On on the lovely Invocatio blog, there's an interesting posts about Ghosts versus Vampires and how traditional depictions of the dead in antiquity sometimes resemble one, the other, or both.
How do ghosts and vampires appear in your favorite games? I like mixing traditional monsters into some areas of Call of Cthulhu. One of my favorite moments in a campaign was a player getting killed by being punched by a mummy (yet another depiction of the dead rising as a monster). I've been meaning to try a playthrough of Night's Black Agents one of these weeks, have you ever used traditional monsters in your games?
One big area of discussion which surrounds research on vampires is the distinction between vampires and revenants. In historical records, these categories refer to similar, but different phenomena, and much effort has been put into sussing out if they refer to the same creature or not (see pg. 3-4 of the Paul Barber article below for one interpretation). The conflict occurs between the vampire, seen as the stereotypical blood-sucking Dracula-type, and the revenant, which is thought to straddle the line between ghost and un-dead corpse.
Vampires, Ghosts, and the Legacy of Antiquity
How do ghosts and vampires appear in your favorite games? I like mixing traditional monsters into some areas of Call of Cthulhu. One of my favorite moments in a campaign was a player getting killed by being punched by a mummy (yet another depiction of the dead rising as a monster). I've been meaning to try a playthrough of Night's Black Agents one of these weeks, have you ever used traditional monsters in your games?