Demographics and Urban Fantasy

[Mord]

You definitely want witches, werewolves, and vampires all to be part of the same Masquerade enforcement group. The world does not have room for N different local conspiracies enforcing N different Masquerades in the same city. From a social contract perspective, the reason that all the spooks of a given region would be willing to recognize a Prince at all and grant any legitimacy to the title is that the Prince is the guy responsible for enforcing the Masquerade.

You can imagine a pre-modern supernatural society in which the title of Prince originated as a designation for a strongman who ruled over a group of lesser spooks by superior capacity for violence, but considering the high level of physical and social mobility that a vampire or werewolf has relative to a serf, there's not a lot of reasons for any given Kindred to stick around and obey some powerful asshole as opposed to just skipping town. If there's no Masquerade to uphold, if you're a vampire living around Mainz and you think the local Prince is a dick, there's literally no reason why you wouldn't just quietly up stakes to Warsaw or Moscow or Istanbul or Aleppo etc... And not really much compelling reason for the Prince of Mainz to send someone to hunt you down, not much spare manpower at his disposal to send after you, no reason for anyone sent after you to look very hard, nor much by way of reasons for the Prince of [Destination City] to cooperate with the hunt. You would certainly have Princes with loyal retainers and stuff, and someone who directly insults a Prince might be hunted down as an extraordinary method of making an example, but from a basic social perspective there's not a lot of reason why anyone would be especially interested in cooperating with the local Prince beyond the bare minimum needed to prevent the Prince or one of his knights from actively decapitating them.

Once the Masquerade becomes a thing, Princes gain a legitimating reason to wield power over other Kin that society as a whole has an interest in supporting; the office ceases to be a badge of purposeless vanity satisfied through naked force. Starting in the 1400s, the job of the Prince transitions from being "a powerful dude possibly backed up by other collectively powerful dudes who lays claim to a lot of land and will kill you if he catches you poaching," to "a powerful dude definitely backed up by the majority of Kin in the region, who will set the dogs on you if anyone finds out you have tipped off the humans." Obviously the Princes who reigned at the dawn of the Kin social contract founded on the Masquerade would have been the old-school strongman type, but any of them who didn't get with the program would have been overthrown and put out of everyone's misery.

Once the Prince becomes "protector of the Masquerade," you gain a reason why a Masquerade violator in Mainz could reasonably expect to be hunted all the way across Europe. A polite letter from Mainz would find the Prince of Aleppo to be perfectly amenable to lending his hit squad to the cause of mailing your staked ass back to Mainz in a box, and the members of the hit squad would be personally motivated to help on some level as well.

You also gain the quirk that powerful blood god vampire elders would no longer be eligible for office, because the production of truckloads of exsanguinated virgins just isn't compatible with the Masquerade. Princes would no longer be disproportionately likely to be the most personally powerful person within the domain. The traits being selected for would be those correlated with doing the job effectively and keeping the support of the local upper class Kin while doing so. Obviously once human population growth really kicks in, the resources at Princes' disposal increase as well, so the Prince's personal power would become even less relevant to his fitness for office; even a very powerful Prince's direct power would be dwarfed by the Court's collective power to carry out whatever agenda the Prince can persuade them is in their interest.

Probably the most effective Princes would be those who are best at framing their agenda items as being vital to Masquerade enforcement; correspondingly, most intrigues would probably have as their coup de gras the framing of one's opponents as having breached the Masquerade in some way. The institutions of the Masquerade and the Prince would probably have evolved to the point of synonymity - a global breach of the Masquerade brought about by the advances of the 21st Century would probably shake Kin society to its core and destroy the political theory underpinning the Princes' right to rule. If there's no Masquerade to enforce, why do I listen to this old asshole anyway?

As for who these Princes would be, I think that vampires would be the most common office holders simply because they are immortal by definition. As a class, they would necessarily be the ones to have the most power within Kin society due to compound interest and the fact that old Vlad was keeping tabs on your master's master when he was still an apprentice and knows where literally all of the skeletons are. Even if elder vampires occasionally drop into the Sleep of Ages (or are gently "helped into bed" when their thirst for blood becomes unmanageable), they would pass on their titles and key knowledge to their childer over time.

I think that the world of the Kin would be a vampire's world, in which werewolves, witches, and other non-immortal spooks are mere tenants. Certainly you would have your odd Witch that has achieved immortality as a lich or a Mummy or whatever, and they would naturally play the great game at the same level as a vampire of the same age, but social mobility for a Werewolf in the domain of New York is probably about as limited as social mobility for an undocumented Ecuadorian in Atlanta. Sure you will have a handful of Werewolf princes, and you can bet that they will be touted all over the place as "proof that the system isn't rigged in favor of vampires" kind of like black CEOs. Check your vampire privilege. #INeedWerewolfism #NotAllVampires #hashtags

[Omegonthesane]

"Mass production edition" != "downgrade or upgrade on an individual level". It's more like if "Tremere Necromancer" was a prestige class that both Witches and Vampires could take with a backstory note that the first Necromancer was a Witch who invented Vampires as a mass production monster with level appropriate versions of what they now thought were their defining powers rather than the power set they actually had as a starting monster.

[nockermensch]

The idea that "Earth, but with a society of supernatural monsters on it" has to have exactly the same violent death rates as RL Earth is an insane constraint. If you want to keep the same population numbers everywhere, just tweak the birth rates up to keep with the increased number of mysterious deaths and unsolved disappearances.

[Username17]

Once the Masquerade becomes a thing, Princes gain a legitimating reason to wield power over other Kin that society as a whole has an interest in supporting; the office ceases to be a badge of purposeless vanity satisfied through naked force. Starting in the 1400s, the job of the Prince transitions from being "a powerful dude possibly backed up by other collectively powerful dudes who lays claim to a lot of land and will kill you if he catches you poaching," to "a powerful dude definitely backed up by the majority of Kin in the region, who will set the dogs on you if anyone finds out you have tipped off the humans." Obviously the Princes who reigned at the dawn of the Kin social contract founded on the Masquerade would have been the old-school strongman type, but any of them who didn't get with the program would have been overthrown and put out of everyone's misery.

Once the Prince becomes "protector of the Masquerade," you gain a reason why a Masquerade violator in Mainz could reasonably expect to be hunted all the way across Europe. A polite letter from Mainz would find the Prince of Aleppo to be perfectly amenable to lending his hit squad to the cause of mailing your staked ass back to Mainz in a box, and the members of the hit squad would be personally motivated to help on some level as well.

I like this timeline. Although I would expand it to not be merely about the Masquerade, but about existential threats generally. Urban Fantasy often has world threatening threats - Zombie Uprisings, Demonic Invasions, the rise of the Ancient Vampires, whatever. And the large scale organization of humans into potential monster hunting forces can be contextualized as merely one threat among many.

The Prince thus goes from a metaphorical protection racket to an actual protection racket that provides actual protection once kindred society realizes that there are in fact things in the world that kindred society needs to be protected from. So as the age of exploration starts getting under way, and the kindred get access to printed words and all that, the world suddenly becomes a lot smaller - and the fact that there actually are things out there that can overrun and destroy a castle full of Kin starts to sink in. Some of them are just large numbers of mundane humans, and some of them are ancient evils, and some of them are new forms of supernatural menaces. But the reality is that there are some menaces that one vampire can't fight and twenty Kin can. And once that becomes accepted truth, the Kin have to hang together because of the absolute certainty that otherwise they will hang separately.

-Username17

[Jackson Taus]

The idea that "Earth, but with a society of supernatural monsters on it" has to have exactly the same violent death rates as RL Earth is an insane constraint. If you want to keep the same population numbers everywhere, just tweak the birth rates up to keep with the increased number of mysterious deaths and unsolved disappearances.

This only works within certain limits though. You increase birth-rate by 50%, and everyone goes from having 2.1 kids to having 3-5, and maybe it's not super-noticeable. But beyond that and you're having cultural effects.

Going with "1980's murder rate" doubles your murder rate, which doesn't really solve your problem.

Going with 1960's birth-rate, and having vampires kill the extra people off works out to about 3.85M deaths. That gets you 10,500 vampires who kill every day, or 74,000 who kill once a week. But it doesn't solve the "composition of deaths" problem and actually exacerbates it - in this model, "death by vampire" is 6 times deadlier than heart disease or cancer. Even if vampires successfully cover up 99% of their kills, there are still more vampire deaths than car-crash deaths.

===

Fundamentally I think the solution here is based around Torpor. Either short-term or long-term, vampires just have periods of inactivity. They only hunt 1 week a month or something. This lets you increase density by 4 pretty easily. Obviously, there are safeguards - it's random enough that no obvious "I only ever see that guy at the end of the month" pattern emerges, and they're alert enough that you can't just walk into their lair without waking them or something. Then everyone just sets an alarm clock for their secret society meetings or whatever.

[Chamomile]

I don't see why people are so dead set against the "vampires tap without draining" model. None of these demographic problems even come up if vampires rarely kill people.

[erik]

I agree that increasing birthrate is not the way to go; that's overkill.

[edit: I also agree with Chamomile that mandatory vampmurders are totally unnecessary]

There will obviously be more monster murders in a setting with monsters as compared to reality, but so long as murder isn't mandatory then you're solid. There's bad apples who kill, but an uptick in murders is pretty easy to sweep under the rug so long as it isn't pathological.

Just take your 1980's murder rate, which I guess averages out to an extra ~16,000 homicides in the United States (increasing to 10/100,000 from 5/100,000) using 325M population.

If murders are covered up as other causes of death then you could well fly under the radar with a murder rate 2x worse than the 80s (20/100,000). You get 48,000 extra murders in the U.S. which would put it between Diabetes's and Influenza. So something on the scale where most people can't be fucked to take a vaccine to reduce their chances of getting it when they know it's real.



Look, almost 10M people dying of heart disease worldwide. Get your coroners on the payroll and people dying of "acute anemia" gets folded in on the statistics. 20/100,000 murder rate comes out to 1.5M people annually, which is bad, but not indistinguishable from mundane Earth.

[Username17]

20/100,000 murder rate comes out to 1.5M people annually

Which simply underlines how unworkable it is to have vampires who kill frequently and also are numerous enough to have meaningful politics. Remember that in CyberFang the author had to straight up double the vampire population of Night City.

Without about 100 vampires, you aren't going to care what "The Toreador" think because "The Toreador" is one guy named Tom. The entire model of clans and primogen representation and conflicting coteries and shit requires there to be about 100 vampires. At 1:100,000, you can only get that in 10 million human megacities. If you find yourself saying that the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and fucking London are too small to support your vampire society, your vampire society's standards are too high. I would go so far as to say that if your vampire demographics cannot support vampire politicking in Berlin or Rome, that I have already lost interest.

Now White Wolf in particular asked us to not only have basic politics, but advanced politics with conspiracies within conspiracies. Where there's a secret snake cult inside the Tremere who are betraying the other Tremere. That requires groups of more like 500 vampires before that begins to even be possible. The Tremere have to be numerous enough that there are groups of Tremere that can split off and have secret snake rituals that the other Tremere don't know about. And at 1:100,000 vampires, that kind of critical mass is reached... nowhere. Mexico City, New York, and Tokyo are very large, but they aren't large enough to have 500 vampires in them under those constraints and there is nowhere on Earth with enough people to support enough vampires to support those kinds of groups within groups.

But here's the thing: 1 vampire per hundred thousand isn't nearly enough vampires to do the vampire politicking you want, but it's still more vampires than can support a vampire population that kills frequently. You talk about the difficulties of stretching vampire murder rate to 20/100,000, well weekly killings by vampires who themselves are 1:100,000 works out to a murder rate that's more than twice that. One killing per week per vampire is 52/100,000 vampire murders even with the vampire numbers we've already dismissed as being insultingly too small. The death rate for all intentional injuries (including all violence and suicides) is only 26/100,000.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

Without about 100 vampires, you aren't going to care what "The Toreador" think because "The Toreador" is one guy named Tom. The entire model of clans and primogen representation and conflicting coteries and shit requires there to be about 100 vampires. At 1:100,000, you can only get that in 10 million human megacities. If you find yourself saying that the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and fucking London are too small to support your vampire society, your vampire society's standards are too high. I would go so far as to say that if your vampire demographics cannot support vampire politicking in Berlin or Rome, that I have already lost interest.

Now White Wolf in particular asked us to not only have basic politics, but advanced politics with conspiracies within conspiracies. Where there's a secret snake cult inside the Tremere who are betraying the other Tremere. That requires groups of more like 500 vampires before that begins to even be possible. The Tremere have to be numerous enough that there are groups of Tremere that can split off and have secret snake rituals that the other Tremere don't know about. And at 1:100,000 vampires, that kind of critical mass is reached... nowhere. Mexico City, New York, and Tokyo are very large, but they aren't large enough to have 500 vampires in them under those constraints and there is nowhere on Earth with enough people to support enough vampires to support those kinds of groups within groups.

The political math depends very heavily on how many factions you have. Faction bloat, conspiracies nested within conspiracies, and anything else that proliferates the number of distinct subgroups can easily kill coherency no matter how many individuals you have. So you absolutely, positively, must keep the number of factions down - especially locally. You can have a ton of bloodlines scattered across the world, but you can only have a handful in any given metro.

To some extent that's going to be on the GM. White-Wolf did occasionally make the point that all of the non-standard bloodlines/factions/whatevers were supposed to be super-rare and to account for like 5% of the total population when you put them all together such that in any given campaign maybe one individual from any of them should show up, and you really need to world-build with that in mind.

So if your city, however big it happens to be, has 100 vampires in it, 99 of those need to belong to your main groups of 5-10 clans (and if you're including witches/werewolves/others in your game, then those need to be part of that 5-10). A city with 100 supernaturals can maybe tolerate a single nasty conspiracy of rule-breakers trying to get up to some nasty something that destabilizes the region and ultimately in their wild fever dreams the world, but this will be maybe a dozen individuals max whether they are nested within one larger faction or part of a cross-faction group.

One of the issues with the oWod 1:100,000 assumption is that it was built around the idea that every vampire had minions, probably quite a few, and that elders had dozens or hundreds of them. The way the city was theoretically supposed to be set up was that each vampire might average 10 or more minions, and these were supposed to be the principle NPC type encountered in social situations. Of course, people didn't actually do this, especially players, because they want to play a character, not a small business or law firm. Generally the source material doesn't do this either. Ghouls, familiars, etc. tend to be rather thin on the ground, and if a vampire has a minion it's usually another weaker vampire or some other kind of full-blown supernatural like a werewolf. Essentially you can assume more vampires if you assume fewer ghouls.

Ultimately you need to decide a minimum number of supernaturals to make you politics work. If you manage to avoid faction bloat I think you can easily go as low as 50 - if you have 7 clans that's 7 apiece, if you have 5 clans that's 10 apiece, which is sufficient. If you want the minimum playable metro to be 500,000 people (and to justify this in universe as Dracula said you must have this many mortals to claim dominion), then your ratio is 1:10,000. Personally I find that a bit high, but so long as you keep the number of overpowered elders down, I can certainly see it working.

If you go with the 1:10,000 ratio, then you classify your campaign setups into 3 tiers:

Tier 1: 500K - 1 million: 50-100 supernaturals. At this scale everyone knows everybody, politics tends to get personal, and almost everyone politically active is probably going to group into one of two factions. 99% of the time this will be the pro-Prince and anti-Prince factions. The US Senate serves as possible model.

Tier 2: 1.5 million - 5 million: 150-500 supernaturals. At this level you have differentiation between principle actors and the mob. You probably have a large number of supernaturals who fade into the background and try to avoid taking sides. The population is large enough to hide a serious conspiracy or two, and factions are large enough that the Prince might not actually personally meet their biggest rival face to face on a regular basis. There's still probably a main pro-Prince and anti-Prince faction, but these are likely to have sub-factions and also self-organizing groups with pet issues. The Us House of Representatives serves as a possible model.

Tier 3: Over 5 million: 500+ supernaturals. At this level your metro becomes too large to manage as a single unit and it gets divided into sub-units, each likely the size of a Tier 1 city (and many would map naturally to boroughs, wards, or other city governance subdivisions, possibly even with their own title like 'viceroy' for the acknowledged leader). The difference is that there's some kind of executive committee exercising overall oversight that the general supernatural population never gets too see. a random vampire in a city this big will never get a meeting with the Prince without going through complex protocol and without their immediate superior being aware of it. The population is also large enough to be vulnerable to mass movements and even mob-action (in a Masquerade friendly sort of way). There may be a number of factions with diverse aims and rapidly shifting allegiances. This is 'central committee' type situation.

But here's the thing: 1 vampire per hundred thousand isn't nearly enough vampires to do the vampire politicking you want, but it's still more vampires than can support a vampire population that kills frequently. You talk about the difficulties of stretching vampire murder rate to 20/100,000, well weekly killings by vampires who themselves are 1:100,000 works out to a murder rate that's more than twice that. One killing per week per vampire is 52/100,000 vampire murders even with the vampire numbers we've already dismissed as being insultingly too small. The death rate for all intentional injuries (including all violence and suicides) is only 26/100,000.

I think it's fairly well established at this point that you can't have a population of supernaturals that kills frequently - whether vampires or otherwise - and still have an urban fantasy with a viable Masquerade. however, that's feels emminently solvable. Yes, you have to have a mechanism where all your vampires can feed without getting caught or killing - but that's doable. If the act of feeding induces memory loss in the victim and if the amount of blood needed to reach satiation (save in extremis) is well below harmful levels, then you're mostly good.

PCs, of course, need to be able to kill people at an accelerated rate, but that's okay. In fact, the immortality of vampires actually works in favor here. Immortal conspiracies go long and burn slow before eventually erupting into a paroxysm of violence. It's just implied that campaigns are nestled in the chaotic sweet spots between long periods of boredom - murder rates absolutely can and do hit major localized spikes year to year.

[kzt]

If you have 2 factions, one of whom opposes the ruler of the city, there is an obvious solution available to the ruler, who presumably is an old, powerful and pretty damn ruthless person. So I'd probably not have one side running around claiming they are the "resistance" when the guy they are "resisting" could give Hitler or Stalin lessons in ruthlessness. I think it just won't work out.

[Thaluikhain]

I think it's fairly well established at this point that you can't have a population of supernaturals that kills frequently - whether vampires or otherwise - and still have an urban fantasy with a viable Masquerade.

Can you have a viable Masquerade anyway? "It just does" is a terrible explanation of how vampire feeding works without breaking the Masquerade, but don't you have to say "it just does" for the Masquerade working for other issues?

[Omegonthesane]

You can't have the world be recognisable and not have something that could reasonably be construed as a masquerade.

Two things though.

First recall that people go to mega churches to see men perform miracles live on stage, and that doesn't make people believe in miracles, and not *just* because no footage of whatever was staged actually comes out. If the system behaves as if vampires aren't real, your masquerade's strong enough for comfort.

Second probably if anyone gets undeniable proof, they relatively soon get either killed or invited into the conspiracy as a ghoul.

[tussock]

If I recall my old vampire movies, isn't vamp feeding a thing where they drift in with the fog, feed on someone, drift out, and repeat every few days until the person they're feeding on becomes a thrall to the vampire? And you stop the thrall process by chasing them off or stabbing them in their coffin, that they're stuck in most of the time because flying around and feeding on people is exhausting.

That's maybe not directly useful for vamp adventuring, but as a thing that can hide, you probably want thralls to mind the coffin, and repeated secret night feeds on potential thralls that can't happen too quickly or they might die, and not eating your living buddies because they're more useful with blood in them, and otherwise blood is just this temptation you can sleep off because you're actually a spirit-cloud that can take the form of a person sometimes and food is sort of abstract at that point anyway.

5am Vampire post. Hmm. /submit.

[virgil]

Another point against vampires killing people - unless they go at the same person repeatedly over several nights, it would be impressive to see a vampire chug a two-litre soda bottle of blood in order to kill a single human.

if your vampire’s killing folks, it’s because they left a couple of great big spurting holes in a jugular, not because they actually drank all their blood. we gotta stop having the scene where the detective says the victim was ‘completely drained of blood’ unless there were like 5 vamps involved.

or if your vamp goes waddling away with a bloated tummy like a milk-drunk kitten, that could work too.

[Mord]

If you have 2 factions, one of whom opposes the ruler of the city, there is an obvious solution available to the ruler, who presumably is an old, powerful and pretty damn ruthless person. So I'd probably not have one side running around claiming they are the "resistance" when the guy they are "resisting" could give Hitler or Stalin lessons in ruthlessness. I think it just won't work out.

Remember, the Masquerade must be upheld. The Prince can't drive large groups of his opponents to such desperation that they decide they're screwed anyway and therefore retaliate in a manner that endangers the Masquerade. That's the kind of thing that gets the reactionary classes whose support the Prince relies on to depose him and replace him with someone willing to engage in rapprochement with the proscribed faction.

This is not a situation where personal power will make much difference. The Princes who figure that they can do whatever they want because they can transform into a thirty-foot demon are relics of the late Middle Ages and if they kept that shit up they would end up staked and bricked up in a wall in some 15th-century ruin. The modern Prince has autocratic authority that in no case can exceed the limits of what the Masquerade will bear, and his exercise of that authority is contingent on his being able to convince the conservative faction that any given action item meets this criterion.

Furthermore, "opposition" and "loyalist" factions wouldn't be GI Joe and Cobra; these are people who live in the same domain, participate in the same society, and expect to do so for the next hundred years. You might have some hard-liners on either side based on personal antipathy towards the Prince, but for the most part people are going to act according to their narrow interests as they relate to the issue of the day. Allies today could be opponents tomorrow, so it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to get into a shooting war or be issued a death warrant over the question of whether the Nosferatu and Bone Gnawers living in the storm drains have to temporarily relocate while the mortal public works department does a sewer improvement project.

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could get away with general purges because they did it to people who had no way to fight back and no way to call for help within a society and a physical territory to which their military forces controlled access. If Hitler and his Nazi state were operating as a shadow faction within Weimar Germany, he could not have carried off the Holocaust or the purge of the SA, because a single Auschwitz or SA escapee could blow the whistle and the legitimate government would crush the whole enterprise.

[Mord]

So if your city, however big it happens to be, has 100 vampires in it, 99 of those need to belong to your main groups of 5-10 clans (and if you're including witches/werewolves/others in your game, then those need to be part of that 5-10). A city with 100 supernaturals can maybe tolerate a single nasty conspiracy of rule-breakers trying to get up to some nasty something that destabilizes the region and ultimately in their wild fever dreams the world, but this will be maybe a dozen individuals max whether they are nested within one larger faction or part of a cross-faction group.

One of the issues with the oWod 1:100,000 assumption is that it was built around the idea that every vampire had minions, probably quite a few, and that elders had dozens or hundreds of them. The way the city was theoretically supposed to be set up was that each vampire might average 10 or more minions, and these were supposed to be the principle NPC type encountered in social situations. Of course, people didn't actually do this, especially players, because they want to play a character, not a small business or law firm. Generally the source material doesn't do this either. Ghouls, familiars, etc. tend to be rather thin on the ground, and if a vampire has a minion it's usually another weaker vampire or some other kind of full-blown supernatural like a werewolf. Essentially you can assume more vampires if you assume fewer ghouls.

Remember also that if you integrate your vampire, werewolf, and witch societies, you can have just as many people who count in your Kin society as you did in your vampires-only-No-Homers society with a fraction of the death toll. It doesn't make any particular amount of sense to think that Kin society on any level would be racially segregated, with the exception of things like vampire blood lineages that might have some traction in more traditionalist domains.

If you're an elderly Witch and you want to keep on truckin', you might arrange to have yourself Embraced, and poof! Now you're a vampire, but you still have all your Witch friends and I don't see why you wouldn't keep your same IHOP Pancake Society membership card and keep on attending the same book club and stuff. It probably wouldn't even be unusual: "Oh, hi Martha, did you do something with your hair?" "Thanks for asking, but no, I just became one of the hungry undead." "Well that's nice; one of my old apprentices did that a few decades ago and it seems to be working out for him."

So, 1:100,000 spooks might, in any given area, consist more heavily of werewolves or Mole Men or whatever than vampires, and then you don't really have a mandatory murder problem even if your vampires are contractually obligated to leave a trail of corpses. (They aren't.)

[erik]

I don’t think witches should become vampires. They may achieve immortality by sorcery - infernal pact, necromancy, or dream shenanigans whatever, but they ought be specific creatures in their own right. Witches trade their soul for powers from another world leaving no viable essence left to be turned by an undead. At least that’s how I’d do it.

[deaddmwalking]

I don’t think witches should become vampires. They may achieve immortality by sorcery - infernal pact, necromancy, or dream shenanigans whatever, but they ought be specific creatures in their own right. Witches trade their soul for powers from another world leaving no viable essence left to be turned by an undead. At least that’s how I’d do it.

If witches are 'normal humans' that unlock arcane power, there's no inherent reason why they shouldn't be able to be turned into vampires. You'd have to create a reason.

If 'witch' is a job, there's no reason why a witch couldn't be a vampire any more than an accountant or an actor.

[erik]

Yes. My contention is that witches should not just be a job as a normal human. See After Sundown. You burn out your soul. You die. You replace your blood with sap. You can see how these may not be compatible with vampirism.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, when it comes to After Sundown anything that has to do with grabbing entire templates is "Standardizing Nonstandard Magic" material. Becoming a vampire through non-standard magic is fine as an origin story, setting disruptor or as a convoluted respec scheme for an unhappy player but obviously you don't want a scenario where players feel entitled to run around stacking entire monster types like cordwood just for the blatant powerups. It's exactly the kind of thing that has to be customized to the table it's addressing rather than something you can handle with one-size-fits-all rules.

Outside of After Sundown it's a much more open question though because being a witch or a vampire may not necessarily constitute an entire class.

[Omegonthesane]

Given that After Sundown creatures can all perform sorceries from the same list the implication is that ritual magic user the profession is just shared between classes. All the stuff about Mighty Rituals of Vast Power for the second edition sure sounded like it was Standardising Nonstandard Magic in that you aren't expected to use any particular example of that shit in regular play but its effects are setting defining.

Having the first vampires be witches who turned into vampires through a magic ritual worked for Warhams.

[Chamomile]

A witch becoming a vampire seems reasonable to me, although it should only come with a handful of powers core to the vampire concept, and not the full suite you'd expect a player character whose first splat was vampire to gain rapidly or immediately upon being turned. Like, vampires are undead, which means they don't need to breathe, they aren't using most of their internal organs which makes it hard to kill them just by shooting at center of mass (but not necessarily any harder to incapacitate them in that way), must now drink blood to regain their power rather than performing spooky rituals with human bones or making themselves a brew or whatever, lose their powers in sunlight but not in the rain, and are vulnerable to wood but not iron. The vampire transformation hands out a tiny handful of useful tricks, but for the most part it just swaps out weaknesses and power schedules and does not hand out the full set of Clout, Fortitude, Mesmerism, etc. etc. powers you would expect a player vampire to start with.

Particularly if we're doing this ground up and don't care about compatibility with existing After Sundown mechanics, I think it's fine if there's a hierarchy to splats not in power but in compatibility. A witch can become a vampire or a werewolf, and vampires and werewolves become witches as soon as they pick up any magic powers outside their core disciplines, but a vampire cannot become a werewolf nor vice versa. You can also go straight from being a regular mortal to being a vampire and that does not automatically grant you any witch powers, so a starting vampire isn't an upgrade to a starting witch, nor does a witch get a significant boost in power from becoming a vampire.

You could create a big whole web of different splat types - I don't think it's a big deal if a fallen or reborn becomes a vampire but I would expect many Icarids not to, and even if we're not using all the After Sundown splats it still serves as an example of how down into the reeds you can get with this kind of thing. I think it'd be simpler to say: Witches get to swap (but not stack) their current voodoo type for another. Other splats are mutually exclusive to one another.

[erik]

I'm not suggesting aping the mechanics of After Sundown, it was a fluff thing that I was wanting to carry forward. It is a real question as to whether "witch" is just someone who casts sorceries, or if it is a real transformation.

I much rather having witches immortal-up via necromantic rituals, or via pact or as astral projection dudes. [edit: and yes, maybe a ritual to transform into a vampire could be an option, but let's not make that the default]

I feel it has a lot more flavor than just giving everyone fangs.

[deaddmwalking]

I[edit: and yes, maybe a ritual to transform into a vampire could be an option, but let's not make that the default]

I feel it has a lot more flavor than just giving everyone fangs.

I think that if you take the position 'witches can't become vampires' you also have to explain why they can't - saying they're already dead or have sap for veins could do that, but then it pretty much has to be 'no vampires, no exceptions'. If you think they should be able to become vampires, you have to decide why they don't all choose to do that. It could be that being a vampire isn't really a power-up for them - if they can do everything vampires can do with magic then they don't benefit from becoming vampires (and Vampires potentially don't benefit from learning witchcraft). It could be that vampirism is generally incompatible with their form of magic so they really don't synergize well. If witches are more powerful than normal humans, why wouldn't vampires want to convert them? And if witch-vampires are more powerful than witches or vampires, why aren't they running the show?

I think it's a pretty important question to answer early.

[Omegonthesane]

The primary reason to suggest witch-vampires was to explain why vampires were super rare until Dracula, by implying that originally vampirification could only be done by the Super Ritual until Drac pioneered the method of exsanguinating the new convert and feeding vampire blood to the corpse as a much quicker way to go straight from human to vampire without the intermediary stage of becoming a witch and remaining interested in the kinds of sorcery where your flavour of immortality is vampire instead of "undead not requiring further blood drinking" or "pact with Cthulhu" or "Force goat" long enough to be able to self-convert.

It has the wrinkle that all elders that are older than Dracula are witch-vampires instead of single class vampires who never retrained, but that isn't the worst thing.