if there aren't a lot of really ancient vampires to deal with because vampirism was imported from the New World like tomatoes and syphilis?

Wikifacts inform me that "Vampires proper originate in folklore widely reported from Eastern Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries." Now on the other hand, there are 13th century European burials with stakes in their torsos and all kinds of traditions of revenants and cannibal spirits and ghouls, but whatever; let's say some of those traditions are a blend of BS, weird people eating other people for funsies, and some local Eurasian variant on the "true vampire." But forget the local draugr; just a few centuries after first contact with a vast empire that ran on rivers of blood, you have peasants all over Europe (mostly in the Balkans) staking Grandma at her funeral because of the risk that she's a secret hematophage.

Obviously the Spanish weren't too keen on things like understanding the cultures they were putting to the torch, so the origins of vampirism might have legitimately been unknown even to the people who brought it back from the New World. Dracula gets all the bitches, but he didn't make his play for London until the 1890s. Actually, Hernan Cortes was the father of European vampires. He could have transmitted vampirism personally to Europeans in 1528-1530 or any time between 1541-1566 (his death was attested in 1547). Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) would have been the right age to be part of the first or second generation of native European vampires. The famous vampire who called himself Dracula, in this telling, is just some guy who just called himself Dracula after the historical figure, and no one really knew the difference back in England.

Narratively, why would you place the origins of vampirism in the conquest of the New World? Well, if you wanted to have a setting where vampirism is more a representation of imperialist/capitalist/colonial exploitation than disease. Placing the origins of vampirism in the New World doesn't turn the tables on the conquistadores, rather, New World vampirism and New World gold together spark the war in which the entire world is eventually subjected to the shadowy rule of immortal European bloodsuckers. African slavery, child labor in manufactories, the East India companies and the Raj, Chinese treaty ports... All over the world and down the centuries, more blood than Montezuma could have ever imagined, a sacrificial pyramid with billions queued on the steps - all waiting quietly to be squeezed out by the 1% waiting at its top.

[Thaluikhain]

Wouldn't you still get old vampires (or need a reason not to), just not European ones?

It's an inventive idea, but one I could see being handled really, really badly. I shudder to think what White Wolf would have done with that idea 20 years ago.

[kzt]

Wouldn't you still get old vampires (or need a reason not to), just not European ones?

It's an inventive idea, but one I could see being handled really, really badly. I shudder to think what White Wolf would have done with that idea 20 years ago.

If you assume that vampires are alive, then the old ones mostly just died from the disease that killed like 90% of the rest of the natives.

If you assume that vampires are really dead then yeah, not so easy.

[Jason]

The idea that all religions have exorcisms is one of the dumbest things I've ever read and a perfect example of why "true faith" sucks.

I guess you don't read a lot, then. Moreover, my argument weasn't that all religions have a "rite of exorcism to banish demons" but rites, prayers and procedures to gain divine help to repell evil spirits in some or all of their manifestations".

I am looking at religions on an abstract level, looking at their purpose and how they implement the means to cope with loss and trauma in an age before psychology and psychotherapy.
I am also looking at how to translate those means into a magical system, fit for a fantasy setting and a plausible reason for the resulting mechanics. Whether or not you call the resulting explanation "true faith" or not is something I just don't care about.

And you can shove your "you're just looking at everything from the lens of your religion" bullshit right up your arse, right along with your semantics. Granted, you might know more about religions than I do. There is no way for me to ascertain that. But I am working with religious beliefs from pretty much all around the globe on a daily basis in my actual practice.

Moreso, I am not even religious, so you can take your neat little accusations and suck a barrel of cocks!

If you need to go dumpster diving through Algonquin mythology to find a story where a Wendigo hunts someone and claim that a wendigo is evil and it's kind of an animal-like spirit in a man-like body so that's why crosses should hurt vampires you've absolutely left the plot.

Except, you don't. You do understand how shamanic healing works, do you? You do understand the concept of dreamcatchers and totems, do you? You honestly couldn't have picked a worse religion that the (northern) native american one to refute rite to banish evil spirits across world religions.

That there was Jason's arguments strictly speaking but yes, although I should add that the rite of exorcism doesn't even work on vampires so it's already not the hill to die on if you want to defend "crosses hurt vampires despite our setting explicitly rejecting Christian cosmology".

That's certainly true. I used exorcism as an example for mystical rites in religions to repel, or gain porotection from evil spirits. It's quite obvious that the rituale romanum wouldn't be of much use against a vampire out of bram stoker's book.

[deaddmwalking]

That there was Jason's arguments strictly speaking but yes, although I should add that the rite of exorcism doesn't even work on vampires so it's already not the hill to die on if you want to defend "crosses hurt vampires despite our setting explicitly rejecting Christian cosmology".

That's certainly true. I used exorcism as an example for mystical rites in religions to repel, or gain porotection from evil spirits. It's quite obvious that the rituale romanum wouldn't be of much use against a vampire out of bram stoker's book.

Jason, I think you've missed the boat on this one.

Let's take it slow.

Me and my buddy Koji (who happens to be a non-practicing Zen Buddhist with a fair number of Shinto beliefs as are many Japanese). As we walk, we're accosted by a vampire.

I often have a rosary with me, and in this case I pull it out and hold it out to protect myself from the vampire. Does it work? Why or why not?

Koji happens to have Shide (zig-zag paper streamer with a prayer written on it) that he holds up to protect himself from the vampire. Does it work? Why or why not?

If you think holding up a crucifix is an iconic image that you want your game to support you have to decide whether it is EVERY crucifix, or only SOME crucifixes. You also have to decide if it is every PERSON or only SOME people. Faith isn't generally a measurable quantity. I have a lot of faith in science, but I'm not sure that believing in science OUGHT to help me with a vampire, even if I hold out a calorimeter. Even if I have a lot of faith in the divine, does that mean I expect god to directly intervene for me at that moment? I mean even if I accept that God exists and is a benevolent being, I also have to accept that sometimes children starve to death in Yemen - clearly faith isn't BY ITSELF enough to stop bad things happening the world over. If it only applies to me PERSONALLY, that sounds like a quality that I possess which is totally independent of any religious belief.

You basically can't have a system where all religions are equally OBJECTIVELY detrimental to vampires. Having a player produce a Flying Spaghetti Monster bumper magnet isn't quite the same visual that you were supporting before... If you try to make something like that work, the vampire doesn't even have to recognize the symbol - it's magic powered entirely by belief and in a game that gets ridiculous and abused. The moment your suggestion results in the GM deciding what 'real religions' are, you're going to move into offensive territory very fast.

So we have four cases:

1) Symbols are potent themselves. This one doesn't really work because there really isn't an end to religious symbology. While anyone can pick up a crucifix and hold back a vampire, what about a bible? What about a crescent moon? What about a Star of David? What about a Lightning Bolt (Zeus)? What about a bull horn (some deity from 2000 years ago)? If someone, somewhere, recognizes it is a powerful symbol of protection, all vampires, everywhere are forced to do so, too? This only makes sense if there is some concrete deity enforcing this rule, and then you'd expect them only to enforce it for the religion(s) they actually like.

2) People are potent with a symbol they choose. This one can work as an ability that people select. Since this is an ability, it doesn't REALLY have anything to do with faith. A devout Hindu with this ability will succeed where an equally devout Hindu without this ability will fail. Faith and symbols mean nothing, so claiming that 'true faith' is important doesn't really do anything.

3) Individual vampires recognize and are repulsed by certain symbols. This one again doesn't have anything to do with true faith. If you meet Vlad, he might recoil from the Crucifix because he finds confronting his religious past distasteful. But his Hindu vampire friend doesn't care and the symbol means nothing. If you go this route, potentially any vampire can ignore the symbol(s) so it doesn't really give you the iconic holding out a crucifix. You really end up pulling out the whole golf-bag of religious paraphernalia and trying to figure out what works on THIS vampire. Not so cool in a game.

4) Religiosity and the symbol don't mean anything BY THEMSELVES. A devout 'true believer' with the appropriate symbol does nothing. But a SPECIAL religious symbol does. Coronado's Cross is a Crucifix of Undead Turning +12. Holding it out works for anybody because the item is magic, not because it is a religious symbol.

Any way you choose to go, all religions being equally able to deal with vampires because of their 'faith power' isn't it. If it was, you're going to offend atheists and you still have to explain why the vampire cares about what you believe. I believe pretty strongly that people shouldn't kill people or drink their blood - why isn't that enough to save me?

If you want mechanical underpinnings, you need to answer some questions about how it works and for whom it works - once you start addressing those questions, deciding these factors DOES get offensive.

[Mistborn]

Wouldn't you still get old vampires (or need a reason not to), just not European ones?

There's certainly precedent.

[Mord]

Wouldn't you still get old vampires (or need a reason not to), just not European ones?

You would have as many musty old blood gods as you might want or need, without having to explain anything relating to a native European vampire species that went underground and concealed itself after thousands of years of existing openly.

If you don't want any musty old blood gods at all, you could say the Spanish killed them off, probably with a lot of help the native Aztecs and their subjugated peoples.

[Username17]

I spent seven years living in Czechia, and the Slavs were quite notable for taking anti-vampire precautions for the last thousand years or so. Now what that entailed was usually iron nails sticking corpses to the bottoms of their coffins, iron bars around the top of the coffins, piles of rocks in the coffins, dismemberment, or incineration. If you had some specific reason you wanted those to be anti-zombie rather than anti-vampire measures I certainly couldn't stop you.

But if you go down to the Med and the Middle East where we have a bit better records from a bit longer ago, we got the North African Lamiae drinking blood and killing travelers about three thousand years ago, and we got the Ekimmu rising from the grave to cause trouble some six thousand years ago. Again and still, you could ignore those monsters entirely or assign them to other categories if you wanted to.

Bottom line, if you wanted your vampires to be Onaqui that haunted Meso America until the Spanish came and then spread throughout the world, that's a plausible Urban Fantasy backstory. Indeed, that's literally the backstory of the From Duck Til Dawn franchise, which is a fine thing to be. But the other bottom line is that this would be a rather strange setting for people who came in wanting vampires.

That is, the Slavic legends of the last thousand years or so about vampires loom very large in peoples' concepts of what a "Vampire" is. Bram Stoker leaned very heavily on Slavic lore when designing his vampire stories. And so while there are certainly blood drinking monsters in lots of legends from all over the world - it's the Slavic vampires that bring all the boys to the yard. If you say "We're going to play a game about vampires" and the next words out of your mouth are "There's nothing remotely Dracula-like in this setting." people are going to call bullshit.

One of the pieces of unintentional genius of Masquerade was offering different kinds of vampires for different people. And there are certainly people who would be down with the Onaqui as a vampire type. Indeed, it's fucking bizarre to me that Masquerade never delivered those. But I wouldn't expect the Onaqui to be the most popular vampire type. Like, at all.

-Username17

-Username17

[Tannhäuser]

From Duck Til Dawn

Not to be confused with Count Duckula.

[Longes]

From Duck Til Dawn

Not to be confused with Count Duckula.

It's a little-known TV Series about Duck Dynasty hunting vampires.

[Zaranthan]

If this thread doesn’t manage to wander into Bunnicula I will be very disappointed.

Hmm. Vampires as a metaphor for disease, corrupt nobility, and invasive vermin.

[Mord]

That is, the Slavic legends of the last thousand years or so about vampires loom very large in peoples' concepts of what a "Vampire" is. Bram Stoker leaned very heavily on Slavic lore when designing his vampire stories. And so while there are certainly blood drinking monsters in lots of legends from all over the world - it's the Slavic vampires that bring all the boys to the yard. If you say "We're going to play a game about vampires" and the next words out of your mouth are "There's nothing remotely Dracula-like in this setting." people are going to call bullshit.

One of the pieces of unintentional genius of Masquerade was offering different kinds of vampires for different people. And there are certainly people who would be down with the Onaqui as a vampire type. Indeed, it's fucking bizarre to me that Masquerade never delivered those. But I wouldn't expect the Onaqui to be the most popular vampire type. Like, at all.

But here's the thing about Dracula vis a vis the Slavic folklore: they aren't the same thing. You've pointed out yourself that Slavs have had stories about vampire squash and vampire shovels. Slavic vampires have been associated with butterflies, of all fucking things; there are approximately one hundred billion trillion attributes of vampires in some Slavic myth or another, and Bram Stoker, as an Irishman writing in London in the 1890s, did not know 99% of them and ignored 99% of the ones he did. This is because Slavic vampire myths, like all vampire myths and all myths in general, are incoherent and baffling. The vampire legend that looms largest in peoples' concept of what a "Vampire" is is British and American in origin.

What Bram Stoker did with Dracula was create a set of powers and motivations for a modern vampire using some terminology and attributes lifted from Hungarian and Romanian folklore. His vampires set the template in terms of defining in the popular English-speaking imagination what a vampire is and what it does, but his creatures are still purely antagonistic and monstrous figures. What Anne Rice did was ascribe to her vampires both humanity and sexiness, and that right there is the birth of the vampire as modern cultural phenomenon. Very specifically, Anne Rice is the progenitor of the vampire as a figure with whom you could or would want to identify, and thereby all seven original White Wolf vampire clans and a whole shit-ton of media substantially more influential than WW. It's worth noting that in the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula, which claimed to be super-faithful to Bram Stoker's Dracula, Gary Oldman's Dracula is closer in motivation, personality, and emotiveness - in a word, depth - to Lestat than to Bram Stoker's Dracula.

White Wolf's vampires all work the same, even if they're nominally Mesoamerican (Tlacique), sub-Saharan African (Laibon), Mongolian (Anda), or Caribbean (Samedi), not because White Wolf was consciously trying to push universal Slavic vampirism, but because they were trying to push universal Anne Rice vampirism and dress it up in regional costumes. WW's attempts to fork vampirism into regional variants was doomed from the start not just because of their willfullly ignorant Atlantacentrism, but because there's an intrinsic contradiction between having all your vampires be Anne Rice vampires and incorporating regional mythology to any meaningful extent. This is because actual mythological vampires are not people, they are monsters, and they don't do things like brood sexily or have relationships with Brad Pitt. That part is 100% modern and the only reason it looks to be compatible in any way with specifically Slavic vampire myths is down to random-ass chance. We like to talk about Penanggalan here, but when you talk about incorporating them into After Sundown, you are necessarily subjecting the original mythology to the same Tom Cruise-ification that Slavic vampires went through in 1994, and what comes out the other end of that process is not meaningfully African any more than Gary Oldman Dracula is meaningfully Slavic.

It literally does not matter what the in-universe origin of vampires is in whatever setting you create; you will still have Tom Cruise-like vampires in your setting because the vampires your players will want to play as are Tom Cruise vampires, not vampires informed directly by any regional myths in particular. (Unless you're one of the four people who pledged to my Pumpkin: the Bloodsucking Kickstarter - 45 days to go, let's keep up the momentum!)

When you say "We're going to play a game about vampires," it could not matter less whether your vampires are nominally Mesoamerican or Biblical or Astral Parasite in origin, because that is totally irrelevant to whether the vampires in your game are remotely Tom Cruise-like, which they are.

[DrPraetor]

The "let's make the monsters sexy and identifiable" trope has been reinvented and templated onto different chunks of folklore repeatedly in history, at least back to ancient Persia, and probably before. The storytelling advantages have been obvious for some time.

So you have stories in which just-monsters are repurposed as heroes and former divinities are recast as the monsters throughout history.

So you can make sexy playable characters out of any fucking thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikoloshe

and when you do you're going to want to pick through the folklore for stuff that works in your story - as any other storyteller would obviously do - and either ignore or dismiss as false anything that doesn't fit well.

Anne Rice and Vampires win a gold star for pinging the collective unconscious in the last 50 years or so, there are plenty of alternatives that predate Tom Cruise.

Now, with all respect to Lestat, it's witches and not vampires that have the most universal fokloric support, including of course that many vampires are essentially a flavor of witch. So, as has been proposed previously, if I'm writing an urban fantasy game from scratch, then I'm trying to balance fokloric, cultural and trope inclusion against keeping my setting uncluttered with Steves so that there is some manageable corpus of occult lore that you can use and exploit, and I'm going to make vampires a subtype of witch for that reason. Within that simplifying assumption, you will simultaneously want to let people play both Lost Boys and Twilight vampires, or close facsimiles / mashups thereof.

[Username17]

What Anne Rice did was ascribe to her vampires both humanity and sexiness, and that right there is the birth of the vampire as modern cultural phenomenon. Very specifically, Anne Rice is the progenitor of the vampire as a figure with whom you could or would want to identify, and thereby all seven original White Wolf vampire clans and a whole shit-ton of media substantially more influential than WW.

As DrP pointed out, no. Not remotely. This is completely a-historical.

Interview With The Vampire came out in 1976. Count Chocula went on sale in 1971. Count Von Count appeared on Sesame Street in 1969. Barnabus appeared in Dark Shadows in 1967. The Munsters went on the air in 1964. The first "sympathetic" vampire in English literature is Varney the Vampire - whose serialized adventures appeared in The Feast of Blood back in 1845. And obviously there have been heroic demon-fighting Dhampirs in Yugoslavia for centuries before then.

Interview With The Vampire is the beginning of the Vampire Romance subgenre. It's an important subgenre, and it's super important for role playing. But it's not the beginning of the Vampire as a figure that you'd want to identify with. Like, not even remotely close. It's off by over a hundred years and is even itself riding the crest of a wave of accessible and identifiable vampires that started more than a decade earlier.

-Username17

[Mord]

The "let's make the monsters sexy and identifiable" trope has been reinvented and templated onto different chunks of folklore repeatedly in history, at least back to ancient Persia, and probably before.

Care to provide any examples? Particularly the ancient Persian one.

Interview With The Vampire came out in 1976. Count Chocula went on sale in 1971. Count Von Count appeared on Sesame Street in 1969. Barnabus appeared in Dark Shadows in 1967. The Munsters went on the air in 1964. The first "sympathetic" vampire in English literature is Varney the Vampire - whose serialized adventures appeared in The Feast of Blood back in 1845. And obviously there have been heroic demon-fighting Dhampirs in Yugoslavia for centuries before then.

Interview With The Vampire is the beginning of the Vampire Romance subgenre. It's an important subgenre, and it's super important for role playing. But it's not the beginning of the Vampire as a figure that you'd want to identify with. Like, not even remotely close. It's off by over a hundred years and is even itself riding the crest of a wave of accessible and identifiable vampires that started more than a decade earlier.

If you want to give credit for the contemporary "humanized" portrayal of vampires in fiction to General Mills and Children's Television Workshop instead of Anne Rice, sure, fine, but not the point.

The point I made was that contemporary vampires have virtually nothing to do with the Slavic mythology that nominally inspired them. If your setting's vampires really are "real Slavic vampires," your audience will be confused and reject the premise, because "real Slavic vampires" are moldy pumpkins and rusty hatchets. Saying that your setting's vampires are originally Mexican or African instead of Slavic will not make a bit of difference, because your setting's vampires are actually American and happen to be wearing a thin layer of Slavic makeup.

You can do some nifty and game mechanically interesting stuff with re-theming the powers your vampires have if they have a different geographical point of origin, like maybe they turn into serpents instead of wolves, have powers related to pulling hearts out of people, and are repelled by aloe vera if their grandsires were Aztec. But, I don't see such differences in powerset or weaknesses to be really substantial, as long as all the regional variants are portrayed as cursed humans who still feel human feelings and such. The vampire who pines for lost loves and cries bloody tears and describes men as miserable little piles of secrets is the British-American vampire of the 1850s onward and no other.

Close enough.

[Username17]

If you want to give credit for the contemporary "humanized" portrayal of vampires in fiction to General Mills and Children's Television Workshop instead of Anne Rice, sure, fine, but not the point.

I don't want to give credit to General Mills and Children's Television Workshop credit for humanized vampires, because I want to give credit to James Malcolm Rymer in 1845. And that is the point.

Yes, there have been various children's works and parodies that presented vampires that were cuddly and approachable. But there was a best-selling work of English literature starring a humanized and sympathetic vampire two years before Bram Stoker was even born. The vampire subgenre of gothic fiction as we know it has never existed without vampires that are relatable protagonists.

But the existence of parodies is actually important to talk about as well. And that's where we get to Fish Malks. There are a shit load of different vampire stories that appeal to various people, but they aren't all tonally compatible. Just as stories where there are complicated vampire social hierarchies are incompatible with stories where vampires individually murder significant numbers of people or are solitary predators with physically large territories; so too are some stories incompatible simply because they aren't compatible levels of seriousness.

Count Von Count, Duckula, Chocula, Lily Munster, and Bunnicula are all actual vampires and their stories are legitimate within the body of vampire lore. But they are also comedic, which may not be acceptable to people who want to set a serious tone with their vampire story. Fish Malks were in general pretty poorly handled, but the primary complaint (even above the extremely insulting fashion they handled real world mental illness) was that they simply weren't tonally compatible with a serious dramatic narrative.

Similarly, some of the more brutal mass-murderer vampires of splatterpunk works are tonally inconsistent with the kind of minimal heroism most people expect out of their protagonist characters. You really can't fit all the various forms of vampires together. Not just because the vampire encyclopedia is many hundreds of pages long or that some of the magic rules are literally contradictory - but simply because not all kinds of characters can fit in all kinds of stories.

Ultimately, your urban fantasy setting has to decide what kinds of vampires it has and does not have - even if it has aspirations of being quite the kitchen sink. But it would still be really weird to me to voluntarily decide to cut out vampires with eurotrash accents and opera capes. That just seems like a weird thing to try to remove from your urban fantasy setting.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I was referring to Zurvanic literature ( in which various demons are presented sympathetically. ) This is complicated by the alternation between demons and deities that also happens with the Asuras in Hinduism. Unfortunately, any search for sexy Zoroastrian demons is returning hits for Zoroastrian teachings on homosexuality which is not what I want to study.

The vampire who pines for lost loves and cries bloody tears and describes men as miserable little piles of secrets is the British-American vampire of the 1850s onward and no other.

While some of those details are vampire specific, the broad presentation of the monster as an emotionally rejected, cynical critic of the human condition is quite a bit older:

9 Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?
10 Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.
11 But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.

Scholarly consensus puts that rendition of Satan at around the 6th century BC.

Now, with a certainty, the frequency of antiheroes of various stripes in literature is much higher in the modern era; but the antihero including especially the monstrous antihero (with cynicism or brooding as options) is not a modern invention.

[Username17]

So let's talk about inner circles and outer circles. If you're going to have supernatural politics, you're going to need factions. And factions require groups that can be split into subgroups. Now White Wolf went "totally fucking crazy" with this, but something along those lines needs to happen.

The key insight is that your sandboxes are going to have about 100 supernaturals in them. That means that each 1% of your region is literally just one dude. Anything less than 1% can only be conveyed by simply not existing at all. That's the sample size. What that means in turn is that subgroups of groups don't break down very far within the city.

Imagine that you have some group of Blood Witches. Like the Tremere in Masquerade. They represent a core demographic, which probably means that they are like 10% of the city. That in turn means there are literally ten of them. This means that a coven inside them that's secretly more evil doesn't have a constituency. There aren't enough of them for that to be a thing.

What there can be instead is a rogue's gallery of potential villain groups. With the understanding that your city has a representation of 3-6 members from like 7 different antagonist factions, but that the city next door has representatives from different antagonist factions. This lets you get your proliferation of villain groups on without choking the demographics numbers.

-Username17