After a bit of a hiatus I’m back to updating this blog. Trigger for this change is that I’ve reached there point of having fifteen or so WIPs that just need a little editing and a cover and I can finally get publishing!
This is a short post to explain a couple of quirks of the Vampires in Ice Age in Scarlet.
Basics
Starting point is the ‘standard’ vampire archetype. They’re effectively immortal, when they need sustenance they get it from blood (the older they get the less they need), the younger they are, the more they’re affected by ultraviolet light, and they have enhanced physical capabilities that allow them to jump further, hit harder and generally be a bit of a nightmare for non enhanced humans.
Sometimes they’re affected by holy items, sometimes they’re not. There’s no rhyme nor reason to this. There’s some additional element to certain items which give vampires issues, and no one has worked out what it is. Splash a vamp with the right sort of holy water or recite the correct Sutra and you’ll have one sad vampire. Use the wrong sort or catch them on a specific day and they’ll fang you.
It’s a bit of a theme of the setting, time travel, advanced elements of the arcane, it’s a little bit beyond human understanding so it isn’t intended to make sense. We don’t have the mental machinery to understand them.
Gone
I do find some elements of the various vampire mythos a little tiresome so they’re gone and I’ve added a couple of extra ones to fit with the universe.
First thing that’s gone is the sexual element of vampires. They’re dead and they have a completely different set of drivers to baseline humanity. The Vampires in Ice Age in Scarlet are utterly indifferent to sexuality though they might find a specific human interesting from an intellectual or aesthetic point of view. Some of them may even attempt to use sexual attraction to their advantage (most of them are anything but stupid). As they don’t understand it anymore they tend to make a terrible mess of the attempt coming across either as stalkers or lunatics.
In terms of reproduction there’s a ritual and you’d have to agree to it. The old Family Council that rule before the Catastrophe has a clear set of guidelines (they’re unbelievably bureaucratic) and a test to join to show you understand the changes you’re about to go through. It’s a little misleading but we’ll come to that in a bit.
Second thing that’s gone is the endless musing on immortality and how boring it can get. Becoming a Vampire is more than just a physical change giving you ‘superpowers’ and a thirst for blood. If it were just that they would last maybe a couple of centuries before going for a sun-bath out of boredom and they’d be very bad advocates for vampire existence. Becoming a Vampire involves a centuries long rearrangement of mental capacities during which the new Vampire basically goes out and gorges on violence and blood.
That’s one of the changes.
What’s different
At the end of the process of becoming a Vampire the new family member wakes up and discovers that everything is interesting. Mentally a Vampire has very little in common with a baseline human and I’ve tried to make that clear. It fits with a lot of my own mental architecture though obviously taken to an extreme to reflect… different creature entirely.
A vampire could look at a brick wall for the rest of eternity and find it endlessly intriguing. They simply cannot get bored in the same way as a human. They also don’t muse on living forever in anything other than ‘this is fine’ sort of way.
Positive side is that they can live forever and be entirely content.
Negative side is that they lose a lot of who they were, particularly the creative process. If you think how life would be if you weren’t bored by anything you can probably guess that the mirror of that is that where everything is interesting, nothing is vitally interesting. That makes vampires almost completely lacking in creativity.
There’s one notable exception. He’s part of the problem.
And the ones who were creative before they became vampires know exactly what they lost and will try and recover it. Former poets will create great slabs of perfectly structured verse which has no soul and which no one in their right mind would read. Former architects design entirely efficient buildings that perform their function perfectly but look like crap. I suspect that in my world the weakest brutalist architecture in the world was the product of a vampire architect…
Most of the pre-Catastrophe masters were of this sort due to a conscious choice of the leader of the Family at the time (he wanted the best of humanity) and this adds a certain pathos to their pathetic existence.
A vampire can also get caught up on a particular issue for a very long time. Filing, aligning book covers, the proper use of the semi-colon, the intricacies of double entry accounting. They don’t get a lot done but what they do they do very… proficiently.
Signing off
This has been quite a long post so I’ll quickly mention two other points before I sign off. Upon awaking Vampires find that they have an observer in their mind who is an echo of their sire or dame. It’s a third or fourth generation photocopy so to speak so it is quite limited but it defends the interest of the family and the head vampire and is unbelievably irritating, like an overly protective parent.
Until the sire or dame dies, it’s always there. updating them on the basics and suggesting often utterly inappropriate suggestions.
They don’t mention that in the sign up.
The last point is that the pre-Catastrophe Vampire organisation has been described by members as being like the world’s most intrusive and dysfunctional residents’ association. Because of the way their minds work the Masters (a unisex term) can get into some really specific minutiae of your new ‘life’ and how it should be lived.
And they argue continually.
So today’s rules can be changed to the exact opposite and you’re going to have to keep a careful ear out for your observer to make sure you’re up to date on what exact grade of paint is acceptable for the front door of your lair.
Enough for now. More to follow.
Ice Age in Scarlet 