Editing Vampire (section)

==If you're including them in your setting...==

If you're including vampires in your worldbuilding, you should probably decide what general metaphor and niche you're going for.

To provide some examples of niches:

* The inhuman monsters who are merely pretending to be human.
* The tortured and persecuted people struggling with their inhuman and/or monstrous wants and/or needs.
* Both of the above, with the more inhuman ones being the ones who fall off the slippery slope.
* Always Enemy Mook types, who it's perfectly okay for protagonists to murder by the bucketful.
* Superhuman badasses who in turn have some very obvious vulnerabilities.
** In other words: A just about perfect opponent for an "asymmetric warfare" scenario.

And some of the more obvious metaphors to reach for:

* Human predators, whether social or physical.
* "Aristocrats are evil parasites" cliches made literal.
* Violent criminals generally.
* The inhuman creature who mainly serves as an exploration of immortality.
* On the positive side, it's fairly easy to make "attempting to be good" vampires into "recovering addict" metaphors.

The two most important questions are "Are they protagonist material?" and "Are they by default antagonists?"--and it's quite possible to answer "Yes" to both, with the "good guy" vampires being in some way the exception to the rule (for example, a spell exists to grant a vampire a human soul)--or, for that matter, "no" to being default antagonists (for example, if they don't need to kill when they feed, nor do they have to feed on humans, "civilized" vampires may emerge).

Another question to ask is whether you want to give them an animal motif, and if so, what animal. There are actually a number of options here. There's the obvious classical bat, but that connection actually only arose when European settlers arrived at North America and learned that some of the bats there drink blood; prior to that, vampires turned into wolves. The film Nosferatu actually gave Orlok (yes, ''that'' was the vampire's name) a ''plague rat'' motif. And as mentioned above, the Bloodsuckers of the videogame Darkest Dungeon brilliantly utilize a mosquito motif, one particular individual amongst them instead has a tick motif, and then there's a mod for that game where an individual of a different strain comes along who has a leech motif.

There's also the all-important but rarely-addressed question of whether nonhuman blood can sustain them, and by extension whether nonhuman vampires are possible. If the answer to either of these is no, then it's best to have a reason why. If the answer to both is yes, then it's best to give your vampires some of the freaky supernatural abilities and aspects available to you, because otherwise they'd really be no different from some poor sob who got attacked by a wild animal and contracted rabies.

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