Demographics and Urban Fantasy

[phlapjackage]

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.

That was my thought too. Over a long enough time scale, any numbers look big. 2000 months is ~167 years, so 64 million murders-by-vampire over 167 years doesn't seem too crazy, at first blush.

So I just found some data on US deaths from 1900 to 2014. It's not complete, but for napkin math I think it's enough. Over those ~115 years, the avg death rate in the US is ~2million (1.878million-ish, but I'm rounding up for conspiracy-not reported-etc deaths). In 2million deaths a year, the 32000vampires*12months=384k accounts for about a fifth. Seems high, every 1 in 5 deaths being vampire-related. Either this world is darker and there's a vast vampire conspiracy manipulating statistics (death/missing/etc), or the death-per-vampire needs to be lower.

Or maybe these numbers are ok, with a little hand-waving. Maybe the number of vampires has increased as the "food source" has also increased, allowing more vampires to survive over time. So early vampire numbers were fewer than 32k, so fewer deaths to cover up even keeping the 1-per-month idea.

[deaddmwalking]

Vampires killing one person a night is bad because it interferes with the stories you want to tell. Needing to kill is bad because making the PCs be monsters in every sense of the word - it doesn't allow you to emote on the erosion of humanity. But just because vampires don't need to kill doesn't mean they shouldn't kill. Most vampires probably don't identify with humanity and don't have a problem killing.

We're not positing newly created vampires - they're already here and they're already doing what they do. People die and some of those deaths are vampire deaths regardless of what it says on the death certificate. Maybe half of ODs are really vampires. Maybe some vampires finish off accident victims.

Clearly if you assume that everything in the world is exactly the same as the real world there's no room for vampires, anyway.

It's a bad movie, but I, Frankenstein shows a world like ours but still darker. Blade is a decent movie and does the same. Most of us are ignorant of the darkness, but there's room for it in our world with just a little imagination.

[DrPraetor]

You have two degrees of freedom here (formally speaking these are correlated so - yeah no-one cares).

One, you can alter the world quite a bit and still send the characters to that charming cafe I like in the 19th arrondissement - and if demons want to level Paris, this will grab the players attention in a way that an attack on Waterdeep or Minas Tirith will not. So maybe Paris is really dangerous at night but it's still Paris: there is some fuzzy limit where this falls apart. Myself, I think replacing all heart disease deaths with vampires and having statin drugs be vampire repellent is past the limit of what makes the real world unrecognizable, but I'm a pharmacogeneticist so YMMV.

Second, you can ask for suspension of disbelief. Yeah, maybe you can't really hide 50K occult murders per year in the existing crime statistics - but maybe I could go along with that - while 5K would be a lot easier and 500K obviously too many. That is, you can add stuff, proclaim that it doesn't alter the world in any discernible way, and hope people go along with it.

Both of these are somewhat audience dependent. Are your players soft in the head? Do they think the government is secretly dominated by lizard people in the real world so crime statistics are made up by the Illuminati anyway? There are pizza-gate truthers and I'm sure someone believes that the DNC is sacrificing dozens of people to Satan every day. So your baseline understanding of the world, and willingness to mentally brush over implausible adjustments without rendering it unrecognizable, is going to vary what you can get away with changing or with sweeping under the mental carpet a lot.

I mean, people seem to play Mage: the Ascension unironically, never mind that a majority of people in the real world believe in Magic or that universities are full of ecologists who are scientists themselves and definitely believe in atoms; but if you didn't know any scientists maybe the Technocracy wouldn't seem like high fantasy to you, and if you grew up in the suburban midwest maybe you think people are sleepers who are unconsciously using their skeptic brain waves to jam your reiki.

[Username17]

Over a long enough time scale, any numbers look big.

No. Over a long enough time scale, any numbers are big.

There's a concept in cryptography that a cypher is sufficient if and only if it keeps the information hidden until it is no longer relevant that it remain secret. A fuel order that would reveal troop movements might no longer be important to keep out of enemy hands in a few weeks, and a message that would give away the identity of a spy might need to stay under wraps for a few years to give that spy time to retire and extract. Immortal vampires have to have kept their existence secret from at least the time they were created to right now. And if that amount of time isn't significantly longer than a human lifespan for at least some of them, it hardly matters that your vampires are immortal, right?

Every murder is a signal that sends information. And it is critical that if vampires have successfully remained a secret that they have successfully cyphered all of those signals at least until now and stretching back as far as they have been operating. They not only have to hide the scope of their murders on a year to year basis, they have to hide all of their murders for as long as it takes. Death is, vampirism aside, forever. So they pretty much have to keep each murder under wraps forever.

Now it is true that individuals are eventually forgotten by history. Deaths of the past are less important than deaths of the present. Eventually all the humans of today will be dead and it won't really matter whether they will be eaten by vampires or die of heart disease. Hitler once said "No one cares about the Armenians" to indicate that he would get away with his own atrocities because the Ottoman Turks had so thoroughly gotten away with their own. But you know that was a double irony, right? Armenia is an independent country now, the Ottomans factually lost control over thirty thousand square kilometers of territory because people didn't forget about those killings. And of course, I'm still talking about Hitler's atrocities right now. Evidence of occult murders could still drive people to investigate a hundred years after the fact.

The typical vampire conspiracy in a movie is one that can be uncovered by four kids and a dog in act one. But an occult conspiracy that's actually supposed to have survived intact on a global scale for hundreds of years would have to be much more resilient than that.

-Username17

[maglag]

The typical vampire conspiracy in a movie is one that can be uncovered by four kids and a dog in act one. But an occult conspiracy that's actually supposed to have survived intact on a global scale for hundreds of years would have to be much more resilient than that.

And that resiliency comes from MAGIC.

People don't want to play Hiding: The hidden where you play people who just want to stay hidden for no valid reason. Exactly what adventures they would go in? They can't since you're explicitly telling the players they can't change anything in the world and they can't cover their tracks in any way!

But if the occult conspiracy actually has occult/MAGIC powers instead of being just some old dude in a rubber suit, then they can get away with it meddling kids and not or not. MAGIC mind control, MAGIC change corpses so it looks like they died from something else, MAGIC whatever. That's how the vampires keep their conspiracy going.

So all the statistics numbers the normal people see are just an illusion, part of the masquerade, assuming a world where MAGIC does not exist and there is no such thing as immortality.

But once you add MAGIC and immortality and actual occult to the equation, then you can't be sure of anything anymore. Or did you go out there and personally count every dead person in the world for the last years? You didn't. You've just been seeing the numbers the vampires want you to see while they have their blood parties.

And when you go "no way so many vampires can exist, we would've noticed all the extra corpses/anemia!", then the vampires toast each other with glasses full of fresh blood for a masquerade well done before resuming their political bickering.

[Starmaker]

No. Over a long enough time scale, any numbers are big.

No. Every murder may be a signal, but signals fade. Humanity's attempts to find something useful about vampire murders over the course of history can just neatly telescope into a finite sum.

Every murder is a signal that sends information. And it is critical that if vampires have successfully remained a secret that they have successfully cyphered all of those signals at least until now and stretching back as far as they have been operating.

People in the past of the real-life Earth "knew" there were vampires. The rationalist window of thinking there are none is really narrow, and the window of care is narrower still. People don't just need to care about the existence or nonexistence of vampires, they need to care about the victims.

Historians and forensic scientists investigate prominent figures like Richard III or King Tut, but no one is digging out every victim of the wasting sickness or whatever to find out what they really died of. Catherine II ascended the throne of Russia and imprisoned Saltychikha for 38 of the 139 slave murders that stuck, and then made it impossible for slaves to report future murders.

Right now, if someone dies in an apartment in Moscow, Russia, and is found 3 years later, no one is going to try to find out how and why (but some considerable paid worker-hours will be spent by various govt agencies and privatized natural monopolies pinning the person's utility debt on each other). Apartment raiders adopt old people and disappear them without a trace. It might not hold in real-life New York, but the fictional counterpart where it is won't be appreciably different, because Moscow is right there and the world spins on, somehow. In fact, it will be more in line with the public perception.

[kzt]

As Franks has pointed out, you can maintain belivability for that sort of approach with a tiny number of vampires. You can't have many thousands of vampires in a developed country killing lots of people in each year and have a game world where Wikipedia is a useful resource for the players.

For example, France has a population of 67 million. If there are 6700 vampires killing 100 people each/year then they murder 670,000 people a year. That's 1% of the population every year. There were 875 total murders/year according to the easiest to find data. So not only can you not hide the murders in the murder rate noise, vampire murders are the single largest cause of death in France.

[ACOS]

the #s don't lie. because of that:
- feeding ought be a non-lethal endeavor. looks like harems, ghouls, and drunk/drugged-out party kids all who get to wake up tomorrow all the way down.
- murder of baselines must needs to be reserved for last-resort protecting of the masquerade. those who find themselves going to that well too often make themselves a liability to the masquerade, and thus must be eliminated.
- pursuant to #2, most murdering is going to have to be between supernaturals; i'm sure some sort of protocol needs to be hammered out.

that being said, yes, there is a little bit of room for a slight increase in murder rates, given the darker nature of this type of setting. however, that means letting Phoenix look a bit more like Chicago or St. Louis; Duluth should not look like Mogadishu.
We can look at the perception of what has happened in Rotherham or Colone to see what "darker" looks like.

[Username17]

The yearly numbers are pretty harsh. We keep track of deaths by cause as numbers per one hundred thousand people per year. As we've previously noted, one vampire per hundred thousand isn't nearly enough to do vampire politics - that's just 20 vampires in the entire Indianapolis-Carmel metropolitan area - not even enough for there to be a clan elder and clan junior for each clan. Let alone for there to be a Tremere chantry that has members that are members of secret sects and shit. And yet, one vampire per hundred thousand means that the death rate for vampires over all is just the number of murders per vampire per year. At one a month that puts "vampire attack" right between Opiate Overdose (13 deaths per hundred thousand) and road traffic fatalities (11 deaths per hundred thousand).

The numbers after several years are harsher still. Each vampire that kills one person a month will equal Ted Bundy's reign of terror (36 killings) in just three years. They'll equal Russia's Chessboard killer in 5 years (60 deaths). They'll equal the Green River Killer's 72 killings in 6. They'll top El Monstro de Los Andes' record holding 300 killings in just 25. I don't have any contemporary examples to give for fifty years of monthly murders, you have to go back to probably-at-least-partially-apocryphal events like Bathory.

Basically you got three choices if you want modern society to be something you can Wikipedia:

• The Vampire Apocalypse started twenty minutes ago. We don't have to explain how vampires escaped detection with their massive body counts for all these years because they didn't exist in all these years. It's World War V starting... now.
• There are only a handful of Vampires in the whole world. Each predator has a territory that covers a big chunk of a continent and has multiple cities in it. They almost never interact with each other.
• Vampires feed from people non-fatally almost all the time. They have herds and thralls and slaves. This compatible with but does not require the existence of vampires who don't attack people at all - drinking from animals or get blood from transfusion bags or whatever.

Now obviously only the third option has the slightest chance of involving Vampire Politics in any meaningful way. You can't be the fourth most powerful vampire on the primogen council of Portland if the entire West Coast is the domain of a single traveling murderer. You can't be the scion of a respected lineage of blood suckers if none of the blood suckers before you were around long enough to earn or demand respect.

-Username17

[Nath]

I always found the baseline people use for vampire feeding frequency particularly high, for little added value, if any. you actually don't want all the four of five vampire PC in the team going on hunt, each with their specific technique, in the middle of an adventure, so "once per night" serves no practical purpose on their side.

You may want to tell the stories about lone vampire or vampire gangs going on blood orgies night after night. But those are the stories of vampires who get caught (usually by a remotely competent cop or a some random teenagers). There are also stories of vampires who never feed more than once in a decade, waiting for a traveler to get lost near their mansion.

So there's probably some conceptual space for a much slower pace, with mental flaws, additions or other specific conditions when your story really requires a vampire that feeds every night.

[kzt]

You may want to tell the stories about lone vampire or vampire gangs going on blood orgies night after night. But those are the stories of vampires who get caught (usually by a remotely competent cop or a some random teenagers).

I suspect they get caught by the hit teams sent by masquerade central, who comb the news services and have contacts in the national police forces and major metro PDs across the world.

And playing the hit team going after rogue vampires is seems like possibly a multi-clan adventuring group...

[virgil]

I mean, I don't get why vampires need to be continuously active murder machines. Having them attached to human trafficking in all its forms seems more than sufficient at portraying their monstrous appetites.

[Daniel]

I have always liked the following 3 solutions.

Werewolves reincarnate. There is actually a set number of them that eternally recycles through the ages. They think they are dying out, because nowadays there are more of everybody else around and they never bothered to do a proper head count.

To survive longterm, vampires need to live in a society with other vampires to avoid going mad and suicidal of loneliness. They like styling themselves as apex predators, but they are much closer to parasites and rarely actually kill. You need roughly 1000 people living in reasonably close proximity of each other to sustain 1 vampire*.
Yes there are small factions of truly ancient vampires around, but most 'ancient' vampires are posers.
(I once did a short Vampire the Requiem campaign in which the players discovered halfway through that the entire Circle of the Crone did not exist prior to the 2nd half of the 19th century)

Mages. About 1 in a hundred-thousand humans will Awaken with a bit of prodding, i.o.w. an apprenticeship. On top of that about 1 in a quarter million will Awaken spontaneously in their lifetime.
In practice about 1 in a million will actually Awaken spontaneously in their lifetime. The rest will be picked up beforehand and awaken during a regular apprenticeship, which is less traumatic for both the new mage and the environment around said mage.
Mages are assumed to be very good at recruiting, so they manage to come very close to the 14 mages for each million people number.

*What actually happens is that if you grab 1000 people at random, enough of them will be defective in the sort of way that a vampire can reliably take advantage of them.

[Username17]

At this point I'm pretty much over trying to figure out a way to fix White Wolf's version of Werewolves, Mages, Fairies, or pretty much any of the other shit. White Wolf's elevator pitch on Vampires specifically was good enough to put butts in the seats, but all the other supernaturals had very little going for them. If you were going to make a game about modern wizards or werewolves, would there be fucking anything that you'd willingly appropriate from Apocalypse or Ascension? Of course not.

Vampire needs a pretty hard reboot and all the basic assumptions of the game system and world building need to be radically challenged. But there's certainly things about Masquerade that appeal. It was the number 1 game in the world for several years running and there are good reasons for that to have been the case. But Werewolf and Mage were both failures. They were supposed to be as big as Vampire and they never were. If they had just been splats that fit into the existing Vampire framework they would have done better than they did as standalone products.

We should take a step back from trying to fix Werewolf and just admit it was a bad job and its very existence needs to be questioned. Yes, there is a place for player character werewolves in a vampire game, but why does that indicate that we should have a standalone game about incestuous werewolf tribes fighting captain planet villains? Burn it down and walk away.

-Username17

[Daniel]

Masquerade's success was an example of a rpg going viral.
There is nothing there beyond ripping of Ann Rice, rules that looked easy and the green marble with a rose cover.
By historic happenstance that clicked with a large group of people that wanted to play something, but certainly not AD&D 2e.

[ACOS]

Masquerade's success was an example of a rpg going viral.
There is nothing there beyond ripping of Ann Rice, rules that looked easy and the green marble with a rose cover.
By historic happenstance that clicked with a large group of people that wanted to play something, but certainly not AD&D 2e.

also, it was a product of the disaffected youth culture of the late 80s/early 90s.
now days, not only is it not "edgy" anymore, it's become a cliche`. i mean ffs, we're already several years on the other side of the goddamn Twilight stage of the genre. i'd say it's run its course.
would need a MASSIVE facelift to catch much traction at all with the younger folk of today.
/2¢

[kzt]

So an example of lucky vs smart? I can kind of buy that given how awful the game is if you try to play the rules as written, but there are a LOT of urban fantasy books sold and there was obviously a lot of Vampire books sold, so there is obviously setting appeal.

How many readers have any interests in a TTRPG is another question that I certainly don't feel capable of answering in an intelligent fashion.

[Username17]

Masquerade's success was an example of a rpg going viral.
There is nothing there beyond ripping of Ann Rice, rules that looked easy and the green marble with a rose cover.
By historic happenstance that clicked with a large group of people that wanted to play something, but certainly not AD&D 2e.

I would definitely say that Masquerade's success was about being in the right place at the right time. AD&D had kind of shat the bed, and people wanted a game that promised more social stories than endless dungeon crawls. The goth esthetic was also a big thing at the time.

But it also had an elevator pitch that resonated with people better than its competition. Remember that Nightlife came out slightly earlier, and people did not rush to embrace it the same way they embraced Masquerade the following year. Some of that is because Nightlife is incomprehensible hot garbage, but in many ways so was Masquerade. We saw the crushing dominance of Masquerade because:

• Better art and production values.
• Better written prose.
• An explicit statement that you did not have to do the hack-n-slash that so many other games were offering.
• The promise that you could play different kinds of vampires.

That last one is pretty key. Nightlife let you play all kinds of crazy crap: Daemons, Vampyres, Animates, Inuit[sic], Wyghts, Werewolves, and Ghosts. But whatever you played, you still had to be one of the monsters from Nightbreed. If you had a favorite horror movie that wasn't Nightbreed, you could get fucked. While Masquerade let you play the vampire from Nosferatu, Lost Boys, Interview With the Vampire, and several different versions of Dracula, Nightlife really only let you play the monster from Vlad the Impaler even if you weren't technically even a Vampyre at all.

Now Masquerade did fail to achieve its design goals. The vampires it presented did not live up to their promise. You actually couldn't do the Lost Boys or Interview With the Vampire, or fucking any of it because the vampire types weren't fit for purpose. But you could imagine a new version that successfully managed to present various types of vampire that appealed to a 21st century audience and actually delivered the fucking goods.

Mage can't say that. Neither can Werewolf. Those books were cargo cult all the way down. Divided up into various tribes and circles because it worked for Vampire but the underlying justification for fucking any of that was missing. There are seventeen fucking Werewolf tribes, and over and above the fact that not one person can actually remember what all seventeen of them even are, I can't name a single piece of source material that any of them are referencing. None of the Tribes serve as a bridge or an entry point. If you want to play one of the monsters from Dog Soldiers or American Werewolf in Paris or The Howling or Teen Wolf or Wer, or fucking anything in the genre, where's the connection? What is the fucking justification for any of the tribes?

Mage and Werewolf are just too far up their own assholes to be in any way salvageable. Nothing that happens in either of those games is an actual hook that would make someone remotely familiar with any bit of urban fantasy or horror to say "I wanna play that." It's all self-referential naval gazing all the way down.

-Username17

[Daniel]

Traditional werewolves generally make for poor protagonists in a rpg.
So naturally they made lots of stuff up.
The real problem for werewolf was that goths wanted to play rpg's, Green Peace volunteers did not.
As for building on the stuff they did dream up. I like for example the 5 shapes and the Delirium.

Mage on the other hand fails just as hard as Vampire, but no harder at the promise to play different kind of wizards. And subjective reality is a great central conceit to wrap a game about magic around.

[Username17]

The five shapes are a good example of a bad use of conceptual space. The Werewolves in Nightlife have three forms: a human, a wolf man, and a dire wolf. What earthly purpose are the other two forms? I can't even remember what they are called.

-Username17

[virgil]

...subjective reality is a great central conceit to wrap a game about magic around.

No it's not. It's a cool conceit for single author fiction, but it's terrible for a cooperative game. The market that Mage tapped was the same market that appealed to people who enjoyed the Matrix - reality is an enforced falsehood, and you get cool powers just for knowing the Truth.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Werewolves in Nightlife have three forms: a human, a wolf man, and a dire wolf. What earthly purpose are the other two forms? I can't even remember what they are called.

The glabro was good for getting some of your hulk-out muscle without driving all the nearby humans into Delerium or giving up your thumbs; it was actually my favorite form. The lupus was good for running around as a not-obviously-unnatural wolf, and was the best stealth form.

And subjective reality is a great central conceit to wrap a game about magic around.

That might be true, but it has nothing to do with how any classic horror movie witches or wizards work. None of them give a single fuck about violating consensus or trying to convince the masses of their sorcerous paradigm. They just have certain extranormal abilities that their opposition then has to contend with.

[ACOS]

The Werewolves in Nightlife have three forms: a human, a wolf man, and a dire wolf. What earthly purpose are the other two forms? I can't even remember what they are called.

The glabro was good for getting some of your hulk-out muscle without driving all the nearby humans into Delerium or giving up your thumbs; it was actually my favorite form. The lupus was good for running around as a not-obviously-unnatural wolf, and was the best stealth form.

nit-pick: i think frank was making a narrative argument. this looks mechanical in nature.

[ETortoise]

When I was first introduced to Werewolf, I thought it was cool that the five forms meant that PCs could turn into different werewolves from fiction. I saw glabro as the Lon Chaney wolfman, hispo as the large quadruped of American Werewolf in London, lupus as turning into a regular wolf, and crinos as the awesome wolfman with digitigrade legs. The five forms allowed players to have their cake and eat it too, when it came to how their werewolf looked when they transformed.

[erik]

I didn't really care for the 5 forms, I prefer 2 forms werewolves only. 3 is pushing it but ok. I couldn't remember all of them either. The few Werewolf games we played didn't really use the setting or metaplot at all. We were gang bangers basically trying to carve out our own territory for most campaigns. The only memorable game-system related entertainment was getting all the PCs to take the silver immunity advantage so we could be carrying around lots of silver bling and weapons, and call ourselves the Silver Pack. Not quite enough to make a game out of tho, which is why we moved on to other games.