#Dracula published like a scrapbook

[lycorogue]

I'm talking with a friend about Dracula Daily and how neat it is to revive a literary classic like that. How it was able to get published with its new chronological narrative as opposed to the original overlapping timelines.

But we both thought it would be cool if we somehow had a Dracula that included Jonathan's entries in shorthand with Mina's translation next to it.

Then I remembered the -ology books I read in the early 00s (I think... may have been late 90s).

For those who don't know, these were a series of childrens books that presented the fantastical or mythological as "factual" by designing the books like field guides or lost journals.

Their prominent series was Dragonology which had its own spin-offs. There was also Wizardology and Egyptology (which focused on the Egyptian pantheon being real) and Mythology (which was the same thing, but for Greek gods) and Monsterology, etc. Apparently there's 17 books in total in the series! I fell off at about 7!

Point being, these were awesome, interactive, fun books.

And I kind of want a Dracula stylized like them.

I want pages where it looks like Jonathan's original journal entries - written in the shorthand - are secured to scrapbook pages, with Mina's typed up translation nestled next to them. Similar to how Shakespearean plays have the original text to the left and then a modern translation on the right.

I want pages that look like Mina's and Lucy's letters back and forth to each other - printed with different handwriting fonts - are on corresponding pages. Maybe with the torn open envelopes tucked behind the letters.

I want Mina's transcriptions of John's audio recordings.

I want the telegrams being sent by Quincey or Helsing.

I want the actual newspaper clipping about the Demeter.

I want the receipts from the shipping company moving Dracula to Carfax.

I want the visual storytelling of all of these different bits of media compiled like a giant tome of a scrapbook.

I'd also love maps! Maps showcasing the route Jonathan took to and from Transylvania as well as the doomed route of the Demeter. I want a map of England with the various named locations showcased. I want a map of Whitby. I want a map of the interior of Dracula's castle.

So on and so forth.

Anyone know if this is already a thing now that Dracula is in the public domain? Anyone know of an existing shorthand translation of Jonathan's journal entries? Any graphic designers out there feeling where I'm going with this and want to team up to manifest it????

[vampireadamooc]

As Always: text is provided only in the event of access expiration or post deletions from the hosting site. Whenever possible, always read the article at the link.

Blood Types ‘The Vampire: A New History’ By Regina Munch October 29, 2018 Books Secularism and Modernity

The Vampire of Vinesac, 1883 (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo) Right from the start, a recent long-anticipated trip to Romania delivered on its promise. On the shuttle from the airport into the heart of Bucharest the driver asked if we had ever visited before. When I told him no, his mood turned grave. “We have a beautiful country,” he said. “But it is not safe to go out at night, especially for a young woman.” When I asked why, he hit the brakes, turned around slowly, and smiled. “You must be careful of the vampires.”

It was just what I’d been hoping for. A huge fan of Dracula, I’d always wanted to see the place that had inspired Bram Stoker’s classic tale, and to get a sense of how its citizens feel about clueless foreigners associating their entire country with nocturnal bloodsuckers and Vlad the Impaler. They certainly seem willing to cash in on it, judging from the tourism industry’s marketing and advertising. But they also revel in it, as evidenced by my grinning shuttle driver.

Romanians are hardly the first people to use the myth of the vampire to establish an identity or advance an agenda, as Nick Groom makes clear in his book The Vampire: A New History. Far from a Freudian representation of sexual desire, an inelegant metaphor for colonialism, or merely a played-out trope, the vampire, according to Groom, is something more layered and complex. “Vampires came into being when Enlightenment rationality encountered East European folklore,” he writes, “an encounter that attempted to make sense of them through empirical reasoning and that, by treating them as credible, gave them reality.” Various folklore traditions make whispering mention of mysterious hybrid ghosts, zombies, werewolves, and demons, many of which suck blood. Only after members of the European elite began to investigate these entities using the science of the day did they become what we know as vampires. Thus, “the vampire is a specific phenomenon that dates from a precise period in a certain place, and which consequently has recognizable manifestations and qualities—particularly concerning blood, science, society, and culture.”

Groom divides his book into two sections—delightfully titled “Circulating” and “Coagulating”—to demonstrate the flow of ideas about disease, demonology, and politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which congeal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the Gothic literary figure—epitomized by Stoker’s Dracula—that we’re familiar with today. He writes that although most histories of vampire mythology begin in the Victorian era, the Gothic monster can be traced back to the folkloric milieu of the previous two centuries. From Eastern Europe came tales of bloodsucking creatures that stalked the living, tales that through the 1600s and 1700s spread across the continent. They shared many of the same elements: the vampire comes into being through the reanimation of a corpse; it can influence the weather and certain animals; it preys on loved ones, strangling and sucking the victim’s blood, often from the chest; it can be killed with a stake or by decapitation. Localized versions might include more specific details, such as the unearthing and opening of a suspected vampire’s coffin to find the corpse floating in fresh blood and gore. Sometimes it had partially eaten itself and its clothes. In other versions, one could protect oneself by drinking blood from a vampire’s head, eating the dirt from its grave, receiving Holy Communion, or making the sign of the cross.

The corporeality of the vampire—as opposed to the ephemerality of a ghost, for example—lent itself well to “investigation” via the latest medical and forensic methodologies. William Harvey’s discovery of circulation, Christopher Wren’s development of hypodermic injections, and fears of contagious disease were changing the way the body was understood, and when European empires consolidated power over Eastern Europe, they deployed new techniques to make sense of what they were hearing about. It was only in such investigations, Groom writes, that vampires were “discovered”; they “did not exist until the emerging medical profession and natural philosophers began to try to explain them and they were thus named and categorized as vampires.” When, for example, a recently deceased woman was reported to be attacking villages in Moravia and her corpse was found to have fresh blood in it, Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa deployed two doctors and the head surgeon of the military to look into the matter. Such investigations were thoroughly documented, as Groom writes: “Detailed forensic examinations were accordingly made and records kept, including catalogues of signs and symptoms, and much learned (and pseudo-learned) work was published in professional journals.” Indeed, in the 1730s, many such journals made their reputations for scholarly seriousness and rationality with accounts of outbreaks of vampirism in Eastern Europe.

Even Enlightenment philosophes weighed in, trying to discern what was mere religious superstition and how, if vampires did indeed exist, they might be incorporated into knowledge about the natural world. As these reports spread west, debates about vampires “detonated.” One of Groom’s most interesting chapters recounts the different ways religious authorities responded to reports of vampires, and how their responses reflected their own theological and political priorities. The Catholic Church, for example, downplayed such reports; clergy saw that they might lose their influence if people resorted to near-pagan methods of protecting themselves from spiritual peril. Eastern Orthodox clergy, on the other hand, promoted belief in vampires and presided over stakings and decapitations of suspect corpses to reinforce their power over encroaching Roman Catholicism. From a theological standpoint, the issue was even thornier. For Protestant theologians, “vampirism, seemingly engineered by the Devil and his demonic minions, smacked too much of Catholic superstition” and so was dismissed. Catholics, theologically invested in corporeality, were in more of a bind. If the dead really were being raised to hunt the living, did that mean the Devil was as powerful as God? This couldn’t be true—so was vampirism a diabolical illusion meant to lure sinners into pagan beliefs? Even Enlightenment philosophes weighed in, trying to discern what was mere religious superstition and how, if vampires did indeed exist, they might be incorporated into knowledge about the natural world.

Bloodsucking monsters also transformed political life. Groom writes that as scientific discoveries increasingly “medicalized” the human body, so the metaphor of the “body politic” changed as well. Vampire analogies proved useful for political agitators: usurers were called vampiric for their predatory loans; monks sucked funds from the wallets of peasants; corrupt officials cannibalized their citizens. In other words, “blood oozed through eighteenth-century thought…simultaneously part of everyday life, a mysterious substance of folklore and superstition, [that] lay at the heart of the Christian mass and the symbolism of the Church.” The figure of the vampire encompassed all these aspects.

It is from this frothing and fearful era in European history that the literary Gothic vampire was born in the nineteenth century. While vampires originated in Eastern Europe, Groom writes, their main “artery” was England, where the vampire became Gothicized and Romanticized into the figures we know today. Anxieties over medical advances—corpse-harvesting; vivisection; and a new institution, hospitals—seeped into vampire stories. As theories of evolution began to gain traction, vampire mythology became a vehicle for expressing fear of regression to a primeval state—one in which we are all bloodthirsty predators. Soon enough it was fear of women—specifically the “New Women,” who “dressed casually, smoked, rode bicycles and even—horror of horrors!—educated themselves.” (It is telling that most nineteenth-century vampires were female.) Karl Marx applied the vampire metaphor to economics and politics: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Stoker’s Dracula is a culmination of all these aspects of the nineteenth-century vampire. The text is a “mass of papers—a scrapbook of textual proofs that reflect the earlier emphasis on evidence and authenticity.” Dracula is brilliant for its ability to set old folklore against new technology, to combine “contagion and the body, blood and the economy, political power, the invisible and vampirism” that haunted the Victorian imagination while drawing on an earlier obsession with empirical evidence and investigation.

Lurking in the cracks of social, theological, political, and medical knowledge, vampires drew “uncomfortable and disturbing attention” to society’s shortcomings. Always threatening to escape the cracks, to “ooze” and “contaminate,” vampires confound boundaries and borders, natural and supernatural, self and other. Groom writes, in the most chilling passage I have read in an academic text, “Vampires are not both dead and alive; they are also undead. And so they disturb the primacy of animated life and humanity by replacing the fundamental distinction of life and death with a third state of being”—that is, unbeing.

Though Groom impressively manages to analyze vampires’ influence on almost every facet of private and public life—social, theological political, medical, cultural, sexual, literary—over the span of four centuries, there are a few missteps. For such a well-organized book, the writing can meander. And in his evident enthusiasm for the topic, Groom sometimes loses the reader with examples that don’t quite find their way back to a larger point. But the examples are so fascinating in themselves that this is forgivable.

Groom writes that he has “tried to resist essentializing the vampire as an elemental mythic type,” or letting it be a mere canvas for theories about sexual neuroses, colonialism, or feminist theory, “valuable as these approaches might be in other ways.” Instead, “the vampire becomes more thought-provoking and more perplexing” in its correct historical context, and when it is allowed to seep from the fractures in our thinking and the contradictions of daily life. “Vampires are good to think with,” he writes. Let them be the “roving thought-experiments” that they are. I agree with him there. Just be careful at night.

[adalard-schroder]

STRIGOI

This is the type of vampire Count Dracula was. They are rare, but dangerous. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

Immune to sunlight. Usually malicious. POWERFUL.

These are the ones known to have super strength, super speed, able to transform into animals, weather manipulation, immortality, and ARE ABLE TO CAST SPELLS. THEY CAN CURSE YOU.

There are three types:

strigoaică: female, much like a witch

strigoi viu (living strigoi): A sorcerer of sorts, has extreme weather manipulation and will steal from farmers

strigoi mort (dead strigoi): THIS IS WHAT DRACULA WAS. The most dangerous kind, they will act as they did in live while draining their victims.

Slaying

They are extremely hard to kill, but here is a short summarry from wikipedia:

In 1887, French geographer Élisée Reclus details the burials in Romania: "if the deceased has red hair, he is very concerned that he was back in the form of dog, frog, flea or bedbug, and that it enters into houses at night to suck the blood of beautiful young girls. So it is prudent to nail the coffin heavily, or, better yet, a stake through the chest of the corpse. "[19]

Simeon Florea Marian in Înmormântarea la români (1892) describes another preventive method, unearthing and beheading then re-interring the corpse and head face down.

The Dracula Scrapbook by Peter Haining, published by New English Library editions in 1976, reported that the meat of pig killed on the day of St. Ignatius is a good way to guard against vampire, according to Romanian legend.[20]

There is a known method used by gypsies to get rid of a strigoi as explained on the show Lost Tapes:

Exhume the strigoi. Remove its heart and cut it in two. drive a nail in its forehead. Place a clove of garlic under its tongue. Smear its body with fat of a pig killed on St. Ignatius' Day. Turn its body face down so that if the strigoi were ever to wake up it would be headed to the afterlife.

[rpgsandbox]

Pelgrane Press is terrified to announce The Yellow King Roleplaying Game. Written and designed by GUMSHOE master Robin D. Laws, YKRPG takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines.

Inspired by Robert W. Chambers’ influential cycle of short stories, YKRPG pits the characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. This suppressed play, once read, invites madness. Or a visit from its titular character, an alien ruler intent on invading and remolding our world into a colony of their planet, Carcosa. Four books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront your players with an epic journey into reality horror:

Belle Epoque Paris, where a printed version of the dread play is first published. Players portray American art students in its absinthe-soaked world, navigating the Parisian demimonde and investigating mysteries involving gargoyles, vampires, and decadent alien royalty. Includes the core rules.

The Wars, an alternate reality in which the players take on the role of soldiers bogged down in the great European conflict of 1947. While trying to stay alive on an eerie, shifting battlefield, they investigate supernatural mysteries generated by the occult machinations of the Yellow King and his rebellious daughters.

Aftermath, set later in the same reality, in 2017 North America. A bloody insurrection has toppled a dictatorial regime loyal to Carcosa. Players become former partisans adjusting to ordinary life, trying to build a just society from the ashes of civil war. But not all of the monsters have been thoroughly banished—and like it or not, they’re the ones with the skills to hunt them and finish them off.

This is Normal Now. In the 2017 we know, albeit one subtly permeated by supernatural beings and maddening reality shifts, ordinary people band together, slowly realizing that they are the key to ending a menace spanning eras and realities.

New GUMSHOE features include:

A completely new player-facing combat system.

A fresh, evocative approach to wounds, physical and psychic, inspired by the innovations of GUMSHOE One-2-One.

Linked character creation across multiple settings.

The Yellow King Roleplaying Game. The core game. Four books in 6" x 9" format, grouped together in a gorgeous slipcase: Paris; The Wars, Aftermath, and This Is Normal Now. Core rules appear in the Paris book, with brief setting-specific rules sections in the other three. The beautiful and ingenious slipcase includes a GM screen. Although dabblers can get just a PDF of Paris book by pledging at the introductory Dauber tier, the four books are not sold separately. When you purchase The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, you get the complete set of four.

Absinthe in Carcosa. The sourcebook. 1895 Paris cries out for a city guide, and this is it—a player-facing world artifact presented as a scrapbook created by an art student just like the characters. Brought to stunning full-color life by document wizard Dean Engelhardt (The Hawkins Papers) this book compiles public domain period sources, intriguing ephemera, and a raft of troubling Carcosan ramblings written by Robin, each ready to springboard into a scenario premise.

The Missing and the Lost. The novel. Set in the Aftermath reality, this new work of fiction by Robin features the return of a favorite character from his previous short story collection, New Tales of the Yellow Sign. The man called the Repairer wants to forget what he did in the rebellion, and everything he knows about the care and maintenance of Government Lethal Chambers. But traces of Carcosa still stir in the ruined places of America, and they have other ideas.

The Yellow King All-Rolled Up (ARU). More than a dice bag, this gaming roll, brought to you by the makers of the ENnie-winning Dracula Dossier ARU, lets you gather your cards, d6s, and writing implements together in a sweet swaddle of decadent yellow.

The core game comes in three editions:

Standard Edition: Hardback covers for all four books. The version you'll later see in your local store.

Deluxe Edition: Leatherette covers for all four books, with signed bookplate. These will not be available at retail stores.

Ultra-Limited: Hand-altered Deluxe Editions, signed and numbered, with hand annotations and pasted-in documents and ephemera, each one unique. Only 10 copies will be sold, and these will only be available in pledge levels.

The sourcebook and novel come in your choice of:

standard softcover editions or

deluxe limited editions - the sourcebook has a leatherette cover, and the novel a clothbound cover with dust jacket.

As soon as you pledge, at any level, you gain immediate download access to a PDF preview document of the game in its current work-in-progress draft form. You'll be able to play right away—and, if you're inclined to help us out further, send us playtest feedback to help us refine and improve the final game.

Kickstarter campaign ends: Sat, July 22 2017 1:00 AM BST.

Website: Pelgrane Press

[blood-fangs-talons]

Dracula Talk: Unreliable Narrators Make Room!

I propose that Dracula’s structure and writing makes it ideal for re-imagining the story with the morals and emphasis that we, the media consumer, deems important. Its ‘found footage’ type construction allows us to reject the specifics of the story that Bram Stoker presents, and rearrange the narrative to suit our specific need or wants.

So if you’ve never read Dracula, it’s made entirely out of diary entries and newspaper clippings. 

That’s the book. 

Dracula is like someone’s scrapbook of "The Worst Six Months Of My Life”.

A lot of the tension in Dracula relies on the person writing an entry, not knowing the implications of what they’re seeing--the journalist, not understanding why the Demeter washed up onto a sand bar, and the townspeople worried about the dog that escaped it. van Helsing, learning of the fateful evening on the cliffs too late. Seward, not knowing that the bizarre turns his patient took were directly indicative of the movements of the vampire until it was useless (because Renfield was fuckin dead). The book is full of not knowing important things. 

Since I’m a vampire nerd, I like to imagine what would happen if the characters of the book were real. So let’s suppose that the whole lot of them got together and found a guy to write their journals into novel form, and published it as a sort of ‘don’t worry vampires aren’t real but if you see someone doing this shit maybe feed them some garlic just in case and also here’s how to kill one steps 1 through 10.’

A lot of interesting things come up once you have ‘the hunters were real’ as a premise. because it means that 

1) there is a ‘true’ story, 

2) that the events of the book do not necessarily accurately depict that ‘true’ story, and 

3) that events took on two filters: one through the observer (the refraction of truth being reduced by having the accounts of multiple observers) and the other through the ghostwriter (Alias Bram Stoker). 

This results in a very distorted image of events.

God knows what we might have missed with this, with at least five unreliable narrators (Mina, Johnathan, Jack, Lucy, and occasionally Arthur, as well as the myriad of nameless journalists and letter writers. Because all of the characters are human, they are inherently unreliable narrators).

God knows what we might have missed with this, with a ghost writer who was a Victorian Male, with Victorian Male Sensibilities. 

THIS IS A GOOD THING FOR FICTION AND FANFICTION WRITERS. This much ambiguity and vague storytelling means that that you can put ANYTHING BETWEEN THE LINES. you can even ERASE SOME LINES, with the declaration that “this was probably written by a jackass who wanted to fulfill his own personal fantasies and expectations of how women act, talk, and write when men aren’t around”

As I have done here. 

So Go Forth, my fellow Dracula Packmates! interpret! Conjecture! Imagine! And above all, STICK IT TO THOSE SEXIST, HOMOPHOBIC VICTORIAN WHITE MALES