From: | Starjammer <starjammer@**********.COM> |
---|---|
Subject: | Vampire strategies |
Date: | Wed, 16 Dec 1998 03:48:10 -0500 |
>
>Here's a thought...
<snip request for vampire ideas>
>Ideas??? Come on folks, let's hear it!
>
>-K
Well, the first, last, foremost and always rule is: Screw With Their Minds.
Depending on your interpretation of the vampire, he'll either have innate
mental abilites (Influence, etc.) or at the very least a whole horde of
finely-tuned Control Manipulations and Illusions. Maybe both. Now, the
average ham-handed GM can fall back on the "look into my eyes and become a
slave to my pale, scrawny, anemic, vampiric, too-much-mascara-wearing,
too-little-food-eating,
you-wouldn't-give-me-a-second-look-if-I-didn't-have-fangs,
I'm-so-goth-I'm-dead lustiness" routine, but subtlety demands more.
First, any old vampire worth his salt is going to have feelers out all over
covering his sensitive interests, and the runners will show up on his radar
long before he shows up on theirs. And it should be fairly easy for him to
find them first.
So, being an old and wise vampire, he'll try the simplest method first:
Misdirection. Red herrings, false leads, mild distractions (like a dozen
good job offers from twelve different fixers and Johnsons within a month),
and so forth with a little subtle "encouragement" on the unconscious level.
If/when that fails to work, then comes the next part: Chaos. No overt
attacks, not yet. No, suddenly all that good fortune turns. Job offers
dry up. Milk runs go horrendously wrong for no good reason. People you
thought were friends just don't like you anymore. Nightmares. Things seen
from the corner of the eye. All your fake IDs get a tax audit. God simply
up-ends his shit-bin and you're standing underneath it. By this point the
runners should realize they've offended someone, though not who or why, and
should be getting jumpy.
Next stage: Menace. Unseen Things (TM) start Lurking in The Shadows.
Someone follows you for two blocks, then isn't there when you turn to
confront him. You find your pet cat's carcass on your front doorstep, and
it died when you were eight. Things Go Bump In The Night. Your old friend
turns up out of nowhere to apologize for being such an asshole to you for
the last three weeks, and you shoot him because you suspect he's one of
Them. An IRS agent turns up to conduct one of your tax audits, and you
shoot him when he pulls a gun on you; a gun that's not there when you look
for it. At this stage, God just drops the shit-bin on you. By now, the
runners should see that they're in a tunnel with lights on *both* ends, one
end's a way out, and the other's a train. Choose quick.
End game: Confrontation. By now, the runners from behind their barricaded
doors and ready to slaughter anything that moves should be finding out who
the enemy is and what's going on. Now comes the part where the runners
trace the strands of the web back to the center, running afoul of plots and
minions along the way and (to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones) engaging the
forces of evil and killing them deader than hell. By the time they find
their way to the Master Vampire, he can offer them an ultimatum: Walk away
or else. Fight me and you'll probably die, for I am ancient and immortal
and so forth. Even if you can kill me, I've buried you so deep that you'll
never dig your way out of it by yourself. OR... walk away and this all
becomes a bad dream. You can't hurt me, you can't fight me, you can't stop
me. Do the sensible thing. The runners might just agree, if you've done
it right.
It all comes down to psychological warfare and the practice of patience.
You don't have to kill the runners and call attention to yourself if you
can make them ineffective by sapping their energy an erg at a time. I
highly recommend Sun Tzu's _The Art of War_ on this topic. Even though it
refers primarily to the arrangement of armies, the principles of strategy
are universal.
Starjammer | Una salus victus nullam sperare salutem.
starjammer@**********.com | "The one hope of the doomed is not to hope
Marietta, GA | for safety." --Virgil, The Aeneid