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TalenLee
@TalenLee

so far if you're reading along at home about Cobrin'Seil, you'll have seen me invoke the term 'necrostate.' This is a description for a type of stable, present political body, ranging from a whole full-sized country as we'd recognise it today down to a stable persistent city or the like, where political power is in some way concentrated in the control of someone or someones who are dead.


TalenLee
@TalenLee

Here's the thing. From the perspective of a long lived leader, the Eresh Protectorate are a fantastic deal for offering stability and long-term growth. They're one of the longest lasting organisations, they have had no major revolutionary actions and their generally hands-off position towards their city states makes them excellent for trade and any special interests. There's an entire Eresh city that feeds the protectorate pretty much nothing but sheep products, and if your special interest is things like ancient magical books or even just medicinal sciences, you probably can do worse than saddle your existing project to this body. Looks good.


TalenLee
@TalenLee

The story of how it got to be this way is one thing, ubt there's now a new question, which is, how does this nation-state of a vampiric ruling class and a shockingly stable non-vampire population exist?

Well, I have a city, I have an idea, and I want to keep it, and know what? Having vampires gives me space to make something that I love to give players, something to belong to. Factions! Factions are a great way to breathe life into spaces that are complicated because it means people don't have to try and swallow like, a country or a city, they can get their heads around bits of it, and the ways things are separate or together around the imagination space. Knowing that the Eresh Protectorate represents a collection of city states is one thing, but knowing the factions in it and how they relate to each city state gives different vibes, and makes the whole thing more chunkable.

So what kinda factions am I gunna put in the city? The vampire lords who run the place, and their particular vibes. We get to have a bunch of personalities in the city, and then communities built around meeting the needs and demands of those personalities.

Here then are some ideas for Weirdo Vampire Nobles and what they do to fill their time that create factions:


First thing I do is rustle up some ideas. Just some basic ideas of 'what's weird stuff that vampires can do to keep themselves entertained?'

IDEA 1: LET THEM EAT BRIOCHE!

Some Marie-antoinette style vampire liege who makes the politicking and negotiations between vampire nobles that are entirely abstracted valueless propositions in stories into like, a big larp. Like huge political movements, sweeps of people, enormous values, and then at the end of every few months, PUBLIC GUILLOTINING of the LOSERS!

The losers are vampires, so they're fine, but their deaths DO mean they have to reset their current characters, and restart at level 1.

IDEA 2: ROTTING WINGS OF A BLOODY ANGEL

A friend had a vampire character once who she described as a bit like a vampire lord but with angel wings that were rotting and falling apart. Cool, I can work with that.

IDEA 3: PIRATES ARE COOL, THOUGH?

I like the idea that since vampires can't cross running water, maybe there's a sort of part of the city where they're constnatly doing like 'pirate vibes' stuff with looting and plundering and assigning bounties and stuff, and since they want to make sure that like, works, they are setting up caches for non-vampires to go get, or building attackable boats and putting those out onto the water so they can chase each other. The ways this definitely gets some sailors killed is a bug they're currently trying to fix.

So that's three ideas, and one of them might look, as a district description as:

Do you like Catholic Imagery? Do you like golden artwork, stained glass, habits and collars and artistic depictions of suffering in the name of religious faith? Then you may well belong to the Estate of Mercy.

In the Estate of Mercy there are some of the city's most expensive churches, expensive artwork of gold and silver and glass. It is a place where faith is vital and many of the people attending here are artists and performers and priests who tend to the people who need and want these spaces. It's also a place where a vampire princess emerges at night, claiming random places of worship to be the site of her rolling, sprawling, constant partygoing bacchanals.

It's explicitly a sharing deal: Mercy's Estate pays and maintains for the whole district to be able to be built and maintained and even cleaned. But they have to be actual churches and cathedrals and actual devotional art. The result is that there is an ecosystem in the Estate of Mercy, where they attract artists who are driven by their faiths, and then the debauched who love to commit acts of blasphemy against those faiths, and then, the types of people who revel in the repair and maintenance of those things.

What this means is that the Citizens of Mercy often have a particularly strange relationship to their faiths - sometimes they start out as partygoers who become more invested in the art for its own sake and sometimes they start as artists who embrace the party. The point is that Mercy, as a ruler of her district, is incredibly strict about religious liberties and faiths and makes space for all types.

Mercy herself is marked with an almost classic vampiric aesthetic; pale skin, white hair, red eyes, outlined typically with dark makeup and dressed in blacks or whites. She has wings, a thing she blesses her coven and adherents with, which look burned and ashen, or rotted and failing.

--

There, just a basic idea at this point.


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in reply to @TalenLee's post:

I made a custom setting for Blades in the Dark meant to slot into the One Piece inspired 5e campaign out tabletop group has been running. It's lighter in tone than default BitD, and I've been interested in undead heavy settings for a while, so I wanted a less hostile version of Duskvol, where any ghost is basically a ticking time bomb to vengeful spirit.

What we ended up with is a whaling boom town, Flenzholm. Nantucket by way of Kowloon Walled City, but with an emphasis that the idea that this is only the most recent iteration of settlement here, borne of modern geopolitics, and that the ghosts and people seeking them out have been here since pre-history.

The city is built on essentially the (naturally occurring) entrance to the afterlife. Ghosts and other undead have a higher chance of forming after death there, and are also drawn in from the outside world. So we have a city where a much larger than average undead population is a facet of day-to-day life.

The high populations of sea monsters in the area is tangentially related to all this, but that is the major economic draw of Flenzholm, not the ghosts themselves. So there's quite a bit of diversity in approaches to them from the living. There are native populations who's civilizations grew up with the undead presence, ability to consult with ancestors, and so on. For newcomers it may be a novelty, an annoyance, or an opportunity to exploit. And the Chartered Fogbank Company, originally inspired by the British East India Company but inevitably colored by my own experience working for modern day corporations, is able to industrialized its treatment, mostly for the worse.

in reply to @TalenLee's post:

I love this take on vampires.

The Protectorate just keeps sending auditors with increasingly powerful anti-mesmerism charms because "these numbers can't be right, they must be tricking the inspectors". Meanwhile: the vampire lord is trying to figure out the optimal ratio of wheat to rye in the crop rotation.

Luckily it's already rl canon that vampires have autism (gotta count/clean up that rice, refuse to take implied invitations, etc), so a Big Boy getting into a Project like this makes total sense.

I love them.

one of my favourite as yet unnamed incidental NPCs in the setting, on the same level as a Volo or a Richthofen, is a character who first invented the triangulation method of mapping, and did it as a proof of concept, resulting in some of the first truly accurate maps of some countries. But then they became obssessed with showing the method's reliability, and wound up in the Szudetken, the place with fucked up fae geography folded up in on itself. In order to map this effectively bottomless archive, this cartographer became a vampire, just so they could have the time to properly complete this project, which has made them even more demanding to make the project to a fine degree of detail.

There's a new volume of Maps of the Szudetken every year, because this vampire is not fucking around and is, to no great surprise, the best cartographer in the world at this point, but also, they're trying to map a fucking fractal.

I do really really enjoy the concept of the Horror Peninsula being folded in on itself, because you just don't have to worry about who else is next to the dark forest, or how many misty valleys in a row you can realistically have

in reply to @TalenLee's post:

I think you’ve got yourself a metaphor for how social democracy looks at people as cash cows that (sustainably) support the lifestyle of a few oligarchs, except in the real world billionaires don’t get the brain worms in this particular way.