An Alternate Necrology of Vampires
Vampires. Vampires aren't like other undead. A zombie is brought back from the dead as a rotting corpse, a slave to its master's desires. A skeleton brought back bare of flesh, empty of soul, likewise a slave. The lich goes gleefully into death to move beyond to become something entirely else It dies so that it can stay forever in the mortal realm . . . without being mortal. . . without being alive. A mummy is created often as a guardian of a tomb, trapped there forever, or is a priest ritually transitioned into undeath to continue their gods work in the world forever. . . but again, they die first. A vampire isn't like that. A vampire is undead and unliving, but it's because they're caught between life and death. They cling on to life so hard, they can't let go. They never actually die. Instead they stop in a place in between, caught out of time, with a body that continually returns itself to the state it was in at the time of their death. It is this timelessness, and this state of never having really died, that distinguishes them from other undead. As such almost all vampires still retain their mortal memories, their mortal souls, probably at the very least their mortal personality, unless they've had their mind destroyed by the transition and gone feral, but even then somewhere deep inside the original person is still there. The problem is that hunger for life, that overwhelming desire to live no matter what, has translated itself into a literal hunger for life. A vampire drains the life of others to sustain their own, because they don't have any of their own. As long as they can continue to drain this life from others, they can remain as they were: young and vital forever. Unless they're unlucky enough to be one of those that continues to age. . . but still they're caught out of time and the fuel for that is life.
Now the most obvious kinds of vampires drink blood, after all the blood is the life. But there are other ways to be a vampire. One can drain life force directly. One can steal breath. One can drain chi, which is probably just life force after all. The definition is clear: a vampire feeds on the life of others. Vampires are often characterized as predators, and some of them can be. Some of them strike and kill and feed unto the death of the person that they take life from. But many slowly feed and some may never kill. This makes them more parasite than predator, and if they choose to give back some measure of value to those that they take life from it can even be a symbiosis.
Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder assume that all vampires are evil: that the transition into undeath makes them evil; and there's certainly a tendency there. The hunger for life that is disdainful of the needs of others to the point that you would steal their life to continue your own does have a tendency toward evil, but a balance can be found. One can be less than evil, if not precisely good.
The other thing we must understand is that Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder portray vampires in a few very specific ways. Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition really only has one kind of vampire: the suave sophisticated charismatic vampire, often a nobleman. That's what the archetypes are going for. But there are many other archetypes, and there are as I pointed out before vampires that don't drink blood. Pathfinder has a few more. They have the standard vampire, the moroi. They have the Jiang Shi who feeds on life force rather than blood and takes some aspects from Asian vampires. They have the Nosferatu who becomes visually a monster and older and more destructive, a less seductive kind of vampire. These just scratch the surface of what vampires can be, and we're going to get into that..
It's interesting to me that the vampire is one of the creatures that exists throughout the world in almost every mythology, in almost every folklore, and it has a similar interpretation in most of them, but the idea of the suave sophisticated vampire is very new. The idea that vampirism is entirely a communicated curse, something caused by another vampire drinking your blood too many times (or even required to give you some of their own blood) . . .well, that's not as old as one might think either. Now many victims of vampires would in most folklore come back as vampires, but the first vampire in any infestation usually had a very different origin. They might be cursed by God (or a demon or a devil or a witch) for some transgression they made in life. They might be simply unfortunate enough to have died of a plague and be the embodiment of that plague in the world. In Slavic myth they could simply have been a werewolf during life and automatically become a vampire after death. Many other individuals with just some oddities about them were considered to automatically become vampires after death. Religious heretics could become vampires after death simply because of that. But the thing that strikes me again in all those cases is (from my perspective), that what they all have in common is that hunger for life, that refusal to go into the dark, and a hunger for life that will allow them to remain in their bodies. They're like ghosts that won't let go, and use the life of others to fuel the body that they're moving around.
Now there are some other creatures that have some similarities, like a revenant, but a revenant is driven . They come back for specific goal. They come back to kill their murderers, or save their children, or something like that, and when that goal is achieved they're done. They go peacefully into the night. A vampire on the other hand lusts for life. All of the aspects of life. Many of the Slavic vampires and other vampires across the world do not just feed on blood and that sort of thing. Some of them also eat flesh. You've got the nachzehrer and the upir and all these other creatures, some of which are as much zombie from modern perspective as they are vampire. They can be quite different. The nachzeherer for instance turns into a feral pig rather than turning into a bat. (The bat thing is pretty new.) Vampires are more often associated with things like rats, although there is an association with wolves obviously. The thing is, not only do they feed on blood and flesh, but many vampires, especially in the Slavic countries, come back to have carnal relations with their spouse. They want everything about life. They want to continue to live, and this really distinguishes them, especially from the other common intelligent undead that are still in their bodies, like liches and mummies, because a lich or mummy didn't become undead to continue to live. They became undead to surpass mortality, to avoid ever having to be mortal again, to to leave life behind. It's a very different perspective: a vampire wants to live forever.
When you take into account that the mortal mind is probably not suited to immortality, and unlike the mummy and the lich, they have not transitioned into a state of true immortality but simply frozen themselves at the moment of death, a vampire is far more likely, over a great deal of time, to become unstable, to lose memories, to become unaware of who they once were, or what they once wanted. But they will still remember that they want to live. Their primary drive is that lust for life, however it be expressed, whether it be expressed sexually, or blood drinking, or direct life drain . . . and all three of those can be combined in the same entity.
With that in mind we are going to address in this alternate necrology a few possible additional origins for vampires, and talk about some of the lesser known types of vampires across mythology and folklore. . . and also some origins for vampires that were not explicit in the mythological material, but to me make a lot of sense and fit in. This Alternate Necrology, while it will be going into a D&D 5e supplement when I put out my book, is much more widely applicable. This should be useful for World of Darkness, for Night’s Black Agents, for any game that includes vampires as one of its primary enemy types, or even player character types. This is kind of a deep dive into vampires.
Now I would like to shout out to GURPS for the Bloodlines book and the Undead book, which did a lot of research into the nature of vampirism across the world, and obviously to White Wolf’s treatment in Vampire the Masquerade and Vampire the Requiem, but I'm going to delve into some things that they didn't even. Buckle up. This is going to be a long one.
The now standard vampire portrayed in D&D is obviously based on the Stoker version from Dracula, with a touch of Anne Rice for flavor. It has most of Dracula’s abilities, and his weaknesses…but it also has the pop culture weakness to sunlight that seems to be everywhere (except, oddly, Twilight, which I’m not getting into). Dracula isn’t hurt in any way by sunlight, although he cannot use many of his powers in daylight. He, like the vampires before him, walks in the day with ease. The first instance of a vampire being destroyed by sunlight is the Dracula knock-off movie (great in its own right) Nosferatu, from the 1920’s. It can turn into a bat, it can control the minds of those who meet its eyes, it can summon rats, bats or wolves. It heals swiftly and drains both blood and pure life force, depending on its mode of attack. It’s serviceable…but a little bland. And rarely is any thought put into the why and how of vampires. (For a little insight on that, see my Alternate Thaumatology of Curses and on the Origin of Monsters).
For a very different perspective on vampires, consider three closely related ones from Celtic myth: the glaistig, the leanan sidhe, and the ganconer. These are all beautiful *fey* who drain the life and sometimes blood from their victims. The Leanan Sidhe gives inspiration and artistic skill in return, but they all drive their victims to death. These aren’t undead at all! They are more like succubi (another type of vampire, honestly). But…what if their victims became undead . . . caught outside time by the ageless nature of the fey but not able to become truly immortal like them?
Or perhaps the keres, angelic looking figures (similar to valkyries) from Greek myth, the handmaidens of Eris and Ares. As spirits of violent death, they feed on the waning life of those dying on the battlefield, or even bring them death directly. What if they were demonic spirits that likewise could bring their victims back to a state of unlife…as long as the victim is willing to pay the price of stealing the life of others forever? Or likewise, imagine if the *valkyrie* are like that, and when they choose the slain to live forever in Valhalla, they are actually making the einherjar into vampires, and Valhalla is actually still the mortal world?
Imagine a line of vampires started by the curse the Greek gods put on Tithon, given immortality but no immunity to aging, draining both life and youth from their victims and passing on the curse, all to avoid shriveling into a husk that still hungers, able to influence time, able to take the form of a cicada…
Imagine the blood descendants of Tantalus, he who was cursed to hunger and thirst eternally in Tartarus for the sin of feeding his own son to the gods . . . only Demeter ate any (we aren’t getting into the bloodlust of fertility deities right now, that’s a whole article). A curse of eternal hunger and thirst sounds like a vampire to me, and the grapes and receding pool are just an allegory for never being satisfied no matter how much life you take. . .
Further afield, outside the pale of European lore, we have some really interesting possibilities. Most of the Aztec gods were bloodthirsty, requiring sacrifice of blood, of hearts, of lives. And literal undead stars came down as heart-eating vampires in the form of the horrific Tzitzimitl. But it’s really the spawn of Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli who might be recognizable as vampires to us, or those flayed in honor of Xipe Totec…But the creature the Aztecs themselves feared as a vampire was a servant of Tezcatlipoca called the civatateo, a woman who died in childbirth and was transformed into a bloodsucking monster who would hunt young men for both blood and sex, and have their children (after killing them) who were *also* vampires!
Africa was not without its vampires, such as the adze of the Ewe people of Ghana, which took the form of a firefly, or sometimes a horsefly, but might also take human form, possess humans, or become a twisted goblin thing, or a ball of light (not the only vampire to do this, just wait). Worse than just taking the blood of the living, they would suck the life from an entire village's crops, dooming them all. These were the inspiration for my midgecloud vampires in the Beast-Kin Vampires supplement.
Another African bloodsucker is the asanbosam, from the Akan people of Ghana, an ogrish vampire with red hair and iron teeth, which sometimes resembles a gigantic bat with a 20 foot wingspan and has hooks for hands. Not to mention the obayifo of the Ashanti people, which shines light from its armpits and anus, and possess people, or the Asiman of the Dahomey people, who is a living witch who can fly in the form of the ball of light (remember the adze?) and turn into animals once they have fed.
Southwest Asia definitely has its own entries, like the vetala, an undead corpse possessing spirit that causes all sort of horrors, like miscarriages, by stealing life. Interestingly, they are *specifically* said to be held between life and death. The pisacha, on the other hand, are demons who feeds on human lifeforce, can turn into any animal, and become invisible. They are said to be able to possess people, but that could well be just their mind control.
North Asia isn’t left out. I’ll just mention one here, the coppernail, a fiend who appears as a beautiful woman with long copper or bronze fingernails that she uses to suck your blood out.
China, of course, has the aforementioned jiang shi or chiang-shi. It is of note that they are quite different from their Pathfinder incarnation. Unlike many of the other vampires, they do really die…but often refused to let go, or at least their ‘evil soul’ their po, did. They might be raised by necromancy, they might be exposed to too much yang aspected chi, a black cat might jump over their coffin while they lay in it, you name it. It being a contagion only appears in modern tales probably influenced by western cinema. They drain chi, and might look like a normal corpse, usually with rigor mortis, thus the ‘hopping’ gait attributed to them, or a white furred long taloned monster. Some turned into butterflies or cats.
Japan had (among others) the gaki, who were hungry ghosts or maybe kami who could feed on anything from colors and music, to blood and life, to corpses and dung. Each one ate something different . . but nothing ever satisfied them. They also had the snake necked blood drinking nure-onna, and the razor haired harionago.
Southeast Asia has the hideous penanngalan, which detaches its head from its body and flies at night to drink blood trailing it’s lungs and intestines along behind it, or the aswang, a beautiful girl with a super long needle like tongue that sucks blood and can only be killed by stuffing her hair and nails into the second mouth at the back of her neck.
Australia has the super weird Yara-ma-yha-who, a short , red, frog-like, toothless critter with suckers on its hands. It drains your blood with its suckers, then swallows you, then regurgitates you. If it does this enough times, you become one.
These are just a few of the examples from each region mentioned, people have filled whole books with vampire lore.
Imagine animals come back from the dead to drink the blood of the two legged as revenge for their mistreatment in life, especially animals unjustly reviled by humans: bats, spiders, snakes,wolves, tigers, biting flies, panthers, toads…and more.
Imagine a druid of the circle of spores come back as a vampire, still fighting for his wilderness…
Imagine the Mothman of urban folklore as a former moth-winged fey turned vampire…
Imagine an elven priest of a god of winter, from an arctic living tribe, stealing blood and warmth..
Imagine the host of the Sluagh, ghost, faerie, and vampire all at once, both alone and as a gargantuan swarm…
Imagine Strahd von Zarovich with levels that actually represent his background as ‘the Warrior, good and just’.
Imagine, as Derleth or Lovecraft might have, as Lumley did, vampirism as a horrible infection from the Khaos outside, somehow akin to the aberrations...
Vampire lords, and the First Vampire…
All these and more will be in my upcoming supplement: A Lust for Life, the Alternate Necrology of Vampires.
