How do we make vampires cool again?

How do we make vampires cool again?

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dandwiki.com/wiki/Complete_Vampire_Overhaul_(3.5e_Template).
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Not with lolis certainly.

More lolis.

A few lolis, a few adults.

The problem with vampires is that they're all over the place and they're internally inconsistent

They're fast (unless they're not) and strong (unless they're not) and smart (unless they're not) and stealthy (unless they're not).
They can turn into a bat (unless they can't) or a wolf (unless they can't) or a cloud of mist (unless they can't)
They have magic (unless they don't) and they're awesome swordsman (unless they're not) can control the weather (unless they can't) and they're necromancers (unless they're not) and they're undead (unless they're not)

They don't like the sun because if kills them (unless it doesn't) and they don't like holy stuff because it kills them (unless it doesn't) and they don't like garlic because it kills them (unless it doesn't).
They can't cross running water (unless they can) and they can enter houses uninvited (unless they can) and they can't enter church (unless they can) and they don't have reflections (unless they do).

They're like predators (unless they're not) and they're like nobles (unless they're not) and they're like the Mafia (unless they're not) and they're like slavs (unless they're not) and they're like goths (unless they're not) and they're ancient (unless they're not) and they're the next step in human evolution (unless they're not) and they're all named Vlad (unless they're not).


To make vampires cool again, you have to acknowledge all this stuff and try to rationalize it in a logical and consistent way.
The only thing I've seen to do this is Vampire the Masquerade; in VtM, the first vampire was Caine, and he got his powers by being the first murderer. The act of murder usurped the power of God, since only he had the power to kill indiscriminately. Since then, Vampire powers (and the potential for new powers) have been as varied as he powers of God himself.

Okay, guess we're done here guys, thanks.

Making them smug lolis is a good place to start.

Mainly lolis, some adults so that the perverts who are into that kind of thing aren't discouraged.

Vampires are the creepiest things ever

Yeah, no. See, I don't like the idea of having sex with anything that might think of me as food. There's too many real world instances of that ending very badly for the non-bitey half of that relationship.

There's literally nothing wrong with them. I think a better question is, how do we get tg to start enjoying life again

Make them monsters again. Not some anti-hero weeaboo love interest redeemed hero. No. Just make them.blood thirsty monsters who have no regards for human life.

You can't. The people who hate fun won the war, and now you're stuck with baitspam, repetitive nonsense, and pointless arguments forever.

nothing can be done here im afraid

and you know it, deep down in your rotten heart

nothing can be done

youtube.com/watch?v=wwLWAkZCUzM

> How do we make vampires cool again?
Make them bestial bloodsuckers.

Instead of a fat basement dwelling neckbeard, how about we make Veeky Forums into a voluptous, outgoing 18-year-old girl who secretly loves playing traditional games?

>how about we make Veeky Forums into a voluptous, outgoing 18-year-old girl who secretly loves playing traditional games?
She still will be a whiny bitch like most of Veeky Forums is.

impossibru

this is how i nosferatu

That's not cool, just spooky.

...

>wings growing out of the head
I'll never get this.
Does this mean her head is all brain and no muscle?

> all brain and no muscle
FUCK
I MEANT ALL MUSCLE, NO BRAIN

Something like what is described here dandwiki.com/wiki/Complete_Vampire_Overhaul_(3.5e_Template).

I would suggest taking an unironically look at Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. I think they did the whole vampire aspect very well, from the bestial quasi monsters blood leeches to the high lord of all vampires. It is a pretty interesting idea and close to the original mythos.

Take the Piercing Cold feat to bypass their energy resistance

...

hellsing

Simple. Disregard shit like Twilight or True Blood were ever a thing.

Vampires are monsters, and though they have a certain charm, that's always secondary to their bloodthirst.

also this youtube.com/watch?v=pshSDDqKVSA

THE TOOLS OF THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONS ARE STRONGER THAN THE CAPITALISTIC SWINE

It is a cartoon aesthetic choice bro, there is no explanation here.

Also why is this your only gripe here? A high tier vampire's body isn't necessarily made of flesh and blood, it could be necrotic shadowy energy that is warped to a certain shape? Even classic vampires can morph into bats, sometimes a single tiny bat, sometimes a whole cloud of bats, sometimes into pure fog. If they can do that putting wings on the head isn't a problem.

REMOVE VAMPY!

>this is how i nosferatu
>standing outside the sun
really? REALLY?

Thought about having a setting where Vampires are oldschool, and only created via pacts with a demon.

Their drawbacks and powers vary from vampire to vampire, as part of the bargaining done for their soul. Souls that the demon thinks was headed it's way anyways have very little leverage and end up being shitty vampires. Pious righteous people get much more offered from the demon, usually in some sort of Faustian bargain to try and save their people/country/loved ones.

source?

>Also why is this your only gripe here?
Because it's an aesthetic that never appeared on classic vampires.

Vampires being smoking hot bombshell babes? Sure, why not, just look at Elvira or something. It's not too far of a step to turn them into loli, because Japan turns absolutely everything sexual into prepubescent girls.

Other than that, the general aesthetic is there - the gothic fashion (even if it's gothic lolita), the pale skin color and all that. The basics are solid, even if the execution is meh.

But head-wings were never a part of vampire portrayal before Darkstalkers, at least, as far as I know, and they serve absolutely no purpose.
What the vampire gonna do, flap its head-wings and fly away? I just want to say something how stupid it is, but I think I've just gone fully numb.

Also, if anything, leather wings resembling bat wings were always the succubi territory. Why put them on a vampire?

Always assumed it was a hold over from eastern "vampire" myths that had them as disembodied heads. The wings are how they fly when they abandon their body to do spooky things.

>But head-wings were never a part of vampire portrayal before Darkstalkers, at least, as far as I know, and they serve absolutely no purpose.
>What the vampire gonna do, flap its head-wings and fly away? I just want to say something how stupid it is, but I think I've just gone fully numb.
They don't serve any purpose, they are just a fashionable accessory. Plus Vampires do not need to flap wing to fly they can just float.

>Also, if anything, leather wings resembling bat wings were always the succubi territory. Why put them on a vampire?
This is a valid question, the thing is that Japan's pop culture considers vampires differently. They are mostly just another type of demon, instead of an undead. Sure there are anime/manga where they use the classic version Hellsing most notably. But a lot of the other source newer source material just puts vampires and demons into one basket. They give them elf ears, they are not harmed by sunlight, they are not eternally craving blood, not cold and dead to the touch, do not live forever just live for very long, automatically have superpowers etc.

Why? Because culture warps everything as it pleases, usually to as simplification to fit a certain story/character.

looks like a certain magical index

Why is it that Vampy has headwings and Urias don't? Cause he is a beefcake of a vampire and headwings would make him look stupid

"Call me!"

>someone needs to standardize vampires

Someone did. In fact, everyone did, and each writer did it differently. That's the whole problem.

Mix em up while also keeping within the boundaries of weaknesses. Also, don't be afraid to have multiple origins.

Drow Nobles of Houses that follow Lloth often become embraced to be vampires of a particularly spidery bent. As in, they transform into a spider instead of a bat, they command spiders instead of other beasts, and they dissolve into spiders instead of mist. These are vampires created by Lloth, and failures during the embrace mutate into Driders instead.

When my players went to encounter Drow, they were not expecting vampires, and especially ones that are just spiders all the way down.

S-step back you fiend!

I have a setting Im working on with regions of tundra and pine forests mostly (and inhabited by not!nordic barbarians and nomads) with a local god/demigod of solar eclipse, lies and annihilation selecting his grand priest through manipulation and violence. Once chosen, the grand priest is turned into a vampire but hes different than 'classic' vamps in few aspects:
>Those vampires are not vulnerable to sunlight (however they may be vulnerable to other stuff)
>Dont need to drink blood but rather feast on last breathes of living creatures (meaning you cant 'farm' your humans by not draining them completly)
>No domination powers (theyre nightmarish enough and exlude fear and anger)
>Cant reproduce quickly (they must slowly transfuse blood through surgical means with their victim in order to turn him to one, isnt controlled by his creator and the creator is temporarily weakened in the process)
>Slightly beastier and shorter temper than regular vamps
>The grand priests control the tundras through puppets or directly and behave like Ravenloft darklords
Just noting this is not a finished idea and definitely needs some more flesh and polishing but hope you like it.

>You will never be a young priest that was choosen to be turned into a loli vampire

Suffering.

Every time.

Actually make them monsters.

Like the 'Reaper' strain of Vampire from Blade II.

>tfw

by making them have at least a few set rules and rolling back the angsty/weeaboo shit.
The more weeb shit we add the more vampires stop being vampires and start becoming magic girls with the magic of "dark love and friendship that is somewhat creepy" instead of "love and friendship".
The more angst we add the more we got goth/emo kids instead of vampires.
The less set rules about them we have the more vampires stop being a thing, because we wont know what people mean by vampire.
Look at why zombies worked for so long, while they had slightly different incarnations, they were more or less the same thing in 99% of the time. When you said zombie people knew what you were talking about, fast or slow, virus or curse, muted or not was just background to flesh out this incarnation of zombies, but still when someone said zombie we all had a similar idea in our heads.
Also stop romanticizing them so fucking much, vampires are not fucking Werter, in thier core they are parasitic creatures with wielding inhuman powers, no your wifu/hasbando

>[Combichrist - Tractor.mp3 intensifies]

Have them all follow Mannfred von Carstein as their spiritual liege.

You improve them by killing everyone who fetishizes vampires.

Place them in the freezer for a few minutes.

They can be dark and edgy and all they want
But life as a vampire should be painted as pure, unadultered shit by every DM

>oh, you want to feed onto this street prostitute with no lab testing whatsoever? Here comes a bag of HIV!
>yeah nobody will miss that hobo... but I guess you contracted Sepsis!
>feeding with cats, rodents and other animals? I wholeheartedly agree, my friend! Whoopsies, you failed the save roll, enjoy Bacteremia

I thought Vampires were immune to most, if not all, human diseases.

Refrigerators.

give em trenchcoats, katanas and sunglasses

youtube.com/watch?v=cNOP2t9FObw

Top vampires to draw inspiration from;

Dracula (Bram Stoker's Dracula), Carmilla, The Vampyre, Kain (Legacy of Kain), Dracula (Dracula Untold) weeb shit beyond this point Dracula (Castlevania), Alucard (Castlevania), D (Vampire Hunter D), Dio Brando (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), Demitri (Darkstalkers, esp. the OVA)

Shit Tier Inspiration
Alucard (Hellsing), DIO (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), Every Single Vampire Character (Twilight)

Honorable Mentions: Lestat. Anne Rice's earlier work wasn't too bad but I would suggest that it hasn't aged well.


Feel free to add any suggestions or corrections but I feel strongly about this list.

make them either actual bloodmad monsters or people who have to try really hard not to be, as opposed to this whole "as long as i feed on a hooker semi frequently im a ok"

being a vampire is a fucking curse, no fun allowed

you're wrong.

TOP VAMPIRES TO TAKE INSPO FROM:

characters from Blade and Blade II

SHIT VAMPIRES TO TAKE INSPO FROM:
all the rest, ESPECIALLY Dracula, who is a complete bore.

I thought the whole "bursting into flame in the sunlight" or "constantly craving fresh human blood" or "becoming an inhuman monster that only has the cruelest shell of humanity left" was the curse.

Hot/crazy principle applies here.

What about Vampire: The Masquerade?

>dissing based fuckmothering alucard
the pure embodiment of purile edge deserves to be acknowledged

Shit I forgot Blade i'm so sorry goddamnit shit I didn't it again!!!

Jared Nomak a best.

It has some cool characters, like Beckett, but I felt like it was too non-specific being a table top setting rather than an encapsulated story.

I should probably have also added Morrigan Aensland but she's technically a succubus?? Darkstalker vampires and demons are weird.

yeah Alucard's fun.

Fun things are fun.

I mean come the fuck on, if your character doesn't cock his gun with his fangs you're playing VtM wrong.

I think Seras is a better vampire character because her story arc goes into what the change is like and so on.

Alucard is more a living plot power or force of nature with an agenda. He's like what happens when you reach the end of your story and you're ready to just die or chill out, but the GM insists you stick around and everything he throws at you is a joke so of course you're going to get bored.

>puerile
juvenile

puerile is small children.

juvenile is teenagers.

This is a natural progression. Vampires were quirky historical and literary oddities for centuries. Then for a long time, they were sex symbols. Now their appeal is getting lower and lower class, until it was trailer trash and tweens and landwhales.

Every subculture goes through this, why not a mythological movement too?

The best vampire of the past 10 years wasn't a vampire at all. It was Donald Draper.

>SHIT VAMPIRES TO TAKE INSPO FROM:
>all the rest,
Are you not forgetting someone?

Remilia is best. REMILIA!

It doesn't come up very often, but a couple of sources imply that, even though they're immune to disease themselves, they can be carriers. I think Vampire: the Masquerade suggests it as a thing DMs can run with, and I'm sure when Father Callahan is explaining how vampires work to Roland's group in whichever of Stephen King's Dark Tower books he first shows up in (Wolves of the Calla, I think) he mentions that at least one of the types of vampires he's documented can spread HIV.

>Carmilla
>Legacy of Kain
>Vampire Hunter D

Top taste, user.

Requiem's a bitch. Turim and Otto are the cool ones.

I thought vampires were already ice cold.

Why do people like Carmilla?

This and Vlad carstein

Sure, Satan

Oh shit, Requiem. That's some of most bizarre and metal shit I ever read. I know it all takes place in hell, but it's one of my favourite examples of what a vampire society would look like.

Make them creepy again. Vampires were menacing when they were a quiet stalker that existed simply to eat. Vampires (and frankly, all good scary monsters including ghosts) stay scary when they have mystery. So maybe don't try to develop any pseudo science or explanation bullshit for them if you want them to stay scary.

I like both types of vampires in Tsukihime.

The sluts and the worst girls?

mannfred von carstein and generally warhammer vampires are good stuff too

>Vampire Hunter D

I'm not too familiar with him, but I really liked Bloodlust. The bit with the old guy in that town full of people who hate him turning out to have been someone he saved as a kid and at the end where he goes to that female vampire hunter's funeral decades after the main events of the story were really cool; I like vampire stories that take place over decades or hundreds of years. Might as well get some narrative mileage out of that whole immortality thing.

It helps when your dad is Bigger D.

Vlad and his society of vampire aristos actually making Sylvania a (comparatively) decent and safe place to live compared to the rest of the Warhammer world was always one of my favourite things about the vampire count background.

In a case of role reversal, the secretary turned out to the be the vampire who bit her boss.

Because it aside from the lesbianism and strangely gothic romance....the vampire is a fucking horror. It's a literal living disease that is at once wiping out an entire countryside while shacking up and giving the heebee-jeebies to a delicate flower of a girl.

>"bursting into flame in the sunlight" or "constantly craving fresh human blood" or "becoming an inhuman monster that only has the cruelest shell of humanity left"

You mean "Now you HAVE to stay up late SO STFU MOM", "See the worthless sheeple as the livestalk they are are treating them as such", and "Being an enlightened being, euphoric in your own intelligence for throwing away the USELESS STUPID-DUMB TRASH that is morality".

You gotta keep the target audiance's mindset in mind here.

"He Never Died" is probably unknown here, but it's goddamn impressive.

...

See, I never could tolerate romance of any sorts with vampires, let alone gay or lesbian. There's just something disgusting about it.

>ESPECIALLY Dracula, who is a complete bore.
Do elaborate why

I'm guessing because user is a capeshit fag with ADHD.

Welcome to the entire fucking reason why vampires became sexual creatures.

It's meant to be scary.

The point of Carmilla was "lesbians are evil parasites that will murder your children" not fapfuel.

Remilia a CUTE!

So to recap;


GOOD Vampire Fiction:

Dracula (Bram Stoker's Dracula), Carmilla, The Vampyre, Kain (Legacy of Kain), Dracula (Dracula Untold), Blade (Blade), Dracula (Castlevania), Alucard (Castlevania), D (Vampire Hunter D), Dio Brando (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), Demitri (Darkstalkers, esp. the OVA), Beckett et al (Vampire the Masquerade), Requiem et al (Requiem, Vampire Chevalier)

BAD Vampire Fiction

Alucard (Hellsing), DIO (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), Every Single Character (Anne Rice Books), Every Single Character (Twilight)

>Thread asking how to make vampires cool
>No one mentions Blood Dragons

Welp there's your answer.