Random Musings

Vampiric Practices

Week 59 / Prompt 6 - Tell us something about you that might surprise us.

I used to pretend I was a vampire. and a werewolf...and a faerie.. and a mage.

I belonged to an organization that was the White Wolf Official Fan Club, a gaming production company that created role-playing games. The organization ran hundreds of games across the world. We would gather in groups, all decked out in costumes, and portray characters in a live-action setting. We would take on the persona of our character and interact with others portraying their characters to create a living story. There were storytellers that would create events for our characters to deal with, but the majority of what I was involved with was stories we created ourselves - political and social. We would vie for positions of power over one another, make alliances to topple others from power, gain favors and make deals to accomplish other types of goals. In reality, we created our own form of government and then went through all the processes of ruling, executive, legislative, and judicial. There were some that enjoyed chasing after the evils that our storytellers would create, exploring those stories rather than the socio-political ones. But I was a social-nut and focused more on that.

I was involved in this gaming group for well over eight years. I portrayed numerous characters in that time. Vampire tended to be my favorite (as it focused more on the socio-political avenues), though I love werewolf as well. My favorite character was easily my Italian vampire named Adriana Vitelion de' Medici.  I've been told I still have quite a lot of information out on the web about her, if you cared to google that name.

I loved werewolf as well because of where I got my initial introduction to role-playing. In eight grade, my family was uprooted from my hometown and we lived in the Pacific Northwest for two and a half years. It was really hard to make new friends in eight grade.. that awkward year just before high school.. and I was really shy. I spent almost my entire eight grade year at home in chat rooms when I wasn't in school. I found this Wolf-pack roleplay chatroom. We pretended we were wolves (not werewolves, but wolves), and we roleplayed with each other in a wilderness setting as if we were true wolves in a wolf pack. I loved that group of people, and I loved learning about wolves and pack mentality, and all that. Those years have forever cemented in me my love of wolves, and I now consider the Wolf to be my totem animal, from what I learned in those years.

The world where most of the eight years was spent in was a dark, gothic-horror world. The vampires didn't sparkle, but they did drink blood (we pretended that part, never actually partook). The werewolves would change to massive half-man-half-beast creatures that could easily kill, but they had such a great sense of family and setting that they were actually a ton of fun to play even when not killing evil baddies the storytellers created.

In all this time, I also acted the part of the storyteller on more than one occasion. Those were great, too, as it let me be the one to develop the stories through which the players would deal with.

All of this gave me such incredible experience. As a player, I learned how to speak publicly with more confidence. Sometimes as Adriana, I would have to speak in front of over 100 other vampire players. Sometimes as a storyteller I had to do the same. I learned how to negotiate, manipulate, scheme; and how to host a party, manage conflicting personalities, and a host of other skills. All of these directly translate to real world applications.

I also honed my writing skills. I wrote so many backgrounds for characters, and some of them incredibly detailed. I know several of my vampire characters were incredibly old, and I loved doing research into history to find out little tidbits about the places they'd been to use for my characters. Adriana was from the Renaissance (Medici?), and another of my characters was Roman, while yet another was from old Russia. Such fun to do research into those old worlds to learn what they were like!

I've since stepped back from these games for numerous reasons, though my old friends that still attend them do miss me and have asked that I come back again. We'll see. Maybe some day.