"One hundred years of vampire cinema: opera capes and neck-nuzzling, glowing beauties and monster-kid wish-fulfilment. Gone! The whole lot swallowed up by this eerie bacchanal of sex and death."
That's Alec Worley on Substack, talking about Robert Eggers' 2024 remake of Nosferatu. Personally I found the movie disappointing after Eggers' previous work (especially The Lighthouse and The Northman) and would have spent my time better re-watching Werner Herzog's version or F W Murnau's 1922 original -- both so much eerier. (Spoiler-free review here if you're interested.)
My own preference is for the unglamorous and grave-cold variety of vampire, not the kind that snarls and growls and prowls like a big cat. It's a taste that may have been formed originally by Gerald W Page's short story "Thirst", which swept away my childhood notions of the vampire, acquired from reading Dracula when I was 10 years old*, and gave my teen self an unplugged, proto-punk take on the myth. Mr Page was kind enough to find the time to correspond with aspiring writers like me, so he may have discussed his reasons for wanting to break the mold. When I have time I shall go through his letters (which of course I have kept these fifty-three years) to see what he had to say about the story.
Later in my teens I was inspired by Gryphon's song "The Unquiet Grave" -- not specifically vampiric, admittedly, but chilling all the same with lines like this:
"My lips they are as cold as clay, my breath smells earthy strong, And if you kiss my cold grey lips, your days they won't be long."
Robert Dale, with his deep knowledge of British folklore, encouraged this predilection with his very chilling depiction of Pyron the reaper, a vampire in the Brymstone campaign. Oliver Johnson a few decades later gave us another feral vampire in his Lightbringers game. This is from the game write-up:
"A pitiful mewling cry came from a thorn thicket to the south of the clearing. It sounded like a small child in distress or perhaps a snared bird. A narrow crawl way snaked deep into the thorns towards the sound. Nafaj squirmed into the tunnel. The thorns snagged cruelly at his clothing and skin. When he was several yards into the thicket, he saw a boyish white face staring back at him down the darkened tunnel of thorns. Though he had steeled himself for such an encounter, his will deserted him as the creature started whispering its blandishments. To his horror he found himself crawling forward. Soon he was next to the vampire. All its limbs had been ripped off; it was but a torso and a head. The vampire drank Nafaj’s blood and instructed him to return later that night.
"Nafaj emerged from the thicket. The setting sun causing him discomfort, he had thrown the hood of his cloak over his head, but none of the others thought to question why this was. He was carrying a dead bird and explained the noise had been its dying song. The others were eager to be gone from the accursed place, but the marquis’ horse was suddenly lame and this caused a delay. Darkness fell, a temporary camp was made and watches held throughout the night."
The natural habitat of these revenants isn't a Victorian drawing room, nor even a Gothic castle. They are the dead who won't stay quiet, clawing their way up out of the dirt of the graveyard and crawling along ditches and over country lanes because enough of a spark of consciousness remains that they are jealous of the living and want to steal their warmth and lifeblood.
Such walking-corpse vampires can still have uncanny powers, like Gerwin in the Jewelspider scenario "Death Is Only The Beginning" who is able to hide himself from mortal sight after dark, though I prefer them to be nothing more than bloodless cadavers with a raging thirst, like the thing that visits you in your sleep in Workshop of the Gods:
‘Wake up!’
‘My friend... I dreamt a beautiful vampire was about to drink my blood.’
‘Beautiful?’ cries your companion in a voice thick with horror. ‘It is a monster. See!’
You look where he’s pointing and in a split-second you’re on your feet, heart pounding with adrenaline. Because only the vampire’s appearance was a dream. The rest is all too real. You see the vampire now as she really is – not a pale and beautiful woman, but a rotted corpse with maggots writhing in her pock-marked cheeks and lustreless eyes that leak brown slime. Clammy strips of dead flesh hang from her bones. The room is filled with the stench of decay.
She lurches forward, swollen grey fingers reaching for you, her lipless teeth clacking eagerly.
Sleep tight!
*To be fair to Mr Stoker, the Count is not intended to be a typical vampire. His wives and Lucy Westenra present as chillingly inhuman, nearly mindless vessels of simple appetite.
This year is the fortieth anniversary of my first published book, Crypt of the Vampire. I've blogged about it before, and longtime readers will already know the story of how it came to be written -- and revised (in 2013) and later expanded (in 2016) by David Walters.
In the introduction to David Walters's 2016 version I wrote:
"As my preference when running role-playing games is to let the players drive the story, I dispensed with the long introduction usual in gamebooks at the time. There’s no spoon-feeding here, no overt mission. You aren’t told your history. You are the hero, as the back cover blurb used to say, so your background and motivation are up to you.
I’m not saying it works. You as the reader must decide that. I’m just saying it was deliberate. Crypt of the Vampire is my love letter to Hammer horror, and I wanted it to have the pace, vigour and dislocating dreamlike quality of the best of those movies."
Is there anything more to say? Yes, plenty. The full origin story of Crypt of the Vampire has yet to be told, but it's coming soon. With Samhain approaching, expect to hear the creak of a coffin lid, the howl of wolves, and the flapping of leathery wings. There's no escape -- so stock up on garlic and hawthorn stakes now, and watch this space.
While you're waiting -- have you tried this Golden Dragon mini-adventure, "The Island of Illusions", that Oliver Johnson and I wrote back in 1984? And listen to this comparative analysis of two very different Gothic novels by the virtual hosts on NotebookLM.
To get you in the mood for Halloween, here are some vampire movies I've enjoyed. Got your own favourite? That's what the comments are for.
My first published book was Crypt of the Vampire. That was before the Soviet Union fell. A couple of years ago I reworked it as an Alexa app (Amazon call them skills, but apps is what they are) but it never saw the light of day because the coder lost interest. Eventually -- by which I mean after I've finished Vulcanverse book 5, Jewelspider, Tetsubo, Abraxas and Λ -- I'll release that revised version as a book.
But you don't have to wait that long for some sinister vampiric thrills, because Red Ruin Publishing have unleashed another of their top-notch free Dragon Warriors solo adventures, Lair of the Vampire, set in Hudristania, where:
"...tiny villages squat miserably in the isolated mountain passes, like birds’ nests huddled into a crag for shelter. Frightened peasants quake under the rule of a hundred local despots. Terror soars aloft on membraneous wings by night and sifts the carrion in lonely churchyards—for this is the traditional home of vampires, ghouls and werewolves. Black-clad priests trek from valley to valley, but the peasants are always torn between faith and fear. Spend a few days in any of the mountain villages and you will see a funeral procession wending a path down through the narrow streets—old men whose lined faces show the scars of many losses, grim youths with jaws set in sullen defiance, veiled women sending up a shrieking lament, and wailing children who have yet to learn the injustice into which they have been born. The mourners are led by a priest with a silver crucifix on his breast. Watch and wait. After the procession has gone past, once the wailing and the clanging of the priest's bell have faded into the distance, you may see another figure pass by. He follows the mourners at a respectful distance, his eyes showing only a weary determination. On his back he has a heavy knapsack. After the coffin has been lowered into the ground, the priest will linger to pay this man a few silvers before hurrying back with the other villagers to bolt his door. The stranger opens his knapsack and prepares the items he will need. He is a draktoter, a profession that combines gravedigging with another unpleasant duty. He takes the mallet and stake from his sack and turns towards the open grave. It is his job to see that the ranks of the nosferatu will not be joined by this unfortunate soul."
(Incidentally, have I recommended Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand is Singing to you? Terrible title for a really down and dirty old-style vampire story that captures that same grim flavour.)
Over on Patreon today there are three adventure seeds for Halloween, as well as plenty of other material relating to Jewelspider and the lands of Legend generally. Also downloadable free from Red Ruin, and packed with the usual high standard of rules, scenarios, discussion and source material, comes Casket of Fays issue 11. Aunty Crookback alone will give you reason to close the curtains as dusk gathers, and you'll hesitate to answer the door to what sounds like trick-or-treaters...
This short self-contained adventure could serve as a monster-of-the-week interlude if you need to insert a lull in a bigger campaign. The setting is rural Ellesland, part of the medieval world of Dragon Warriors and Jewelspider.
The restless dead
Two men, strangers to the district, recently died in the village of Drakelow. They were itinerant labourers who had hired on to help with the reaping, making their beds in an old cowshed across the fields. It appears they must have argued one evening and each stabbed the other in the heart.
The coroner, Sir Achard, duly arrived and assayed the scene. He confiscated the purses of the two dead men. Local enquiries revealed them to be Gerwin and Lampert. They had spent time on several local manors, usually getting driven on to their next location because of drunkenness or Gerwin’s tendency to flirt with milkmaids. The bodies were buried in a potter’s field attached to the churchyard.
To the annoyance of Sir Percy de Grainville, lord of Drakelow, the coroner levied a fine on him for taking on labourers of unknown provenance. He was even more annoyed a few days later when a farm worker returning from the fields with a cart full of wheat saw Gerwin and Lampert in the orchard. He ran off, abandoning the cart, and when a group of villagers returned to the spot they found the whole contents of the cart spoiled, the grain black and rancid as if it had been soaked in sewage water for weeks.
And so it begins
Now, at this point you may be asking how the player-characters come into this. They could be working in the fields themselves to earn a few coins (the pay is ninepence a week) but it’s likely your players don’t care to trudge around doing menial work. Higher status characters could be guests of Sir Percy, or perhaps they arrive in Sir Achard’s retinue. Another option: they’re sent by the bishop when the first hints of something diabolical start to get bruited about.
Or the player-characters could be wanderers themselves, just passing through, but with the locals already jittery that’s a dangerous position to be in.
Two days after the burial a little boy returns home without his sister, telling a story of how they met a man on the road sitting on a wooden box. He invited the little girl to lie in it, saying that it was a bed he’d been given by the charity of the villagers. ‘Then another man came and they put on the lid and carried her off.’
The sexton notices the soil in the potter’s field has been roughly churned up. ‘I patted those graves down myself.’ Digging at the spot, which is Gerwin’s grave, he finds the body of the missing girl. There is no sign of Gerwin’s corpse or his coffin.
Sir Percy decides there is no need to summon the coroner to investigate the death of a ten-year-old girl, even though the body has been drained of blood.
Further sightings ensue: two figures loping through the fields at sunset; a horrible clamouring and banging in the street at night; plague symbols daubed on the door of the mill house.
The facts in the case
Further investigation reveals some more facts, if the player-characters are interested. On the day Gerwin and Lampert died, they had taken part in a custom where the lord lets loose a sheep in a field and whoever catches it first gets to keep it. They won, but the sheep was not found with their bodies. ‘It must have got loose and wandered off,’ reckons the coroner if asked.
Their purses contained a total of twenty farthings, though they had earned at least two shillings each in the time they’d been working on the manor. ‘Spent the rest in the tavern,’ is the coroner’s opinion.
Apart from the fatal thrusts there were no other knife-wounds on the bodies, but some of the jurors (twelve locals summoned for the purpose) admit to seeing bruises on the arms and necks, as though the dead men had been restrained.
Gerwin had been seen hanging around Lucy, the 16-year-old daughter of Richard the miller. Some villagers think she was sweet on him, others that his attentions were unwelcome. A day or two before Gerwin’s death, he and Richard argued in the lane and each threatened the other. Richard has three strapping sons (Joseph, Barnaby and Abel) who all share their father’s fiery temper and most villagers wouldn’t care to get on the wrong side of the family.
Things get serious
Richard Miller comes down with a fever. He gets weaker and his son Joseph is sent to fetch a physician from the monastery. He takes some money to pay the monks but does not return that night. The next morning he’s found torn limb from limb. His purse is open on the ground beside the body but only some of the money has been taken – a little over two shillings, the sum the characters might expect Gerwin and Lampert to have saved if they make any effort to calculate it.
The coroner is no happier to be called back than Sir Percy is to see him, especially as the circumstances of Joseph Miller’s death don’t admit of any easy explanation.
‘Brigands, perhaps? They tortured him for his money, it seems.’
‘Why not just take it? The purse was in his belt.’
‘For sport, then. They must have tied him to horses. How else could he have been ripped apart like that?’
‘But there were no rope marks. Just hand prints on his limbs.’
‘Absurd. What hands could dismember a strong lad as though he were an over-roasted fowl?’
More calamities ensue. The geese are found with their necks wrung. Among the carcasses lies a severed finger, black and mould-spattered. ‘One of the birds must have bitten it off,’ says the sexton, picking up the finger. ‘I’ll bury it after I’ve got the rector to pour some holy water on it.’ But that night the sexton is taken ill.
Others get sick. The miller’s remaining sons are pursued on their way back from the pub and barely get home and bar the door before there is a terrible pounding and roaring outside which goes on all night. Next day they relate the tale: ‘On the roof it was, and we had to use all the firewood to stop it coming down the chimney. Suddenly the noise stopped, just as the cock crowed. Then at sunrise when we went to look in on Daisy – ’
‘Hush, you fool,’ says Barnaby, kicking his shin.
It soon seems clear that ‘Daisy’ is a sheep the Millers have been keeping tethered at the back of the mill. Nobody heard her bleating because of the sound of the river. The carcass been stripped to the bones.
‘Eaten raw,’ remarks the coroner. ‘Perhaps wolves..?’ But he sounds decidedly uncertain now.
Stake out
Lampert is easy to deal with. He can be dug up in broad daylight. The cloth around his face is soaked in blood and his flesh, though marked with pocks of decay, is ruddy and swollen. The rector sprinkles the body with holy water and directs the villagers to cut off the head and put it face down between the legs.
Gerwin’s grave is already known to be empty, so before he can be dealt with in the same way his new resting place must be found. As a red herring, he’s been seen lingering near Dipcap Wood, a copse on a rolling green hill half a mile from the village. The villagers occasionally gather fallen branches from the outskirts of the copse but never venture in because it is a place of ill repute. The characters could waste a day or two searching the copse for Gerwin’s grave site, which in fact is in the wheat fields much nearer to the village.
Gerwin is able to go about invisible after dark, so the characters need to track him. They can follow his path through the wheat field where he has trampled the stalks flat going to and fro from his new grave, or they must think of some other ploy.
But there is a risk if they leave it too long that Lucy Miller comes down with the sickness, and she is not expected to last the night, so perhaps they can’t afford to wait for the safety of daylight and must go to confront the vampire in darkness.
It’s a tough fight. Gerwin cannot be cut except by weapons that have been forged with magic or else blessed, so all other edged weapons do half damage against him. A mace will be useful only if it shatters a bone (signified by scoring at the upper range of damage), otherwise he shrugs it off.
Holy water? That’s useful only once the monster is down, to stop it rising again. There's no Hollywood acid-in-the-face effect here. Forget too the tigerish snarls and snapping of modern vampires faced with crosses. A holy character might succeed in driving Gerwin back to his grave, just as the sound of cockcrow does, but his departure will merely be accompanied a sough of wind and then he’s gone. If confronted at his graveside, he stands his ground and fights to the bitter end.
Gerwin’s own blows not only land with the force of stout cudgels, they inflict a stinging numbness so that the injured character is at a disadvantage to hit the following round. Meanwhile he is invisible, so characters who are fighting him must be guided by the movement of the wheat stalks, his heavy tread, and the stream of gibbering obscenities he’s uttering. That means a penalty to hit unless the character has a cantrip to see things masked by invisibility or is able to make a sorcery roll, in which case they will know to hold up a stone with a hole through it in order to see him.
Postscript
The idea of the scenario is to highlight the difference between vampires of the world of Legend (such as Robert Dale's memorably grisly Pyron, here) and the traditional Victorian drawing-room variety. Even the word vampire is used interchangeably with revenant, prodigy, fiend or draugur. If you were to use the term undead it’s unlikely most people in Ellesland would know what you meant, and folk theories abound: the corpse is reanimated by an evil spirit; the man didn’t die but became possessed; the individuals were always hellions yet dormant, needing only death to transform them pupa-like into the demonic thing they are now. Remember that the idea of the resurrection of the flesh is accepted as fact by most people – this is just a hellish parody, perpetrated by the Devil, of the Saviour’s return to life that all God-fearing folk hope to share on the Day of Judgement.
As a guideline, here’s William of Newburgh’s 12th century account of a creature modern readers might be tempted to call one of the undead:
‘A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.
‘Hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart.’
A thought about how to handle that invisibility. Putting invisible creatures into fantasy games can feel a bit sci-fi, not to say tricksily green-screen, so how about suggesting to your players that there's something so horrific about the vampire that they just can't bring themselves to look straight at him. They know where he is, but their eyes just won't stay in that direction and their minds refuse to take it in. It's like somebody in a dream whom you're aware of but can't quite see. Don't use the i-word. Make it strange.
Oh, and who really killed Gerwin and Lampert? I don't really need to spell it out, do I?
Having dusted off the Questworld folders recently - and by the way I do mean folders and I do mean dust, these having languished in the attic for over thirty years - I thought I may as well take a look through and see what still catches my interest.
One of the things that baffled me and my co-writer, Oliver Johnson, was the degree to which Questworld retained Glorantha's bronze age technology, culture, races and even specific deities. After all, if you liked Glorantha then you'd play official RQ supplements, wouldn't you? I had nothing against Glorantha myself, but the setting wasn't what most appealed to me. What I liked about Runequest was the rules, which over the years I've used for games in ancient Sparta, Tekumel, Arthurian adventures, and my own campaign world of Medra.
Anyway, we set about tweaking Questworld to be as different from Glorantha as we could make it. We were lumbered with the Issaries River (though it did get renamed the Ophis a few years later, when we started repurposing the material for our creator-owned Invaders & Ancients project) but we insisted on including something more like traditional fantasy undead. Gloranthan mythology defined undead in terms of their inability to regenerate Power, so we invented a class of "living dead" as well. Vampires were already taken, so ours had to be "vampyrs". Oh well, we could always pass it off as a nod to Polidori.
VAMPYRS
ARMOUR: As worn
SPELLS: Any
SKILLS: A vampyr has plenty of time in which to develop its skills. Perception and Stealth are particularly favoured: assume an
average of 75%-80% for these.
A vampyr depends for its
existence on draining blood from the living. The symbolic nature of the act
provides potent magic; as the victim's life ebbs, the vampyr draws the vital
essence into itself. The blood must drain directly from the victim to the
vampyr. Blood stored in flasks would be useless, its magic destroyed.
If the vampyr goes without
blood its CON begins to decrease. This represents the sapping of the creature’s
energy. After seven full days without blood the vampyr loses 1 point of CON. Five
days later another CON point is lost, then further points at four day
intervals. For each CON point after the first, the vampyr also loses 1 point of
STR. Moreover, after the first couple of weeks without blood the vampyr begins
to show signs of ageing. When CON reaches 1 the vampyr's STR sinks to 3. It
remains in this state for one month, then becomes truly dead – though even then
the soul is not released unless the corpse's head is severed. The vampyr can stay
in its coffin in order to slow the rate of CON loss, as each night that it
rises is equivalent to two nights of remaining dormant.
The maximum amount of
blood that a vampyr can drain in a single night is one pint. Usually it
revisits a victim on successive nights, and the victim loses CON and STR as
shown on the Blood Loss Table. Each point of CON that the victim loses adds one
point to the vampyr's CON. When the vampyr’s CON reaches species maximum,
further points go towards healing any damage the vampyr has taken, at the rate
of each CON point lost to the victim giving the vampyr the equivalent of a healing 6 spell. This is the only way a
vampyr can heal itself.
Vampyrs are unaffected by
non-Runic weapons unless impaled by the weapon – and even then only half the
normal impalement damage is taken. Bladesharp
or other magic cast on a weapon will damage the vampyr, of course, as will
Runic metal weapons.
A vampyr does not collapse
when it has taken damage equal to its hit points - it must be hacked apart
until it cannot fight, and in this respect is treated as a zombie. If for any
reason the head of a fallen vampyr is not removed then the creature can be healed
(by a charmed servant, for instance)
by causing blood to gush from a living victim onto the vampyr's body.
Vampyrs have the power to charm. This requires the vampyr to talk
to the intended victim for at least thirty seconds, and they must be within ten
metres of one another. Charm cannot
be used while the vampyr and victim are in combat, it must be normal
conversation. A charmed victim allows
the vampyr to do whatever it chooses with him/her.
It is widely believed that
vampyrs can accomplish transformation into bat, wolf and mist form, but this is
not definitely known. A vampyr certainly cannot
make such a transformation in full view of its victims. When not observed, a
vampyr can find its way up vertical walls and through locked doors exactly as
though it does possess shapechanging abilities, but as it can never be seen to
do so the exact truth of the matter is irrelevant.
A vampyr can be destroyed
by driving a stake (in fact any sharp instrument) through its heart and then cutting
off its head. The stake interrupts the flow of magical energy that sustains the
vampyr, causing it to become in all respects like a normal corpse. If the stake
is later removed the vampyr comes back to "life", because the soul
has remained latent within the corpse. The action of severing the head frees
the soul to go to the spirit plane, irreversibly ending the vampyr's living
death.
Being caught in sunlight
immediately removes the vampyr's power to charm
and its invulnerability to bronze weapons. Also, the vampyr loses 2 points of
CON every round it remains in sunlight until CON reaches zero and it ceases to
function. Removing the head at this point will destroy the vampyr. If a vampyr
which is already dormant in its coffin is exposed to sunlight then it suffers
no CON loss but is held trapped, unable to rise, the until the sun sets.
Vampyrs cannot cross pure
running water except by bridge, boat, or on the back of someone else. Swamp and
marshland have no effect on them.
Vampyrs can be driven back
with the Life Rune. If someone tied to this Rune presents it strongly before
them, the vampyr is forced to retreat so as to keep at least four metres
between itself and the Rune. This only applies as long as the Life Rune cultist
concentrates fully on the power of the Rune. If backed into a corner so that it cannot circle
round the Life Rune, the vampyr will go berserk (as a fanaticism spell) and attempt to escape. The Death Rune has no
effect on vampyrs. Many of them worship it in some form, as a matter of fact.
Anyone who dies from a
vampyr's bite will become a vampyr or a demi-vampyr. A true vampyr is created when
the vampyr allows the victim to drink its own blood at the same moment that it
drains the victim's This costs the vampyr 1d4 points of characteristic POW
(regainable through POW increase rolls) and ensures that the victim will arise
three nights after his/her death as a new vampyr. The new vampyr loves its
creator and is therefore (usually) totally loyal. SIZ, INT and POW remain the
same as the vampyr previously possessed in life, DEX and CHA both increase by
1d6, CON increases to species maximum, and STR increases to 1½ times species
maximum.
If the vampyr does not
sacrifice POW its victim will arise as a mere demi-vampyr. Such a creature has
characteristics as follows:
So the demi-vampyr gets
the increased physical power of a normal vampyr, but its DEX and POW are
reduced and it is left with. animal-like intelligence. It drains blood just
like a vampyr, but cannot charm and
takes normal damage from bronze weapons, and so must resort to random attacks
and waylaying travellers on desolate country roads. Enough of its intellect
remains for it to utter phrases and pleas for help in order to lure victims,
but the demi-vampyr has no real understanding of anything it says. If meleed,
the demi-vampyr will battle ferociously (usually with its bare hands or a
simple club, and with a maximum fighting skill of DEXx5%) until it sees a
chance to escape. A demi-vampyr will obey simple instructions from the vampyr
that created it, but has no loyalty and will flee if endangered. Demi-vampyrs
have all the vulnerabilities of a true vampyr.
NIGHTSHADES
Nightshades are living
dead creatures that are sometimes encountered in woods. They are met only when
there is a fog, as they have the magical ability to create shadowy images from
fog. This ability is used to confuse and intimidate an enemy by making it seem
as though there are many more Nightshades lurking among the trees.
Nightshades are
translucent figures drifting forward through the mists. They often seem to be
screaming at their victims, but no sound can be heard. Nightshades are
protected at all times by a shimmer3 spell (not included in the Defence
above). Bronze weapons pass harmlessly through their insubstantial bodies.
Weapons of Runic metal, or
which are under the effect of a spell such as bladesharp, will affect a Nightshade, but only to the extent of
doing the basic weapon damage. For example: a fighter with a bronze greatsword
slices at a Nightshade. Seeing that he has done it no damage, the fighter now
applies a bladesharp 1 to his weapon.
This is enough to give the sword power to affect a Nightshade, and the
fighter's next strike does the weapon's normal damage (2d8 in this case), without
bonuses for the bladesharp spell or
the fighter's STR and SIZ.
When a Nightshade touches
its opponent there is a tremendous discharge of magical energy. The opponent
must match his SIZ+DEX vs twice the damage rolled for the creature's touch (see
Knockbacks, Runequest Appendix C). If
the touch did 14 points, for instance, and the opponent had SIZ+DEX equal to
24, this would give a 70% chance of a knockback.
If the body of someone
slain by a Nightshade is left in the woods where he died then he will become a
Nightshade himself once the body has rotted (in 3-18 months).
WIGHTS
*The
wight's touch is not a strike; it does no direct damage, but its effect reaches
through armour for a POW vs POW attack. If the wight wins, the character
suffers 1d3 damage (like a disruption
spell) in that body area and loses 1d4 points of STR. When the character's STR
reaches 0 he will fall to the ground paralyzed. Even before this, it is likely
that he will have become too weak to heft his weapon. Wights usually transform
their defeated victims into zombies, but if they are thwarted from doing so then
their victim's lost STR recovers at the rate of 1 point an hour.
ARMOUR: None usually; can wear any
SPELLS: Battle magic to INT limit; 1d12 points of Rune
magic
SKILLS: Detect Life 80%; Detect Magic 80% (as the spells,
but at no POW cost)
Wights are the spirits of
the priest-sorcerers of an ancient empire. They inhabit their original bodies
(transformed and sustained by their sorcery) and lurk in burial mounds. They
are sallowish and dessicated, and their sunken eyes gleam with a preternatural
light, but apart from this they look much like a normal man. Wights dress in
the rotting, dusty tabards of a bygone age and rarely trouble to wear armour
because they are unaffected by bronze weapons. A bronze weapon striking a wight
will, moreover, take 5d6 damage due to instantaneous corrosion.
Wights are capable of
various exotic Rune magics, including the ability to summon up dense, freezing
fog from the moors to lead travelers astray. Wights will travel abroad in such
fog, or at night, but abhor the direct light of the sun. Their Rune spells,
once used, recover at the rate of 1 point a day, at moonrise. Wights are living
dead (not undead) and therefore recover POW normally.
The wight picture at the top is by Ryan Barger and you can buy print copies of it here.
My first ever gamebook was Crypt of the Vampire, illustrated by Leo Hartas, and recently Leo was asked to do five new illustrations for a special colour edition of the book published by Megara Entertainment. It's not just window dressing. Megara also commissioned Way of the Tiger scribe David Walters to write a bunch of new sections for the book, expanding the adventure by about 30%.
David has done a fang-tastic job of matching the style and mood of the original book, while also making it more cohesive by building up the sense of the vampire as a threat throughout. So it's no longer just a dungeon bash. Now it really feels like you might find Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing around the next corner. (Possibly with Jack MacGowran and Alfie Bass not all that far away.)
You can get the new edition exclusively from Megara, while the original version is available from Fabled Lands Publishing on Amazon. Take your pick.
I think of Crypt of the Vampire as my first gamebook, but it’s moot. I’d already written the magazine version of Castle of Lost Souls. That was serialized in White Dwarf in the summer of 1984, several months before the Golden Dragon series launched, and later got reworked as the sixth GD title. But Crypt was the first time I’d taken on a whole book.
Those were busy times. I had to turn down designing the PC game “Eureka by Ian Livingstone” because of all my magazine and book commitments. Maybe that was a mistake, as my friend Steve Foster, who wrote it in my place, told me he bought his first house on the proceeds. (The picture below, that's us back then in our slimmer days. I'm the one reading Captain America.) But at least with Golden Dragon I got my name on the title page. The road that’s grassy and wants for wear, you see.
Crypt and the later books nearly didn’t happen. In spring of 1984, while I was writing the first instalments of Castle of Lost Souls, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson offered me a contract to do a series of gamebooks for Games Workshop. I’d done bags of work for GW before – an entire role-playing game in 1980 called Adventure (never published; GW acquired the RuneQuest rights) and then in 1983 an entire Questworld campaign pack with Oliver Johnson (never published; GW lost the RQ rights). In the case of the gamebooks, though, they seemed to be serious. They were willing to pay an advance, and that was a first.
Except… it was £350 per book, which was a pittance even in the ‘80s. And it would have been an exclusive contract, meaning I couldn’t work with any other publisher. “Why would Ian and Steve want to compete with Fighting Fantasy?” I wondered. For whatever reason, I dragged my heels about signing and was mighty glad I did, as a matter of weeks later I went to see Angela Sheehan at Dragon Books, had a nice long chat, and walked out with a two-book deal.
Originally Temple of Flamewas down as the first book in the series, and the contract describes the other as “Dungeon of the Undead”. I think it was probably my dad who said, “Put ‘vampire’ in the title, it’ll grab people more than ‘undead’.” The publishers wanted to call it Crypt of Dracula, but I wasn’t having that. These books would be read by kids, and I didn’t want their first experience of Bram Stoker’s creation to be in a gamebook. Dracula was already in public domain, Stoker having died seventy-two years earlier, but I believe writers owe a creative courtesy to each other that lasts a lot longer than the term of copyright – though, regrettably, not everyone shares that view.
For the new edition, I’ve revised the text slightly to excise the trad fantasy elements (a hobgoblin, an elf) that seemed most intrusive. Now the atmosphere is very slightly more Gothic, the setting less definitely medieval. “Ah!” the DW players will say, “but isn’t Wistren Wood in Ellesland?” And so it is, but my Legend games have moved on – past the Last Trump at the end of The Walls of Spyte, even – to a time of matchlocks and sabres*.
But that’s getting close to a foolish consistency. Whether or not Crypt of the Vampire is set in Legend, at heart it belongs to the lurid fairytale world of Hammer horror, where Cushing’s alert, flashing gaze locked with the fiery brooding in the eyes of Lee, and dark ivy-choked halls waited in the depths of darker woods. I like what Johnny S Geddes said about Crypt on Demian Katz’s gamebook page:
“Every now and then around midnight, and especially when there's thunder outside, I go back and take another tread through the enchanted forest leading to a dark mansion.”
That’s how I like to think of it being enjoyed. And, with Halloween almost upon us, here’s the chance to curl up with something creepy. The new edition also has Leo Hartas’s illustrations, incidentally – it was Leo’s first book as well as mine. Start as you mean to go on, that's our motto.
*Update 2024: In fact that gunpowder-powered version of Legend never came about, as I realized that the kind of campaign I was planning to run wasn't a good fit with the tastes of some of my players. So the Legend you'll see in my Jewelspider RPG is the original Dark Ages/early medieval setting familiar from Dragon Warriors.
About a year ago we ran a short series of posts about the town of Brymstone, a setting for roleplaying games in the land of Legend. I played in this campaign back at Oxford originally, before Dragon Warriors was even thought of. The town was called Sneyp then, though not apparently from the Old English root meaning a marsh, for it was surrounded by farmland and downs. Robert Dale, its creator, later renamed and relocated Brymstone to the DW country of Ellesland where, funnily enough, it seemed like it had belonged all along.
The main thrust of the Brymstone campaign was the tension between the traditional power of local lord, Erek Longsword, and the town guilds that were gaining in strength. This conflict was embodied in the Brollachan, a primordial shapechanger who had settled in the district and seemed to be fomenting strife for his own reasons. I'm keeping the rest of the campaign under wraps because possibly the team at Serpent King Games may want to do something with it someday - and in any case, that decision is Robert's, not mine. But here is a short episode that gives a little of the folkloric flavor:
A VAMPIRE AT CRADOC'S FORD
This incident has nothing to do with the Brollachan storyline, but will provide some light relief for the player-characters, as well as a good fight. The creature in this adventure is not quite the standard sly bloodsucker. Folklore abounds with a number of interpretations of the vampire, after all. The shrewd and scheming tactician personified by Count Dracula is one; this is another.
The characters hear that the villagers of Cradoc's Ford are looking for adventurers to help guard an isolated farm against attacks by a vampire. The young daughter of one of the farmers, Anskar, has suffered recurrent attacks. Local efforts to track the creature down having proved ineffective, outside help is sought. The characters will be expected to arrange themselves into a hunting party by day and provide protection by night. For this they will be paid 25 silvers a day each (payments will be made one day in arrears), and there is a reward of 300 silvers for whoever removes the vampire's head. The villagers will lend a hand if the characters make any attempt to track the vampire, but they will not fight except in extreme circumstances. The vampire's lair is an old forgotten barrow on a low hillock north of Cradoc's Ford (see map). There are no really clear tracks, so unless a search party stumbles across it by accident there is only a 10% chance that even the most experienced trackers (say Assassins of 5th rank or higher) will succeed.
The characters will probably soon see that the best way to catch the vampire is to let it come to them. At Anskar's farmhouse they will meet his ailing daughter Kara, frail and pale but still winsome. Her swain, a youth named Skuli, is also present. He is a very likeable sort, though not particularly charismatic or forceful. However, he is utterly devoted to Kara and will doggedly insist on joining the characters' vigil. They need only watch for one night before the vampire makes its appearance.
Pyron the Reaper (vampire)
Reflexes 18; ATT 22; DEF 2; Sickle (d6+2,6); Unarmed Combat (d6,4); AF1; 30HP; MAG DEF 7; EV 7; move 10m(20m); STEALTH 13; PERCEPTION 10 (darksight); nonmagical weapons (unless of solid silver) score half damage
Pyron can fight until literally cut apart, but effectively only has animal-level intelligence. This does not mean that he is stupid, merely that he cannot reason logically. It would never occur to him to lie low for a week or two to throw hunters of his scent, for example. When approaching his prey he may utter phrases of reassurance ("But wait - Pyron means you no harm..." etc, etc) without consciously remembering their meaning. In trying to imagine himself into Pyron's role, the GM should perhaps consider something like a very long and horrible nightmare. Pyron's conscious mind fell into the sleep of death years ago, and the fragment that remains is primitive, tormented and irrational.
He is not affected by garlic or crucifixes. Because he is just a walking corpse as opposed to an undead spirit, he does cast a reflection. He cannot change into a bat, mist or perform any other Hollywood trickery such as mesmerism. Immersion in fresh running water renders him powerless, and at the sound of cockcrow he must depart to his lair or be destroyed by the first rays of dawn.
In a fight at the farmhouse, Pyron will continue to attack until he is obviously losing the fight. If he manages to retreat (perhaps taking advantage of a chance diversion such as burning logs spilling from the hearth and starting a fire during the struggle - the GM can improvise) the villagers will insist that a hunt is mounted to destroy the monster once and for all. They will not pay the characters any more until Pyron is slain, and will place themselves under the protection of Erek Longsword if threatened.
Pyron's hasty retreat from the farmhouse will have left good tracks, and his barrow should be found without difficulty. Forewarned by now that he is not the kind of vampire they are accustomed to, the characters should no longer be caught off balance by the fact that he is immune to the usual precautions. If they enter after sunrise they will find Pyron lurking in the very heart of the barrow. Bearded in his lair, he fights to the true death.
A distinctive mood may be brought to this adventure by giving some emphasis to the characters of Anskar, Kara and Skuli. Anskar does not entire endorse the youngsters' relationship, so Skuli is eager to prove his worth. So eager that he might just rush into battle against Pyron - and either get himself killed if the PCs do not act quickly, or just possibly end up as the one who slays the vampire and claims the reward. It could be interesting for once to give the player characters the impression that they are not at the centre of the stage, but peripheral characters in someone else's story. Whether that story is one of tragic love, grand heroics, gentle whimsy or broad farce... that is up to the GamesMaster.
There is a small amount of treasure in the tomb, though most of the grave goods are of purely archaelogical interest - just old pots and so on from the player-characters' viewpoint. There is a gold drinking cup worth 900 silvers, silver belt fittings (on the belt around the vampyr's waist) and a necklace of jet (not worn by Pyron; perhaps a last token from a loved one). The silver would fetch perhaps 60 silvers and the jet (prized by sailors as a charm against shipwreck) another 100 or 150. All told, some 1100 silvers. The villagers will claim a quarter share as is their due under local law. Again, they will invoke the protection of Lord Erek if threatened.
As I read through this, I'm aware that Pyron as an archetype has appeared a few times in our games, most recently in Tim Harford's Immortal Spartans campaign, where he dwelt in an ancient tomb by the eastern walls of Rome and was known as "the Etruscan". If your taste is for these gray, loam-smelling, grave-cold vampires, I can recommend Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand is Singing and Lindsey Barraclough's Long Lankin as two novels that will send a chill down your spine. In a nice way.
A short story for Halloween today, and it's one with an interesting inception. Back in the 1980s, my friend and Dragon Warriors co-author, Oliver Johnson, was working at Random House. They were sketching out plans for a "Clive Barker book of monsters" - this was to be a ghost-written project with Mr Barker's name on the cover. Oliver's idea is that we'd take a look at all the old traditional horror tropes with the USP that they'd all be given an urban twist. As a fan of Fritz Leiber's stories of urban horror I was up for that, so much so that I jumped the gun and started work on the vampire and werewolf chapters right away. Unfortunately, Random House couldn't reach a deal with Clive Barker so I was left with this story and nowhere to use it.
A mere decade or so later, another friend Dermot Bolton was producing a short horror movie. The only snag was, he didn't have a script - or indeed a story. I recalled "Death Sucks", presciently narrated by a scuzzy English adventurer who turned out to sound a lot like John Constantine. I didn't want anybody thinking I'd ripped off Hellblazer, so the main character became a woman and, as the budget didn't stretch to Bangkok, the script for A Dying Trade moved the action to Yorkshire. The illustration above is from when Russ and I thought of turning the script into a comic book, but it was never completed.
You can watch the movie here. But I recommend reading the story first. There's also an essay on the undead over on the Mirabilis blog today. In the book, that would have been a companion piece to the story. If it strikes you as a bit taxonomically reductive, remember that it's a mock-academic essay by an unreliable narrator, not gospel.
Death Sucks
As usual Bangkok had a smell midway between a stale fart and a pervert's breath. There'd been a fan in the taxi - real luxury - but when I stepped out onto the pavement it was straight into a hot wet haze. Like one of those steaming towels they give you in Thai restaurants. Only this wasn't wiping the filth out of my pores, it was rubbing it in.
A thousand glaring streetlights haloed in the shroud of fumes overhead - fumes left behind by the rush hour traffic a couple of hours earlier. Two slim-hipped girls swept by in front of a crowd of German sailors. All lipstick, high heels and tight silk, they moved with the grace of teenage boys. There was a good reason for that, but I don't think the sailors had twigged yet. I stubbed out my cigarette, only half smoked, and spat on the pavement. You don't have time to worry about lung cancer in my line of work.
Off Sukhumvit there are a dozen streets with no name. Off those a hundred more. I followed my instincts for a block or more, past a bar and a street corner temple and down an alley with a pink neon sign at the end. It blinked on and off with a sound like a moth's wing batting on a screen, illuminating a carved wooden doorway where more girls in cheap silk waited on the slick cobblestones.
"Good time, all ways," breathed one of the girls as I got close. In Bangkok you can buy anything except a decent pint of bitter. She slid beside me with a rustle of silk, and the stench of the city got washed out by her cloud of musky perfume. "You name it," she said.
A perfect setup for the old leech, you have to admit. Sex and death have always been two peas in a pod, and how better to entice your prey than with the Brides of Drac ploy? Where better to disguise a genuine threat than in a city where danger is just a game played out between pussy, gin and dollars? I cracked a smile and nodded to the door. "In there," I said.
She glanced back, hesitation showing for just a moment under her frozen-on smile, then looked me up and down. I hadn't dressed like a businessman or even a tourist, just a typical cosmopolitan barfly. Cherry ripe for leech, I figured.
"Sure," she said. Must've figured right. She slid a stone-cold hand under my arm and moved me that way. The door seemed to open of its own accord, and we were in a small foyer where everything seemed to have a gauze of shadow over it. It reeked of perfume and incense - beauty concealing decay, like the painted smile of the bought body beside me. She took me down the passage and around a corner, then fiddled with a door under a forty watt bulb. In its light I could just make out where the corridor turned back to the foyer, forming three sides of a square.
The door gave a click and opened into a musty cubicle - one of a dozen lining the corridor. I returned her smile coolly enough, but my breathing was getting shallow by now. I can always feel it when leech is near. I lit a cigarette to cover it and went in, blinking in the hot white stare of a halogen lamp. Now, why in here if not out there - ?
The door shut behind me with the girl still outside, but I didn't waste time on a backward glance while she locked it. The fact that she hadn't come in with me meant I'd been pegged for an extreme prejudice number. I could get it any number of ways, all right; she'd been telling it straight when she said that. I flicked away the cigarette and put a handkerchief over my mouth. I keep a patch of odour eater folded inside it, and that's worthwhile insurance I can tell you. Your Siamese leech is not above using his tarts to spread a bit of pox, but when he really wants to fuck you over he'll use a garrote or a whiff of the old Mama Cass.
I could see straight away what the spotlight was for. The back wall of the room was one big mirror. Must have been the same in the other dozen rooms - from this side, all erotic furnishings. But from the other...
I broke it with a chair and followed the chair through into a tiny courtyard all overgrown with weeds. Seven years bad luck was worth it for the gulp of almost-fresh air and the sight of leech standing there waiting for me. The building completely enclosed the courtyard - was probably built up around it bit by bit over the years - and three stories up I could see the night sky where the city lights shone fever-yellow on low cloud. The courtyard was no bigger than one of the cubicles in the whorehouse, and there was a kind of round tombstone in the middle that could've been a hundred years old. At least.
The leech was dressed in white brocade pajamas like Yul Brynner's in The King and I. You could have mistaken him for any thin old Thai geezer except for the way he seemed to flicker like a flame in the darkness. That, and the smile like a fistful of tiger's teeth that he gave me as I moved forward. He said something in French, but I was too high on adrenaline to take it in. His smile broadened as he saw the silver-plated stiletto I pulled from my boot.
"I'm glad one of us is enjoying this, old mate," I said to him. "Personally, I feel as sick as a poodle." I lunged at him with the knife but somehow it missed him, passing between his arm and his side. Of course. You never can land a hit on leech until you've got him reeling.
He made a sound somewhere between a snarl and a laugh and caught my wrist, turning it with a flick of his scrawny old fingers. I had to do a forward flip or he'd have broken it. That put me flat on my back on one side of the courtyard, and my knife somewhere in the weeds on the other. I glanced up at one of the one-way mirrors to see some poor fat sod getting his last bonk with one of the Brides. He didn't seem to be enjoying it much, but then he'd enjoy it less when she sank the fangs in.
"You're a bleeding voyeur, you know that?" I panted at leech as he glided over to finish me. "Well cop a look at this."
I pulled my shirt open, showing him the Sanskrit characters I'd had painted there that afternoon. He stopped as if a wrecking ball had hit him between the eyes, goggling while I staggered to my feet. The priest who'd painted the characters swore he was using indelible ink, but some of them had smudged a bit even so. Maybe that was how come leech was able to twitch his fingers and even whisper a few curses in French while I retrieved my knife and did the necessary.
I'll cut a long story short. The Brides bought it when leech did. I hadn't exactly counted on that, but it did make the job a whole lot easier. Two of three of them must have been with him since the beginning - 1860s or thereabouts - so when I pulled the plug on them it gave the punters they were humping a sight to carry to their graves. You've got to laugh.
You're wondering about the Sanskrit trick? It just goes to show what I always say, that you've got to treat each case on its own merits. This time round it was a fair bet leech would've been a Buddhist when he was alive, so I found someone to paint the Pragna-Paramita sutra on my chest. That's the one about how nothing is real. Airport bestseller stuff if you ask me, but it certainly gives your Oriental vamp pause for thought. Tracking down the priest to do it wasn't easy, mind you, but in the end it's like I said.
Happy Fourth of July, and here's a quick plug for the iPhone version of my novel Florien, published last week by Megara Entertainment, who are the folks behind the iPad version of The War-Torn Kingdom (aka Fabled Lands Book One) that should be out at the end of the year. (I've seen a video of the beta being tested and it is stupendous - not just a gamebook conversion, this is a real 2D CRPG.)
Anyway, enough of that. We were talking about Florien. This is a book I originally wrote for the Horrorscopes series, which put me in the distinguished company of writers like Terrance Dicks and Lisa Tuttle. But between approving the treatment and delivery of the manuscript, the publisher had a change of heart. Originally they intended the Horrorscopes series to cover a range of genres from spooky/supernatural to psychological thriller to slasher fic. So I wrote Florien as hommage to Hitchcock (specifically the Vertigo to Marnie period). Then the publisher got worried that Turn-of-the-Screw type tension wasn't what they wanted after all. "Can't you put in a stalker, serial killer or rapist?" they asked. Well no, not without making it a completely different book.
So my wife Roz dashed off the in-yer-face terror book the publishers were after. She came up with the plot in forty-five minutes (literally - we had just that time before a Desmond Morris programme came on TV that we wanted to watch) and wrote the whole book in fifteen days. And that appeared as Mirror Image in the Horrorscopes series while I kept the rights to Florien.
I thought I'd soon find another publisher for Florien, but it was the one book of mine that I couldn't sell. The snag was, it has a sort-of vampire theme, and a dash of teen romance, but it defies (well, contemptuously ignores) all the conventions of teen vampire romance books. One publisher showed me a series they had in that genre and wondered if I could adapt Florien to fit. Their book started, "Gary turned his head towards the hillock where they were putting her coffin into the ground. As a vampire, he couldn't walk on consecrated ground so he couldn't be there to see her off. But he would be there later, as the moon rose, to welcome her back."
Okay. So you see how the mention of vampires in the second sentence kind of puts it firmly into the way-out-there fantasy category? Well, Florien's not that kind of horror book. It's more of a Hitchcock thing, like I said. It's the kind of fantasy where there's not a sword or a spell in sight. Where vampires don't sparkle or hiss or do that growly thing like a cat in a bad mood. Where things, quite frankly, are not at all what they seem. Indeed, is it a vampire novel at all? Judge for yourself by grabbing a copy of Florienfrom Amazon.
