inspiration
I've been thinking about new roleplaying campaigns to begin in 2025. Last night I was glancing over one of my past GURPS books, GURPS Adaptations, and I hit on a pssage I had written for it:
Less than a year after their final encounter with Count Dracula, Jonathan and Mina Harker had twin children - a son, Quincy, and a daughter, Lucy. Now in their teens, both have developed unusual qualities that set them apart from other people - and have started wondering why. Are they adopted? Under a family curse? Bastards of some noble family? Their investigations open the door to family secrets perhaps better left hidden.
It struck me that this might be expanded, by having most of the player characters be the Harker children, now adolescents or young adults. The publication of Dracula in 1897 invites the supposition that Quincy Harker had been born earlier that year; if he's now adult, the year should be 1918 or later, in the aftermath of the Great War.
This would clearly be a Gothic campaign, with its troubled family heritage (I'm thinking that enough of the vampiric influence would stay with Mina to grant her children strange powers and maybe strange flaws). I'm thinking that the family past ought to be a secret even from the children, and thus that the various papers that Mina compiled would never have been published, and indeed probably are not officially recognized, though Lord Godalming might take them into account as a representative of the Foreign Office. I'm looking at Vampire: The Masquerade as a rules sytem, but I would want to discard its assumption of a vast underground culture of vampires; it seems to me that real Gothic fiction doesn't do elaborate worldbuilding on fantastic assumptions, but treats its fantastic elements as alien and inexplicable, like the entities that appear in many of Lovecraft's stories. (This was something that struck me when I watched Locke and Key a few months ago, though I'd read other fictional works where it was true, without consciously identifying it.)
I've never quite seen my way to running a vampire campaign, but this one might be viable. And like some other campaigns I've run, it would be metafictional . . .
Less than a year after their final encounter with Count Dracula, Jonathan and Mina Harker had twin children - a son, Quincy, and a daughter, Lucy. Now in their teens, both have developed unusual qualities that set them apart from other people - and have started wondering why. Are they adopted? Under a family curse? Bastards of some noble family? Their investigations open the door to family secrets perhaps better left hidden.
It struck me that this might be expanded, by having most of the player characters be the Harker children, now adolescents or young adults. The publication of Dracula in 1897 invites the supposition that Quincy Harker had been born earlier that year; if he's now adult, the year should be 1918 or later, in the aftermath of the Great War.
This would clearly be a Gothic campaign, with its troubled family heritage (I'm thinking that enough of the vampiric influence would stay with Mina to grant her children strange powers and maybe strange flaws). I'm thinking that the family past ought to be a secret even from the children, and thus that the various papers that Mina compiled would never have been published, and indeed probably are not officially recognized, though Lord Godalming might take them into account as a representative of the Foreign Office. I'm looking at Vampire: The Masquerade as a rules sytem, but I would want to discard its assumption of a vast underground culture of vampires; it seems to me that real Gothic fiction doesn't do elaborate worldbuilding on fantastic assumptions, but treats its fantastic elements as alien and inexplicable, like the entities that appear in many of Lovecraft's stories. (This was something that struck me when I watched Locke and Key a few months ago, though I'd read other fictional works where it was true, without consciously identifying it.)
I've never quite seen my way to running a vampire campaign, but this one might be viable. And like some other campaigns I've run, it would be metafictional . . .