 Cover | |
| Designers | Grate Lane |
|---|---|
| Publishers | Steve Jackson Games |
| Publication | 1995 |
| Genres | Horror |
| Systems | GURPS 3rd edition |
GURPS Blood Types ( ISBN 1-55634-113-X) is a 128-page soft-bound book compiled by Lane Grate and published in 1995 by Steve Jackson Games as a supplement for the third edition GURPS role-playing game system. It contains biographies and gaming statistics for 23 vampires, vampire-like beings, and guidelines on creating more for various campaign settings.
GURPS Blood Types breaks vampires and vampire-like beings into three broad types:
Mortal Vampires--Living beings who have become vampires through some pact or deal. Generally they are not undead.
Undead--Once living beings who have come back from the dead to feed on the living
Spirit and otherworldly beings--Otherworldly parasitic beings that masquerade as a member of a mortal race.
Those with a ^ can be active in daylight
Blood Types is a GURPS game supplement, published as a 128-page softcover book by Steve Jackson Games and designed by Lane Grate. [1] Editing was by Jeff Koke and Scott Haring, with illustrations by Dan Smith and a cover by Tim Bradstreet. [1]
Rick Swan reviewed GURPS Blood Types for Dragon magazine #227 (March 1996), and rated it a 5 out of 6. [1] According to Swan, Blood Types "belongs on the shelf of every horror aficionado who's had his fill of recycled Bela Lugosis". [1]
Among the sources used to make this book are some scholarly ones:
The undead are beings in mythology, legend, or fiction that are deceased but behave as if alive. Most commonly the term refers to corporeal forms of formerly-alive humans, such as mummies, vampires, and zombies, who have been reanimated by supernatural means, technology, or disease. In some cases the term also includes incorporeal forms of the dead, such as ghosts.
A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods they inhabited while they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century. Vampiric entities have been recorded in cultures around the world; the term vampire was popularized in Western Europe after reports of an 18th-century mass hysteria of a pre-existing folk belief in the Balkans and Eastern Europe that in some cases resulted in corpses being staked and people being accused of vampirism. Local variants in Eastern Europe were also known by different names, such as shtriga in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania.
A monster is a type of fictional creature found in horror, fantasy, science fiction, folklore, mythology and religion. Monsters are very often depicted as dangerous and aggressive with a strange, grotesque appearance that causes terror and fear. Monsters usually resemble bizarre, deformed, otherworldly and/or mutated animals or entirely unique creatures of varying sizes, but may also take a human form, such as mutants, ghosts and spirits, zombies or cannibals, among other things. They may or may not have supernatural powers, but are usually capable of killing or causing some form of destruction, threatening the social or moral order of the human world in the process.
Vampire literature covers the spectrum of literary work concerned principally with the subject of vampires. The literary vampire first appeared in 18th-century poetry, before becoming one of the stock figures of gothic fiction with the publication of Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), which was inspired by the life and legend of Lord Byron. Later influential works include the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1847); Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a lesbian vampire, Carmilla (1872), and the most well known: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Some authors created a more "sympathetic vampire", with Varney being the first, and Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire as a more recent example.
Vampire: The Masquerade is a tabletop role-playing game created by Mark Rein-Hagen and released in 1991 by White Wolf Publishing as the first of several Storyteller System games for its World of Darkness setting line. It is set in a fictionalized "gothic-punk" version of the modern world where players assume the role of vampires, who are referred to as "Kindred." and deal with their night-to-night struggles against their own bestial natures, vampire hunters, and each other.
The Anno Dracula series by Kim Newman—named after Anno Dracula (1992), the series' first novel—is a work of fantasy depicting an alternate history in which the heroes of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula fail to stop Count Dracula's conquest of Britain, resulting in a world where vampires are common and increasingly dominant in society. While Dracula is a central figure in the events of the series, he is a minor character in the books and usually appears in only a few climactic pages of each book. While many of the characters from Newman's Diogenes Club stories appear in the Anno Dracula novels, they are not the same as the ones in those stories, nor is the Diogenes Club itself the same.
The Vampire Chronicles is a series of gothic horror novels and a media franchise, created by American writer Anne Rice, that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.
Vampire: The Requiem is a role-playing game published by White Wolf, Inc. for the Chronicles of Darkness setting, and the successor to the Vampire: The Masquerade line. Although it is an entirely new game, rather than a continuation of the previous editions, it uses many elements from the old game including some of the clans and their powers. In the first edition, it required the World of Darkness core rulebook for use, and was released alongside it in August 2004.
Wilhelmina "Mina" Harker is a fictional character and the main female character in Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.
Vampires are fictional characters appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The concept of the Vampire has been depicted by Marvel to varying degrees of significance. Bearing strong resemblance to their literary counterparts, Marvel vampires mostly are an undead subspecies of humans which sustain their immortality and paranormal power by drinking the blood of the living. Unlike most other depictions of the creature, these vampires have their roots in both the supernatural and biology. Victims are converted to vampirism via enzymes carried in the vampire's saliva which cause reanimation once introduced into the bloodstream during feedings.
Vampire films have been a staple in world cinema since the era of silent films, so much so that the depiction of vampires in popular culture is strongly based upon their depiction in films throughout the years. The most popular cinematic adaptation of vampire fiction has been from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, with over 170 versions to date. Running a distant second are adaptations of the 1872 novel Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. By 2005, the Dracula character had been the subject of more films than any other fictional character except Sherlock Holmes.
A moroi is a type of vampire or ghost in Romanian folklore. A female moroi is called a moroaică. In some versions, a moroi is a phantom of a dead person which leaves the grave to draw energy from the living.
Vampire hunter or vampire slayer is a fictional occupation in history and fiction which specializes in finding vampires, and sometimes other supernatural creatures. A vampire hunter is usually described as having extensive knowledge of vampires and other monstrous or undead creatures, including their powers and weaknesses, and uses this knowledge to effectively combat them.
Vampires are frequently represented in popular culture, including appearances in ballet, films, literature, music, opera, theatre, paintings, and video games.
The name "Nosferatu" has been presented as an archaic Romanian word, synonymous with "vampire". However, it was largely popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Western fiction such as Dracula (1897), and the film Nosferatu (1922). One of the suggested etymologies of the term is that it is derived from the Romanian Nesuferit.
In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, a vampire is an undead creature. A humanoid or monstrous humanoid creature can become a vampire, and looks as it did in life, with pale skin, haunting red eyes, and a feral cast to its features. A new vampire is created when another vampire drains the life out of a living creature. Its depiction is related to those in the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood Dracula and monster movies. In writing vampires into the game, as with other creatures arising in folklore, the authors had to consider what elements arising in more recent popular culture should be incorporated into their description and characteristics.
Count Dracula is the title character of Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula. He is considered to be both the prototypical and the archetypal vampire in subsequent works of fiction. Aspects of the character are believed by some to have been inspired by the 15th-century Wallachian Prince Vlad the Impaler, who was also known as Dracula, and by Sir Henry Irving, an actor for whom Stoker was a personal assistant.
Legends of vampires have existed for millennia; cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of demonic entities and blood-drinking spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. Despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century Southeastern Europe, particularly Transylvania, Romania as verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or a living person being bitten by a vampire themselves. Belief in such legends became so rife that in some areas it caused mass hysteria and even public executions of people believed to be vampires.
Urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, film horror and television dealing with industrial and post-industrial urban society. It was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain, Ireland and the United States and developed in British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In the twentieth century, urban Gothic influenced the creation of the subgenres of Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic. From the 1980s, interest in the urban Gothic revived with books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels that drew on dark city landscapes, leading to adaptations in film including Batman (1989), The Crow (1994) and From Hell (2001), as well as influencing films like Seven (1995).
John Edgar Browning is an American author, editor, and scholar known for his nonfiction works about the horror genre and vampires in film, literature, and culture. Previously a Visiting Lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he is now a professor of Liberal Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia.