A Genre Issue

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Dave Storrs has run several sessions of a Dresden Files game. Last session, one of the PCs encountered a Jade Court vampire, or so we're pretty sure. As we have no details about these vampires from Butcher's books or the rpg-in-progress, Dave invented his own version, and they're pretty lethal. They feed not on blood, but on intelligence, dreams, that sort of thing. A wizard's mind is particularly tasty.

Nunzio was a bit skeptical that the White Council didn't know a lot about them and that they hadn't gone to war with the Council. None of this really bothers me -- as Dave pointed out, the mere handful of facts the PCs have was what one wizard on the Council could look up in one book in the space of about an hour. The Jade Court signed the Unseelie Accords. No, that doesn't bug me.

The fact that the Jade Court is so awesomely badass wouldn't bug me at all if they proved to be extremely rare and if there are no similar critters that the PCs also conveniently don't know about lurking out there. The problem here is not Dave's gming, but the conventions of the genre he's emulating.

The things with a series like the Dresden books or the Anita Blake books is that you've got a character who's an outsider private detective type in a supernatural world. The easiest way to sustain this concept in book after book is to keep inventing new types of supernatural communities for the character to learn about. Eventually, the weight of this threatens to overwhelm the reader's suspension of disbelief. How, with all of this stuff out there, is it possible that humanity as a whole is still in the dark? How are certain factions in the dark about certain other factions?

Right now, in Dave's game, it's not really an issue. We're starting to put pieces together, and the Jade Court is the only thing that seems to be in its position of Big, Unknown, and Few Known Weaknesses. It's that "known" that's the key there, as Dave's indicated that more research may turn up useful information.

Oh, there's also a demon running around, but that's merely Big. We know from demons. Okay, we know that the PCs are in a really bad position, but it's not like they've never heard of these things. There may or may not be some snake woman at some point, according the the PC with Cassandra's Tears, but one unique creature doesn't bother me, and if she's totally unknown, well, as of now, it's not like anyone bothered to do serious research on the concept of snake women.

But I could see things piling up over time. This is why I eventually decided in the original Cthulhupunk game I ran that humanity would find out about the supernatural. It had gotten to the point where agrumer was joking about the Herd, i.e., humans, being a myth that monster parents tell child monsters to scare them into behaving. "Be good, or the humans will get you!"