Demographics and Urban Fantasy

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 2:25 pm

Thaluikhain wrote:Does the vampire population need to be sustainable? I mean, yeah, it needs to have been sustained up until now

Yes it does. If anything it should be easier to sustain now vs 10-50 years ago since there are more people. For unsustainability to be occuring now and not earlier something must have changed. If you decided that suddenly a huge increase in vampire quantities or hunger occurred then you have some splaining to do. That shouldn’t be the default.

Frank wrote:If private plane owners killed and ate people every day or even every month we'd run out of homeless people in less than half a year.

Sounds like a plank of the Republican platform.

violence in the media · Fri Oct 12, 2018 4:02 pm

phlapjackage wrote:Just doing some quick napkin-work:

610000 is listed as 1 in every 4 deaths in the US. So total deaths per year in the US is ~2.4million (just checked, latest data from 2014 is ~2.6million). Divided by the 32k supernaturals mentioned above gives something like a possible ~100 deaths supernatural/year to play with in terms of how over-arching the masquerade is seen to be (obviously not all deaths are supernaturally related)
- Number of deaths underreported?
- Cause of death wrongly reported?
- Deceased information wrongly reported (age/ethnicity/name)

What if you just did something crazy and had nearly all human deaths be the result of supernatural occurrence? What we think of as heart disease is just a side effect of being secretly preyed upon every night for 30 years. All the serial killers and mass shooters are people mindfucked into taking the fall for the Masquerade for various reasons.

Think of us as the factory farmed cows of the supernatural community. Sure, some of us die from accidents, disease, or cow violence; but that's nothing compared to the slaughterhouse.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 4:18 pm

If the world isn't recognisable as "like our world on the surface" you lose the main design advantage of having a Masquerade in the first place. You'd have to pick supernatural creatures very carefully to make them secretly be the cause of all disease-related deaths and most mass murders.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 4:45 pm

Blade wrote:You could probably factor in "missing persons" statistics as well. They're estimated around 800 000 every year in the US.

These are not the same as people permanently and mysteriously disappearing. Most are not missing very long. For example, there are a lot of missing teens who run away from home. The vast majority get found within a fairly short period.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 4:51 pm

Thaluikhain wrote:Does the vampire population need to be sustainable? I mean, yeah, it needs to have been sustained up until now, but if there are too many vampires nowdays and the masquerade is about to break, that can be either a plot point, or something that happens after the campaign ends.

The vampires (etc) that have been around a while will really want it to be sustainable. And I would assume they would have the ability and willingness to destroy those who threaten their existence.

Which leads to Stross's vampires who kill any vampires they hear about because any who comes to their attention are sloppy or attention whores who will get noticed by the authorities soon. And they really like living their quiet unlife and don't want it ruined by anyone.

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 5:30 pm

kzt wrote:
Blade wrote:You could probably factor in "missing persons" statistics as well. They're estimated around 800 000 every year in the US.
These are not the same as people permanently and mysteriously disappearing. Most are not missing very long. For example, there are a lot of missing teens who run away from home. The vast majority get found within a fairly short period.

While true, it is also true that a lot of people just assume that those hundreds of thousands lost are permanently lost as Blade suggested. So take people's false presumptions and say that that is the reality. Would make for a much darker world.

I know Jim Butcher used the suggested conceit in the Dresden Files that many of those missing persons were really dead due to supernatural. Whether he knew that it was just temporarily missing or not, I dunno the degree to which he was intnentionally twisting reality.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 5:48 pm

You can't increase the death rate significantly without impacting the population growth rate as well. If global population is only 5,000,000,000 because vampires are hungry, then you can no longer find out the mortal - and therefore approximate supernatural - population of a place by looking it up on Wikipedia.

K · Post by K » Fri Oct 12, 2018 7:04 pm

I always assumed that vampires group together for access to an active nightlife/drug scene. You get to know pretty quickly who can be picked off easily in that scene because everyone will just assume they got into their van and moved on to the next town or they ODed in a ditch somewhere.

I live in Santa Cruz, CA, inspiration for Lost Boys, and between the homeless, the tourists, and the drug addicts, a lot of people come in an out of the nightlife scene and no one misses them or looks for them.

You don't increase the official murder rate if no one thinks to look for you and no body is found.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 7:39 pm

K wrote:I always assumed that vampires group together for access to an active nightlife/drug scene. You get to know pretty quickly who can be picked off easily in that scene because everyone will just assume they got into their van and moved on to the next town or they ODed in a ditch somewhere.

I live in Santa Cruz, CA, inspiration for Lost Boys, and between the homeless, the tourists, and the drug addicts, a lot of people come in an out of the nightlife scene and no one misses them or looks for them.

You don't increase the official murder rate if no one thinks to look for you and no body is found.

Sure. The best way to get away with a crime is if nobody realizes a crime has been committed. For example, if you can convince everyone that a teen girl ran away the odds that the cops will find the DNA evidence you might have left when you kidnapped her is pretty much zero, even if a few years later they reconsider this. Once the crime scene is lost so is the evidence they didn't collect.

My brother in law had a nephew that the Baltimore cops reported as a natural death. You know, how lots of healthy 23 y/os die in their sleep, while all their expensive shit sneaks out of the house. So no attempt was made at crime scene preservation. When the autopsy several months later showed he'd been poisoned...

It's harder to do this when you end up with blood sprayed on the ceiling and holes in the walls.

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 8:23 pm

So, in a RL world the the Clinton Body Count is supposedly a thing (irrespective of how tinfoil-hat it may or may not be), in a world of actual vampire conspiracies permeating throughout all levels of society, the #s shouldn't be that hard to deal with.

Also, why wouldn't there be a coterie or 5 working the night shift at various retirement homes?

but yes, most of your feeding is going to be of the non-lethal type.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 9:25 pm

The truly vast number of missing persons cases can allow you to have a truly vast number of murders escape detection for a little while. Further, the amount of missing persons cases that are never solved can hide a very small number of murders forever. But it can't do both at the same time.

The whole point of an Urban Fantasy setting is that you have like immortals and shit, who have been keeping this shit going for a long time and intend to keep this shit going for a long time to come. And that means that the whole missing persons angle isn't helpful for murders.

It doesn't mean that it doesn't help. Vampires can be kidnapping people constantly and then leaving them at a bus stop three weeks later anemic and mind wiped. That kind of activity would vanish into the very large number of temporary missing persons cases. It's just that the number of "never found" people just isn't very large and absolutely doesn't cover tens of thousands of vampires killing people at any particular rate.

You just actually can't have enough vampires to have to have a society and have the vampires in that society individually murdering people at any particular rate and have your setting look enough like Earth that you can look up facts about it on Wikipedia. You can have any two of those things, but not all three. It's the fundamental paradox of Urban Fantasy.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Sat Oct 13, 2018 12:01 am

FrankTrollman wrote:The truly vast number of missing persons cases can allow you to have a truly vast number of murders escape detection for a little while. Further, the amount of missing persons cases that are never solved can hide a very small number of murders forever. But it can't do both at the same time.

The whole point of an Urban Fantasy setting is that you have like immortals and shit, who have been keeping this shit going for a long time and intend to keep this shit going for a long time to come. And that means that the whole missing persons angle isn't helpful for murders.

It doesn't mean that it doesn't help. Vampires can be kidnapping people constantly and then leaving them at a bus stop three weeks later anemic and mind wiped. That kind of activity would vanish into the very large number of temporary missing persons cases. It's just that the number of "never found" people just isn't very large and absolutely doesn't cover tens of thousands of vampires killing people at any particular rate.

You just actually can't have enough vampires to have to have a society and have the vampires in that society individually murdering people at any particular rate and have your setting look enough like Earth that you can look up facts about it on Wikipedia. You can have any two of those things, but not all three. It's then fundamental paradox of Urban Fantasy.

-Username17

I'm saying that there isn't a missing person's case. People vanish all the time and no one is looking for them, or filing reports with the police, or making a fuss because they are people who society at large doesn't, and maybe cannot, track.

The world is full of uncounted people who live in the margins alone and have few if any social connections. In the goth dystopia of a White Wolf-style game, the assumption is that there are a lot more people camping in squats where only one or two other squat-dwellers would notice if they don't make it back from the methadone clinic one night, and those guys don't talk to the police.

You can just be estranged from your family and not talk to them for years. I'e done it. No one filed a missing person's case for me. There have literally been times when only one or two people would have even noticed if I went missing, and I can only hope that they'd file a missing person's report. Lonely deaths are more common than you think.

That being said, basing your vampire game on the brutal truth of social isolation and dehumanization may be too dark for a gothpunk game.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 12:47 am

Yeah, we're still not leaving in a dystopian future where everybody's registered and tracked in some super database. People go missing all the time and nobody gives a fuck to even report on them until they find the body (if they find the body).

As for old statistics, well they're just that, old statistics. Any records that reach us will be far from perfect. And for all we know vampires could've tampered with them. "Yeah, London only had this few people back then. It's not like vampires had a massive barbecue at that time and then covered our tracks. Trust this old moldy piece of paper, will yah?"

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 2:06 am

maglag wrote:Yeah, we're still not leaving in a dystopian future where everybody's registered and tracked in some super database. People go missing all the time and nobody gives a fuck to even report on them until they find the body (if they find the body).

As for old statistics, well they're just that, old statistics. Any records that reach us will be far from perfect. And for all we know vampires could've tampered with them. "Yeah, London only had this few people back then. It's not like vampires had a massive barbecue at that time and then covered our tracks. Trust this old moldy piece of paper, will yah?"

They called it the Great Smog of London

Something that entertains me is looking at various weird newspieces or whathaveyou and trying to imagine them as cover for a world like After Sundown.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 2:54 am

Yeah, plus as Frank himself pointed out in the other thread, religions rewrite their stories all the time and most of the people just go along with it simply because those that remembered the events are already dead.

So considering that vampires don't die of old age, and that back then there was no internet and stuff like the press also only arrived relatively recently so any numbers would have a few copies, any vampire conspiracy should've been easily able to rewrite any official records, in particular when they can just wait those that know the truth to know by (un)natural means and then just change a few papers.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 5:49 am

K wrote: I'm saying that there isn't a missing person's case. People vanish all the time and no one is looking for them, or filing reports with the police, or making a fuss because they are people who society at large doesn't, and maybe cannot, track.

The world is full of uncounted people who live in the margins alone and have few if any social connections. In the goth dystopia of a White Wolf-style game, the assumption is that there are a lot more people camping in squats where only one or two other squat-dwellers would notice if they don't make it back from the methadone clinic one night, and those guys don't talk to the police.

You can just be estranged from your family and not talk to them for years. I'e done it. No one filed a missing person's case for me. There have literally been times when only one or two people would have even noticed if I went missing, and I can only hope that they'd file a missing person's report. Lonely deaths are more common than you think.

That being said, basing your vampire game on the brutal truth of social isolation and dehumanization may be too dark for a gothpunk game.

I'm quite aware of how many lonely deaths there are. I mean, I end up certifying the deaths of people with no family from time to time because I work at a hospital. The issue isn't that these kinds of untraced deaths don't exist or that there isn't room for a few prolific serial killers to hide in the statistics. The issue is that there isn't room for serial killers in significant numbers to operate for extended periods of time and still hide in the statistics.

Real serial killers tend to operate for only a short period of time and there aren't very many of them operating at the same time. Real deaths sometimes go unnoticed for weeks, months, or even years. But that's not enough.

Let's take the guy who died in his apartment without any human contacts and just had his rent and utilities paid by direct debit for 3 years without anyone realizing that he was dead. That's a disturbing story, but the broader point is that this sort of thing doesn't help vampires very much, because the system did in fact notice he was dead eventually. It took three fucking years, and that's obviously enough time to get away with murder as an individual, but it's not enough to keep your murders from ever showing up in statistics. Vampires are immortal, and having their crimes escape detection for 3 years is plenty of time for them to move to Chicago or something, but it's not enough time to hide the fact that there are serial killers operating over time. If all your crimes escape detection for 3 years, the number of reported crimes is going to be the same as if they were reported right away if you're continually operating for more than 3 years.

The number of murders you have to hide is the number of murders per year per vampire for two hundred fucking years. It becomes a very large number if the number of vampires is large enough to support social cliques and political factions and the number of murders per vampire per year is significant.

There's plenty of people to prey upon. The world has over thirty million slaves in it, and if every Vampire kept three human beings in literal chains they would be a rounding error on the human slave trade even if there were seven hundred thousand Vampires world wide. And that kind hide because the Vampire's slaves don't die and get replaced every year. Maybe the Vampire loses interest and leaves one of their slaves mind wiped and anemic at a bus stop and captures a new slave, but they probably don't do that every year and even if they do there isn't any trail of bodies from that.

The world has a lot of heroin addicts and homeless people and runaways and stuff that can easily be captured and abused for extended periods without anyone noticing or caring. And if you have magic powers that keep them from ever talking about it, you can pick up these people and feed on them to your heart's content - as long as they don't actually die. A catch and release program doesn't impact demographics and can be maintained indefinitely. A catch and kill program depopulates the pool almost immediately.

The reality is that if your equation is X*Y*Z that your number is going to get stupidly titanic if any two of those numbers are large and the third one is anything other than a tiny fraction. And since one your terms is time, and your vampires are fucking immortal, that term is always going to be real big. Like, thousands of months. The other term is number of vampires, which is going to be a big number as well if you want to have political factions of vampires, which you do. So the final term, the "murders per month" term has to be a tiny fraction for the total to not be ridiculously unmanageably large.

32000 vampires for 2000 months at 1 murder per vampire per month is 64 million murders. That's like five holocausts for the United States alone. You can't do that and have a remotely plausible Earth-state. You just obviously can't.

Again and still, you can pick 2 of the following three:

Vampires are numerous enough that they can have meaningful internal social divisions.
Vampires individually kill people at any significant rate.
The world is remotely recognizable as Earth.

You can't have all three. You just can't.

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 7:52 am

So if you don't care about Vampires at all, things are fine?

Like if you want all the After Sundown types that aren't Vampires who could kill people but have really no reason to, then it's all cool?

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 8:22 am

If your supernatural creatures murder people on the reg, and their numbers are large enough to have their own society with politicking and shit, someone will put two and two together eventually. There just aren't enoguh murders to hide it in.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 9:30 am

Is it so bad to have vampires just drink a pint of blood each night for the magic essence or whatever? Then even if they hit a person every night the most folks are like to notice is people being a bit anemic. Sure, some assholes drink more than they need, or stock up for the week by draining someone dry, but if they don't keep their business quiet then the other supernaturals get pissed.

FrankTrollman wrote:you can pick 2 of the following three:
1 Vampires are numerous enough that they can have meaningful internal social divisions.

2 Vampires individually kill people at any significant rate.

3 The world is remotely recognizable as Earth.
You can't have all three. You just can't.

I think the ideal is all of option 1, a little of option 2 and 3. Vampires (and other supernaturals) kill people some. And the Earth is a bit more dark.

Chicago is often referred to as a dangerous city. Chicago's murder rate is about half that of St. Louis (and about 1/4 of East St Louis). I lived in St Louis in the late 90's early 00's for just after the precipitous drop in national murder rates, I still heard about murders that happened within a few blocks of where I lived along with armed robberies. I changed my habits for my safety in ways that I haven't done in Indianapolis, even when I lived near high crime areas. I was still on Earth, just a more violent patch of it. Hell, if crime rates return to 80's numbers it would be darker, and would be a different landscape, but still recognizable as Earth. Just more like 80's Earth.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 7:28 pm

"Earth but the murder rate is increased by 10% to 100%" is still recognisably Earth. The issue is, a murder per vampire per week has a greater than 100% impact on the murder rate.

I don't think anyone's seriously objecting to the idea of vampires who still have to feed but can nom a person a night, hence the suggestions of catch-and-release programs or straight up kidnaps.

If you have means of magical body disposal of the "fuck you you're never finding this" kind, you instead increase the rate of missing presumed dead people. Not sure if that's any better.

K · Post by K » Sat Oct 13, 2018 7:38 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
32000 vampires for 2000 months at 1 murder per vampire per month is 64 million murders. That's like five holocausts for the United States alone. You can't do that and have a remotely plausible Earth-state. You just obviously can't.

That's bad napkin math.

If you look at the yearly deaths, its closer to 1.6 million a year. Now that's a lot of people, but then you have to realize that the uncounted don't factor into any statistics. For example, the estimates for the number of illegal immigrants that come into the US range from 2 million to 7 million a year, but those are just napkin math too because those guys aren't counted when the surveys get filled out. Its just a rough, napkin math estimate because someone needed to fill out a report.

Then spread that 1.6 million all over the world. Shit, the US alone has seven million drug addicts. If one out of four drug addicts goes missing after burning their life down enough that no one is looking for them, the US alone could feed the vampire population, but if you spread that out over the world, its not even a speed bump.

Narratively, the world with thousands of vampires is supposed to be darker. Vampires are not supposed to be sexy dark sexy super-heroes; they are supposed to be pushers and pimps, the people who have a livelihood that depends on destroying people's lives.

Vampires aren't serial killers in the classic sense. They'd have to act more like rational actors who have a business that requires them to make people disappear, like human traffickers. The world with vampires has to be a lot darker because the vampires need broken families and lives in order to feed the inputs on this beast.

So there is probably a lot more drugs, a lot more illegal immigrants, and lot more dirty cops in a world with tens of thousands of vampires. Shit, the opening credits of Lost Boys is literally a montage of missing persons posters and people who society is not going to miss, and that's how its got to play out.

That being said, you can't play that RPG. Murdering an immigrant family every week is not going to be considered a good time in anyone's book.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 8:41 pm

The US may have seven million drug addicts, but the churn isn't seven million drug addicts per year. I don't see how you can criticize Frank for napkin map when making a blatant deficit/debt error.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 9:00 pm

Lokathor wrote:So if you don't care about Vampires at all, things are fine?

Like if you want all the After Sundown types that aren't Vampires who could kill people but have really no reason to, then it's all cool?

There are obviously other solutions.

You could decide that you want one hundred thousand Vampires that are all killing a person every night. And then your world is having over thirty six million Vampire deaths per year. And then no one fucking cares about the Brujah taste in music or whatever the fuck because it is World War V. Vampires are doing the Rape of Nanking every week, and literally killing people at more than quadruple the rate of World War II. Now obviously, even if this starts with something vaguely recognizable as Earth (perhaps because the Vampires wake up and start murdering people) it won't be remotely recognizable in a year because every man, woman, and child in Canada will be dead.

Alternately, you could decide that you want to keep the nightly murders, but keep the Vampire population low enough that you could slide their antics into the world unnoticed. That means that there's only like 2 Vampires operating in an area the size of, say, Europe. At this point we aren't concerned about the political aspirations of the Gangrel because there literally aren't enough vampires for there to be any Gangrel. At all. Also there aren't enough vampires for the players of a typical table top role playing game to all play one and be on the same continent at the same time.

Now personally, I find the concept of vampires having sufficient numbers to have political factions and have been operating long enough to have ancient grudges and conspiracies to be more interesting than mandatory hobo murders. But you do you.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Sat Oct 13, 2018 9:12 pm

John Magnum wrote:The US may have seven million drug addicts, but the churn isn't seven million drug addicts per year. I don't see how you can criticize Frank for napkin map when making a blatant deficit/debt error.

The question is: how different is the world if more drug addicts are created each year? Its a pretty large population of 7 million where around 72K a year are ODing just in the US, and some are getting clean, and yet they are replacing themselves at a rate that keeps them from shrinking overall.

You have to imagine a worse world where people are getting addicted at a greater rate because its being pushed by supernatural power. The world doesn't look too different if 300K are getting addicted each year and 200K are getting eaten by vampires

Take 200K from each populated continent and we are at a million easily. Cull another 600K from immigrant populations, the mentally ill, and the lost, and a worldwide number of 1.6 million is possible.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Oct 13, 2018 9:26 pm

K wrote:The question is: how different is the world if more drug addicts are created each year?

Incredibly different. You can't just replace a quantity with a flux and expect things to be remotely the same. The drug deaths in the United States have doubled in the last ten years to about 72k, and that's a huge national tragedy that people notice and shit. And it's not even a little bit close to the numbers you'd need to support vampires of sufficient numbers to have social cliques who also murdered people as part of their regular diet. Like, not even a little bit close.

Heroin addicts are normally heroin addicts for a long time. They mostly don't die off after a year and get replaced with a new heroin addict. If they did, people would fucking notice.

The number of slaves that exist in the world is something that vampires could hide their own slaves in. Because slaves are a quantity rather than a flux. The number of murders that exist in the world is not something that vampires can hide their own killings in. Because murders are a flux and not a quantity. Each murder per year is per year and you have to double it in two years, and multiply it by a hundred in a century. A slave per year can be the same slave next year or get traded for a different one, but in any case isn't doubled next year.

-Username17