The horrific games of a child vampire.

[Shinizak]

I'm designing a villain that is a child vampire. They are sadistic but childish and they have the backing of a Small Castle town via vampiric powers. This child mostly just wants to play games with the party, but these games are deadly and destructive.

If the party encounters her she'll kidnap them in the middle of the night to make them subjects of these games.

My problem is I don't know what kind of sadistic games this child would want to play, got any suggestions for what a child vampire would want to play?

[Yanagi]

I'm designing a villain that is a child vampire. They are sadistic but childish and they have the backing of a Small Castle town via vampiric powers. This child mostly just wants to play games with the party, but these games are deadly and destructive.

If the party encounters her she'll kidnap them in the middle of the night to make them subjects of these games.

My problem is I don't know what kind of sadistic games this child would want to play, got any suggestions for what a child vampire would want to play?

Do you mean literal games or figurative "compel people to do things for amusement"?

Off the cuff...

At first jump I think about four things:
- one, kids like making adults do silly things purely as a demonstrating asserting control
- two, kids like making rules and "games" but tend to change them if they start losing
- three, kids like creating narratives and activities in which they're the center of attention, and the point of the thing they create is that they're the center of attention.
- four, kids like experimenting with adult activities while not understanding them, ie playing at doing a job or being married.

All of these strike me as jumping-off points for an evil kid to build a "plan" to target the group: they either want to "play at being an adventurer" or "play at being a vampire villain"--self consciously performing a part and trying to get the adventurers to play their part (and compelling their goons to participate however they need)--but their vampiric nature means that it's all vale tudo for all the participants (except themselves).

Consider how much the kid is whimsical and needy...which are your typical child-villain traits. Whimsy means an evil kid willing to trash their existing playset and care-worn goons just for the novelty of watching adventurers do things that are entertaining or amusing. Neediness means an evil kid that's experimenting with social dynamics in ways that leech affection and attention from people, and feel rage and betrayal when they don't get enough supply of those things. These are not mutually exclusive things, either.

Also consider what kind of sadism you're talking about: the direct more-violent kind or the more baroque emotional-psychological kind. The former lends itself to a sort of child-playing-camp-villain that announces the peril because it's fun--play rock-paper-scissors and fight a golem made of the thing you throw, behold-my-murder-circus...basically a bunch of separate scary vignettes that are challenges or appear to be challenges. The latter lends itself to one long "game" in which the adventurers are being led through a kind of lethal lets-pretend where they don't know the part they've been assigned. Trickery for it's own sake--doing something just to announce "haha I fooled you"--is appropriate for either situation because it's a very simple, childish form of asserting dominance and control.

I personally think the latter...no-holds-barred Let's Pretend...works better and can blend both direct cruelty and more abstract forms as the child tries to test what they can put the adventurers through--using emotional/psychological means to press them into physical harm, wash rinse repeat until the "story" they have in mind is enacted. The minions don't appear a single opposing force, but are instead assigned theatrical parts--allies, quest givers, exposition sources, characters with subplots, obvious antagonists--that help to push the adventurers through a series of scenarios the vampire child has concocted for their own amusement. Depending on how you want the game to feel, this can be played straight--a series of challenges that are consistently dangerous--or include a "childish" attempts at surprising the adventurers with either anticlimax (something hyped big resolves easily) or guignol hyperbole (something "normal" suddenly turns dark, frightening and dangerous).

My first thought is...the child is going to want to tell a story where they're the MacGufifn, and it's just a matter of what kind of MacGuffin they want to be. I said earlier that "play at adventurer" and "play at vampire villain" are two natural choices, because they're both roles in which the child can command attention, exposit on their own importance, and leverage things from people around them.

Playing the self-conscious villain in a camp way--the kind of person that has a lair with death traps and gets on the horn to mock the heroes as they struggle--is the more straightforward version: what the child is trying to draw from the adventurers is confirmation of their own power and control of the situation. This can be very direct--Saw-type traps and James-Bond-ian travails while the child makes silly and unreasonable demands, offers and reneges mercy and respite--or a more elaborate psychodrama in which the minions play out roles that create an atmosphere so the adventurers are made afraid with stories and demonstrations of the child's power. The former is more of a dungeon crawl, the latter is more like an within-the-setting RPG module with a series of challenges and fetch quests where the characters are being led through a story by the child.

But I actually like better the idea of the child being bored and wanting to play in a novel manner...so instead of positioning themselves as the antagonist, they attempt to present themselves as a victim or tragic figure captured by a greater power or more evil thing--someone to be rescued or saved--and use that incentive to try and drive the adventurers through a series of threats and challenges while egging them on and trying to bond with them. So the game structure is like in the last paragraph--crawl or module--except the adventurers are touching base with the child themselves (and with minions who seem to be allies and good-faith sources of information, but are enacting a script that leads the adventurers into hazards).

[Segev]

How legitimately innocent (not "safe" or "nice," but innocent" in the sense that they aren't really mature enough to know better) do you want the kid to be?

It won't make their acts less horrific, but if you're going for a gothic sort of tragic horror, having the minions split on hate vs pity for the kid based on the fact that the kid is just too powerful to chstize effectively and is consumed by murderous needs (e.g. blood thirst), but also has true emotional attachments that have turned abusive because the kid is able to use power to get his or her way when it would be better to have been told "no."

The minions might look to the heroes as saviors for themselves from the monster-child, as enemies to gleefully squash because they like working for a monster, as potentially the ones who can bring the tragically-overpowered child to heel and try to teach him right from wrong, etc.

"Please don't hurt her!" some might say.

The neediness and careless cruelty both should remain in full force. But the question of whether merely ending the monster's threat is a truly happy ending becomes a consideration.

[Bohandas]

I'm envisioning a pretend tea party that escalates quickly...

"Silly, of course we don't have any real tea. Razor your arm open so we'll have something to drink"



How legitimately innocent (not "safe" or "nice," but innocent" in the sense that they aren't really mature enough to know better) do you want the kid to be?

And on a related note, are they actually young?

[Segev]

And on a related note, are they actually young?

This is both important and unimportant. Important, because if the answer is "no," it opens a second question: are they capable of maturing beyond their physical/apparent age? Being old can mean having knowledge but still having childish emotional needs. In such a case, even the most self-aware eternal child has the frustration of always having to try to intellectually override their emotional urges in ways that are difficult, at best.

If, on the other hand, they're old in time and in spirit, they may be only play-acting at childishness, which puts a different spin on it.

So, how old are they, chronologically? Physically (i.e. at what age did they get turned)? Emotionally (i.e. are they play-acting at childishness or are they genuinely unable to use adult emotional coping mechanisms)? Mentally (i.e. do they have ancient knowledge and training to try to overcome their needs? Are they 'mature for their age?' Or are they stuck with a child's understanding of the world)?