Matto

Re: So the King is a Vampire

Re: Quick and dirty campaign settings The oasis idea is good, and can be adapted to island-hopping archipilegos or Italian-style city-states. Anywhere that could adapt to isolated city-states with insular political structures would make world politics much simpler, and militaries smaller and less complicated. I usually go with starting my players in a small border-town or tiny off-shoot island of a larger Empire. Then, as sessions drag out, I complicate things from there. You could also take existing maps and localities and convert them to fantasy. Drag out a map of the U.S. and put major fantasy cities over New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angelos. You could make the plains states a centaur plain and the Rockies an orcish hide-out. You could also do this with state or town maps, maps of Europe or just about anywhere interesting. It might also make for enjoyable farce: ie, stamping a suitable villain over stereotyped areas. I won't give any examples. This is my second post, and I don't know the geography of other people yet. Don't want to upset.

Re: So the King is a Vampire Vampire king? That sucks. It's all very relative, as everybody has pointed out. And aside from needing to read "Knights of Dark Reknown" now (once I'm done with "Echoes of the Great Song"), I'll add a quick thought. The thing about vampirism is that in many mythos, it locks the victim into a permanent nocturnal state. Combine that with extravagently long life, amazing supernatural power, and the need to feed on human prey, and you have an excellent formula for a villain. Over the course of a lifetime, most people become mere amplifications of what their nature draws them toward. Silly people become sillier, the wise become wiser, etc. We move toward an extreme unless or until something cataclysmic happens. And so I reason that most vampires are evil based off of an eternity of darkness, predatory feeding, and the betrayals involved with many fantastic "vampiric courts", such as those seen in Vampire: the Masquerade. Other fantasies argue a much more unnatural sort of evil that draws out of the vampire-- Buffy: the Vampire Slayer suggests they lack a soul and thus become selfish, murdering, callous monsters. David Gemmell also wrote "Morningstar," where a vampire does not feed on blood but rather on innocence, as true a monster as any. But I always preferred my vampires moving toward evil at their own pace, slowly losing their humanity as centuries slip past. You need to decide on what kind of stake-holster your king is-- the soulless or the sophisticated. Also, what kind of Champions of Good are these? A Paladin who fights for the Lady of the Light is going to want a strong moral agent on the throne (not that strong moral agents can't be frightening in power. . . .). If they're headed up by a world-weary general who knows that politics are a matter of choosing between bad and worse, then it will be more a matter of policy than biology. Personally, I like the idea of a dark ruler. I'll have to look that Eberron stuff up. But if nothing else, this is the kind of discussion I'd rather seen played out in a game between the PCs than anything. Watching the friction could be interesting.