The term "Embrace" is used to refer to making a new vampire, right ?

[Captain Australia]

In VAMPYR, the term just means to feed, so technically when you're running around grabbing skal and sucking on their neck, the phrase "I embraced that skal" would apply.

Or, maybe it means a more intimate feeding, so doesn't apply to combat bites - when you find a mortal and feed of them, you are 'embracing' them.

I personally think this is wrong, and a glaring issue with the game.

1) The term "embrace" means to take a mortal victim and make them into a vampire.
So Johnathan Reid is embraced at the start of the game. Some vampires will embrace as a cruelty, but most will do it out of lust or loneliness, but to embrace them doesn't mean "take them into your embrace" (to feed), it refers to the intimate act of turning a person into a vampire and bringing them into the society of vampires.

2) A vampire can feed without killing.
It's odd that you have to murder the citizens to 'embrace' them, and you're not turning them into a new vampire, you're just drinking their blood.


I'm not a massive fan of vampire stories - but I have read "Dracula" and a few forgettable books by Anne Rice, and I'm like 85% confident that the mythology of 'embracing' someone is as I say above - the act of feeding/communion that turns them into a vampire.

I get it that it's a cool word, but I think this game is using it incorrectly, anyone who's a bigger vampire fan know for sure ?

Quick websearch supports my remarks:

"The Embrace: The act of a vampire draining and replacing a victim's blood, with a bit of their own, to pass the curse of vampirism to a mortal."

[AC Denton]

Well, this is Vampyr. It's not Dracula or anything else.
Therefor Embrace is whatever the devs want it to mean in their universe.

The games choices, levelling and consequences depend heavily on the death of those whom you embrace. It'd be pretty boring if it didn't kill them.

[Captain Australia]

Pretty narrow response, mate. Sure, if you played this exact game, exactly as it is now, but could feed on civilians without killing them, it MIGHT be boring (or not, depending on how the process of feeding were done in a skill & RPG sense). And certainly would be LESS boring if you could turn victims of choice into vampires.

Either way it's immaterial to what I'm saying.

I know it's a new fiction but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be genre-aware.

It's like if I were making a superman movie - sure I could tweak the formula around a bit, make him kill even if he's never previously killed in every prior piece of superman fiction, that's all fine. But if I took a piece of universe lore and changed it profoundly, that would be a problem. (Especially if, as I think the use of 'embrace' is, it's a mistake).

For example, if I said superman eats kryptonite and is nourished by it, or started using the phrase 'heat ray' as referring to a good looking guy named Ray.

These days no work of fiction stands alone on an island, everything is built on the back of something else. The writers of Vampyr didn't invent the idea of vampires.

You could say that 1/8th of all love stories are a retelling of Romeo and Juliet (if you were a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥). But love stories, like slasher movies, have a history and set of conventions that have been built upon.

So, again, I'm just asking for clarity if the term is used incorrectly, and the interwebs tells me it is.

None of the examples are great .. hmm .. OK, in adult movies there's a term called a "fluffer". If I made a movie about the adult film industry, and my main character were a 'fluffer', but in my movie 'fluffer' meant someone who only does foot fetish work ... that would be a problem.

If I did it by accident, then it reveals an oversight in my research and writing.

If I did it on purpose, then I disrespect the work that came before it, and subvert accepted terminology and potentially confuse my audience .. for kicks, I guess.

Anyway, not to worry, I think they made a mistake.

Saying "its their universe, so it means whatever they want" doesn't erase the mistake.

I mean, if in all previous fiction the term 'vampire' meant somebody who drinks blood, you could surely play with that, making them use razor blades instead of teeth or have other kinks on the established genre.

But to then take established genre words like 'feed' or 'hunt' or other words like that, and not use them in the way the genre has previous ... it's either a mistake or disrespectful.

It's an obscure fan-boy term, I guess, so if the devs got it wrong, no doubt most of the playing public couldn't give a ♥♥♥♥ - but I do think it's worth an honourable mention.

[Sheppard]

I see no problem with taking established genre tropes and doing something else with them or even tossing them entirely for something fresher. Is there a mistake if it's internally consistent in the presented universe?

In this game, they make it pretty clear that London vampires have to kill to feed and the act of killing for food is called Embracing. Turning is turning, making progeny, making a childe, etc. Consider why a vampire might call it embracing instead of feeding. What does that tell you about British vampire society? Perhaps vampires from other locales use different terminology, varying with where they consider themselves on the food chain, how they act, how they see themselves. That would make sense. What you consider a mistake could well be a deliberate worldbuilding choice. We don't know.

Keep in mind this is fiction. It does not need to use terminology from other vampire fiction. Who is getting disrespected? What parts of vampire lore are stories "allowed" to tweak? Where is the cutoff between "established, unchangeable vampire lore" and "this person's spin on vampires"?

My opinion: Vampires have a hunger for blood. Everything else is open, though yes you may want to have some typical vampire traits in there too if you're going for an instantly recognisable classic vampire.

[Captain Australia]

Well, it's just terminology, and I personally see a great many arguments in making it lore-consistent. For example, "embrace" is never really explained in the early game (or at all?), someone familiar with vampire fiction could easily assume the act is converting a bunch of vampire underlings and be quite confused. When I had (A) embrace come up over that first scumbag, I thought "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, why would I want to turn this bastard into a vampire" and in that selection process of looking at citizens to embrace, it was always based around who deserved eternal life - not who was I going to kill to feed on, which is a much simpler prospect.

I reckon anyone familiar with vampire fiction (who's read an Anne Rice book, I guess) would share the same level of confusion, even to the point of wondering "huh?" after your first 'embrace'

I think it's a mistake, like if the term "awakening" had a special meaning or "ascension" in a particular thread of fiction, and I didn't know and used it based on my assumption of it's meaning.

It's prudent to stick to convention with a lot of technically specific words, IMO, for example, Canonization means to promote a deceased person into sainthood, and it's jarring if I, not understanding or researching the term, start to apply it to living people in a creative work.. (or even use it meaning to fire someone from a canon, which probably would be more acceptable because it's a total departure).

And sure, I can say "it's my creative work, so I don't make mistakes and by the way ♥♥♥♥ you"

But it doesn't really change my essential point.

Also, the story in Vampyr couldn't be more vanilla vampire, they use all kinds of common themes and terminology appropriated directly from other fiction - elder vampires that can communicate telepathically, the fact that you certainly can 'sire' a mortal, turning them into a vampire using the established technique of drinking their blood and having them drink yours. Etc So it's not some neo-cyber-vampire who may actually just be a nutcase, and cuts with a razor and makes new vampires with his ♥♥♥♥.

Another parallel would be the Cthulu mythos. A lot of games and artists borrow heavily from that, and you'll see common themes and terminology throughout. The elder gods and other monstrosities get repurposed all the time, but I imagine most storytellers try to keep the themes and technical ♥♥♥♥ pretty faithful.

I'm just offering the theory that the writer didn't know what embrace meant in the context of vampire fiction and made a little accidental fluff of it. I wouldn't get too bent out of shape.

[CrackeR]

Sounds like someone just needs to vent pages of meaningless tripe! Seriously, the Devs scripted a game and called it Vampyre...period!
It is not titled Vampire, so we just might entertain the thought that it is a game of fiction and independent of yours or anyone's "take" on the genre from any other fiction about vampires!

Lastly, does it really matter WTF the Devs take on "embrace" is?

[Captain Australia]

Sounds like someone just needs to read pages of meaningless tripe and put their facile stamp on them out of some misguided sense that it's been sought after or somehow adds value ?

It doesn't *matter* (halfwit), it's just an observation.

For a certain cohort of players, it is relevant in a way, because you spend the first half of the game looking at the context of all of the conversations from a completely different vantage point - that by embracing your victim (as opposed to feeding) you will be making the person into a vampire.

For example, if you weigh up "embracing" the indian 'doctor', he makes a remark that he's comfortable with death and thinks immortality would be horrible. OK, adds context, an embrace would be a cruel thing (but feeding would be maybe less cruel than on someone who isn't ready to die).

In the context of 'embrace', a 'good' oriented character would consider embracing the fatigued doc tor, as he really is just eager to serve, despite having made mistakes. In the context of 'embrace' meaning 'to kill and feed', then you'd probably just do it on the piece of ♥♥♥♥ dock criminal who adds nothing to the sum of humanity (like certain aggravating ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who hypocritically accuse people of making irrelevant comments instead of just IGNORING stuff that doesn't interest them).

If I made a game where the protaganist can "murder" unlikeable people they meet over the internet using the mental power of "electrokinesis" (zapping them from their computer) ...

... well, it would be a great story, for one thing ..

.. and the term electrokinesis would be fine, because I made it up.
... but if in the story I didn't "murder" them, but rather used my power to wipe their (essentially already empty) mind...

.. that would be a problem, because 'murder' had a previously accepted meaning.

It's not the end of the world, but it is a bad choice.

"Yes, but they're *THE DEVS* so END OF STORY !"

♥♥♥♥ you, this particular sub-story is MY story, go away and sin no more, halfwit.

[Simpson3k]

Ok i didnt read everything.. but in echange for always killing the one you feed from you dont really have to feed at all. Its not like that you feel any real hunger or get any limited vision on controle when not feeding for to long .. like in the very beginning where you could not recognize you sister. That and the blood balance for combat is seperated from the blood mechanic that gives experience.

[Sheppard]

Originally posted by Captain Australia:

I'm just offering the theory that the writer didn't know what embrace meant in the context of vampire fiction and made a little accidental fluff of it. I wouldn't get too bent out of shape.

You've written 1.6k words on something you claim to not be bent out of shape about and "doesn't matter (halfwit)". Any particular reason for this?

From the looks of it, your argument boils down to this: I reached a point in the game where I had to choose to Embrace or let go. Though it's obvious embrace = kill, I don't like they used this word for it. There were some stories from other media that used Embrace differently, and I prefer the usage there instead of the usage here.

I don't understand what you mean about Rakesh. You already know what embracing means in this game before you meet him, so there is no confusion.

I think we have a fundamental difference of opinion. In your example you use "murder", and say that instead of murder you wipe their minds with electrokinesis. And then you say you can't use the word "murder" for this act based on the dictionary definition of murder. I disagree. It's simple: in your story, all you need to do is define murder to include brain wipe, showing this through conversation, context, whatever.

"He lowered the expended BWipe device. The body breathed, but John Smith was gone. He'd thought murder would be harder, but no. Just the push of a button. Easy."

or

"Breaking news! At 3pm today, an unknown assailant assaulted local celebrity John Smith with what is suspected to be a BWipe GR1000, a military-grade electrokinesis device recently banned by Parliament. John Smith was rushed to the hospital, but sadly the mind wipe was irreversible. Authorities are searching for the murder suspect, and ask that all citizens report any suspicious activity."

Your reader now knows that brain wipe = murder. There is no problem here except that was probably clunky, but you get the idea.

[jkelley]

Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire repeatedly uses the term "embrace" to mean "bite into your prey's throat and suck it dry," i.e. to feed. As far as I can tell, neither Stoker nor Rice use the term "embrace" to mean "to sire, to make a fresh new vamp." I checked the electronic texts of Dracula and Interview with the Vampire.

See, for example, this passage in Rice's novel: "I thought of that singular experience I'd had with her and no other, that I had killed her, taken her life from her, had drunk all of her life's blood in that fatal embrace I'd lavished on so many others, others who lay now moldering in the damp earth."

White Wolf definitely used "to embrace" to mean "to sire," but Stoker and Rice didn't. Why should White Wolf, coming pretty late to the game of vampire storytelling, serve as the standard for what "embrace" means?

[Diablerie]

Originally posted by jkelley:

White Wolf definitely used "to embrace" to mean "to sire," but Stoker and Rice didn't. Why should White Wolf, coming pretty late to the game of vampire storytelling, serve as the standard for what "embrace" means?

Pop culture is why. The reality is that a lot of people's exposure to vampires and vampiric lore no doubt came from the popularity of the white wolf table top from the 90s (up until today come to think of it) Think of it similarly to how the most pervasive image of a vampire is that of a creature that burns in sunlight when the reality is that even this facet is (relatively) recent circa the early 20th century and was not a feature of stoker's work, or earlier works before him.

Myths and fiction change over time and are molded as the need arises. If this were not the case and no one dared to have fresh takes on vampire lore, we'd still have stories of people dressed in victorian garb and lurking in european castles. There'd be no fresh contemporary takes such as The Lost Boys, or indeed Vampire the Masquerade.

[jkelley]

Originally posted by Diablerie:

Myths and fiction change over time and are molded as the need arises. If this were not the case and no one dared to have fresh takes on vampire lore, we'd still have stories of people dressed in victorian garb and lurking in european castles. There'd be no fresh contemporary takes such as The Lost Boys, or indeed Vampire the Masquerade.

Yes, absolutely, and just as one game (White Wolf) uses the word "embrace" to mean one thing, this game uses the word to mean something else. Myths and fiction change over time, just as you say. The meaning of "embrace" isn't set in stone, as the original poster believes it to be. White Wolf isn't the eternal authority on all things vampire.

The original post in this thread includes the inaccurate claim that "embrace" meant "to sire" in the works by Stoker and Rice. In another thread, the original poster similarly wrote: "Embrace: in the game they refer to it as biting someone and drinking their blood. In all other vampire literature: an embrace is to take a mortal human and turn them into a vampire." That statement also simply isn't true. "Embrace" doesn't mean anything of the sort in "all other vampire literature."

[Diablerie]

My point was just that people's perceptions are often molded by pop culture which is why one would believe (if inaccurately) that white wolf's take on the word embrace was somehow the final say on the matter when it isn't necessarily

[wicked lester]

Originally posted by jkelley:

Originally posted by Diablerie:

Myths and fiction change over time and are molded as the need arises. If this were not the case and no one dared to have fresh takes on vampire lore, we'd still have stories of people dressed in victorian garb and lurking in european castles. There'd be no fresh contemporary takes such as The Lost Boys, or indeed Vampire the Masquerade.

Yes, absolutely, and just as one game (White Wolf) uses the word "embrace" to mean one thing, this game uses the word to mean something else. Myths and fiction change over time, just as you say. The meaning of "embrace" isn't set in stone, as the original poster believes it to be. White Wolf isn't the eternal authority on all things vampire.

The original post in this thread includes the inaccurate claim that "embrace" meant "to sire" in the works by Stoker and Rice. In another thread, the original poster similarly wrote: "Embrace: in the game they refer to it as biting someone and drinking their blood. In all other vampire literature: an embrace is to take a mortal human and turn them into a vampire." That statement also simply isn't true. "Embrace" doesn't mean anything of the sort in "all other vampire literature."

Yeah, the OP is clearly in the wrong: Stoker never uses the term embrace with respect to Vampires, Rice does not use it to mean sire. In fact, if we're being honest, Rice, not WW, is the one that made vampires a romantic and sympathetic figure. In addition, I'm pretty sure that most people are far more likely to be familiar with Rice lore than WW lore. Aside from the short-lived Kindred series and the lawsuit over Underworld, the general populace has barely heard of The Masquerade, while Interview with the Vampire is one of the best known vampire movies of all time.

As far as I know, Embrace as siring is only used in WW. I'm perfectly willing to be proven wrong, however. I don't watch/read a lot of newer Vampire fiction. Twilight, True Blood, Be Human?