Question of the Week #116 · 2:44am Jul 26th, 2023
Hello everyone and welcome back to the question of the week.
Well, this question for the week is rpg related... But not in the usual way.
So, my local dnd group plays on Saturdays, though recently my brother has landed a job that has him working the weekends. Since he is one of the DMs this means that every other week he can't DM (and he actually plays a character for our friend's campaign during the other week), so we have been considering other options.
One option I offer was that I would DM (or GM rather) some other non-DnD games during his week. So, far we have agreed on Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition. Now, I've been thinking about it a bit and I have a couple ideas for a campaign, that I wanted to throw out there.
So, one idea is that it takes place either on an island or in a post WW3 USA. In the case of the later, vampires while still trying to ruke from the shadows, they are also invested in humanity's survival (cause of the amount of humans being significantly reduced).
In either case, the campaign would take place in a fictious city ruled by a vampire prince named Victor Ebonroot, who rules the city that serves as a proverbial playground for humans and vampires alike. For him it is a balance of ensuring that both parties being happy with humans being completely oblivious to the matter.
The players will be friends/acquaintances of Victor and all have been invited to the city by Victor to partake in a special hunting event (essentially vampires hunt down specific humans, monsters, mages, etc... That are in the city), however it is later revealed that he brought the players to the city because another vampire group who managed to conceal the identities is trying to kill him and out of everyone he knows, Victor trusts the players over his other allies.
So, here are the questions:
- If given a choice, would you prefer an island paradise or a city in a barren, war scarred USA?
- Is this a campaign idea that would interest you, if you were given the choice to play it?
Well, there you have it.
I hope you all found this interesting.
-This image can be found: here.
I like the bats!
I’d probably say destroyed city. Island is cool but then you have to worry about ponies getting there, and if it counts as running water because some vampires can’t cross that. Barren landscape brings lots of open space, places to hide, underground meeting spots, abandoned settlements.
To me, vampires fall on the really edgy spectrum if it is not mainly a horror trope. So... this wouldn't be my cup of tea. Bat ponies though, they are just bats; nothing vampire about most real life bat species.
A barren USA? I assume a lot of areas are full of radiation and rubble if the nukes landed on the ground instead of exploding above the city. Seen a short youtube clip that says that the reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not a radiated hell is because of how the nuke detonated.
Assuming there are still sufficient humans left and the areas that was nuked didn't contain the bulk of their natural resources, I feel like the humans might do something like the Chernobyl NPP and make a giant metal concrete sarcophagus around radiated sites. Or they build it around their cities as walls instead to staunch as much radiation as possible that got carried by the wind.
Assuming your vampires are miraculously immune to cell decay, living in those nuked sites are a really bad idea. Can you imagine a highly irridiated vampire walking around a human city? That is bad for the human's survival.
I think the vampires would live in the cities, or at least near the radiation barrier to keep as much of their presence low without the humans questioning why these "humans" are not contributing to society. Since this is WW3, I believe humans have track records of every human in their system.
Otherwise, if radiation is no problem, building on one of the nuked sites is the biggest win for the vampires. They get free claim to the land first. They will inevitably be exposing to the world when the humans try to reclaim their land, but, if the vampires are clever about it and have some built structures already, the human leaders will probably have some form of legal land dispute where both vampires and humans agree on the plot of land.
This is under the assumption that these vampires do not reveal their vampire nature and that the vampire in charge must have some form of authenticity of being an American. I'm pretty sure the humans hate other races now, and if they found out some non-Americans started building on their land, I'm sure you will know what will happen.
The vampires got the perfect stake in the world if they got a city up an running. Probably the largest vampire congregation hidden in plain sight. Though, they got to start rethinking of the word "prince" if the humans come into contact with them.
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5739393 So, I guess I must have not conveyed this very well. The vampires are still trying to maintain the masquerade (that being that they are blending in with humanity), so the humans have no knowledge of their existence.
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It's the tenuous position of trying to keep ponies alive to feed on them (because I'm sure there's plenty of other things trying to kill them, which would really throw a wrench into that whole surviving thing) without letting them know that they're basically being farmed. But I was also thinking vampires might like a little time away from regular ponies, like clandestine meetings where they can just be vampires without worrying about keeping the mask on, something like that.
No, that's what I'd figured.