Charlie's Vampires
http://rpcsandbox.wikidot.com/vampires-research-tone-edition
The following is still WIP but id greatly appreciate feed back and how to improve the draft.
Charlie's Vampires
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Part 1(/2) of a crit I'll reply to my own comment later but I think it's important you read this sooner.
To preface this, I'm gonna give off a lot of my subjective opinions for lore and formatting, if you don't mind.
Naming
I'm autistic about linguistics, so I'm making a section for this.
El’tyrnians is an awkward word because it doesn’t have any linguistic basis in real-world etymology. And if I’m to believe they originate from an ancient Indo-Aryan civilization where vampires first appeared, I’d expect the name to at least follow the morphology associated with Semitic languages.
El’tyrnians also isn’t the proper way to name a species (unless you’re following the convention used for aliens, like Lunar-ians). The -ian suffix usually implies either a realm the race comes from or an ethnicity tied to their culture.
The word "El" refers to divinity (Ex: El-ohim), and the ’ between "El" and "tyrn" is a glottal/pharyngeal consonant, and it's used wrongly here because the two syllables are already separated by a consonant. (Ex: Hawaii Hawai‘i) It's just making a word look more exotic for no reason.
"Tyrn" is an old Norse word that means thorn or bush. Combining the two words together, you have something roughly meaning "thorn-god" or "god-thorn" which I admit is kinda cool, but I thought it was important to disclose what you're actually writing here.
TL;DR: Eltyrn
Species
El'tyrnians aren't a species. Species are groups of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, and El'tyrnians reproduce through the infection of human hosts. And you haven't really made ample enough evidence that humans can't reproduce with vampires.
There are retroviruses in real life that can insert their genetic material directly into the host’s DNA. It would be more accurate to call them a parahuman subspecies or a mutagenic retrovirus.
I get what kinda theming you wanna go for, you want this more mysterious race of humanoids and don't wanna compare them to a zombie infection. So, how about this:
Separate pure-blooded El'tyrnians from infected humans. And make it so that infected humans have the ability to interbreed with El'tyrnians, making them members of the same species, but are infertile when it comes to baseline humans.
And call the infected humans conventional vampires instead.
EL'TYRNIANS
Analysis of fossil evidence, genetic data, and human/El'tyrnians cultural data suggests that the species in question has existed for a period approximately commensurate with the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens
Readability and simplification are just as important as detail.
Analysis of fossil evidence, genetic data, and human/El'tyrnians cultural data suggests this species has existed since the rise of modern Homo sapiens.
This kinda simplification should go for the rest of the article.
for example:
Cellular analysis reveals a complete absence of senescence markers typically associated with aging in baseline Homo sapiens.
Simplify
Cellular studies show no signs of the aging markers found in baseline humans.
Homo sapiens nocturnus exhibit no external or physiological markers differentiating them from Homo sapiens under typical clinical assessment. Conclusive identification requires full autopsy, during which anomalous internal structures and biochemical processes become apparent,
Period, make the next part a new sentence.
(I forgot to crit the biology sections)
General History
I'll be honest, this entire section is a bit unnecessary and would be better off being an entirely separate document. You only really need a handful of these events to build up your mythos. You're adding too much detail to this section that actively ruins the experience.
Also, put this as the final addendum. Putting it this early ruins a lot of the later reveals.
So for this section, ground yourself with some rules.
- The event must be relevant to the history of the Authority or the El'tyrnians
- The event must teach the readers a characteristic about the species and their culture
- The event should be short enough that the audience can come up with their own conclusions about what was really going on.
Another complaint I'll include is the fact that everything is listed on a single day. I'll elaborate on how this causes problems soon.
15 August, 1880
This entire section doesn't actually do anything for the article as a whole and can be summarized in only 2 sentences.
Put a horizontal line after every date so you can break off each section into paragraphs.
13 September, 1892
Again, cut off the tangent into a smaller, dissectible piece of storytelling. You don't wanna make mini-tales here, just things that imply something that could be a fully fledged tale.
19 December, 1899
The Authority was observing a 伏魔班 (Fú Mó Bān)[footnote: Demon Hunters] militia.
Cool idea, it worldbuilds on the world you're making.
5 May, 1915:
This could easily just be 2 sentences. If you're trying to hype up important figures within your history, italicize their name.
17 August, 1925:
20 July, 1930:
22 November, 1938:
Unnecessary bloat
14 December, 1940: - 7 January, 1950:
Cool idea, doesn't go on for far too long into the rest of WW2 history. Instead of going into detail about every single day, just explain the events over the course of the year. Most of these events would make more sense if they took place over a period of multiple days or even weeks.
So how about this: remove the date and month, and combine years into "19XX-19XX".
Now you'll be able to separate events by their own separate arcs and mini tales. And it's a lot less of a slog to go through. The incomplete history format has been outdated for a while now, and I don't implore you to follow it.
27 December, 1950:
30 December, 1950:
Unnecessary bloat
5 February, 1955:
kinda cringe
10 February, 1955 - 1960:
Really unnecessary inclusion. It's already implied they do bad stuff.
Tenebrous
Latin city name for a species that speaks an entirely fantasy language in Syria.
17 August, 1967:
Huge piece of lore. Unfortunately included in a bunch of bloat that most people will skip. It's important to cut things down if they serve no purpose to the narrative other than filler.
Also, it has a bunch of grammar errors, but I am not listing every grammar mistake here.
28 August, 1967:
1 January, 1968
Just combine it with the previous part.
4 December, 1970:
18 December, 1970:
21 February, 1971:
14 June, 1974:
15 January, 1975:
13 May, 1977:
15 May, 1980:
13 August, 1981:
15 June, 1981:
27 July, 1981:
15 August, 1981:
30 December, 1981:
1 January, 1985:
5 June, 1989:
1 December, 1989:
5 January, 1990:
11 February, 1995:
Unnecessary bloat. If you wanna make Brinadar put that in the Brindar collapsible instead of here.
20 May, 1995:
That article is deadass gonna be deleted.
21 June, 1999:
8 September, 2000:
3 January, 2001:
18 September, 2001:
16 December, 2001:
22 September, 2002:
23 September, 2002:
4 October, 2002
16 January, 2003:
23 February, 2003:
8 March, 2003: **
9 March, 2003:
11 March, 2003:
19 March, 2003
20 March, 2003:
3 June, 2003:
5 June, 2003:
7 August, 2003:
3 December, 2003:
1 January, 2004:**
The Jahir arc is a bit more interesting than the last one, but it suffers from the poor pacing this sort of format has. It'll be much better if you just make it one continuous retrospective detailing the events between 1999-2004.
The recording begins with light tapping against the microphone.
Awfully lot of em dashes. in this entire speech.
Current evidence suggests that vampires emerged approximately 80,000 to 90,000 years ago—around 10,000 to 20,000 years after the appearance of anatomically modern humans.
Humans evolved 300k years ago.
Human culture came 50,000-65,000 years ago.
While multiple hypotheses exist to explain this—ranging from accelerated mutation to anomalous interference—no single theory has been conclusively proven.
Improper em dashes. Ask ChatGPT to chill with it next time
Now, contrary to longstanding folklore that > positions vampires as peripheral predators in early human civilization
This is a speech, not a text document. Idk what the ">" is for exactly but we can't audibly say it.
Located beneath Syrian soil
Be a lot more specific, people don't just call it "Syrian", anthropologists and archeologists are more specific, designating their name based on historical documents or their location (ex: Canaanite, Ugarit, Phoenicia)
Recovered inscriptions and skeletal remains suggest that the human population of Tenebrous served as a subjugated class—used for breeding, nourishment, and, disturbingly, recreation.
If we're going strictly by archeological excavation, it isn't possible to infer these kinds of details without a historical source or document. Especially for a site that's 10-11k years old, which is the Mesolithic age and was long before the various tribes and societies united into a proper civilization.
Here's an idea: put their civilization in a cave.
According to the Tenebrous scrolls
Scrolls weren't invented until 3000 BC. Scrolls are made of organic material and will break down unless its been kept inside a preservative pottery or preserved through a chemical reaction. Not to mention, written language wasn't even a thing until at most 4k years ago.
Tenebrous eventually fell to catastrophe around 7000 BCE. Recovered documentation describes the emergence of a contagion referred to as The Red Death.
Again, documents weren't a thing. If you want a reasonable way for historians to infer the idea of "the red death", use comparative mythology
This pattern repeats. The rise and fall of cities such as Banesh, Ferriti, and Monast all follow the same arc: rapid growth, internal corruption, anomalous interference, collapse.
How do you prove anomalous interference
Thoughts:
So far, I just wanna say I am disappointed in it.
The first part was great; it deserves to be a research-tone RPC of its own, but everything immediately after that has been a difficult read. There isn't a lot of good research being done here, and while fantasy is undeniably an important aspect of RPC, there are only so many suspensions of disbelief you can use up before it becomes inadequate.
I truly do like the idea of the El’tyrnians, and I do implore you to continue this idea onwards. It's just that the draft as it just doesn't cut it and would've gotten a 2/5 from me.
They are rage, brutal, without mercy. But you. You will be worse.
As said Jockz above, better will be separate true El'tyrnians who is actually member of anomolus species of homo genus who can breed with humans and give dampir hybrids and infected humans with some simmilarities in biology. We already have RPC-596, so I think make it an originally El'tyrnian disease what somehow adopted to homo sapiens and ripped some El'tyrnian genes resulting poor and rough adaptation of human organism to hemophagy without advantages of El'tyrnian parabiology will fit to article.
Also some more examples of El'tyrnian paratech/thaumaturgy will be nice, cause I think 3 current examples is not enough.
/forum/t-17171310/charlie-s-vampires#post-