Vampyr is so evocative of VtM

[Zolace]

I don't know if it's intentional, but Vampyr reminds me of Vampire: the Masquerade in so many little ways. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but as a fan of VtM I can't help but notice the similarities. If it's not intentional that's cool, but it's still entertaining.

Skals remind me of Nosferatu. Ekons are like an amalgamation of several different bloodlines. They can manipulate shadows like Lasombre, they can maipulate blood like Tremere, they can channel the inner beast like Gangrel. They've got low key Celerity, Auspex, and Domination. Vulkod are like roided out BrujaxGangrel.

The Ascalon Club is like a low key Camarilla.

What do other VtM fans notice here?

[GIGACHAD]

A lot.

Aggravated Damage by fire and sun. True Faith beams damaging stamina(dice rolls) and burning away blood. Humanity degrading by *willing* premeditated murder on innocents(accidental draining like your sister is not if you roll several Humanity checks and even spend Willpower and roleplay deep regret and psychological damage)

No humanity loss on killing religious zealot nuts or people *in self defence*. Same reason draining an absolute waste of humanity like Clay Cox still hurts your soul.

Then there is the word Embrace, its name corrupted however.

Then there is making a new vampire with giving blood *after* draining the person.

[Zolace]

Oh yeah! They literally use the term "aggravated damage" for things like damage from sunlight. I forgot about that for a hot minute. That was even one of the instances that made me think of VtM when it was first brought up in the game!

[GIGACHAD]

Originally posted by Zolace:

Oh yeah! They literally use the term "aggravated damage" for things like damage from sunlight. I forgot about that for a hot minute. That was even one of the instances that made me think of VtM when it was first brought up in the game!

Protip. True Faith in bloodlines should kill the player. Bullet deflection is a level 8 True Faith act. A kindred would be ASH approaching Grünfeld bach by 10 meters.

[Al]

We're talking about a myth known in different but similar forms the world over, and further influenced by modern media (movies, books, etc). Most any vampire story/game/whatever will have overlap.

Sure there's vampires, but.... shrug... of course sunlight harms them, of course crosses can weaken them if weilded by faithful... its part of the general Western mythos, you can't help but have some similarities. There's a few who have written them not to be harmed bu sunlight/fire, or crosses etc but those are in the minority, at least in the Western world.

Ok so there are Skals and Ekons (who make up the Ascalon club) and that's pretty much it, and I doubt they'd even have the Skals if they weren't a way to work the undead into part of the 'epidemic' issue.

Of course VtM was a tabletop game and meant to have different clans/bloodlines for players to fit into, taking place in their relatively familiar modern world.... That's going to create a different kind of game, than one created without all that baggage.

Overall it doesnt have the feel of VtM for me which is why I like it, perhaps because it draws more on alt-history and celtic myth, rather than trying to fit into a modern day american mega city setting with social/politicial interactions between clans/lines that I could care less about.

[GIGACHAD]

Originally posted by Alan:

We're talking about a myth known in different but similar forms the world over, and further influenced by modern media (movies, books, etc). Most any vampire story/game/whatever will have overlap.

Sure there's vampires, but.... shrug... of course sunlight harms them, of course crosses can weaken them if weilded by faithful... its part of the general Western mythos, you can't help but have some similarities. There's a few who have written them not to be harmed bu sunlight/fire, or crosses etc but those are in the minority, at least in the Western world.

Ok so there are Skals and Ekons (who make up the Ascalon club) and that's pretty much it, and I doubt they'd even have the Skals if they weren't a way to work the undead into part of the 'epidemic' issue.

Of course VtM was a tabletop game and meant to have different clans/bloodlines for players to fit into, taking place in their relatively familiar modern world.... That's going to create a different kind of game, than one created without all that baggage.

Overall it doesnt have the feel of VtM for me which is why I like it, perhaps because it draws more on alt-history and celtic myth, rather than trying to fit into a modern day american mega city setting with social/politicial interactions between clans/lines that I could care less about.

He didn't say anything about Mythos but game mechanics, such as"too specific" niche ideas such as True faith not just hurting but literally reducing Stamina for combat, and Aggravated Damage (Faith/supernatural claws and/or Fire/Chlorine gas) *permanently* damaging the vampire until rested, and stake "stunning" the target (in VtM, stakes dont kill Vampires but paralyze them)

Then the word "Embrace" though used in a "false friend" word. And especially the bite not being infectous but bite+giving vampire blood which must be *deliberate*, and murder of an innocent permanently degrading your mind and nature(Humanity). Not many vampire settings have that.

[Kain]

Honestly, I wouldn't be mad if they took the helm of developing an official story.

[Zolace]

Yeah, because of all the game mechanic similarities, this really feels like a VtM lite, or, dare I say, "discount" VtM game. The story would honestly fit in the world of VtM, and the story tellers and producers behind this could make a decent VtM game.

[Al]

Originally posted by D O N A C D U M-TR:

He didn't say anything about Mythos but game mechanics, such as"too specific" niche ideas such as True faith not just hurting but literally reducing Stamina for combat, and Aggravated Damage (Faith/supernatural claws and/or Fire/Chlorine gas) *permanently* damaging the vampire until rested, and stake "stunning" the target (in VtM, stakes dont kill Vampires but paralyze them)

Then the word "Embrace" though used in a "false friend" word. And especially the bite not being infectous but bite+giving vampire blood which must be *deliberate*, and murder of an innocent permanently degrading your mind and nature(Humanity). Not many vampire settings have that.

Doesn't matter that he didn't bring up Mythos in relation to Game Mechanics...., *I* am pointing out that Game Mechanics are built upon the mythos / issues of the game's subject(s). To pretend otherwise is ignoring the obvious.... this is why we find things like a 'sanity meter' in games that are based on Lovecraftian / Cthulhu mythos .... or a "body temperature meter" and things in game that can raise or lower that meter in survival games set in apocalyptic winters (Eg: Hinterland's "The Long Dark"). Game mechanics for Vampire games is simply common sense based on the cultural Vampire mythos being drawn from- they'd exist in same to very similar form even if V:tM never existed, simply because there are certain things that are common to the vampire mythos, especially from western cultures, and media influenced by it (eg: we see vampire/zombie/undead motifs from the west duplicated in Manga merged with some asian elements).

The "bite" alone not being enough to create a full vampire is likewise nothing new. Even in the original Dracula, drinking the vampire's(Dracula's) blood created different 'strengths' in the resulting vampires- those that drank were closer to him psychically and were more powerful. This was one of the vampire effects that became more defined and sexualised as the vampire genre became more romanticised.

Take Herzog's "Nosferatu the Vampyre" that premiered Jan 1979; a 1978 article from the NY Times shared that “ [Lucy] is gradually attracted towards Nosferatu. She feels a fascination.... [when being fed upon] her face takes on a new expression, a sexual one... We see Dracula sympathetically. He is a man without free will. He is a kind of incarnation of evil, but he is also a man who is suffering, suffering for love. " ( https://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/30/archives/dracula-is-a-bourgeois-nightmare-says-herzog-bourgeois-nightmare.html )

That was not something the world wasn't ready for in the vampire genre.... Take the more explicit example of Dracula (1979) a direct example of having the 'victim'/vampire-to-be drinking the blood of the vampire in an unabashedly sexualised scene of vampiric feeding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyamI2ALbIA (Jump to 3:30 for the vampire to be drinking from Dracula scene )

And of course its impossible to discuss the vampire genre without mention of (blegh) Anne Rice... in which vampirism is passed on by the drinking of another vampire's blood, For example, Magnus dug up a slumbering vampire, Benedict, bound him in heavy chains, and drank the blood from the helpless vampire, stealing the "Dark Gift" (vampirism) for himself. The drinking of a vampire's blood, sometimes with the to-be-vampire first being drained of almost but not all of their blood, is described in other scenes and books of hers as well, ( eg creating Claudia https://vampirechronicles.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dark_Gift?file=Claudia.png ); her series first began being published in 1976, a few years before VtM (and was written several years before that until she found a publisher; it was based on a short story she wrote back in +/-1968)

For those unfamiliar with Vampire: The Masquerade's original form as a tabletop RPG game, it was first published in 1991, quite a bit after these films, so V:tM cant be said to have established the idea of drinking from the vampire's blood to make someone a vampire.

We just as easily can look at other earlier vampire media for its influence on the game Vampyr (as well as VtM). Take Nosferatu (the early 1920's silent movie by F.W. Murnau featuring the vampire "Orlok"); the director was in part influenced by Stoker's Dracula, general myths (for example a Serbian fellow he met who told him of how his father was a vampire and how the town vanquished him), as well as of war and of plague (the film came out just shortly after WW! and the 1918 flu epidemic which this game Vampyr also plays on).... the original movie had a 'casting call' for 50 or so rats to show the spread of plague that came in advance of the vampire himself- also based in folklore but it was one of the few films that made a direct parallel between disease and vampires, rather than just 'vampires have control over and/or can shape-shift into rats, bats, mist etc'.

Was the 1991 V:tM highly influential for table-top RPG games? Definitely.

Did V:tM help expand interest in the vampire genre to people that may otherwise not have considered it if not for the tabletop RPG or the later video games? No doubt.

Did V:tM establish the drinking of vampire blood as the means of creating new vampires. No.

Is V:tM the source of "modern ideas" that take vampires beyond that of icky-monsters, for modern vampire related games/media, such as this game, Vampyr? Absolutely NO.

Do games like Vampyr 'owe' their design, development, existence, whatever, etc to V:tM? Absolutely NO.

Modern vampire games, books, manga, films, etc owe much to the vampire related media that came out before them, of which V:tM is just one small part- there is well over a century of media about vampires, plus the many many centuries of folklore, that any modern work can trace back to, completely sidestepping V:tM if they wish to. Even V:tM owes many of its ideas and concepts to the century+ of vampire media that came before it- so while V:tM was not built on a totally original premise, taking the wealth of material it collected from what came before it and packaging it as a tabletop RPG was what was an original, and successful idea (which due to its success has conflated it with the origins of ideas that they simply borrowed from a long history of vampire lore and media)

[Zolace]

Zog me! We've got a badass here! Okay Smart Boy Alan, I think your argument's good enough for a courtroom. If ever Obsidian Publishing/White Wolf tries to be a bunch of upptiy gits and sue the Vampyr publisher Focus Entertainment, like they did to Sony on account of those Underworld movies, then all Focus Entertainment has to do is print your post, hand it to the judge, and BAM! Case dismissed.

[Al]

I'd have written more but I had the better part of the week taken over by a court case ( guess what part I played? ) I also didnt want to bore the heck out of readers; otherwise i could have written 10x as much. I could write more if people request it, but I will assume that this is enough unless otherwise requested.

Basically, V:tM made its imprint, congrats to it.

In fact, I have nothing against V;tM itself.... I enjoyed the tabletop RPG when it first came out, but I did not care for the move to video games.

IMHO, ALL vampire stories (video games, books, movies, etc) have so much to draw from that we cannot say X-franchise is the basis of the story/mythos (in whatever format) unless something is so incredibly copied that the other party can take them to court over copyright issues)....

.... so, IMHO we should just let it be,

V:tM is a fine franchise and worthy of discussion not just of itself, but of its influence culturally on the V:tM boards. Meanwhile, Vampyr, the game this board is at, should be reserved for discussion of Vampyr. How it compares to V:tM.... ok, boarderline, but not how V:tM is better.... off topic.

Lets just accept vampirism is hundreds if not thousands year old cultural / religious idea and as such, has many different variations depending on which culture it draws from.... and thus accept that vampire legends in game XYZ (not V:tM) can mean many different things..... lets simply let X-variation and Y-variation and Z-variation be as they are, without arguing how 'if this was V:tM then.....ABC'. Let each game be their own vampire game, based on their own choice of mythos..... and for me, and I assume others, that is in itself, a point of interest that makes games such as Vampyr all the more interesting of a game.

So.... Truce?

V:tM made its mark on table top RPG games, and on a segment of video games, I totally agree.

Vampire games in general may or may not lean on V:tM for ideas, and/or to attract customers.

Some Vampire games have nothing at all to do with V:tM, and this doesnt make them in anyway 'less' then V:tM- only *different*. Discussion of similarities, etc make sense... but only because vampire mythos across cultures share so much.... but to say game X is superior to game Y because of its' vampire background/history.... well, is an empty argument because it is like saying culture X's vampire mythos is 'better' that culture B's vampire mythos... nope, they are just different.

So again....truce? Or shall I start work on a more lengthy post with footnotes? :-)

[Al]

PS. the idea that anyone bitten by a vampire become a vampire would result in the present world being nothing but the undead.

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~sejdinov/publications/pdf/Horizons.pdf