DESIGN CONSTRAINTS

• Part-time solo+ project
• Realtime first/third person
• Off-the-shelf engine (for collaboration, physics, advanced rendering)
• Single character
• It’s a vampire
• No open world
• Open-ended, independent quest arcs, no big overarching storyline

Realistic goals: a good niche RPG that’s decent looking and customizable, with interesting systems+mechanics, not just another shooter/slasher, made by an actual programmer with solid math/graphics/database abilities. The main development challenges will be character interactions and stat-based realtime combat/vampirism mechanics.

Further goals and constraints:

• Core gameplay loop: hunting, exploration, leveling
• Extended gameplay loop: sorcery/alchemy research and world domination
• Dialogue: short
• Cinematics: few or none

GAMEPLAY ELEMENTS

An exhaustive list of possibilities, in approximate order of importance:

• Exploration
  • Obvious areas of interest
  • Targeted searching for hidden areas, entrances, items, characters (they’ll generally be where it makes sense for them to be)
  • Aimless wandering
  • Completionist map-traversal
• Character development
  • Creation/customization
  • Progression (leveling-up and fine-tuning)
  • Deferred creation (add character background details when they become relevant later in gameplay)
• Vampirism
  • Brutal methods: stalking, hunting, grappling, etc
  • Social methods: seduction, deception, drugging, etc
  • Consensually with willing “donors”
• NPC dialogue
  • Quick, transactional, main quests only
  • Sidequests for additional clues, rewards, and content
  • Information-seeking
  • Completionism
  • Instructions to followers (options may be very limited)
• General NPC interactions
  • Grinding: slaying hordes of gangsters/militiamen/etc for XP
  • Self-defense and evasion
  • Poking, prodding, messing with the AI
  • Crime: burglary, robbery, intimidation, abduction, murder, etc
  • Mind control by various advanced sorcery methods
• Sorcery / Alchemy
  • Spell crafting and preparation
  • Acquisition of apparatus and supplies
  • Researching methods from arcane manuscripts and other sources
  • Inventing new methods by progression and experimentation
  • Testing, usage, and refinement
• Searching for elusive items
  • Aesthetic
  • Functional
  • Informational (sorcery etc)
• Vehicles and shapeshifting
  • Bat form
  • Cars
  • Helicopters, drones, etc
  • Mist, wolf, and other shapeshifted forms
• Extended gameplay
  • Finding and securing safehouses
  • Building coteries/cults/harems
  • Hunting other vampires
  • Hunting vampire hunters
  • Hunting other organized rivals
  • Metagaming
  • Weak MC challenge builds
  • Manipulating the game-world society and economy to advance your Agenda
  • Freestyle role-playing
  • Studying the lore (which will NOT be spelled out in massive lore dumps)
  • Modding and expansion

CHARACTER SHEET

• Inventory
• Vitals: name, sex, age
• Currencies: level, xp, social credit, tokens, privileges, restrictions, surveillance data (which may be hidden)
• Class/classes? probably not.
• Appearance
• Stats, Skills, Spells, and unspent points

As a vampire you have profound strengths & weaknesses compared to mortals. Instead of the usual stats, yours are mostly supernatural and you’ll be improving them mainly to compete with other vampires and supernatural beings, and for convenience. As a general rule your abilities are deterministic (like chess moves) i.e. if you’re able to perform an action, it won’t fail. It’s the web of consequences you have to worry about.

Strengths:

• Eternal youth & beauty
• Limited Immortality
• Rapid healing of cuts
• Regeneration of lost/damaged body parts (within about a day)
• Run 50 mph and jump 10 feet (3m) high (with appropriate conditioning and fuel)
• Survive falling from any height
• Heightened senses
• Arcane lost knowledge
• Sorcery (cellular telepathy magic?)

Weaknesses:

• Sunlight (and intense firelight etc) inhibits healing and many magics
• Sensory overload?
• Memory: knowledge fades with lack of use
• Memory/ability loss caused by brain damage is not restored by regeneration
• Parasitic dependency on human blood
• Garlic? (i.e. high dietary intake gives the blood a revolting taste to vampires)
• Silver? (could be problematic for some reason… it’s the most reflective and conductive metal, has antimicrobial properties, and isn’t especially rare)
• NO crosses, holy water, or instant death from sunlight/silver/garlic/etc

Player Progression & Leveling

• Traditional Level+XP system with points awarded on level-up
• Stats range from 1-9 (weak humans) to 50+ (superhuman); these are generally physical attributes used in combat and other mundane interactions
• Skills and Spells range from 1 to 5-7 max; these are specific gameplay abilities of a generally vampiric nature
• Stats, Skills, and Spells share a single point pool to allow for wider variety
• Caps/Limitations:
  • 9 hotbar slots for quick-use spells and items; additional spells are slower to cast (in both UI and game time)
  • Only 5 slots may use hand signs for fastest spell activation
  • Skill/spell level caps
  • Sum of skill/spell levels and stats is limited to total points earned
  • Changing spells takes time and is best done in a laboratory environment

COMBAT

• Underpins many other gameplay systems by making them necessary when combat is too hard
• Should be difficult, fun, fluid, not too tedious or janky
• Primarily stats-based, with quick resolution
• Difficulty comes from time pressure and choices
• Tactical options: vampire sorcery and strength, grappling, weapons, stealth, evasion
• Modes: melee, shooting/throwing, vampire abilities
• Typical threats: fists, makeshift weapons, knives, guns & swords occasionally, guard dogs, drones
• Advanced threats: daytime, angry mobs, coy-wolf packs, rival vampires, vampire hunters, aliens, alien/future weapons

VAMPIRE HEALTH & FEEDING

Blood is essential for optimal health and regeneration. A healthy vampire requires a daily pint of it, approximately, without which the vampire’s body consumes itself and withers away like a full vegan on an accelerated timeline. Beauty fades, the classic monstrous appearance sets in, and the vampire enters a dangerous state of animal bloodlust, incapable of human reasoning, restraint, or sorcery. Should this downward spiral continue, the vampire becomes weak from muscle atrophy and is eventually reduced to a lifeless husk.

When a vampire’s body is damaged or ‘killed’, nonessential tissues are cannibalized to regenerate vital tissues first, such as the heart, liver, brain, and blood, followed by limbs, muscles, eyes, teeth, etc. This takes about a day. Additional blood is then required to restore it to full health. In this condition the vampire’s appearance is monstrous, forcing it to prey on unwilling victims, usually killing them.

Even vampires cannot survive massive trauma such as decapitation, total dismemberment, or cremation.

Blood sources:

• humans, typically by seduction or deceit (primary urban source)
• stored blood is an inferior substitute
• many small animals must be bled to death for adequate intake
• large animals are dangerous unless they’re very docile (e.g. cows)

Technique:

• gentle vampire bites are anaesthetic, leave a small mark, and don’t bleed after feeding
• locations: arm, wrist, inner thigh, breast, jugular
• sleeping or cooperative hosts are best
• forcible feeding: knock them out, bite somewhere they won’t notice, and also rob them

Normal food/drink are consumed for energy and enjoyment

• extra sugar/fat/alcohol provide fuel for superhuman athleticism

Regeneration also requires sleep - perhaps 10 or 12 hours at minimum, like a feline. An injured vampire requires additional sleep and tires quickly even when satiated with blood.

VAMPIRE SORCERY (hard scifi-fantasy treatment)

What if the traditional magic words, wands, voodoo dolls, and elemental magicks were all mere cargo cults trying to imitate ancient vampires, aliens, Atlanteans, Hyperboreans…?

If so, what was the real magic? What if magic wands were guns, lasers, remote controls? What if magic words were voice commands? Or just “die motherfuckers!” in an alien language? What if elemental creature-summoning was just an advanced form of animal training?

Vampires in this game will most certainly have telepathic control abilities. If it works on people, why not frogs, locusts, or cells? Maybe their immortality magic/biotech (which shall remain a mystery even to them) also enables them to manipulate molecules with their mind like the Bene Gesserit or The Thing. No human could ever learn it because they lack the equipment - not unless a vampire “gives them the gift”. You could imagine many “spells” derived from this ability if you were an immortal parasite with all the time in the world…

• Telepathy
  • Range of abilities:
    • Read emotions and impulses
    • Read concrete thoughts
    • Read abstract thoughts
    • Mesmerize (manipulate emotions and impulses of a pet animal or human acquaintance)
    • Nudge (somewhat like riding a horse)
    • POV (see through their eyes, hear with their ears)
    • Possession (full control over thoughts and speech)
  • Limiting/enhancing factors:
    • Skill and experience
    • Genetics and vampire lineage
    • Distance
    • Line of sight
    • Emotional bond, especially with lovers
    • Blood bond with “donors” as well as vampires of close lineage
    • Subject’s cooperation or resistance
    • The telepathic link with a lover-turned-vampire is so strong it can only be severed by betrayal or true death
• Microtelepathy
  • Manipulate microscopic organisms, including one’s own cells
  • This is the basis of Biosorcery
• Biosorcery AKA Autopangenesis (ancient vampire discipline of “Lamarckian” genetic self-modification and more)
  • Allopangenesis?? (do it to others)
  • Healing / Rapid Regeneration (various methods which don’t require feeding and sleeping)
  • Remelanization: darken one’s skin color to pass as mortal (even at Nordic melanin levels)
  • Magnetovision: vision augment for detecting ferrous metals, useful for locating juicy non-anemic blood sources. Works best in environments free from iron, steel, and electrical interference.
  • Inflict disease or poison
  • Replication (turn mortals undead; a long and risky blood transfusion procedure)
  • Create life (accelerated cloning)
  • Synthnobacterial airborne mist form
• Microbiology (knowledge obtained from modern science)
  • Phenotypes (mappings of DNA sequences to various biological features)
  • Bridge theory (mapping of phenotypes to autopangenesis, obtained by experimentation)
  • Other blood/DNA tricks
  • Brewing any organic chemical they can imagine
  • Bioelectric high voltage devices
• Quantum-mechanical space-folding teleportation??
• Doppelganger (biosorcery self-transformation to match the appearance of a human subject)
  • Involves DNA replacement and vampiric regeneration (specifically of the skin, hair follicles, irises, and facial structural tissues)
  • DNA may be sampled from a living or dead person, or self-modified to approximate the desired phenotype.
  • Without rapid regeneration, the process takes several hours.
  • Transplant rejection is a common complication which requires immunosuppressant drug treatment or excessive regeneration. Hyperacute rejection, which often results from ABO blood type mismatch, causes severe visible and internal damage in a matter of hours, requires massive nightly blood intake (up to a gallon) and extended sleep regeneration.
  • Convincing transformation requires long-term observation to imitate the subject’s voice and mannerisms.
  • Permanent replacement of a histocompatible subject is possible. The vampire typically waits to perfect his imitation before murdering the subject.
  • Full-body metamorphosis is theoretically possible. Stem cell replacement should prevent rejection. However, brain replacement may wipe the vampire’s memory. Also, it would take a very long time, requiring the vampire to hibernate for months or years in a coffin filled with magically preserved blood.
• Shapeshifting (taking on nonhuman forms)
  • Illusion
  • Biosorcery (Advanced Doppelganger)
  • Self-transformation by other means…
  • Also note that possession is sometimes confused with shapeshifting
• Familiars (semi-independent beings who do the vampire’s bidding)
  • Willing servants or trained pets (little or no sorcery required, but takes more time)
  • Mind-controlled slaves
  • Biosorcery creations
  • Summoned creatures/entities
  • CAVEAT: beware the pitfalls of Companion AI
• Other ideas…
  • Four elements: earth, air, fire, water
    • Fifth element variation: aether/spirit/etc or wood/metal/etc
    • Literal or metaphorical?
  • Death magic
  • “Necromancy” as a broad school of vampire sorcery with its origins in the earliest attempts to turn humans into new vampires… (I’ve elaborated on this elsewhere)
  • Blood magic: seems natural for vampires, but I don’t want to rely too heavily on blood as a power source, which I feel was a flaw of Bloodlines
  • Sex magic is the specialty of the succubus/incubus type of vampire
    • MESMERIZE is a simple mind-control spell that does not arouse suspicion. Target must be attracted to you, not intimidated, and NOT distracted by revealing attire.
    • Then you may harness their sexual energy, which can be both a discreet and powerful source, albeit with many complications…

There are many specialized branches of magic/arcane knowledge. You get to choose a few to start with, and you can learn more by gleaning clues from ancient texts and modern science. You can memorize some spells, but others require equipment, preparations, and written notes. The best way to learn spells is to steal another vampire’s notes.

What is the cost of this magic - where does the energy come from? Not blood, it’s too simple a game mechanic. Blood is just a feedstock. The energy comes from other living things. It’s parasitic.

“Leyline” energy could also be cool, some sort of electromagnetic zero point earth energy running along geological lines. Not vampire magic, just arcane knowledge. You need equipment to tap into it. Something out of Tesla’s research maybe.

Historical, Mythical, and Occult Magic (FOR REFERENCE ONLY)

• Bronze Age
  • “The evil eye” goes back this far
  • Babylonian, Assyrian, Sumerian, etc: ?
  • Exodus: elements (summon creatures from water/land/air), death (god-level), lamb’s blood (protection from death)
  • Egyptian: wands, amulets of protection, hexes/curses using effigies (or writing the target’s name)
• Greco-Roman-Aryan
  • Deities, power words, song/music, necromancy, recipes involving herbs and animal parts and gestures/signs (to trigger magical effects) and tools
  • Theurgy (high magic / divine magic): Neoplatonic rituals, evoking deities for good purposes
  • Goetia (greek for witchcraft): low magic, evoking demons or evil spirits for selfish/heretical purposes
  • Necromancy was broad term for all of this magic, which generally involved animal sacrifice (either its blood or its burnt carcass) as payment for a summoned spirit (of a dead person or other supernatural entity) to perform supernatural acts, relay information, or especially to gather information from other dead people in the underworld. According to legend the Greek sorceress Medea (featured in Jason and the Argonauts) spread this school of magic eastward to the Aryans and Persians, and from there it spread back westward to Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc.
• Norse Seidr
  • Prophecy, memory (forget/remember), hexes/curses…
  • ~500 BC, probably before any Greco-Roman influence
  • Considered effiminate in the Viking Age (after ~500 AD)
• Jewish
  • Seems to have roots in Bronze Age Egyptian and Greek sorcery, with later Neoplatonic influences as well
  • Kabbalah seems to be a form of mysticism originating in medieval Spain (~1300 AD) which spread to the Ottoman Empire and the Kiev region where it gave rise to Hasidic Judaism and today’s Chabad-Lubavitch
    • The foundational Zohar is an Aramaic-language text of purportedly ancient origins, which modern scholars are convinced is a fabrication from medieval Spain with additional fake content added later, according to the internet hivemind
    • The basic concepts are well known and permeate modern pop culture: Tree of Life, Ten Sephirot, Tikkun Olam, Reincarnation(!?), and more controversial things we shall not name
    • It’s all very controversial both outside of and within Judaism
• Modern Occultism
  • All mired in secrecy, confusion, and controversy
  • Neo-paganism is a “reconstruction” of ancient European pagan (“rustic”) pantheistic beliefs and practices, which may include witchcraft, based on Greco-Roman-Norse and Christian traditions
  • Neo-gnosticism is a “reconstruction” of Gnostic beliefs from ~300 AD, which were more-or-less synonymous with Neoplatonism, which was a revival of Plato’s philosophy from ~350 BC
  • Hermeticism or “Hermetic societies” are beliefs derived from the Corpus Hermeticum purportedly written by the god Hermes/Mercury/Thoth, also related to Neoplatonism and often including some variation of Kabbalah
  • “Geomancy” refers to a variety of practices such as Dowsing and Feng Shui, and the 20th century Leyline movement AKA “earth energy”…

THE VAMPIRIZATION PROCESS

Vampires are called “undead” for a reason: to become one, you have die first. In fact, it requires a complicated high-risk medical procedure which is best performed in a hospital setting. First, the patient’s body is chilled to minimize tissue degeneration. Then the blood is drained and set aside. After the heart stops, a delay is required. Then approximately half of the donor vampire’s blood is directly transfused into the patient. As a rule of thumb, the transfusion is complete when the flow stops due to pressures being equalized. Although this poses little risk to the vampire, he may lose consciousness. Therefore it is best to employ trusted specially trained assistants to handle the inevitable complications.

In case of premature or insufficient transfusion, the patient’s immune cells will overpower the regenerative essential factor in the vampire’s blood. The patient may be saved by rebleeding, retransfusion of his own blood, and resuscitation. Then he must be carefully stabilized until the vampire has recovered sufficiently to repeat the procedure.

Traditionally the transfusion was delayed somewhat longer than necessary to avoid this complication, which unfortunately resulted in near-total amnesia. However, excessive delay results in permanent brain death, i.e. zombification. Modern medicine has greatly reduced but not eliminated these risks. Therefore the patient should be sure to get his affairs in order and commit all valued memories to paper before undergoing any vampirization procedure.

It is possible but extremely unwise to perform the procedure on animals, especially those with sharp teeth and claws, as they invariably become blood-crazed monsters leaving a trail of destruction in the wake of their downward spiral to premature death.

GAME WORLD ZONES

Cities

• strictly controlled digital technocracy with soft-enforcement social credit system
• mostly underground except for some industrial and transport facilities
• residents are known as “citizens”

Favelas

• neo-medieval fringe settlements ruled by mobs, gangs, cults
• punishments include flogging, branding, gelding, dismemberment, hanging, stoning, burning
• really just the old suburbs
• better overall

Vast Desert

• 99.9% of San Frangeles (officially caused by climate change)
• no reason to go there

Pleasure Domes

• each city is equipped with one domed nature preserve, a slice of pre-desertification Old California
• all citizens in good standing are entitled to 20 minutes a week (terms and conditions apply)

Vast Tropical Pleasure Domes

• elites only
• officially nonexistent

Travel

• high-speed rail/elevator system is the main means of transport (for those with decent social credit)
• communal electric cars/bikes are also available (priced in tokens per distance)
• both are routinely hacked by low society denizens
• methanol-fueled vehicles (think Mad Max) exist in low society, but are scarce
  • well-preserved models from ~ 1950-2015
  • heavily-modded rebuilt vehicles
  • custom-built vehicles, usually armored or minimalist dune-buggy construction

ECONOMICS

SCS social credit scores (cities)

• citizen behavior is heavily driven by fear of losing SCS and associated privileges/rewards
• noncitizens also have SCS but they’re low or subzero
• it is maintained by conspicuous virtue in monitored spaces (streets, trains, homes)
• virtue is defined by fully democratic ballot measures, which are indirectly controlled by the elite
• you are elite…

UBT universal benefit tokens (cities)

• for user-fee rationed goods/services (small luxuries to reward the compliant, and “non-essential” essentials)
• provided by a daily allowance commensurate with SCS
• “use-or-lose” because subject to caps, expiry, fines, freezes, theft by low-society hackers
• gifting… raises one’s SCS commensurate with recipient’s SCS (don’t give to bad people!)
• hackers give victims’ tokens to a friend/patsy with adequate SCS to buy resellable goods
• con artists trick victims into buying goods for them; robbers threaten/force them
• token prostitution is totally acceptable - if the genders match lol
• savvy citizens trade with noncitizens for all kinds of shit - like weapons
• inflation and shortages are a problem (due to price controls and planned economy)

HUD “hydolla” trash cubes (ghetto)

• 1 HYD = small ~10mm cube (1.0 ml volume)
• 10 HYD = larger ~15mm cube (3.4 ml volume) PHASED OUT after street value settled at approx 3 HYD, defeating the purpose of different denominations
• used for small everyday transactions (large transactions use gold, weapons, bulk commodities, promises)
• actually made from melted plastic containers, somewhat limited supply because normies receive social credit for recycling them
• if they don’t look handmade from recycled containers they’re considered counterfeit
• cubes degrade over time and lose value
• old cubes are like the small change you have lying around
• often painted with dots and used as dice
• deflationary and self-regulating
• cube shortages lead to lower prices
• lower prices incentivize plastic-scavenging and cube-minting

Blood (vampires)

• you may acquire a harem/coterie of human familiars/ghouls/donors, which is a micro-economy of sorts
• there’s also increasingly an economics of ordinary blood banking/harvesting
• it’s used for life extension treatments for the SCS-rich and above-the-law human elites
• “giving” blood raises one’s SCS
• but blood dono stations won’t let people give blood if they’re anemic due to vampirism (which may be detected by a pattern of such occurences, so beware)

Political Economy

• buying and selling influence…

HORROR FORMULAE

Stock formulae

• NO jump scares
• random attacks in dangerous areas
• darkness, dim light
• haunting music, near-silence, creepy noises
• gothic imagery (18th century to present)
• hints, rumors, clues
• incomplete and conflicting information
• supernatural details never fully explained
• etc.

The supernatural horror of being a vampire

• the initial transformation shock (if playing as a virgin vampire)
• fear of being caught or hunted
• manmade horrors and civilizational collapse (some of each in this setting)
• fear of other vampires
• encounters with other hostile supernatural beings and phenomena
• the realization that the universe teems with unknown horrors
• the immortal’s heightened fear of true death… or worse
• fear of hell / divine punishment
• fear of being trapped/imprisoned forever, unable to die
• never fully grasping the nature and origin of vampirism

WRITING STYLE GUIDELINES

For myself and anyone else who wants to write for the core game.

• Abbreviated dialogue
  • Get to the point
  • No realistic asides, fluff, filler, um’s and uh’s
  • Embrace hyperbole, reject qualifiers such as “generally, typically, most, not all”
  • No false choices
  • If the outcome of a conversation is determined by skillchecks etc, skip the bullshit
• Readability & flow
  • Lines should sound good when players read them out loud (especially streamers and LPers)
  • Slightly poetic phrasing and word choices
  • Don’t use excessive jargon, slang, idioms, archaic terms, and highbrow language
• Serious tone & subtle dark humor
  • Not too edgy, campy, sarcastic
  • Don’t force humor, let it come naturally
  • Default to straightforward, matter-of-fact, transactional dialogue
  • Remember, most of these people are just trying to survive in difficult and dangerous times
• Mostly clean
  • Use cusses/slurs sparingly; make them count
  • Although no words are off-limits internally, we will censor some as required
  • Avoid obviously taboo topics in the Anglosphere and the West in general
  • Also avoid acceptable/kosher/boomer politics; this is escapism
• Exceptions
  • Certain characters
  • Rants, freakouts, etc

Dialogue Structure

Generic human NPCs have the following lines, driven by matchmaking logic based on the player’s and NPC’s traits.

• Greetings (when player presses E to interact)
  • Love at first sight (conditional)
  • Instant loathing (conditional)
    • Tell player to fuck off
    • Politely tell player to fuck off
    • No response at all
  • “Yes?” by default, followed by player’s pickup line options:
    • ‘Romance’ options: sophisticated, overtly sexual flirting, or vampire fetishism
      • Acceptance
      • Flat-out rejection
      • Polite half-rejection or acceptance under duress (clue to try magic/manipulation)
    • Friendly: smalltalk, polite compliment, work/business
      • Other ways to lure them into a feeding situation…

Unique human characters

• Immediate quest proposal
• Love at first sight (e.g. eager follower or undercover vampire hunter)
• “Yes?”
  • Romance and/or friendly options (which may lead to unique dialogue)
  • Other options (unique)

Vampire characters may immediately recognize the player as one of their own kind and skip the usual pretense of humanity.