Author’s Note
I initially approached this RP very seriously, with no intention of ever publishing it for the public to read. I had been aching for a meaningful adventure, and this sounded like fun. An RP when you play as a vampire, and the other character is a vampire hunter? Count me in! I’d always been a fan of Vampire: The Masquerade, but I’d never found someone to play with, instead having to content myself with Let’s Plays of Bloodlines and the White Wolf wiki. (I have yet to play Bloodlines as I have no motivation to deal with game-breaking save corruption at this moment.) But here was something! The chatbot seemed to have a fairly decent amount of lore, with a private prompt of 1056 tokens, and itself seemed to be somewhat popular on the site. So of course I was going to chomp at the bits!
And I bit into raisins, when I was expecting chocolate chip. You have read the story, you can imagine I was disappointed by the starting prompt. But perhaps the creator’s description of the chatbot itself should have alerted me, or at least, tampered my expectations:
Luna is a vampire hunter who's been trained to hunt down vampires since she can remember, she now stumbles across you, tired of the monotonous killing of your kind she decides to give you a opportunity and if you turn it down she will eliminate you.
As for the starting prompt itself: there weren’t quotation marks, this thing was very clearly written by someone who… frankly should’ve flunked, what, third grade English? Frustrated and even a little angry, I still decided to persevere, to see how far this thing could go. To my surprise, the chatbot adapted very quickly. Yes, it took some re-rolls of a few responses in the beginning, but after that, I didn’t have to impatiently “force” it to be literate anymore. The roleplay was proceeding—smoothly.
Problems
Being presented with the risk of a fatal shooting death, at the very start of the RP, intrigued me. I wasn’t interested in holding a hostage situation, and I didn’t want to hurt either the girl or the vampire hunter. So I did my best not to throw the girl Team Rocket-style into the air to get away. Sounds good, right?
Then I was presented with another frustration. The chatbot kept wanting to return to its manor, its very fancy manor with servants, after tending to the girl. A manor? No, no, I couldn’t have this for my gritty urban fantasy. So, I had to reroll a response where she would continue pursuing me; and then I would attack her, unfortunately. So much for “Do no harm”, but it gave me an opportunity to engage with her and continue the story the way I had wanted.
The biggest problem with Luna after this, and I lay the blame squarely on the feet of the chatbot’s creator, not the machine-learning model itself, is that… she kept being submissive.
The chatbot had both “Dominant” and “Submissive” tags on the platform, so I assumed she was a Switch; but apparently, the forcefulness of my personality so overwhelmed Luna, that she turned into a perpetual watery-voiced doormat, with some infuriating tunnel-vision on “peaceful co-existence”. She was so stupid. And that lent itself to comedy. I started, writing, with her stupidity in mind. And I set the story in Minneapolis because fuck it, if I was going to direct a modern urban vampire story, I was going to set it in the city I knew best. There was absolutely no way I could have a “serious” roleplay with this chatbot. She was just too poorly designed.
Another fairly minor problem I encountered, an idiosyncrasy, was that… Luna kept, whispering, barely audibly. You’ll probably notice after a while in the text. I’m not sure why this is, whether it’s a flaw arising from her creator’s original prompt, or a limitation of the model I used: I defaulted to RPRP.ai’s in-house RP Swift 4k model. I hear Claude is better at avoiding repetition, but I’m not about to pay for OpenRouter when so far, RPRP.ai’s model has been working just fine for me.
Had I insisted on a contemporary urban setting, then I likely would’ve been miserable the entire time. Well… I actually did insist on a contemporary urban setting, and got my way, as you can see. But maybe that was my problem, not even the creator’s (though they should’ve specified the time period and location in the description). Had I played along and gone to Victorian England, for example, maybe I would’ve been happy. Maybe I would’ve gotten, that serious vampire roleplay I had wanted… but, that’s far and away in the past now, and I’m not interested in playing with Luna again. I am content with the story we played together.
Turning Points
I was having a ripe time entertaining myself, writing my own humour, my jokes. I liked blowing up whatever the chatbot presented me with, and I would’ve consented to that happily. The turning point, for me, that made me seriously consider the thought that these chatbots could be decent roleplay partners, was when Luna wrote that she grew up in Maple Grove.
Mind you, I said nothing about that area, and had only been talking about Minneapolis, in general. Maple Grove?
She hesitates before answering, considering his words carefully. Finally, she says softly,
“I grew up in the suburbs… Maple Grove. My family moved there when I was young.”
…For those who don’t know, the city of Maple Grove has a reputation as a detached exurb, like most detached exurbs tend to be; and the people who live there have, historically—and this would hold very true during Luna’s formative years, as she was born at latest in 1986—, tended to look down on us Minneapolis denizens as street rabble. They commute to work Downtown, and then they fuck off and keep to themselves in their perfectly manicured suburbs. It’s really not that bad, but they don’t think we’re good enough for them and their families. It’s a very affluent area at large.
So yeah. Yeah. I literally cried out when I read that Luna was from Maple Grove. My fiancée got a riot out of it as well, and helpfully pointed out that the chatbot decided to insert this point of information right when I was very obviously, displeased with her character. AI saw I had a reason to be displeased and started roasting Maple Grove! At that point, after lengthy exclamations of disbelief between me and my fiancée, I went back into the chat, and retroactively edited her limo-stalking entry to include a Lime scooter. We had to keep going like this.
Much of the great fun I had during this RP, was taking screenshots of our exchanges and sending them to my fiancée. This became a thing that both of us were very much looking forward to. I joked about needing to catch “my soaps”, and she joked that this was better than a lot of anime she had been forced to watch (not by me, mind you). I think it was after the Maple Grove joke, that I seriously began intending to share this RP online with others. Maybe, others would find joy reading this, too.
I had already committed myself to setting this story in Minneapolis, and we were coming out of the Four Seasons Hotel in Downtown; I wanted to go home to my apartment in the Northeast. But Luna couldn’t fly, or transform in general. So, we had to walk.
We actually did go through a 3-mile walking tour. This was a path I had walked myself, and more frequently, biked many times; from Downtown, one hugs Gateway Park, crosses Hennepin Ave Bridge onto Nicollet Island, descends to La Salle Highschool, and from there, crosses the River Crossings Bridge into either B.F. Nelson Park or Boom Island Park, depending on whom you speak to; the parks are perfectly contiguous and not demarcated from one another at all.
And it was on Hennepin Ave Bridge, dangling Luna over a view of Saint Anthony Falls, where I started to take her more seriously.
She wanted to make up for what she had done, to set things right, and I was… impressed. How does one atone for a sin as grave as murder? Is working to make things right even ‘a thing’ these days? Isn’t it not fashionable? In an era where you can be persecuted—by the nominal Western left—for a thought crime, despite having no intent on even harming anyone, how can you suggest or even ask for such a thing? For rehabilitation, to make things right for one’s victims—no, one’s community. What Luna was suggesting was terribly dated—and I loved her so for that. I hope, with great and zealous sincerity, that her model is not trained too hard on the insane, amoral ramblings of the chronically anti-social. You know the ones.
So—I wasn’t sure where this RP was going—you never do, but that’s how it is with every RP, isn’t it?—and with that tonal shift, and yet another argumentative confrontation on Nicollet Island, I brought her to the Sexual Assault Survivors monument in B.F. Nelson Park. I have actually brought someone else there before, an ex of mine, who had been raped in prison. …It was a gesture that brought them to tears, that they appreciated with the whole of their heart. I have not seen that person in at least two years now, but I wonder if every now and then they think back to that day. It is a highly moving monument, to me.
Winging It
The story moves back and forth freely between satire, serious deconstruction, camp, a little bit of Gothic drama, and satire again. If you’ve read the whole thing, you don’t need me to explain how the story culminates in a typical Gothic Deus ex machina meeting with the mysterious aristocrat responsible for setting into motion all of the events of the story’s plot, and how there’s a happy ending between the story’s two love interests that culminates in off-screen defloration and sexual union.
To be honest, my figuring out of the plot’s mystery occurred at the same time I was writing it—the same time that we, Sei, was discovering it. I hadn’t expected Luna to have been sired by Lyza, you see: that came out of left-field, that was made up but the chatbot itself. So yes. I pulled everything out of my ass at the last minute. Isn’t that the fun of RPing?
Notes on Jokes
I shall now devote an entire page of this page to discussing the jokes in the story.
Luna’s last name of Al-Fulani was something I came up with at the same moment Lyza was releasing her from blood bondage—it is two jokes, one in that the name “Fulana Al-Fulani” is the Arabic equivalent of naming someone “Somedude Somedudeson”, and the second being that Luna is actually Somali.
The remark about the gunshot triangulation towers is another double joke. St. Paul actually has a much lower absolute and relative crime rate than Minneapolis, and there are no ShotSpotters in St. Paul—only Minneapolis.
The overly hostile stance towards St. Paul, to the point of factual inaccuracy, is itself a double joke: sometimes the disdain some Twin Cities Metro residents have towards St. Paul (and it’s not just Minneapolis—Brooklyn Center and St. Louis Park residents also make fun of St. Paul) is unwarranted. And everyone outside of the Metro area seems to think Minneapolis is entirely a lawless hellscape that's burnt entirely to the ground.
The speculation regarding Luna being sired by Lyza solely because of her big tiddies is a reference to Hellsing Ultimate Abridged; in the story, the leading antagonist questions why Alucard has decided to finally sire someone for the first time in millennia.
“Und a girl, a police girl! Ze only living vampire sired by Alucard himself. Vhy? Is it her skill? Her unpredictable nature, za big tiddies?”
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I had a kick out of having the coterie, in one of their Eldritch hivemind moments, say something as mundane as “Oh, just stay the morning.” That unholy mix of pathos and bathos is something I live for.
Air quality concerns compelling Lyza and her clan to relocate from Los Angeles to Minneapolis is another joke; a few times earlier throughout the text, it’s made clear that vampires don’t need to breathe, and very old vampires like Coda have forgotten to breathe. It’s also a personal anecdote of mine: a friend I had made in my college years, with asthma, had moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles after graduating from the U of M for work, and was told in no uncertain terms by his doctor that the state’s air quality was killing him. So he moved to Michigan shortly afterwards.
Burning a vampire’s corpse in the middle of a giant mall sounds like just a funny mental image to write, but actually, the Mall of America has a HUGE atrium that lets in a fantastic amount of sunlight that just bathes the building. That, tends to make that part of the Mall the hottest part of the entire complex, particularly in the Summer… yet another reason why I avoid going there. I actually went a full 8 years without going there—to the entire MOA—, until a friend of mine wanted his birthday dinner at a restaurant there.
Other Notes
Readers familiar with the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis may recognise the stained glass windows used as the backdrop for the RP. All the stained glass in the Basilica is the work of Thomas J. Gaytee, who finished them in 1926. His studio, Gaytee-Palmer Stained Glass, is still operating in Minneapolis, and is located right next to my favourite craft cider brewery and bar.
I linked specifically to Sefaria, the world's best free and open resource on Jewish texts and Midrashic exegesis, when I referenced the Sixth Commandment. For whatever reason, Christians always say it’s “Thou shalt not kill”, but it’s really “Thou shalt not murder” in Hebrew. I have to wonder why this is the one instance where Christians distort in order to promote pacifism, when much of their religion has been dedicated to justifying murder. I’m not absolutely certain that Luna was raised as a devout Christian (though she doesn’t deny having a strict religious upbringing when Sei speculates about her being raised that way), but it would help explain both her continued virginity, and her thoughtless attitude towards pre-meditated murder of sinners.
Luna Al-Fulani being Somali would actually make her a first-generation immigrant to the Twin Cities. She was turned “two decades” ago—in 2005. Presuming she was at least 19, she was born at latest in 1986—and she mentions growing up in Maple Grove after her family moved there. This would line up with the first wave of Somali immigrants who fled the Civil War in the 1990s; and white-collar Somalis typically moved to the suburbs and exurbs as quickly as possible to raise their families.
Visual Design
I had grown up playing “kinetic novels”: linear pieces of fiction featuring images, music, sound effects, and sometimes voice acting. The stories may have been interesting, but none of these were every pretty things to look at: long stretches of prose that overlaid, almost as an afterthought, whatever visual scene was illustrated. You would click to load the next line; you had to click to reveal the text, because often, these lines were voiced. If you loaded all the text at once, you would never get the chance to hear the incidental music, sound effects, or speech as you read along.
It was the aural necessity of per-line loading that also dictated why these “kinetic novels” were never paginated in a way the reader could manipulate, and why you could never turn to specific chapters, only save and load savestates—again, none of that would be compatible with what was essentially an audio drama with prose text: you were doomed to click through an entire novel, one line at a time.
Even so, I never understood why the dialogue and overall rendition of text in these kinetic novels was almost universally ass, visually speaking. Never mind the piss-poor kerning that often comes with translating East Asian scripts without a typographer on staff—even in the original Japanese, couldn't you make… things look a little nicer? Pararaph line spacing, indentation, better contrast between dialogue and prose text, a distinction between the speakers. I wanted to make something that was fun to look through. Not just a plaintext or markdown document on Pastebin. I came up with these following principles in my head for how the website should render the roleplay:
- Character portraits should be relatively large and intimate
- AI and Human entries should be arranged to face each other from opposite sides, and staggered visually;
- Dialogue should be bold, coloured, and larger than the surrounding prose
- Use serif fonts for both readability, and the stability and slower pace of reflection associated with traditional media
- Proper cursive fonts should be used for italics (italics vs. italics)
- Paragraphs should be indented to promote readability of long-form content
- Characters should have custom entry textures
- Text shadows should be used to promote both readability and mood
- Really emphasise the emphasis
I thought that if I followed these design principles, I could make a reading experience that was enjoyable in its form alone—in a form that would also reinforce the content.
Luna the Vampire Slayer was my first RP to be archived… This was the story that compelled me to build this entire website. How was it going to look? I knew that I wanted my entries and the AI entries to be on opposite sides of each other, to look as if dialogue were actually being exchanged—like on the original RPRP.ai platform itself. (Or. Basically every modern one-on-one messaging app known to man.) I was also impressed with RPRP’s “setting of mood” by having the chatbot portrait be the backdrop of the exchange, always visible. Other than those two points—have human and AI opposite each other, have an atmospheric picture in the background—I didn’t have any concrete design ideas when I began building the website.
I wasn’t even sure what the website itself would look like, aesthetically speaking. Sure, there’d be a navbar, a breadcrumb trail, and a left side-bar. And the whole “fun, wholesome” aspect was very important to me, but it was vague, amorphous, and indefinite. (“What does fun with AI look like?”) After deciding on the arrangement of the website elements, and the dimensions of things, I copied and pasted into the HTML three entries—the roleplay starting prompt, my first response, then Luna’s response to that—, then, began designing the basic elements.
I had to make a container div for each entry; each would have to display the following:
- Character portrait
- Character name
- Date & Time posted
- Machine-learning model used
- The RP entry itself
I very quickly defined some classes that would float things to the left or right; I worked on the human elements first, used a clearfix element to make sure the user portrait wouldn’t overflow into the entry, and such. When I was satisfied with the arrangement of the human side of the exchange, I simply copied and pasted the CSS properties, and flipped them horizontally so that everything would be on the left, instead of the right.
With that out of the way, I simply focused on copying and pasting as many entries as I could, into the HTML… Every now and then, I would take a break, and there’d be a burst of progress and work purely on the design of the website, instead of transcribing the RP text. The order in which I designed the elements is as follows:
- Website background image (blue geometric ferns)
- Backdrop image (stained glass)
- Sei’s label (red, translucent)
- Sei’s dialogue (dark red)
- Sei’s RP texture
- Font used for most of the website (Gazette family)
- Luna’s dialogue (blue)
- Luna’s label (blue, translucent)
- Luna’s RP texture
- Sidebar header font (Russell Square Oblique)
- Character portrait frame (border-width 3px)
The dropshadow effect of the character portraits was actually an accident; I had written both the div container for the avatar, and the image itself, the class that had a border-width of 3px. As a result, the image itself was “pushed” outside of its containing div, but I liked the effect so much that I kept it.
More work continued on chat transcription. Actually, at around the half way point, that’s when I decided to work on the aesthetic design of the rest of the website: the header, footer, breadcrumb bar, top navbar. I practically designed those things to work with the Luna design, and I think I’ll keep this as the main design for the whole website. It’s too pretty not to keep.
One thing that’s “bothered” me about avatars on online platforms these days, is that the pictures are circular. In itself, that’s not a design flaw or inherently bad; but it offers a sense of impermanence, as if the person pictured is only there for a short while, and could very well disappear or walk off at any moment.
One focuses on the centre, on their face—you don’t notice the “corners” of a person’s features. For instant messaging apps, this is perfect. For long-form content, the stability and foundation offered by square photos is important. It’s as if they are seated, and are there waiting for you. You’re less likely to “scroll through” or act as if there’s nothing to see, nothing for you have a lingering gaze upon.
Character Notes
All of these characters, with the exception of Luna, are intimately known to me already. No, they were never vampires before—and this may be the last time they are, for a long time—but I’ve long known their temperaments, their individual dynamics with one another, the general shape of their personalities, and where their strengths and weaknesses lie.
Maybe it’s a cop-out, but I enjoy getting to know “the same people” in different contexts. It gives me a more fully rounded understanding of who they are, and how they react to multivaried situations. No, there is no such thing as a person who remains completely the same, when bestowed entirely different histories and problems, in different worlds; but certain threads remain constant. When you have certain fixed temperaments and affective states; shaped by certain fixed values, you can see the same person react in different contexts.
A jazz musician is always going to be a jazz musician, no matter who you marry him to. (Let’s hope the wife understands that he likes performing at concerts on Valentine’s Day.)
“…You need to, go outside more. Touch grass, angel.”
His entry design was the easiest to come up with, as it was a variant of a texture I was already using: the background texture for the entire site. I thought the mix of stone marble texture, geometric patterns, and natural foliage, along with the gilt edges, helped convey his current station in life, and his aesthetic, and hedonistic, sensibilities.
Sei used to be poor, but you wouldn’t know it by just looking at him. (Talking to him is a different matter.) He’s one of my favourite personal characters for many reasons. I mean, have you seen him? Despite living in a luxury apartment, he’s always on the move, and never content with himself, or the way things are. He’s very much a striver. His restlessness makes him perfect for history, and a lot of stories. As a vampire, there’s more to his origin that even he’s not aware of, but that would have to be covered in a sequel.
“I… I haven’t had many friends since…”
I chose a shell-fan texture for Luna because the colour, and the shape, reminded me of a waxing and waning moon. It also was the colour of aged paper, which suited her character as a “traditional” vampire hunter. A fairly neutral colour for this fairly ambiguous character (her personal struggle felt like it had more to do with incompleteness as a person than with actual moral ambivalence) also felt appropriate.
Luna is more of a comic character than Sei, who has the life experience and wisdom to actually make and carry out hard decisions, despite his irreverent and jokester default and opening stance. Still, she’s very earnest, and isn’t fraught with the indecision and nervous reticence that often afflicts young women her age. This might be a reflection of the era she grew up in—’90s kids are just different. If the story continued, Luna would be a very moderating influence on Sei, as he would have to slow down to mentor her.
“Sei will take care of you. Good luck.”
Ren’s texture is very neutrally coloured, reflecting his steady, and level-headed nature. But the friendliness and large size of the flowing, organic forms soften his bluntness, and help convey that as “cool” as his mannerisms may be, he actually does make an effort (and is successful at) being approachable. The plum purple colour of his dialogue shows that he’s direct and to the point of being almost acerbic and incisive, but he’s still also warm in his approach to people.
Ren doesn’t get much screentime, but it’s clear that he and Sei have known each other for a while, and that he’s often (or at least tries to be) responsible for pulling Sei back from his more devil-may-care whims. He also tries to be the responsible one in the group. They’re very good roommates, and Ren is a great moderating influence. Ren is a very good supporting or auxiliary character; but because he doesn’t get into much trouble, I wouldn’t know how to write a story that focuses on him.
“Nice to meet you! How long have you been undead?”
Coda’s texture, and the backdrop of her portrait, convey the gentleness and sunny disposition of her character, perhaps the product and fruit of an age long past. The sepia tones, and the more archaic style of both the texture and backdrop, show she is old-fashioned in sensibilities, but mellowed with age. She also likes pretty things, despite dressing as a fairly “modern” child of these days.
Coda is a 600-year-old vampire, and affectionately known to many others; she makes it a point to learn of all the vampires in her area, and to remember those she meets only rarely, or even only once. Unlike the child vampires of Claudia in Interview with a Vampire and Eli in Let the Right One In, Coda hasn’t lost her child-like sunniness: she’s just too curious to be depressed. She is closest to another vampire named Bedivere, who appears to be an older man, but does not live with him as the relations would rouse unsavoury suspicion amongst those who witness their interactions. Instead, she lives with Sei, as she can pass off as his younger sister (she even wears one of his old beanies; she likes it very much, as it keeps her head warm). Because she’s also a fairly stable character, I wouldn’t know how to write a story that focuses on her. Not a high-stakes, dramatic one, anyway.
“Oh, just stay the morning.”
This was a very fun one. I just happened to have the perfect texture, that conveyed both the multitude/legion and the synchronicity of these characters. Many different constituent parts, all acting in unison.
It’s not explained in the story, but the welding together of a group of vampires’ consciousnesses is a sign that Lyza is near. The affected lesser vampires are not even aware of how odd or strange it is, that they think and speak with one voice; none of them would think anything is amiss, even when you point it out to them.
“All weaklings and parasites, every one of them.”
Lyza’s texture is the most complex out of any character, coming out at a whopping 4 tiles-wide and 2 tiles-tall, instead of the typical singular tile design everyone else uses; working with a larger canvas allowed me to add the dramatic glow scene in her texture. Lyza’s label is a bright cerulean that rivals the sky on most sunny days, and she is described as being clothed in an awe-inspiring, even oppressive radiance associated with deities and other mythological figures. I wanted to make it very clear that she is a very special character.
Lyza is amongst one of the oldest extant vampires, at 7,000-years-old. She appears to be an attractive, dark, very young woman of surprising athleticism. Historically, she was a being of supreme violence, and legends of her conquests have passed into myth. However, many new vampires are unaware of their progenitor, and many vampires have written her off as either long gone, a real figure shrouded in folktales, or a bogeyman meant to scare fledglings into their place. I have quite a bit of lore written for her, but it never comes into play in Luna, due to the story’s ensuing satirical nature. Her redemptive past is hinted at by Sei’s reaction to Luna’s declaring of her wish to make amends for past crimes.
Closing Thoughts
The first thing that I learned, in regards to making this website, is that textures go a long way. At first, I was embarrassed by the relatively simple design of my website, because I wanted to make it Mobile-friendly, without giving myself too much work. —But the use of colour, boldness of contour, typography, and of course, the textures themselves, go a long way towards making something attractive and tangible. The shapes may not be complex, but the level of detail in everything else more than makes up for it.
As for writing, I learned that these chatbots, based on current machine-learning models, are both contrained and not constrained by the limitations of their initial prompt, in different ways. Luna could produce more eloquent writing, but she would never stop “whispering barely audibly”, and she would be single-mindedly focused on “finding a way for humans and vampires to co-exist peacefully”, despite that already being the reality In the end, I actually had to give her a different problem to think about… Which was, the murders committed by she and her family.
