Sanguine Antecedents

Vampiric, occult, and arcane inspirations behind Ephemeris

October is shaping up to be a spooky month for me indeed – I’m playing Dracula in a local stage production of Kate Hamill’s version opening in 2 weeks, and a week after that Ephemeris launches on Kickstarter. The workload might chew me up, but it’s feeling good to sink my teeth into a big project again.

My work is usually a big ol’ pot that I throw everything I’m interested into, and I’ve been having a lot of fun stirring up all the inspirations for Ephemeris – here’s a taste of what’s in the soup:

Vampires and Gothic Fiction

The big “in” for Ephemeris is vampires.

Vampires make a ton of sense as the next step in the narrative universe I began with my last game, Retrograde. Retrograde is driven by occult printmaking: human mutants mix their blood into an ink which, when used to print star charts, teleports the printing press to the location depicted on the chart. So it is that starships are built to be giant printing presses, faster-than-light travel is made possible by supernatural means, and deranged blood alchemists begin experimenting with actually consuming Blood Ink. Thusly we can open ourselves up to all kinds of bloody retrofuturist fun that easily leads to a gothic vampire tale. 

Two titans of gothic fiction loom large over Ephemeris: Dracula and Frankenstein. Dracula is classic gothic vampire horror, and, given that I am currently playing the Count, is ever-present in my mind right now. Ephemeris pays homage to Dracula right from the jump – a driverless motor carriage conveys the player characters from their landing on desolate Peles to the foreboding manor of Chateau de la Bré, their ever-polite hosts eager to get down to bloody business. The archetype of Van Helsing also looms large over Ephemeris, and different player character options – the Doctor, the Hunter, the Blood Alchemist – lean heavily into different facets of the prototypical vampire hunter. 

Frankenstein has likewise been an immensely useful inspiration for Ephemeris’ gothic retrofuturism. While the original Frankenstein is not exactly retrofuturism, its vision of mad science manifesting in occult power is exactly what I’m hoping to create with Ephemeris, and the strange machinery powering Chateau de la Bré’s powerful observatory borrows much from the untamed, dangerous electric of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratories. 

A lot of the fun of pulling these inspirations in is that I get to play with their subsequent iterations, as adaptations of both Dracula and Frankenstein abound. There are hundreds of subsequent works based upon these books, and I am inevitably drawing as much (or more) from works inspired by the originals as I am by the originals themselves, and leaning into the remix-aspect of making a game inspired by such heavily iterated material has led to a lot of great writing discoveries and creative play during playtesting.

Something I’ve enjoyed about writing a gothic RPG is how character driven and personal the story is, focused as gothic often is on the ramifications of a dark past on the lives of the present. At its core, Ephemeris is about a mother desperately trying to save her child from an affliction she believes her child inherited from her. Failing to find a cure in conventional science or medicine, she turns to the occult and seeks a supernatural solution – in so doing, she risks opening a pandora’s box that will unleash a horror greater than she could imagine. It’s classic hubris and nemesis, universal and human. Most of my games have been about facing evil corporations or eldritch horrors – Ephemeris is much deeper, darker, and more personal, and will pose its players with dilemmas with no clean solution. 

Weird Fiction and Weird Shit

Related as it is to gothic, Weird Fiction is easy to draw into Ephemeris – the Blood Comet is a sentient entity, not far off from a Lovecraftian elder god. Ephemeris imagines vampires as a kind of cosmic horror – though they function similarly to a Dracula-type vampire, the mechanisms behind those functions are occult and cosmic, the realm of mercurial star gods who through dark pacts offer mortals a taste of their power and transfigure them with a warped immortality. It’s pretty metal. 

I also want to use “Weird” here more as a term of convenience than a pure expression of genre, and I really can’t help putting weird shit I’m interested in into my games. This is pretty wacky, but a major part of Ephemeris is inspired by Zardoz, one of the weirdest pieces of media I’ve ever engaged with, period. Ephemeris’ Reliquary, a crystalline supercomputer that powers Chateau de la Bré’s scientific and arcane apparatus, is directly inspired by Zardoz’s Tabernacle, an artificial intelligence that has the power to grant immortality. I don’t think I’m taking much else from Zardoz here, but into the soup it goes.

Alchemy, Ritual Magic, and Clerical Necromancy

Like just about everything I make, Ephemeris is driven by alchemy and ritual magic. Baroness Bela de la Bré turns to Blood Alchemy in an attempt to cure her daughter’s illness, and when that fails, she turns to pact magic, hoping to make a boon with the cosmic entity trapped within the Blood Comet, giving it freedom in exchange for saving her daughter. 

Beyond alchemy, Ephemeris’ undead means I can also lean into necromancy. I read a weird book in college called Wizards by P.G. Maxwell-Stuart that gave a pretty interesting overview of medieval ritual magic and clerical necromancy. These kinds of arcane practice were all pact magic, whereby the performance of certain ritual would allow one to bind a demon or other divine or daemonic entity and compel them to perform the magician’s will. This is exactly what Bela de la Bré hopes to do with the Blood Comet. It’s also how the lich deep within the Chateau’s catacombs became a lich: it made a pact with a demonic agent of the Unending Dark.

Oh, yeah, did I mention there’s a lich slumbering beneath Chateau de la Bré? These family secrets go all the way back, and there’s a treasure trove of dark knowledge to unravel in Ephemeris.

Putting It All Together – A Supernatural Vision of Cosmic Discovery

A core element of Ephemeris is the empirical reality and power of the supernatural: set in the world of Retrograde where faster-than-light travel is made possible by an occult teleportation ritual, separations between the “natural,” i.e. scientific, and “supernatural” are not exactly necessary – not even logical, really. 

In Ephemeris, as in the middle ages, scientific understandings of the universe are sufficiently limited that purely physical explanations of the mechanisms of the universe do not adequately capture the functions of the natural world, for the “natural world” of Ephemeris is one where a dualist cosmic force actively intercedes in the mortal world, and such things as a mutant spreading their blood over a star chart while reciting a ritual and then printing paper on it result in tangible results. “Supernatural,” then, is really just natural – in the same way that we are bound by the laws of Physics, the world of Ephemeris is bound by the laws of the Unending Dark and the Unending Light.

So it is that the player characters in Ephemeris are fundamentally in conflict against powers of natural law. As such, force of arms alone will not be enough to defeat their foes – unravelling cosmic mechanisms and learning how to utilize such powers may be necessary to prevail against their adversaries, but every new dark power leads one step closer to corruption. The Retrograde System lends itself perfectly to this dance with occult power – push your characters too far down the rabbit hole, and they’ll shred their souls and become enthralled by the dark powers at work under the Blood Comet’s light.

If you’re curious about unraveling the cosmic secrets humming within the Blood Comet and having a taste of the big inspiration soup I’m cooking up, follow Ephemeris’ pre-launch page on Kickstarter. You can also check out a free one-shot version of Ephemeris here and subscribe to this blog to get all the behind-the-scenes of creating the game!

The Library’s New Look

You might’ve noticed that the blog has a new look – I’ve officially migrated over to WordPress! The new digs feel a lot more “me,” and I’m eager to keep exploring what I can do with the new setup.

The blog will still be the same scene with all sorts of happenings related to the games and art I’m making, but I’m hoping to experiment a little more with some narrative content and research-heavy pieces in the near future. I’ll be eager to hear what y’all think and what you’d like to see more of!

Thanks for reading!

– Zosimos