#a thousand year old vampire

[hendrik-ten-napel]

Do you know about A Thousand Year Old Campfire?

It's a small game by, you guessed it, Tim Hutchings, the designer of A Thousand Year Old Vampire. If you're still guessing, you're also right that it's a brilliant game. And yes, I stumbled upon it while browsing through the zines my local games shop. It was a beautiful experience of what we lose to time—how did you know?

Anyway, if you didn't guess all that: this zine is about the excavation of Old Morris Cave, and it's a drawing game. You can read about it in my newsletter.

Consider subscribing if you'd like to read more like this!

[spaceytingz]

playing a thousand year old vampire..... give my girl a BREAK OMFGGGGG likeeeee

[ellawaddella]

Sketches for my Thousand Year Old Vampire character, Pietra.

[the-cypress-grove]

So, You Want To Write Vampires...

Here's a basic list of things to do/consider when approaching this creature.

Source Material

Go back to the origins. Almost every culture around the world has a story or myth containing cannibalism / blood drinking. You may want to base your origin story for vampires on one of these. This can also give you some ideas about what traits and abilities you might want to include that have been written out of modern fiction. It could help you add a unique twist.

2. Vampire Fiction

Vampires have been popping up in fiction for a very long time. Read The Vampyre by John Polidori (thought to be one of the first books written on vampires). Check out Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (the lesbian vampire story that came out before Dracula). Speaking of, Dracula is a classic.

Look at modern fiction. Vampire Academy, Twilight, Vampire Diaries, True Blood, A Dowery of Blood, Crave. Read the good and the bad. Learn what qualities you like and which you will not use.

Make a list of things you like and things you don't.

3. Themes

Writing vampires brings a lot of themes surrounding mortality, immortality, morality, and at what point do we draw the line between what is human and what is other. These themes are integral to a vampire story whether you're writing a gothic horror, a paranormal romance, or a YA. There are a lot of links between cannibalism / blood drinking and love, vampires and LGBTQIA+ characters / coding.

4.Pick your traits

Vampires tend to be unique to the writer. The vampires in Twilight work differently to the vampires in The Vampire Diaries to the vampires in Dracula.

By this point you should have a list of possible traits and abilities you might want to give your vampires. My advice: tailor it to your genre. If you're writing a horror go with the traditional vampire abilities, give them the things that scare you. Think Nosferatu. If you're writing romance, then you might want to soften the traditional vampire traits in the way you find frequently in modern vampire media.

What you choose is up to you.

5. Origins

This is often overlooked in vampire stories but how did your vampires come into being? Who was the first vampire? Is this vampire still alive? How far back do vampires go as a species?

This could affect your vampires in terms of relationships with others of their kind, their powers, their strength.

This might not impact on your plot but, in terms of worldbuilding, if you intend to turn your book into a series then this could be very important going forward.

6. Society

Unless you're writing about the first ever vampire you're probably going to be writing about an established vampire population who will have their own laws, their own history, their own leadership, their own customs. This is an important piece of worldbuilding. It will affect your characters relationships, add conflict to the plot, create established enemies and can be used to raise the stakes.

7. Nocturnal Life

If you're following a traditional burn-in-the-sun vampire and they haven't found a way around this then you need to determine the night life of your setting. What is there for your vampires to do at night?

8. Feeding, Hunting, and Bloodlust

This will affect the level of gore in your story as a lot of the bloody parts in your story will take place through feeding and hunting. This will also determine your vampire population.

You need to decide how much your vampires need to feed, how often they need to do so, and what they can feed on. Do they drink animal blood? Is that possible? Do they drink human blood? Can they drink from blood bags? Do they need the blood fresh? If they need human blood do they need all of it?

The less a vampire feeds, the larger a population you can have in one area as it attracts less attention.

What happens when your vampires are hungry? What does their bloodlust look like? How does it affect a vampire? Is the amount of bloodlust a vampire experiences determined by how old the vampire is?

9. Threats

Unless your vampires are well and truly endless there will be ways to kill them and they will have enemies. Do these enemies take the shape of humans, of other vampires, or another species entirely? How can your vampires be killed? What other species are out there?

[vintagerpg]

An Account of the Lengthy Existence and Numerous Experiences of Ambrose Backhouse, Vampire, with Special Attention to Those Years in Which He Walked Upon This Earth Tho Dead (2022) is a lovely graphic novel by Tim Denee and published by Tim Hutchings. It is essentially a log of a playthrough of Thousand Year Old Vampire. Denee posted the initial installments on Twitter as he went, which is where I initially saw them. Around that time, I was spectating a number of TYOV playthrough logs on social media and this was by far the most engaging, because pictures. I guess Hutchings thought so too!

Ambrose it turned to undeath by the Rek, an ancient vampire bound to the sea floor by heavy chains (love this, its so wonderfully evocative). The pair foster a deadly enmity for each other over the centuries, in and out of which weave the people of Ambrose’s daily life, their schemes and his miseries. As a narrative, it jutters, which is the nature of the game, but I find this to be compelling (just as I do in the game) because real life rarely has threads and conclusions that satisfy the framework of good narrative. This feels weirdly real, and derives a power from that feeling. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I really enjoy how the book resolves, like most lives, with much unfinished.

Denee’s approach to the art for this is perfect, very flat, highly graphical, almost as though pasted together with cut-out colored paper. It has a sense of assemblage that echoes the narrative. He is very good at pushing the style toward warmth or humor and then immediately pulling back to something horrible. The whole this is quite effective. And the book is handsome (if very oddly shaped). Treat yourself!

[shhroomer]

You guys ever read the most beautiful, jaw dropping, feet kicking, leaves you with a feeling of yearning fic that it possesses you? yea that was me anyways here’s vampire Kyle and his annoying assigned bodyguard who’s also a witch

(ALSO IF YOU WANT TO READ SAID FANFIC ITS A KYLE X READER FIC CALLED ITS FALLING FOR THE IDEA BY FEDOSAURUSREX ON AO3 THAT INSPIRED ME TO WHIP THIS WHOLE AU UP)

[armandposting]

marius does seem to have a lot of complicated feelings about what he did to armand and I really hope one of them is guilt for his thinking in buying armand originally. he talks in blood and gold about how when he heard armand's mind, the entire reason he wanted him was because he thought, here is a child who has been so hurt that it will be no loss to the world if I make him a vampire. and he wavers on this later and I hope it's because he saw this child make friends and learn things and love rings and watches and swordfighting and realize that actually there is never a child so damaged that taking them from humanity is no loss. I wonder if part of the reason he never tried to talk to armand after seeing him with the children of darkness is that he saw that boy changed into a lonely stoic cult leader with no more will or verve and was too consumed with guilt to even try. I hope that guilt started when he took armand to kiev rus and saw how much armand still loved the family he hadn't seen in years and for a while barely remembered from trauma. also I hope marius explodes into one thousand pieces but that's mostly irrelevant

[faggotkenjaku]

Stinky!!

[maddyisabstract]

Day 7 of #RPGaDAY2024! Not sure what 'good form' means in this context so I'm just gonna share the first solo TTRPG I played, Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings. Excellent prompts, BEAUTIFUL book, plenty of vampire angst for this goth right here.

[cestacruz]

Anyway since i dont think i actually posted these, have this

Bitches from a Monster AU theyre all gay

Uhh more in the tags cuz i dont wanna type here

[july-19th-club]

huge eric fan now for how he is about his weird little two-thousand-year-old enlightened teenage dad . like, oh, i'm huge and tall but i never want to seem like i'm looming over you so whenever we're face to face i'll kneel or sit below you and look up like you're some kind of jesus . when i met you i thought you were death and you said come walk with me through the dark and i said what's in it for me? and it's been a thousand years and i'm the age now that you were then and i haven't changed; i'm still a careless, blood-soaked opportunist and loving it, but you decided you were a pacifist somewhere in the past couple centuries and i SO SUPER don't get it but i love you so i hope you're happy and enjoying your linen smocks and ancient mien of peaceful remorse. and then i let you die because you think it will help and i hate to let you down. and i never get over you, ever

[kelgrid]

We talked about starting Thousand Year Old Vampire with a neolithic vampire and I got emotional 🥺

[gendernutralghost]

shoutout to my thousand year vampire character blorbo. no one will ever understand you and your backstory like I do

and that's because this is a solo ttrpg character i invented and so not available on any major streaming platforms

[daenysthedreamer101]

I'll just leave this here.

[wehavekookies]

New game new game 👀👀👀

[sn0wbat]

a row of einarrs because.... why not tbh.

honestly i just wanted to have a reference for his hair and skin colors at different ages. he changed a bit

details under cut

toddler

born very light blond

still very baby

child

hair may start darkening, as is usual with most natural blondes.

turned out to be surprisingly good at sewing, placing him with the women at an earlier age than usual. :^)

he was trying to give his dress a more masculine tunic cut, because he liked it more for some reason. unfortunately, he did it maybe a little too well.

still a bit clueless about his gender situation, but Something Felt Off

really liked roleplaying... you will never guess what gender all his best characters were. (boys. they were all boys.)

teen

so apparently lye bleach was a thing?? anyway he probably did that with his hair at this point.

came out as a boy 🏳️‍⚧️

going by einarr for real now

father immediately accepted him, mother not so much.

constantly wearing an oversized capelet over his entire torso because he was dysphoric as hell.

fledgling vampire (age 24-40)

ah, the hubris of exploring on his own while the rest of the group were trying to pillage this mysteriously empty castle. it's an old ruin. and those just intrigue him a lot. they are fascinating to him

anyway so basically he ran into a vampire while going viking. ended up in a duel. died.

in his early vampire years, his growing bat form's white fur started to overtake his existing hair color. kinda similar to graying hair.

once he realized how hardy vampires were, did top surgery on himself with a sword.

then he had to stitch himself up. with his existing sewing skills - a skillset deemed to be very feminine at the time. something poetic about that i feel

stuck in a castle. doesn't escape until he's like 50

middle vampire (age 200-700)

hair has already gone fully pale a long time ago.

skin is getting paler. more purple in tone.

ears are slowly growing in size, gaining transparency along with it

however, has also figured out how to blend in with humans again at this time (through vampiric illusions that make him look mortal)

peasant for a while. growing dislike of kings and authority figures. ends up joining the pirates in his seventh (?) century

has been caught drinking blood from humans, has been caught stealing from the rich, and has been to jail several times. usually escaped pretty easily with vampire powers. has been responsible for at least one mass jailbreak

the look of his clothing actually shifted a lot over all these centuries, but this art wasn't really focused on clothes, so i just picked something basic

ancient vampire (900+)

skin gone blue. fangs gone long.

ears reached their max size a while ago.

gotten quite nostalgic; started to wear norse-style clothing in his own time again. it's comfy and familiar!

among the mortals it has been many centuries of trying to match contemporary fashions. genuinely enjoys working with textiles though, so it's no big deal. yeah he still does this.

cannot keep up a human disguise for more than a couple hours... maintaining an illusion gets exhausting when it's so many things at once.

mostly goes for fish blood these days. it's not the greatest blood, but he likes the taste of it the most and it's less of a hassle to get when he's at sea all the time.

avoids the greater vampire community. he feels it's too much drama all the time, all while they just tend to think of him as a hermit, and well. they're not wrong.

has been known to take some odd jobs here and there, pretending to be mortal.

i did not actually intend to write down this much but!! i just like him a lot. gotta stop myself from writing too much. there's so much more i could say about him, but we'd be here forever