Urban Fantasy Mythic Resonance v Branding

[Username17]

The demographics thread is getting a little bogged down ranting about the specific failures of White Wolf's supernatural sub-groups, so I thought I'd split that off and talk about supernatural typing in general.

The most important considerations when subtyping the supernatural creatures in your setting are branding and mythic resonance. These are in many ways opposed concepts. Your setting's specific vampire lore makes your setting distinct. But everything you claim about vampires makes them different from all the other vampires also makes potential fans balk.

Now different people have different things that cross lines for them. Obviously there are enough people that accept sparkling vampires to make Twilight a multi-million dollar franchise. But even many fans of Twilight ignore the sparkliness within their own head canon. That's a breaking point for a lot of people. On the other hand, very few people draw a hard line about whether it's "OK" for Vampires to cast reflections or not cast reflections. There's also a fair amount of leeway as regards how vampires are inconvenienced by sunlight. Some versions of vampires are dropped in power, some are hurt by the sun, and some just fucking explode. Heck, in some versions there are vampires that can walk around in the day and vampires that can't. The variance in vampire weaknesses that each person will accept is quite substantial, with some things setting off most peoples' bullshit meters and some things being basically OK for most people in the potential audience.

Powers of vampires are also quite different from one source to another, and that seems to mostly be OK with people. The weird elemental sorcery that vampires have in Vampire Academy caused my wife to say "WTF?" but no one seems to bat an eye if vampires can turn into or control animals, dominate weak minds, have super strength and speed, shrug off massive injuries, fly around, or do any of a number of other things that are generally classifiable as "spooky."

When it comes to other creatures of the night, different constellations of weaknesses and powers would set off peoples' bullshit detectors and be easier or harder to swallow. The weird elemental sorcery that the vampires do in Vampire Academy would be way easier to swallow if the characters who had that sorcery were described as Witches or Elves, for example. Like, if you told me that there were Water Elves that specialized in water element magic and Spirit Elves that specialized in spirit element magic, that wouldn't be nearly as weird to me as when Vampire Academy makes the same claim for vampires.

The unintentional genius of White Wolf's initial offering was precisely that they offered a range of different vampire types. Now when you got to the nitty gritty of what the vampires could actually do, it fell massively short. The Brujah weren't able to do the stuff that they did in The Lost Boys (no flight, no hell hounds, no illusion powers, etc.). The Toreador weren't able to successfully do all the crazy shit vampires do in Interview With The Vampire. But more importantly, the universal disadvantages they gave to vampires were totally incompatible with players being able to tell cooperative stories. Things like allowed waking hours might sound thematic, but if you actually check the hours of darkness available to work with, having to wake after the sun sets and then commute to the place where the plot happens, and then get back home before sunrise leaves you no time at all.

Even if you did that sort of thing "right" there's the perhaps more fundamental issue that there just aren't aren't nearly as many "acceptable" versions of creatures other than Vampires. As they say in Monster Squad "There's only one way to kill a Werewolf." And while that's not strictly true, in the sense that there are versions of Werewolves that are harmed by Iron or Fire or Holy Water, and there are even versions where they are just kind of tough guys that you can beat to death with a club - the version people are most familiar with is pretty much unkillable without silver weapons.The only question is again from Monster Squad: "Can Wolfman drive a car?" Various versions of Werewolves are more or less powerful in their monstrous form, but they also have more or less control and humanity. Some versions of Werewolves have working hands and can drive a car, while others do not.

While the variations in vampire expectations and the different packages that have mythic resonance with different people are quite numerous, the same is obviously not true of Werewolves or Mummies. There just are less Mummy and Werewolf stories, and those stories that exist are less varied. The Werewolves in Twilight aren't really all that different from the Werewolves in True Blood. And I haven't read any Nightworld books, but I assume that the Werewolves in them are pretty recognizable. It's simply a much more scripted setup. What this means is that Urban Fantasy has a need for significantly more flavors of Vampires than it does other things.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Mummies are an odd example because I feel like they actually have quite a bit of room to work with but that's mostly because people don't know what to do with them when they try their goofy monster manual undead categorization schemes. Telling your art crew that you want Egyptian mummies gives you some ideas for staging but in terms of powerset you could be plausibly talking about anything from a mighty sorcerer-priest to a mindless shambling bruiser to a dead cat. I couldn't even tell you whether a mummy should be the mook or the big bad and indeed you can find examples where mummies serve as both within the same franchise. Mummies are often less a monster type and more of a bit of flavor that people staple onto a given style of necromancy.

[DrPraetor]

Werewolf was a failure of both branding and resonance.

For starters, it was false advertising, because the resonance wasn't even supposed to be with werewolves - the angry horror fell apart because they lost the brainstorming session (maybe the thing where the werewolves killed the other shapeshifters was an attempt to bring that back? Anyway). The resonance was supposed to be with a mashup of captain planet with gross sex stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Dyqas6Sm8
NO, GROSSER THAN THAT

Now, while it started as a brainstorming session, there were clearly some people who cared about filling out the space of Irish-themed vs Native-American-themed furry nature witches, but it was a niche within a niche wrapped in false advertising. Someone should do a failed design, because I don't know the Werewolf lore well enough to critique it, really.

Instead, let's consider the relatively successful branding and resonance of L5R. L5R has a big advantage in many ways because they built out a mountain of PC-oriented art assets before they had much of a setting besides shifting Japan onto Chinese geography?

Well, you want to play a Samurai.
maybe you want to be elegant and cultured

and platinum blonde, I guess?

maybe you want to be stoic and cynical


maybe you want to be mystical and mysterious
(this one won't embed)
http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/show ... image/jpeg

Or, hey, it didn't even occur to you, but of course you want to play a unicorn-riding country girl.


There are a lot of elements to this - and the L5R clans aren't perfect by any means - but key elements are that they suggest styles and subclasses which people want to play, which is a function of both resonance with what people already know they want and with branding that delivers new character ideas that people didn't know to ask for. Done properly, L5R clans will also not trample on primary roles like general, infiltrator or mage.

So I don't remember how the different Werewolf splats lined up except that you wanted to be born from someone having sex with a dogLupus. But even if you're a filthy hippy who wants to play an offensive racial stereotype of a Native American who is also a werewolf nature witch, not only did you probably not care what the difference between Uktena and Wendigo is, your choice was dictated by whether you wanted to be a fighter or caster so if you somehow did like the... (looks it up) Forbidden Knowledge schtick or the Hyper-Purity schtick better, there's a 50% chance you were SOL for whatever character class you wanted to play.

[Daniel]

Lupus, Stargazer, Ahroun. That combo gave you Gnosis 5, Rage 5, Willpower 5 I think.
That combo was supposed to be relatively rare in setting, but rather common at tables one suspects.

[Username17]

From a strictly mechanical standpoint, the different tribes gave you different piles of starting stuff, willpower and backgrounds and such. You could buy that shit with Freebie Points, and you were obviously going to so to an extent it didn't actually matter where your starting Willpower or Background starting dots were. But of course some of the tribes added up to smaller numbers of Freebie Points, meaning that they were strictly worse than other options. Also, each tribe had a tribal totem, and it was unclear what that did.

Each character was an individual, a part of a mixed-tribe pack, and also a member of a tribe. There is a totem spirit at each level of being. So as an individual you might have the Griffin Totem. Your pack has a pack totem, and that might be Pegasus. And your tribe has a tribal totem, which might be Rat. It wasn't in any way clear what, if anything, happened because of personal or tribal totems. The pack totem actually was clear because there's a section on what happens when the members of the pack pool their background resources to buy one - which is that you get a spirit boost that is worth a lot more than what any player actually spends on it.

Totem spirits are some of them incredibly expensive, so depending on what a tribal totem does or doesn't do for individuals, it's possible that you're supposed to radically re-evaluate the tribes based on the fact that Black Furies get Pegasus and the Bone Gnawers get Rat despite the fact that Bone Gnawers are otherwise just getting more Freebie points from their Background/Willpower totals.

This all changes massively in the Revised Edition, where they seem to toss out the different background numbers for the different tribes, and also make Willpower cost twice as much in terms of Freebie Points. So the tribe's starting Willpower is just how good the tribe is. But there's still no explanation for how good it is to have an expensive and powerful tribal totem so again and still those rankings would be highly dependent on your Storyteller and how they thought that spirit stuff worked. And then there's starting gifts and allowed gifts. Werewolves have access to magic powers and as they gain ranks those unlock other magic powers. Some of those are completely absurd - the top end of Bone Gnawer magic lets you raise a spontaneous army mobilized against a target of your choice whenever you want. Other top end magics involve small stat bonuses that you don't care about, and there's magic that's everywhere in between. Depending on what rank you were eventually going to get to, some of the tribes unlocked ridiculous magic and some of them just didn't.

Also the Revised Edition straight up cuts tribes. Some are dead and the Stargazers left to go join the Beast Courts. So in Revised you have twelve tribes, where two are native American, zero are African, zero are Asian, zero are Pacific Islander, and ten are some flavor of white people. It kinda sounds super racist when you say it like that, doesn't it?

Anyway, regardless of how it's supposed to work, or how individual Storytellers thought it was supposed to work, it's obviously extremely ungamebalanced. And beyond that, as DrPraetor pointed out: the specific way in which it's unbalanced is completely divorced from whatever character archetype the tribe's elevator pitch was trying to sell you. Bone Gnawers were sold as "Hobo Werewolves" but if you got to level 5 you became a Revolutionary War Leader, which is weird and probably not what you were after if you signed on to being a Hobo Werewolf who turned into a mangy mutt in wolf form. And some of the tribes didn't really offer an epic transformation at all - the level five Fianna gift lets you triple in size for +6 strength. Which is somewhat less impressive than calling an army of thousands into the street. But more importantly, if you signed up to be a drunken Irish fairy werewolf, the chances that your envisaged end state was becoming the giant Warwick Davis from Leprechaun 4: Leprechaun in Space and punching people is... pretty low.

Werewolf had five character classes: Rogue (ragabash), Wizard (Theurge), and Fighter (Ahroun). Also 2 other ones that I cannot explain and neither can anyone else. But unlike the L5R example, there was no attempt to give any of those character classes things to do within each tribe. Like in L5R you can imagine what a Crane Clan Samurai or a Crab Clan Samurai does and there's a sales pitch for it. But each Werewolf tribe only has two presented gifts at each level past 1. Even if the support was remotely equal for each supported combination (which it obviously and hilariously is not), there isn't any support at all for most combinations. You have five character classes and two level 2 Gifts. There is at best 40% coverage. And that's before we get into shit like how many of the gifts are stone cold useless and many of the tribes get two gifts at one level that synergize with one of the auspices or how some of the tribes give gifts that are also available as auspice gifts and thus aren't really giving out any gifts at all for that level.

A comparison with the L5R model is just fucking sad. Most of the werewolf tribes are incredibly thematically weak. They don't support most of the character archetypes mechanically or thematically. There are enough of them that they all run together (the Revised Edition cut the tribe list to twelve and I had to look up on line which ones got the axe), and very few of them have any kind of pitch that suggests any particular character. And fucking none of them have support for all the character types the game is supposed to have.

Overly simplistic groups that don't cover available archetypes terribly well is something that crops up over and over again in source fiction. And in books and TV series, it's not actually that much of a problem. If every named character member of Clan McCheatyface is some kind of traitor or spy, that might be bad writing, but it's not particularly a problem. But for a role playing game - where named characters need to be procedurally generated over the course of play that's a big problem. What about Clan McCheatyface Warriors? Or Clan McCheatyface Engineers? The archetypal example of this is of course Harry Potter. In Harry Potter all the members of House Gryffindor are heroes and all the members of House Slytherin are villains. That's lazy and stupid, but it doesn't actually stop play on the books. It does however, make it very hard to role play in the Harry Potter universe. Cooperative storytelling in the Harry Potter universe is extremely difficult because all the members of Slytherin are bad, all the members of Gryffindor are good, and all the members of Ravenclaw do not matter.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

Also the Revised Edition straight up cuts tribes. Some are dead and the Stargazers left to go join the Beast Courts. So in Revised you have twelve tribes, where two are native American, zero are African, zero are Asian, zero are Pacific Islander, and ten are some flavor of white people. It kinda sounds super racist when you say it like that, doesn't it?

Wolves are admittedly not uniform in their distribution. So you wouldn't have any South American, African, or Pacific Islander tribes of werewolves naturally, and you wouldn't have any Australian ones either unless you want to qualify Dingoes as wolves (an open question). That leaves you with indigenous peoples of the Northern Hemisphere, white people, and Asian people. The Asians are hypothetically represented by the Beast Courts because WW stupidly divided the world in half starting at the Urals and everything is different on the other side because stupid reasons.

So this is partly a problem of building a hypothetically global game based on an animal that does not have a global distribution. Cats are distributed more widely and if I recall correctly the Bastet were much better globalized. Of course that doesn't make it not dumb and doesn't make it absolutely stupid to cut Asia off from the rest of the world.

It would make more sense to organize "werewolf" tribes biologically, based on different types of canid. So you'd have Werewolves (you could maybe divide this into two or three sub-populations), but also werejackals, weredholes, weredingoes, werecoyotes, and werewild-dogs. That gets you superior global coverage, though there's not much you can do about South America. Subsequently you could build your different tribes around differences between the animals they turn into, not around the cultural traits of the human groupings them emulate.

This would also mean that when you inevitably add werecats and weresnakes, and were-other-random-megafauna into your game you can continue to retain a biological organizing principle that is consistent across the groups.

[DrPraetor]

So you wouldn't have any South American, African, or Pacific Islander tribes of werewolves naturally, and you wouldn't have any Australian ones either unless you want to qualify Dingoes as wolves (an open question). ... It would make more sense to organize "werewolf" tribes biologically, based on different types of canid. So you'd have Werewolves (you could maybe divide this into two or three sub-populations), but also werejackals, weredholes, weredingoes, werecoyotes, and werewild-dogs. That gets you superior global coverage, though there's not much you can do about South America.

So, um, that's wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maned_wolf

and, if you want a non-wolf Canid in Africa you'd use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wild_dog

as these are the largest in their respective regions.

[Username17]

The issue of the global coverage of wolves is a second order issue for why the "Werewolves are born not made" design decision was fucking awful. The most glaring issue is that if you make Werewolves be people who have bred with wolves and men then it logically follows that a lot of these characters have been fucking dogs, and that is disgusting. But an important second order principal is that even if you dispense with the bestiality issue, Werewolves who are from a long line of Werewolves is an inherently racist concept. You've made Werewolves into a race of superior people, and one which happens to have no Africans in it. That's really fucked up.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse was a Mad Libs document. One in which all the design decisions of Vampire: the Masquerade were held up and then altered for purpose of product identity. And the whole thing about breeding rather than infecting is explicitly and exclusively there to contrast the line with Masquerade, but everything about it is horrible. All of the dominoes fall into a pit and the pit is full of terrible.

It takes a little bit of thinking and extrapolating before you realize that the Werewolf setup didn't actually have any Black people in it. And they didn't decide to cordon off Asia until 1998 when they decided that they needed to come up with a reason why they hadn't mentioned Asia before then. But once you realize that your base design decisions create a game line that definitionally has no black people in it, you have to just take a step back and start making changes. Failure to do so is editorial negligence of the highest order.

-Username17

[Wiseman]

Also the Revised Edition straight up cuts tribes. Some are dead and the Stargazers left to go join the Beast Courts. So in Revised you have twelve tribes, where two are native American, zero are African, zero are Asian, zero are Pacific Islander, and ten are some flavor of white people. It kinda sounds super racist when you say it like that, doesn't it?

Wolves are admittedly not uniform in their distribution. So you wouldn't have any South American, African, or Pacific Islander tribes of werewolves naturally, and you wouldn't have any Australian ones either unless you want to qualify Dingoes as wolves (an open question). That leaves you with indigenous peoples of the Northern Hemisphere, white people, and Asian people. The Asians are hypothetically represented by the Beast Courts because WW stupidly divided the world in half starting at the Urals and everything is different on the other side because stupid reasons.

So this is partly a problem of building a hypothetically global game based on an animal that does not have a global distribution. Cats are distributed more widely and if I recall correctly the Bastet were much better globalized. Of course that doesn't make it not dumb and doesn't make it absolutely stupid to cut Asia off from the rest of the world.

It would make more sense to organize "werewolf" tribes biologically, based on different types of canid. So you'd have Werewolves (you could maybe divide this into two or three sub-populations), but also werejackals, weredholes, weredingoes, werecoyotes, and werewild-dogs. That gets you superior global coverage, though there's not much you can do about South America. Subsequently you could build your different tribes around differences between the animals they turn into, not around the cultural traits of the human groupings them emulate.

This would also mean that when you inevitably add werecats and weresnakes, and were-other-random-megafauna into your game you can continue to retain a biological organizing principle that is consistent across the groups.

Not sure if I'm missing something, but is there any reason they have to be "wolves"? What if there were other lycanthropes like werecrows, werebears, weretigers and so forth?

[phlapjackage]

Not sure if I'm missing something, but is there any reason they have to be "wolves"? What if there were other lycanthropes like werecrows, werebears, weretigers and so forth?

IIRC, old WtA had many types of lycanthropes, but there had been a huge war where the "wolves" basically wiped out all the other kinds, so the basic book only allowed wolves as PCs. Later supplements added other types as PCs into the game, so there's no reason the reboot couldn't have allowed multiple types from the get-go.

[Judging__Eagle]

I thought that the "werewolves are crazy genocidal maniacs; even against other people on their own damned side" was added into the non-wolf species book as a retcon to explain why they hadn't shown up in the original WtA books.

It's been over a decade since I've held the books in my hands, so the original WtA books might have mentioned that history as well.

[phlapjackage]

I thought that the "werewolves are crazy genocidal maniacs; even against other people on their own damned side" was added into the non-wolf species book as a retcon to explain why they hadn't shown up in the original WtA books.

It's been over a decade since I've held the books in my hands, so the original WtA books might have mentioned that history as well.

You could very well be right about that, it's been a long time for me as well. I guess the basic answer to why only "wolves" is that there's no real good reason. Dumb reasons or retcons or whatever are why, afaik. There's plenty of real-world histories and legends about shifters that aren't wolves.

[Orca]

A shame too since including were-great cats almost requires non caucasians; there were wild lions in Europe but that was a long time ago. A clan of African were-lions and one of Asiatic were-tigers, and maybe some Aztec were-jaguars would have gone a long way to expanding the possible PC origins. I'm pretty sure it would have hit a bunch of players in the cool! too.

Edit: though it certainly could have been done badly. Just thinking about how badly African were-lions might have been done makes me cringe.

[Longes]

You've made Werewolves into a race of superior people, and one which happens to have no Africans in it. That's really fucked up.

Silent Striders are African.

Going by demographics/stereotypes:
* Silver Fangs are deranged slavs
* Shadow Lords are treacherous slavs
* Silent Striders are African and Middle Eastern
* Fiana are Irish
* Black Furies are Greek radfems
* Uktena are spooky native americans
* Wendigo are nominally Siberian but actually also native americans
* Stargazers are indian new agers
* Get of Fenris are german nazis
* Children of Gaia are american hippies
* Glass Walkers are Silicon Valley tech bros
* Bone Gnawers are African/Indian murderhobos
* Red Talons are nazis

[OgreBattle]

Can a catholic priest who diddled kids still make holy water that kills creatures of the night

[deaddmwalking]

[
Not sure if I'm missing something, but is there any reason they have to be "wolves"? What if there were other lycanthropes like werecrows, werebears, weretigers and so forth?

Were creatures of all types is going to be something you're probably going to want. While 'wolf' has a lot of traction, there are cat people and they're just not going to be happy unless they're a were-jaguar (even if that is mechanically identical to a were wolf). But even with that, werewolves as a pure blood line is problematic. Especially with the bestiality thrown in.

Having it be an inheritable condition (including potentially from birth) is better. If nothing else, it opens up the play space. A lot of werewolf media is about dealing with what the transformation means. Playing wolf-hippies who grew up defending the planet from Exxon-Mobil is one type of game you can play, but that's not going to be everybody's preference.

Throwing spaghetti here, but I think the idea of 'confronting your animal nature' is hard for people. Most people inflicted with lycanthropy shed their humanity and rampage. The idea that 'there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy' treads on this idea that civilization is something that requires participation and some aspect of our being is alienated by it - and this allows us to explore those themes. Werewolves would generally try not to infect others - the fact that most people react badly would make it unwise. But accidents happen. Dealing with rampaging werewolves that either need to be 'reigned in' or put down could be fun. I definitely think that 'inflicting' the condition on people, like with vampirism, offers better ways to play the game than simply being born that way.

From the perspective of 'magical escapism' there's really only two tropes: you discover that you have access to special powers (become a wizard) or you were born special and were lied to your entire life and only now recognize your powers (Teenwolf and I was a Teenage Witch probably fit here). In any case, many players, in some sense at least, might enjoy the idea of becoming magically powerful beings in real life so if the game suggests that is possible, it makes buy-in just a little easier.

[Longes]

On that topic I'd like to shill for Congresswolf, an interactive story about politics and werewolves from my beloved Choice of Games.

[Username17]

Silent Striders are African.

Silent Striders are Egyptians. They are not black. While Egypt is technically in Continental Africa, it's culturally and regionally in the Middle East and Mediterranean.

More generally, even if you did have a place for black people, telling the black people that they had to play Were-Hyenas or Were-Lions would be uncomfortably racist. Even if you made "separate but equal" were creatures for Chinese and Indian and Nigerian characters to be, it would be insulting and racially insensitive.

And it's not going to be equal. The fucking game is called "Werewolf" and while there are a non-zero number of people who want to play Werebears and Weresharks instead, the inescapable reality is that Wolves are the most popular alternate form. They are the trope namer. We call the general case "Lycanthropy" because Werewolves are what most people think of when they start thinking about these sorts of monsters at all. Whether or not the Weresharks you let Hawaiians turn into are game mechanically as good as the Werewolves allowed to white people, the simple reality is that a lot more people want to play wolves than sharks regardless of whether those people are Pacific Islanders or not. The Wolf is not balanced with the other zodiac animals in a style sense because it's simply the most popular option. By a huge margin.

Yes there's definitely a market for people who want to turn into Bears, Boars, Rats, Tigers, Sharks, and probably some other stuff (although it falls off quickly, I'm not sure anyone actually wants to play a Swan Mae, Buffalo Woman, or Selkie, despite such things existing in folklore). But in the parlance of Masquerade - there's at least 3 clans worth of Werewolves before you get to Werebears or Werecats at all. The difference in popularity is quite stark. For fuck's sake, here's a list of over 150 werewolf movies. Think about how many Werecat movies you can think of. I mean, there's Cat People, and the 1982 remake of Cat People. Also Sleepwalkers. And Wikipedia tells me that there's a 1992 Indian film called Junoon.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

It probably shouldn't come as a vast surprise to anybody that a lot of what Western culture thinks of as "horror" is really just the Western conception of horror. There are pulp stories about the penanggalan from the 1930s, but how many Hollywood movies star that critter? Not many. Like it or not, Western conception of horror are just not universal, which means they tend to translate really badly outside of a Western setting milieu - hence all of the World of Darkness' various half-assed efforts at Incan mummies, were-crocodiles, "the Bush of Ghosts," etc.

And getting around that is tricky, because like a good horror movie you want to establish the rules early on. If vampires burst into flames when the sun comes up, for example, that is important and has ramifications for the setting. And if you introduce Daywalkers in another supplement, that also has ramifications for the setting. White Wolf was largely shit about that because it decided what it wanted the setting to look like first and then made the rules later.

[deaddmwalking]

Making rules to support the setting is fine - that's what RPGs based on existing novels or media properties do. But doing it badly so the rules don't support the setting you claim they do is just SO BAD.

[Username17]

It's important to recognize - as White Wolf never did - that the difference between single author fiction and cooperative fiction means that things that would be acceptable in one are unacceptably racist in the other. The rules of single author fiction are merely descriptive, while the rules of a cooperative fiction are proscriptive.

The obvious example is Nagini in the JKRowlingverse. She's an Asian snake lady. And that's perfectly fine. Her name is the name of an Asian snake lady mythological creature, and she's an Asian snake lady. It's not particularly well thought out, and you're welcome to dunk on it for being cliché, but it's fine. But imagine that that wasn't a character, but a rule for characters that other people wanted to create. Now instead of saying "This is our Asian snake lady named Asian Snake Lady." you are saying "You aren't Asian, so you can't play a snake lady" or possibly "You are Asian, so you have to play a snake lady." That pushes it from being merely unimaginative to being unacceptably racist.

That's why the entire model of true breeding protagonist types cannot work in an urban fantasy role playing game. It's not that we're debating whether it's too stereotypical for a black person to be a were-lion or some shit. It's that we're literally telling people that they can't play the character type they want because they are black. It's fundamentally unacceptable and cannot be fixed.

-Username17

[Eikre]

Mummies are an odd example because I feel like they actually have quite a bit of room to work with but that's mostly because people don't know what to do with them when they try their goofy monster manual undead categorization schemes. Telling your art crew that you want Egyptian mummies gives you some ideas for staging but in terms of powerset you could be plausibly talking about anything from a mighty sorcerer-priest to a mindless shambling bruiser to a dead cat. I couldn't even tell you whether a mummy should be the mook or the big bad and indeed you can find examples where mummies serve as both within the same franchise. Mummies are often less a monster type and more of a bit of flavor that people staple onto a given style of necromancy.

It's not a weird example if you're underwriting the point that Frank is driving, which is that you can't write a whole sourcebook with ten different player-appropriate tribes of Mummies because there aren't ten different Mummy movies with ten different player-character-appropriate Mummy archetypes to choose from. You have Imhotep, and whatever mishmash of other bandaid-flavored zombie assholes you can think of are only there as a result of an Imhotep doing Imhotep stuff. As you have observed, it only pans out to one Egyptian style of necromancy. That means there is exactly one "clan" of Mummies, and they are a clan of Witches. The other eleven twelfths of the book they come in are absolutely not going to be devoted to competing eras of Egyptian mysticism, nor will they be devoted to whatever Incan or Tibetan mummies you can dumpster-dive for in the history of desiccated corpses; they're going to be devoted to the Lords of Salem, Aztec Tlamacazqui, Voodoo Priests, Cathar Hierophants, and Kung-Fu Masters.

[shinimasu]

It probably shouldn't come as a vast surprise to anybody that a lot of what Western culture thinks of as "horror" is really just the Western conception of horror. There are pulp stories about the penanggalan from the 1930s, but how many Hollywood movies star that critter? Not many. Like it or not, Western conception of horror are just not universal, which means they tend to translate really badly outside of a Western setting milieu - hence all of the World of Darkness' various half-assed efforts at Incan mummies, were-crocodiles, "the Bush of Ghosts," etc.

I have to wonder at what point the cost/benefit analysis of trying to set an urban fantasy in modern day earth is more expensive than just creating your own urban fantasy setting on a completely different chasis.

Or does it effectively become magitech at that point where you have to consider the ramifications of fossil fuels vs whatever kind of magic happens in your setting and whether or not your cars are powered by crystals instead of dead dinosaurs?

But I mean is it really that much harder to go the final fantasy 15 route and just have your assorted beasties and your modern day conveniences and scrap masquerades and conspiracies and the associated racial baggage of region locked monsters entirely?

Or is this more about preserving the flavor of having some sort of secret knowledge and membership in an exclusive angst club?

[Pedantic]

I have to wonder at what point the cost/benefit analysis of trying to set an urban fantasy in modern day earth is more expensive than just creating your own urban fantasy setting on a completely different chasis.

Or does it effectively become magitech at that point where you have to consider the ramifications of fossil fuels vs whatever kind of magic happens in your setting and whether or not your cars are powered by crystals instead of dead dinosaurs?

Those settings exist, notably see Max Gladstone's Craft sequence, which replaces modern tech with dark magic (and more specifically, modern contract law with necromancy), but they are nothing like standard urban fantasy.

Replacing the industrial revolution with a magical revolution makes for fun alternate history and/or serves as an interesting way to hold a mirror up to some specific aspect of modern society but it's a whole different set of themes. The point of urban fantasy is that you get to explore a secret demimonde attached to the "real" world, and the primary benefit for an RPG is that you can really easily refer questions about the setting to the world as it is for answers and only talk about the exceptions. Once you replace the internet with a shared nightmare crafted from the human unconscious and combustion engines with bound demons, the exceptions to the world as it stands will rapidly pile up until you lose the benefit of the reference point.

[Username17]

I have to wonder at what point the cost/benefit analysis of trying to set an urban fantasy in modern day earth is more expensive than just creating your own urban fantasy setting on a completely different chasis.

In the United States, there are over a hundred cities with half a million inhabitants. There are fourteen Slavic languages spoken by modern people in Europe. There are eighteen minority ethnic groups in China that individually have more than a million people.

No matter how far down the Tolkien/Barker rabbit hole you go, no fantasy world you make up will ever be even a tenth as full of content as actual Earth. You just aren't going to get particularly close. Not even in a single narrow dimension. You are never ever going to have a language categorization system detailed enough to differentiate Kashubian and Sorbian from Polish.

Urban Fantasy, and Low Fantasy in general, draws upon a wealth of source material that is literally larger than you could hope to write in a billion lifetimes. That's not even an exaggeration. There is no conceivable amount of extra work you could have to do to work the fantasy elements in that would be more effort than creating an equivalent amount of source material for your homebrew fantasy world.

-Username17