"Vampires: Did I Miss A MEMO Or Something?" Topic

I thought I knew everything there was to know about vampires. I thought sunlight, garlic, holy water, stake through the heart and decapitation were the sure ways to kill them. And I thought they were incapable of passing up a victim, when the opportunity presented itself.

However, it seems like either vampires have developed new powers in recent years and I missed the memo, or teen movie and tv writers and producers are making stuff up on purpose or out of ignorance.

What's going on? What are the new rules for battling vampires?

And are current gaming rules keeping up with that sort of stuff?

Dan

The things they show on TV and many recent movies are NOT Vampires, they are some sort of science fiction monster that kills you with pure angst and pouty lips.

Sparkly… Made of crystal and shatter as such.
Some a 'vegetarian' now. i.e. don't drink human blood, only animal…
Thanks Twilight… *roll eyes*

2 words…misinformation campaign.

Bah. Give credit where credit is due – if it weren't for the Twilight movies, we'd have missed out on some of the best Rifftrax ever.

@richarDisney that was priceless. If only the first had ended that way…

Battle Works

Twilight's Rifftrax has nothing on anything Vin Diesel has been in.

Duhhhhh,
Brian

You don't see any old vampires around because they're too dang embarrassed by the new vampires (Sparkly sparkly foo foo's).

And yeah…that IS how it should have ended…after the first 3.5 minutes. Vampire diaries are another good candidate for Blade visiting.

It's all hollywood nonsense for the most part. Most folklore vampires bear no resemblance to Bela Lugosi vampires. Heck, even the destroyed by sunlight thing didn't exist until the Nosferatu movie.

The Twilight Rifftrax was utterly amazingly hilarious. Pure gold.

I annoy my wife by pointing out that they fly through the woods and sparkle/twinkle. They are clearly not vampires but are instead fairies…

How dare they make up stuff about fictional creatures!

My wife loves the Twilight series so I am forced to watch. But Im lost on the "Riftraxx"….what gives?

28 days of night vamps are my favs. They are the real deal.

If you've read White Wolf's Vampire RPG before seeing True Blood, Vampire Dairies [1], or Twiglit, you haven't seen anything new.

[1]. yes.

I thought sunlight, garlic, holy water, stake through the heart and decapitation were the sure ways to kill them.

Then you're already influenced by the movies. Points 1, 2, 3 and 5 are false based on the book Dracula (I don't recall point 4 being mentioned at all). As far as I know, decapitation is the only of those mentioned in the legends prior to the Dracula movies

The Twilight Saga is almost a complete ripoff of the Vampire Diaries (books, not show) with the sparkly silliness added

One of my favorite t-shirts says,

"…and then Buffy stakes Edward.

The End"

But Im lost on the "Riftraxx"….what gives?

rifftrax.com

The old garlic hating, "they're just eeeviilllll" type got pretty boring by the time I was around seven years old, though I did enjoy Bram Stokers book. Then again, anybody that doesn't like garlic may well be evil.

I actually find the sparkly versions more interesting. But the love story really gets in the way of the interesting stuff, and is harder to believe, than anything else about the vampires.

The love story is harder to believe than a vegetarian vampire??

:)

Vampires should be scary as , should be sucking on young virgins instead of sucking on carrots and looking into the camera with sad doggy eyes.

Has the world gone crazy :(

*sigh*

Dan! I kept sending you the memos but you just made paper airplanes out of them! Be sure to read the memo about dinosaurs being a breed of cat.

In Stoker's book, Dracula does move around once or twice during the day. Gary Oldman wears those strange sunglasses…
Of course, he's beheaded with a Bowie knife in his coffin just as the sun is setting, so even Stoker was inconsistent.
And it's not holy water, but the Host. Interestingly, he is enraged by the sacriligeous and blasphemous use to which it is put.

The vampire in Salem's Lot is immune to the crucifix because the priest's faith in it is weak. The vampire contemptuously lets him live, which breaks him.
Van Helsing's faith would have been stronger.

I can just see Vald and the other Nosferatu sitting around the lodge, drinking Bloody Marys and whining about "Kids today. Would you believe the moping about they do? And the SPARKLING! Back in MY day, let me tell you. Impale 'em! That's the answer. Impale 'em!"

It all boils down to Class. Dracula was an aristocrat, and proud. This is what you get when you let the unwashed masses become vampires. They should be food, that's it.

The only sure way to kill a vampire is to completely incinerate every part of it. If any part survives, it can come back. Staking and beheading rarely do the trick. If you are bitten, you will become a vampire when you die (even if years later), and vampires are really only dangerous to their own families.

Above Post

"However, it seems like either vampires have developed new powers in recent years and I missed the memo, or teen movie and tv writers and producers are making stuff up on purpose or out of ignorance."

This.

"2 words…misinformation campaign."

This.

Damn vamps and their misinformation campaigns to make us think they both don't exist and are not scary save for the fact they may use teen angst and metro-sexuality to confuse and take hold of our children's emotions(thus keeping them confused teens while they're already confused teens)! Let there be trials! Trials I say! And witch hunts! Witches are out there too I suspect! Maybe! Possibly! Werewolves however… Make good eatin'. Lets toss 'em on the barbey!

Isn't there archaeological evidence that predates Stoker, of coffins lids that were fitted with wooden stakes or something, to pin down suspected vampires?

Dan

Kain- "so young one, show unto us your dread powers"
Edward- 'Sparkles!'
Kain- "…cast him in!"

YouTube link

There's an issue in one of the Marvel Ultimates comics that has Blade interrupting some emo sensitive scene and chasing down Edward and calling him a pale faced emo vampire wannabe. Just as he's about to run a spike through his chest he wakes up from a dream and curses that he always wakes up just before he kills the MF'r.

BTW, whenever I walk into the room while my wife and/or daughter are watching the Twilight movies I say "Blade would have had those whimpy vampires turned to ash before the opening credits were over!"

As lame as they are, the sparkle vampires actually can go out during the day, so cowardly daytime staking of real vampires is doable.

YouTube link

I think this is most informative.

Aapsych20,

That is just too funny!!!

Dan

Kyrian, Talon, Valerius, or Zarek would kill all these vampire wannabes without breaking a sweat…then have waffles for breakfast!

Kudos to anybody who actually knows who these guys are…

"28 days of night vamps are my favs. They are the real deal"

I prefer these also.

Sparkles belong with 8yr old girls in princess costumes playing with Barbies and Unicorns.

The hunger should dictate their behavior.

I like the classic Wendigo curse in regards to the vampire issue…blood (flesh in Wendi's case) becomes an insatiable addiction, completely overwhelming all other behavior, the entire being becomes focused on consuming more and more, becoming something horrific…a vehicle for the hunger.

Guys,

You've got to watch the sample clip here:

link

Dan

I suppose it's only a matter of time before there is an "Aliens vs. Vampires" movie…. ;)

Actually, stakes through the coffin and chest and into the underlying soil WERE thought to at least keep the vampire from rising from the grave.

Silver is known to thwart disease present in water so it's purifying properties would probably have been thought to hurt the vampire. Ditto with garlic as it was thought to keep away evil spirits (or more precisely disease as garlic mongers were much less prone to getting the plague in Medieval Europe)

As to Holy water, this isn't a Stoker invention either although its application to vampires may be his. Another thing to look up is Gregorian water which also has salt and ash in it and is used to purify alters and churches to this day. Both waters have been thought to destroy evil for many centuries.

They recently found a body in a mass grave in italy that had a brick pounded into the mouth, to prevent the 'vampire' from being able to bite another victim… The stake through the chest simply keeps the Vampire from rising, decapitation is the way to kill them.

As far as Vlad walking around in daylight goes, he was in London in the 1890s. It's not like a Londoner actually saw much sunlight then!

And the only time vampires should sparkle is when they're on FIRE!

The original Transylvanian vampires (according to Austrian police reports of the 18th C.) did not ever leave their coffin materially: only their 'spirit' (astral form?) came out through cracks in the tombstone to somehow suck the 'life force' of people whose dreams they haunted.

If you follow the 'Matheson model' TMP link (microbial disease / quasi symbiosis), cross, holy water… have purely psychosomatic effects reflecting the cultural background of the 'previous' human and would not work against Buddhist or Muslim vampires.

Aliens vs Vampires… we already had the 'space vampires' of 'Lifeforce'.

30 days of night was specially interesting for the 'wolf pack' social structure of the vampires.

Just as with pirates, the nastier aspects of vampires' lives have been sanitized so as to make them more photogenic.

Personally, I like my pirates to be drunken murderous thieves and my vampires to be sneaky geniuses driven by bloodlust. All politicians fall under one of these two categories

And sometimes under both…

The National Geographic Channel documentary "Vampire Forensics" mentions a very interesting document for putting down the undead . . .

"Dissertatio Historico-Philosophica de Masticatione Mortuorum"

I'm trying to find a link to the full documentary, but here's a sample:

YouTube link

Enjoy!

Dan

LOL!!!

Dan

Let's not get too high on ancient vampire folklore. I once read that there was a gypsy belief that even pumpkins and squash could become vampiric.

Seriously. This was from a collection of vampire lore from various places all over the world and throughout time.

Point being even the traditional beliefs can sometimes be pretty goofy.

Though I once described a Fillipino vampire legend to a buddy of mine who blanched a bit at hearing it and told me to, "Shut up. It's real. My grandma told me all about it".

I like the Bibi, a vampire that appears, along with it's demonic imp minions, as a wayward mother, her children and sometimes lambs. Let them stay and they strangle you in the night.

I recall silver being a good tool against vamps too. In an old issue of Marvel Tales or something there is a story that has a witchhunter (maybe soloman Kane) run into Dracula. He pin the lordo f vampires to the stairs by throwing only a few silver coins on his chest. Something about the weight of the purity of the metal.

In another Marvel comic, Kitty Pryde from the X-men tries using a cross against Dracula, who laughs it off, taunting her for forgetting her Jewish faith only to have Nightcrawler and his super faith intervene with a pair of crossed candle sticks.

It's all fun.

-Eli

The 'Space Vampires' offered an original variation in the way they suck 'life force'
YouTube link
YouTube link

Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla , the 'other' (and far better imho) seminal vampire novel -probably based on vague memories of Elizabeth Bathory rather than of Vlad Tepes- antedates Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Carmilla has nocturnal habits but is not uncomfortable in full sunlight, while Dracula goes out for a daytime walk in London streets only once or twice, presumably taking advantage of the famous fog. If vampirism is an infectious disease this may reflect a slight genetic difference of the pathogenic strain. Then, it may be no more than a psycho-somatic symptom, Carmilla being an 'uninhibited vampire', perfectly comfortable with her new nature and her changed ethics (what is interpreted as 'the loss of the soul' by religious people).

If 'ghoulification / zombification' implies a pathogen in the same way as 'vampirification' according to the 'Matheson model' TMP link what are the consequences for possible cross-immunization?

Whatever the particulars they should be bloodsucking villains… not soft-hearted sweaterboys.

My earliest memories of a vampire story was in an old Ripley's Believe It Or Not comic that purported to retell an actual legend… and that creature was much more of a ghost/phantom that sucked the life of his family… not some dapper niblit of royalty. Nothing romantic about it.

Dracula strikes me more as a liche/warlock… IIRC there was mention in the book that he'd studied at the Scholomance… a sort of evil-Hogwarts, with the Devil himself as headmaster.
Similar to many movie vampires that seem to be evil sorcerer first, bloodsucking fiend second… like the nasty princess Asa in Black Sunday… who is accused of 'witchcraft, vampirism and consorting with agents of Satan'.

No sparkle here

Princess Ana with Sigmund and Schlomo

John the OFM 24 Jun 2011 7:06 a.m. PST
It all boils down to Class. Dracula was an aristocrat, and proud. This is what you get when you let the unwashed masses become vampires. They should be food, that's it.

So what we are basically saying here is the new "breed" of vampires are really just "Trailer Park Vampires"?

True blood anyone? At least the sex is hot at times!

VR
James Mattes

Regarding Vampires and regardless of their 'nature', 'ethics' and 'biology' TMP link Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker (and Jean Rollin! link ) fully agree on at least one point: vampires are totally undistinguishable from humans. Thus the 'special' figurines with tusks and pointed ears proposed by manufacturers are not only unjustified, but actually inappropriate. Any elegant yet impressive, beautiful for females, handsome for men, 'normal' human mini would provide you with your 'vampire in human form'.
Meaning btw that one is not limited by the lack of 'vampire minis in period costume': 'generic' Fantasy games such as 'Chaos in Carpathia' can be played in any period you like / already have 'human' minis for (I can't see why such 'adventures' link could not be played with minis in tricornes).
Yet for those *really* wanting 'special' bloodsucker figurines for their 'Lace Wars' / 'Lacepunk' TMP link games, some of Foundry *Elves* could be of use (specially for the females?):

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