Cheating Death: Analysis of the Literary Vampires in Role Playing Games

Abstract

The figure of the Vampire, as we know it today, has captivated people’s imagination for centuries. Vampire legends can be found in Mesopotamian cultures and in early Greek myths, as well as the blood-drinking spirits of Chinese and Japanese civilisations. These stories were particularly relevant in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and spread from there, first in the form of travelling tales in the 16th- and 17th-centuries, and then formalized as the gothic tales and melodramas of the romantic imagination in the late 18th and early 19th-centuries, coinciding with the re-structuring of society and the emergence of industrialization. Most scholars have argued that these stories reflected unconscious community fears at a time of rapid social changes. The vampire is one of the emblems of the
Gothic exploration of the monstrous. It represents the inhuman and the undead. A monster of the night that lives at the expense of other living creatures.

Contemporary works of modern and postmodern horror maintain, in many cases, similar iconographies while incorporating some changes to the figure of the vampire. Closely associated with technological advance, the vampire took on new attributes with the emergence of cinematography. One of the first a most famous movies in this regard is 1922 Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) by the German expressionist F.W. Murnau.

In the early years of the 21st-century, the customary iconography of the vampire changed. These changes have a lot to do with targeting teenager audiences as potential consumers. All kind of products associated with the vampiric theme can be found today, from comic books to video and role-playing-games and music, all with a clear vampiric aesthetic in which the vampire is no longer an object of fear, but a figure representing difference and transgression. This is the case of the True Blood or Twilight series. However, this paper argues that the longevity and success of the vampire as a cultural icon is not only due to its transgressive social potential. My concern is with ‘death’, the ultimate human taboo. To prove my point, I will examine the figure of the vampire in the 1991 role-playing game “Vampire: The Masquerade” by White Wolf Publishing, a production that captures all of previous attributes of this classic figure. Because of the space limitations of this paper, I will only concentrate in three classic novels within the UK repertoire: Dracula, The Vampyre and Carmilla.