Stealing shit.

(This post wound up getting pretty long, I guess I have more to say about world-building than I thought! Buckle up!)

In a previous post, I mentioned that I totally swiped my vampires from the White Wolf Game System.

Yes, I did.

But they swiped their ideas from movies and myths from literally centuries of humans imagining vampires, so I looked at their system as a kind of meta-system for vampires. And I adjusted the hell out of it after doing a lot of my own research.

I like as few rules and regulations to follow as possible. I’ve read several books with supernatural characters in them, and I get turned around by a lot of magic this and secret social protocol that, or supernatural creatures that can do six kinds of special things. I also get turned off by it, and I find it rather hard to believe.

In real life, there aren’t a ton of bizarre hierarchical societies that people belong to. I don’t care for books where every type of creature in the story has to answer to some sort of high muckety-muck about whatever move they wish to make to move the plot along. Can I buy that certain orders of wizards are like that? Sure. Order of the Golden Dawn, anyone? Real human magicians can be like that. (And yes, there are real human magicians.) Do I think werewolves and fairies and vampires and zombies and mummies and what-have-you are all like that? No. And I find it boring and annoying to imagine that they might be. I like to look at different human cultures from around the world and how animals organize their societies when deciding how to put together the social structure for my beings. Some cultures are very tightly organized and very strict about how members move within the hierarchy. Some cultures are more laid-back and open to anyone doing what they like. Some cultures allow for membership in special clubs or groups that are organized differently than normal society. Some clubs are tightly organized, some are more loose. It would follow that supernatural creatures could have the same flexibility.

Then there’s the magic aspect of vampires (and other creatures). I like to keep all that simple, too. Just being what they are is pretty magical, so why do we have to have a lot more thrown in? If you like that sort of thing, sure, go for it, but it bugs me to have to keep track of what certain characters can or can’t do, and I especially hate when a character can suddenly thwart the bad guy because of some ability they have that’s innate to their magical nature. It gets twisty pretty fast in my head. As far as I’m concerned, I like to know that all fae can do this, that, or the other, all werewolves have this and that and nothing else, and all vampires can do this and can’t do that and there we are. If there’s an exception somewhere, or someone has a special ability, I like to have a solid explanation for why that character can do stuff that others can’t, and have it be something that others can either copy with hard work and dedication or that no one can ever copy, ever at all period.

I also like to keep the “urban” in urban fantasy as realistic as I can. I don’t like making the world uglier or grittier than it really is, or more flexible and sillier than it really is, or a whole lot different than what we already know. That way, all those rules are already in place. Supernatural creatures are secret, and they stay that way. Are there literally dozens of werewolves in every major city in the world? No, that starts getting messy and way too obvious. How could that many people keep a secret like that? Someone would notice. Supernatural creatures are secret and rare in my worlds. Except the fae. The fae are not secret and only a little rare, but they hide in plain site and get dismissed as weirdos or non-existent, so they don’t need to worry about it. Nor do they.

I also recognized that White Wolf had invented a game, and that people like to play games they can win. So the abilities that vampires have in that game system are pretty potent, and a player can earn new abilities pretty quickly. I felt like that gave the characters too much of an edge, so I pared that back. Way back. If a character’s life is too easy, that gets boring fast. Characters have to work for their successes. White Wolf also had a chart for figuring out how many vampires can live in a city based on its population. I felt that if there were more than a few in any one large city, it would start to get obvious pretty quickly. So I cut that back, too. With fewer vampires, there’s no need for a complicated hierarchy, nor is there any real need for rules and a system of justice. If you fuck things up for other vampires, they will probably kill you. Or stand back and let you get killed. Period. That just makes sense.

I liked the idea that Clans had certain abilities, but rather than go with complicated bloodlines and insular inter-Clan politics, I just said that vampires inherit abilities from their parent. I also am not Christian and I do not like or resonate with the Bible at all, so I changed the idea that Cain (of Cain and Abel fame) was the first vampire and that vampirism was The Curse laid on Cain by God. Where do vampires come from? They don’t really know anymore. Their birth happened so long ago it’s vanished out of living memory. I know, but I’m not telling.

I also lost all the jargon that’s included in the game. Using just about any of it would all but guarantee a lawsuit if I ever experience any fame, so all the words had to go. I had to come up with some of my own jargon, which isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, but I didn’t need a lot of it. Vampires in my world are not some clique that you join when you are vetted by a higher authority, so there aren’t a lot of in-group jargon words needed that humans don’t already have. I’m sure like any other segment of the population, there are some words and phrases that get used, but they don’t spread around from vampire to vampire as easily as words filter to us from other cultures. Vampires mostly don’t talk to each other, so the words they use wouldn’t have much chance to spread like that.

I kept the way that a vampire gets turned. But that’s not original enough to bring a lawsuit down on me if anyone from White Wolf ever reads any of my books. I agreed with the thought that if a vampire bites you, you can’t just automatically turn into a vampire. If that were the case, then a vampire would have to kill everyone they fed from or that person would turn. If a vampire is feeding every few days, the string of bodies would be rather obvious. And if they’re just turning people every few days, the literally hundreds of baby vampires would become a real problem, too. So it has to be a choice, sometimes a poorly or hastily made choice, to turn someone. No one would be able to make an army of undead to storm the mortal world, because turning one vampire takes a lot of energy. If a vampire tried, the effort would kill them before they could get real far.

And that was about it. Social structure, abilities, jargon. Otherwise, they’re people. I think after you’ve lived a long time you probably get a different view on the world and on life, but aside from that and hunting people to drink their blood, they’re people. Same problems, same strengths and weaknesses, same needs and desires. They’re a great metaphor for how people interact with each other and mess things up.

I find creature-building and world-building to be one of the fun parts of writing. There’s a reason I like to write fantasy – I get to do this crap all the time. Writing plain fiction would get boring for me after a while. No vampires? No faeries? Not even a witch? Come on!

Luckily for me, I get to write whatever I want. So there.