SNV dev notes

This is a roleplaying community blog.

It is also a personal anecdote. 

It is game development notes while working on a flagship project, Space Ninja Vampirates. 

It is also a personal anecdote. 

TRIGGER WARNINGS: MATURE CONTENT. 

On Developing SNV

Trying to do something new with it. 

People go-to resources for inspiration. 

Example: 

FASA’s Shadowrun’s Matrix was not Tron in the core book but all the digital art looks like it. 

Yes: my project is inspired by space opera science fiction and horror cliches. 

No: it should not be played as a re-enactment of those sources. 

How to reconcile this? 

Rehumanise the human. Make the tribes folky. The love within the group of survivors. Exaggerate their dominant personality trait. 

Contrast that with; the monstrousness of the monsters. They are truly filthy, degenerate, abhorrent monsters. 

Make it 18+ XXX Mature rated Horror. 

The vampires are dark triad (narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths) and pedophiles.

The innocents are virgins with a simple, pure code of honour. 

In nineteen-eighties horror movie style they should all be teenagers. 

Anyone whose personality profile is between naive and perverted is subject to temptation, seduction, manipulation. Which is in almost entirely all of us. 

To become all we are capable of being, the full self, requires experience. Experiences change us. Extreme experiences widen our potential dramatically. 

Our integrity is tested by situations. It is called into question and into focus. Our ability to maintain internal stability throughout diverse and extreme experiences is the measure of us. Our reliance on our tribe to help us retain humanitarianism. 

Question: are polyamorous, bisexual gang-bangers, inherently amoral if they don’t know any better? It’s tempting to explore that fully and without prejudice. It’s too easy to make vampires into BDSM cultists and to portray that as an evil thing. 

But I want a more mature game. To cover more angles than using the game to direct hate toward any specific subgroup no matter how deserving according to a different subgroup. 

For example, exploring how children’s blood is more potent and pure than adult blood ignores the refinement and maturity from experience, which flavours the blood of elders. While Vampires have personal preferences, they are connoisseurs. 

Do the Players get to play as Vampires?

Perhaps there are grades of vampires. 

It runs risk of becoming too similar to a particular existing, famous, influential gothic horror role-playing game.  

There is a definite need for a Safety Net. 

I am unsure to leave interpretation open to the player groups to modify the concept to their own play-style or to develop it into a more precision instrument. 

Path of least resistance. 

Keep it minimal and broad-based. 

In my own personal life and explorations of LGBT and BDSM cultural influences I have always maintained two hard rules.

No children, No animals. 

Those are taboos I am not prepared to endorse or encourage. Not even in vampire fiction. 

This game is actively against pedophilia and bestiality. 

I’m worrying about what to do with that. Is it actively against them by ignoring those topics and not including them in the game at all? Or is it actively against them by making them the evil which the heroes are out to destroy? 

It is winter of 2022 / 2023 as I write this. Social media is currently full of the social issues of the day. LGBT is being used as a shield by pedophiles to groom children. 

Time for honest disclosure and courage. 

I was groomed by pedophiles as a child. We didn’t even know what that was back then. Felt it was wrong and re adults involved were bad people. Kids are powerless and have no voice. I was sexually abused by pedophiles as a child. It is a real issue to me, it has affected me. I am at age 44 still in therapy because of it. 

I am now a father myself of a child who has dropped out of school because the teachers are grooming kids in classrooms and he objects to it, simultaneously he is angry that nobody appears to be listening to the kids themselves attempting on raise an alarm bell about it. 

We went to a Protest exhibition in the capitol city museum and were caught up in a Protest against Government school syllabus grooming children behind closed doors, which helped us to put our own experiences in context. 

I’m writing a project about a ruling class of powerful vampires who are intentionally sick perverts, as terrifying protagonists to fight against. 

Of course I am directly linking these things, the influences and inspirations of my own life experiences with my creativity output. 

I want to do it in a safe way. 

I want to get it right. 

I also want to draw blood and create a project which bites deep enough to make a splash in peoples awareness and memory. 

To get paid for it. 

I was born an indigo child in the 1970s and raised on a farm as a hippy kid. My childhood through 80s corporate capitalism and teenaged through the crusty-techno 90s. I came of age at the Millennium. In a field somewhere on the outskirts of Vurtopia. 

Then it was a splash at working for the MoD to fund my sex magic partners voodoo habit and inevitable splashdown into rough dirty concrete and trashy tarmac torture of gangland scenes and underground film and music studio productivity. 

Then further up the coast to dog-town to raise my brave viking son with his witch of a mother. Kept myself sane in my recluse by writing sci-fi stories and gluing bits of card together for tabletop roleplaying game terrain. 

Somehow already it’s 2022, I’m 44 and even this window is becoming someplace I passed through where before the alignment was a curious harmonic of everything coming together at last. 

Which in many ways it has. Strangely the shape it has taken is SNV. It deserves to be given all its worth. It deserves to be done right because it is worth doing at all. 

It’s fucking Christmas again already in two weeks and I need to get laid. My last two girlfriends are both now fifty and both self-obsessed to the point of classic inspiration for a project about vampires. 

Putting my experience to good use as a healing path to capitalise on. Everything coming into focus. 

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