A Loose Vampire Design Doc. by Justin Achilli

by Justin R. Achilli

I thought some people might get some mileage out of this. It will soon supplement the old submission guidelines.

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Vampire is a game of personal, gothic horror. That’s "gothic," not
"goth." Some vampires are goths, sure, but we’re more concerned with the intricacies of becoming a monster and the literary meaning of gothic than we are with lyrics from Apoptygma Berzerk songs.

(Somewhere, right now, you¹ll find a goth screaming, "That’s not goth, that’s industrial! Idiot!" To that goth, I say: Shut up. Somewhere, right now, a European is laughing at you for confusing industrial with darkwave electro. Get over it.)

Vampire is about normal people who have been Embraced into a World of Darkness and turned into predatory monsters. It is a game of horror, of both the internal and external varieties. Each vampire is only half man — the other half is a ravenous, bloodthirsty Beast. Vampires’ worlds fall apart: Mortals they love die, things they held dear now linger out of reach, they prey upon what they once were. They have been utterly cursed. To ease the pain — or to escape what they have become — they pretend to be mortal.  They place elaborate social rules and grand Jyhads before themselves, hoping to divert their attention from their own bestial natures. They cling desperately to the vestiges of their humanity. Their unlives are tragic, doomed attempts to stave off the unnatural forces that lurk within them all.

(Vampire, to some people, is about blowing shit up, hurling bolts of flame and vicariously getting back at a world that shuns them for their geekdom. I don’t publish books for those people. It’s fine for them to play in that idiom — as long as they’re having fun, the game works. They’re going to play Vampire like that anyway, but I’m not going to encourage them.)

So, with all that in mind, you want to write for Vampire, eh? Well, before I hire you, we’ll have to see if you can take it. Part and parcel with Vampire writing comes criticism, and it comes in greater volume than with any of our other games. To see if you’re up to the task, complete the following mock letter using the choices presented and gauge your reactions.

"Hello,
(1) Jackass;
(2) Idiot;
(3) Bonehead;
(4) Moron;

I am
(1) a generic Internet chump hiding behind an anonymous handle
(2) a lonely, frustrated student with nothing better to do
(3) an illiterate dullard with vociferously spoken opinions
(4) a rabid fan who thinks White Wolf owes him something

and I just want you to know that your last book really
(1) sucked.
(2) blew.
(3) stank.
(4) should have been fed through a chipper-shredder.

Why was it so bad? Well,
(1) you didn’t do exactly what I would have done with it, which proves you are stupid.
(2) you left out several details in the interests of creating mystery, but I wanted to know the exact Traits or reason behind [Event X], which proves you are stupid.
(3) I’m incapable of understanding in-character bias in printed material, which results in my confusion and also proves you are stupid.
(4) just because, stupid.

In fact, White Wolf has put out consistently crappy books since
(1) you started writing for them.
(2) Justin Achilli took over Vampire.
(3) they stopped using Sisters of Mercy quotes to open every subsection of text.
(4) they came into existence, yet I still buy every book, if only to give me new reasons
to complain and find a surrogate victim for my own feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.

I hope
(1) wild jackals tear out your liver for writing this thing.
(2) you are assimilated by the Borg, decapitated by Highlanders, hamstrung by my Celtic ancestors and defiled by cape-wearing LARPers.
(3) real goths taunt you when you go to the nightclub, you Manson-loving wannabe.
(4) you get fired and they hire me, even though I have no idea how to write a cogent sentence, let alone prepare a book for publication.

Sincerely,
(1) DarkRavynDeth143@aol.com
(2) Kevin Collegebritches, State University
(3) Nethraxis Zomb, Crimson Master of the Eternal Night
(4) Eugene Fenster, by way of my parents’ basement

P.S.:
(1) Which book explains Baba Yaga’s death?
(2) Enclosed is my character. Please make it official.
(3) I didn’t type my letter legibly or even bother to send a SASE, but I’m going to get all uppity if I don’t receive a response from you.
(4) Rot in hell, you bastard."

If you’re prepared to deal with crap like this, you’ve got the fortitude to work for us. (On a lighter note, you should know that the people you’re actually working for are the silent majority — the ones who accept the game for the entertainment pastime it is and "get it" on a larger scale. They just don’t write as often, because they tend to be better acclimated to the world. Not everyone in this hobby is a wailing, sociopath lunatic. Just the loud ones.)

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about how to write for Vampire.

Most importantly, a writer must have a grasp of English. Grammar, punctuation, solid mechanics and a good voice are paramount. One of many people’s common misperceptions involves the belief that writing is easy — not everyone can draw well, it’s hard to lay out a book to given graphic design specs, but any monkey can sit in front of a keyboard and type pretty words. Not true. In fact, writing is the hardest thing many people will be expected to perform in their entire lives, and doing it well is even more difficult. A writer must be a good communicator before I hire her, as our production schedule doesn’t offer enough time to piece together a flaw-heavy manuscript. You may have the best ideas in the world, but they’re worthless to me if I can’t make heads or tails of them. If you’re a good idea guy, team up with a competent writer and submit a joint proposal. Just don’t send me "I like alot of vampires and the diablerie in the Sabbat of Mexico. But mithris was wetching and a Lupine. Attack!" and expect to have it published.

Vampire’s core theme is a tripartite concept: It is a Storytelling game of personal horror. Storytelling involves taking a concept and doing something with it. We all know the Ventrue are wealthy powerbrokers nonpareil, but what do they do to garner that reputation? How do the Nosferatu manage to maintain their vast information networks? How does a twisted Tzimisce acquire that reputation among others of her kind? Tell a story worth the words. Show us "memorable antagonists, prizes worth fighting for, fascinating settings, believable goals, plot twists, betrayals, redemptions, heroism, tragedy, triumph, horror and general weirdness." If you expect me to pay you, and you expect others to buy your book, you’d best make sure it’s worth our dollar-two-ninety-eight.

The personal aspect rests upon the role of the characters. We don’t need books in which clans/sects/coteries are faceless, monolithic entities that exist only to serve the greater agenda. Sure, the Toreador involve themselves in the worlds of art and mortals, but what motivates them individually? Clans are not fraternities that gather for Spring Rush or to take over the Brujah primogen’s crime syndicate. Sects are not giant companies or armed forces that unite to war with the infidels or "control" (damn, I hate that word) cities (even though they may say otherwise, as is the case with some particularly fervent Sabbat or Assamites). Rather, clans are more like families and sects are more like social societies, and when was the last time the Achillis or the goths banded together to drive the Methuselahs from the city? Focus on the individual — the intent is to show the unique nature of being a vampire, not to join an eternal, undying corporation as a pathetic servant. Nothing inherent to clan or sect membership ties a vampire to a "party line," and it’s more likely for a conniving Ventrue to plot against other Ventrue than it is for him to shake his fist at a cadre of black-biker-jacket-wearing Brujah gangstaz. Princes don’t just "hang out" on velvet thrones, and not all Sabbat are molotov-tossing psychotics.

Concerning horror, your submission had better seep with it. Without horror, this may as well be a superhero game, and that’s not what we’re after. Consider: All characters are dead, yet exist in a fragile state beyond death by stealing away the life’s blood of the people they formerly were while fighting to hold back the excruciating urges of the Beast. All vampires are addicts, dedicated, above all else, to acquiring that precious fluid upon which their existence hangs so precariously. To what depths will these characters sink in the pursuit of their schemes and wants? Let’s see those depths.

With those central ideas in mind, here’s what I’m looking for.

o New Twists: Surprise your reader. If we know what’s going to happen in the plot, it’s boring. I’m not advocating random chaos or arbitrarily motivated antagonists, but sometimes the logical conclusion isn’t what shakes out of an event. Weirdness and mystery are good.

o Interesting Characters: This is such a hot button for me, I don’t even want to open it up. Just make your characters have whole personalities. The idea of a "generic Malkavian" is pretty weak; everyone is an individual. Also remember that your characters’ concepts are not their clan or sect. See? You’re getting me started. Cool characters, please.

o Monsters: I don’t want florid tirades about eternal damnation, but I do want to see that we’re not dealing with fanged superheroes. Simple, but very important

o Open-endedness: Yeah, that’s not a word. So what? Anyway, if you’re dealing with plot, allow players’ coteries to have an impact on their environment. This is very hard with Vampire; characters run such a broad spectrum of motivations that it’s impossible to create a truly universal situation. It’s not like the old days of hack ‘n’ slash games, where you could stick a monster in a room and every character would make a beeline for it and kick its ass, whether they were priests, elves or whatever. Still, try to accommodate as many tastes as possible, and plan for as many eventualities as you can. If the objective of a story is to recover a torpid Kindred’s body, give my vagrant Gangrel truck driver a reason to participate.

o Focus: At the same time, however, your idea needs a unity of vision. Why the hell is the Ventrue gang boss hanging out with the Malkavian political hopeful on the balcony of the Brujah runway model’s loft? You can’t stop players from creating characters who have no business being together (check out a convention game that lets you bring your own character to the table for big laffs sometime), but you can at least bring a sense of order to the material you’re putting into print.

o The Young Ones: I like games that aren’t infested with low-generation god characters. A 13th-generation vampire is every bit as cool as the fifth-generation Prince of Paris, and a damn sight more likely to be believably played. Vampires already have an edge over the mortals among whom they hide — we don’t need any more vertigo-inducing lists of mega-Traits. Skew your writing to reflect the higher generations, unless you’re writing for sympathy with an older vampire.

o Keep it Current: The Vampire setting is ultramodern, and a 600-year-old jackass capering about in a velvet frock coat is gonna get waxed by the Inquisition, if not other Kindred. Vampires enact their Masquerade by following mortal trends, not by guzzling bloodwynnnne from crystal goblets with their vampyre wyves and speaking fantasy roleplaying-influenced faux Olde Englishe. Hey, you! Yeah, you; the Lord Byron doppelganger! I’m setting you on fire because you look like a vampire! Seriously, show us how hip and cutting-edge vampires are. Or, by contrast, show us a static elder who still does wear his powdered wigs — and show us the difficulties he faces by being unable to cope with change.

Now here’s what I don’t want.

o Stuff We’ve Already Done: I’m not interested in Your City by Night, in which the main conflict is a struggle for princedom.

o Stuff We Haven’t Done for a Reason: No Clanbook: Samedi or Secrets of the Inconnu, please. It’s hard enough to keep the mystery without turning over every rock in Vampire’s backyard. Maybe these books will come out at some point, but if they do, it’sbecause Vampire needs them and not because the eight millionth "I think Samedi are cool" submission was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m a bitter, resentful jerk, and I’m more likely to not print a book out of spite than to be won over by fawning over a pet idea (see below).

o Crossover: I’m the guy at the office who hates this the most. Mixing the various World of Darkness supernaturals almost invariably comes at the expense of the games’ horror and leans it toward a disparate mix of random superpowers. That, and the systems of the different games don’t work well together. Werewolves don’t even have tribes in Vampire; they’re almost always unknowable "Lupines." Other supernaturals follow suit. Send crossover to someone else and keep Vampire out of it if you know what’s good for you.

o Your Personal Crusade: So you like the Daughters of Cacophony. Great. The strength of your fetish/passion won’t sell books. Cool ideas will.

o The Same Old Tropes, Redux: Blah blah blah prince blah blah blah Ventrue blah blah blah control blah blah blah manipulated blah blah blah in his bid for power. Yawn.

o GoobCon XIV: I don’t know what committee approves these sorts of things, but every now and then, the gaming community appropriates some weird trend and it becomes chic to participate in it. People claim to be Celts or pagans or Gypsies or Wiccans or Native Americans, or they wear blowzy poet shirts and trenchcoats. What the hell is this all about? Well, most vampires aren’t gamers. Leave your Scottish Gangrel and your Ren Faire-visiting Nagaraja Abomination at home, please. Let these cultures have their dignity and let the dorky fads hurry to their merciful deaths.

Important Note: The Vampire schedule is full until mid-2001. I will not be adding new projects until that time. I do, however, need people to work on books in the interim, so please send in your proposal. Even if I don’t use your idea immediately, I may use you for one of the other projects on the board.

A list of inspirations for Vampire:

Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat — Vampires are sexy in a modern context, and the historical flashbacks are very evocative. I wasn’t a huge fan of Queen of the Damned, which I found too epic for my tastes, or The Tale of the Body Thief, which gave vampires some weird powers (but showed how much Lestat lost by becoming a vampire).

Sheridan LeFanu’s "Carmilla" — Here’s how you exist for centuries: by hiding and reinventing yourself. This story is also very sensual and spooky.

Frederick Cowles’ "The Vampire of Kaldenstein" — What a bunch of monstrous degenerates these guys were!

John Polidori’s "The Vampyre" — Despite the aftermath of lace and capes, this story pretty much established the core ideals of the modern vampire.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula — Duh.

Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting — Unpleasant, seedy characters; swap out the heroin for blood and poof! Instant vampires! The movie also provided a good film translation, which is uncommon.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — An excellent book stylistically (Fitzgerald describes his characters through their actions, showing rather than telling), and the social commentary is certainly applicable to Kindred society.

Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities — A nest of high-society vipers and what they do when things go awry. Very Camarilla.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels — Welcome to what could easily be the Sabbat. The Fear and Loathing movie is actually better than you heard it was.

John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — Very Southern, but also very gothic in the sense Vampire illustrates: rife with corruption and rotten from within.

Blade — Um, see, there are these 13 cla– er, houses, right? And they have mortal minions called ghou– uh, familiars. Oh well. The vampires in Blade were certainly very sexy and ultra-modern-hip-cool, and Steven Dorff’s performance was excellent. Plus, New Order was on the soundtrack and played during the phenomenal opening scene, so you can’t go wrong.

The Crow — Despite spawning a legion of fiendishly made-up LARP kids (and Sting), this was a scummy, noisy, vibrant, violent, druggy, and even somewhat gothic hell of a good time, with kickass sets to boot. Michael Wincott gave a sterling performance as Top Dollar, and I think the movie was better than the comic.

The Replacement Killers — Mainly the opening scene. You can bet that when vampires walk into a nightclub and some grade-A whup-ass starts to happen, there’s going to be some Crystal Method playing really loudly. And most of the movie’s characters are World of Darkness-style scumbags.

The Godfather, The Godfather II and Goodfellas — Treachery! Greed! Death! Sex! Lather! Rinse! Repeat! If you don’t like these movies, there’s something wrong with you. Every element of these movies can be adapted to suit Vampire, most of them with very little shoehorning.

The Hunger — A bit dated, but excellent nonetheless. Two creepy vampires ply their trade in New York as Bauhaus leers at the camera. I think David Bowie really is a vampire.

John Carpenter’s Vampires — Again, the strongest part of the movie is the opening scene, and it gets kinda action-campy from there. That opening scene is quality, though, and it gives an unsettling feeling for the "nests" of vampires. The head vampire, Varek, is really sinister in an over-the-top "bad dude" way.

Some General Writing Guidelines

Spellcheck, Damn You!: Your word processor does this. You have no excuse to submit a proposal with spelling errors. Even if you¹re a brain-dead, flesh-eating, feces-flinging howler monkey, all you have to do is click a little button and 60 percent of your moronism will disappear.

Action!: Many writers have a tendency to slip into the future perfect tense and passive voice. The Storyteller games are as much about proactivity as reactivity, and writing should reflect this. Consider:

o The hapless serf was slaughtered by the frenzied vampire.

o The frenzied vampire slaughtered the hapless serf.

Note the inherent sense of action in the second sentence — it¹s actually happening (even in past tense) as we speak, by simply making the subject active instead of passive.

o The characters will discover the slumbering Methuselah.

o The characters discover the slumbering Methuselah.

Note that "will" in the first sentence implies that the characters may get around to it eventually, whereas it definitely happens in the second sentence. Keep this dynamic of dynamics in mind, please!

Verb Tense: Present. Things happen now! Use the present tense to indicate that the things you¹re talking about are going on as we speak. Only use past tense if you are discussing something that did indeed happen in the past. For example:

o The players¹ characters stumble upon the lair of Assamite ghouls.

o A group of rogue Assamites established a fanatical ghoul cult in 1973.

Words I Hate: Don’t use any of these words unless they¹re the best choice for the job: Utilize, Moist, Zesty, Tangy, Facilitate, Basically (and its ugly sister, Essentially) and Incredible. Also avoid "junk" words — the ones you use to make yourself seem smarter. I don¹t care how smart you are, I just want to read something without being patronized. Some of those above words are junk words, for example.

Bad Phrasing: Avoid it. Things don¹t "begin to" happen unless they¹re interrupted. ("It was then the Tremere began to take action against the Tzimisce" implies that they never finished. "The Tremere began to take action against the Tzimisce, but faced opposition from Ventrue Eastern Lords that ended their campaign" works just fine.) Be wary of subjective prepositions, too; within, upon and the like are treacherous and rarely appropriate.

There Is and There Are: Not only are these often used incorrectly, they’re passive as all hell. "There is" means, "In that locations existsŠ" which generally isn’t what you’re trying to say when you use this construction. Here; I’ll show you.

o "There is my car," is fine, if passive-voiced.

o "There is a school of thought that suggest vampires are the children of Lilith, not Caine," is a damn mess. Where is this school? "There is" suggests it has actually, physically been constructed somewhere. And it’s still passive, even if you’re talking about a literal school, which you’re not. See what I mean? Just say no to there is.