In general, do you think that contemporary prepared humans should be able to pwn things which have traditionally been creepy crawly or scary monsters? For example, let's think about an old folkloric vampire, i.e. a walking corpse with an appetite for blood, without necessarily considering super-intelligence such as Stoker's Dracula might have. If we were to imagine a medieval dude with a knife stumbling on an old folkloric vampire in, say, a misty cemetary, we can imagine how it would be tough to deal with said vampire. But what about a a contemporary guy who is prepared with NVGs, a shotgun, and a sidearm? Even if the contemporary person isn't using any specific anti-vampire charms like garlic or whatnot, think about it in terms of physics. The shotgun can remove a head at close range, right? So even if the vampire is supposedly immune to normal weaponry, what can it do against shot going at several thousand feet per second that can make its head into a chunky smear? What can it do without teeth and eyes and a brain, after all? Just think about the raw mangling power of modern weaponry.

The way I see it, if we're talking about a scary monster with human intelligence and/or supernatural age/experience, such as a D&D lich, the question of technology and firepower vs. spookiness should theoretically go out the window since the scary monster can do everything a human can, unless the super intelligent monster has been so isolated it has no idea what a human can do. Like, I can imagine a D&D lich being stuck in a catacomb for 1000 years and looking down on humans so much he expects to find them with platemail and swords and dies just from being totally surprised and unprepared in one critical encounter.

I suppose that another obvious exception would be incorporeal entities, since you by definition really can't shoot those, set them on fire, or whatnot. I suppose which if any contemporary weapons should be able to affect incorporeal monsters is a whole other subject for discussion. But in terms of things like, say, ghouls, werewolves in wolf form, zombies, D&D giant rats, or similar things that are beefier like bone golems or what have you, you'd think that things like plastic explosives, .50 cal rifles, PKM machine guns, white phosphorous and whatnot would be able to pwn those things much more quickly and thoroughly than a crossbow or a stake and mallet. Dare I say trivially easily, with preparation and sufficient ammunition?

Simply put, no.

People are, in theory, smarter, more knowledgable, more educated. The "spooky" doesn't hold as much mystery because of a plethora of TV shows and movies and comics and books and what have you that have come out in the last 50 years. This should give humanity an edge.

But it won't.

People are soft, weak, and stupid. Compared to a country villager from a couple hundred years ago? We lose. We don;t have to fight to survive. We don't work as hard, we don;t have to deal with survival as a day to day activity.

Those movies, TV shows, and books? they work against us. What is "fact", and what is fiction? How do you kill monster X, when it's differnet in every show? And then there's the fact that when confronted by the supernatural, people simply would not believe it. It's fake, a movie prop, a guy in a costume. Poeple might freak, might run, might even try to fight, but by the time they realized that the werewolf was real, they'd be dead.

The old villager? They believed in the monsters. They were ready to fight the monster, when needs be.

<shurg>

In the "long run", we'd be better off. once we had time to adapt mentally to the situation. Figure things out, use our knowledge and technology to opur advantage. But that assumes we survived that long.

Well, that really depends on the monster. Like, if it were a werewolf, a contemporary person would probably just think it's a huge exceptionally bad tempered wolf, and the difference is in many ways academic when it comes to the wolf mauling you. I expect if you were equipped to deal with a big bad wolf that you'd be more or less well equipped to deal with a werewolf, and vice versa.

I expect that if I saw a zombie there'd be a good chance I would think it was an actor or something, so you do have a point there. But other things are impossible to confuse for an actor a movie prop. Like, if you saw a big bone golem in the shopping mall ripping shit up, or even a big bone golem just walking around in an isolated area, I think that would be very difficult to dismiss as being a guy in a costume or what have you.

Person 1: Dude! I'm out of here.
Person 2: Psshhh! It's just a special effect. I'm gonna stay to see what movie this is for.
Bone Golem: <SMASH>

It really depends on the threat, I think. The vampire, well it doesn't take a genius to figure that decapitation would work; that's pretty much a constant (except for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's version of Dracula who literally can't be killed by anything unless you have the most powerful witch in the world capture his magical ancestral sword and channel absurdly powerful magics through it to strip him of his powers, in which case he just becomes a vampiric Vlad the Impaler, one of the most ruthless warlords in all of history and a skilled fighter with centuries of experience in addition to his vampire powers). The werewolf gets obliterated by British policemen when it visits London. Zombies, we've seen how that works; if they're plague-style zombies they kick some ass, if not they better have good diplomacy skills.

Other creatures aren't so easy. A properly armed infantry unit would pwn a Lich on their first encounter, but there is no guarantee that they would be able to find, correctly identify, and destroy its Phylactery. If the lich had any sense it is certain that they wouldn't be able too. Hell, the first thing I'd do if I were a lich is construct a heat-proof and pressure-proof box, put my Phylactery in it, seal it up, and teleport it into the heart of the sun. Because there is no better protection than a giant nuclear furnace in outer space. So the lich gets pwned once, and then he know what he's up against so he takes his time, watches a great deal of television, and plots and take over the world. With his powerful magics and virtual immortality there is little doubt that he would win any war of attrition, particularly since he almost certainly knows how to teleport and thus cannot be trapped by conventional means (and could disintegration ray his way through any barrier eventually even if he couldn't teleport).


Plague style vampires, if organized, also present an extreme threat. Due to their potential propagation rate and the ability to use modern weapons, they would eventually overwhelm all human resistance if they put their minds to it.
I can't imagine why they don't in modern vampire tales. The same is true for any intelligent tool-using plague monster.


There is a reason why classic monsters are either lone or stupid.

Any creepy crawlies are generally predators of humans. Given that we already have a group of people that are predatory towards our own kind and have developed techniques to protect ourselves from them, I cannot see any reason why they wouldn't be capable of dealing with small incursions of creepy crawlies entirely autonomously. Inefficiencies can, no doubt, be supported by the far greater numbers of humanity. Larger populations of creepy crawlies may require full scale military intervention to eradicate, but initial inefficiencies are supportable until the infestation reaches a particular relative scale.

Technology is a double edged sword because it is, by design, intended to be used by everyone. Creepy crawlies that are capable of understanding modern arms and equipment can harness an equal force multiplier to our militaries, but creepy crawlies have a lot more individual force to multiply.

This discussion is based on the premise of fictional creepy-crawlies. From what we can see, many of those fictional creepy-crawlies are basically just super-predators. Zombies, werewolves, aliens, etc. would appear to be just very powerful, very successful and perhaps very specialized predators which can be eliminated by normal means. In those cases, all else being equal, a properly equipped modern human would fair better than a poorly equipped human. That's just common sense. As story tellers, it behooves us to change those circumstances, however, for a better story.

There's also a category of creepy-crawlies which are supernatural in some way. For instance, classic succubi and vampires aren't just some sort of monster which fly around and attack, but a spiritual creature or manifestation which is not limited by the normal laws of physics. Imagine an elemental with immunity to normal weapons or the like. Your lich also falls into this category. Physical means don't really apply, so the question is primarily one of education and ingenuity. As has been pointed out, those people with the most appropriate experience win, which oftentimes may be the medieval person who believes in these things and has a culturally held defense against them. A fantastic example here actually is from the Bible, where someone is trying to cast out a demon, and the demon says "I know of this Jesus Christ, but who are you?" and just continues hanging around. Basically, modern people may not have the faith in the supernatural necessary to wield the powers to fight back. I think that would be a fantastic plot twist. None of the PCs are religious, so none of the religious methods work for them.

Finally, there's the category of 'appropriate threat'. A GM who attacks a party with smurfs is not a very good GM because there's no challenge. Sure, you can throw ghouls and beasties and watch the party slice through them, so at that point you need to throw something more difficult. Change the challenge to horrors, if you want. Again, I've designed a custom monster for my game which I may release once the party discovers it, but most modern methods will be ineffective, while there are some medieval methods which are perfectly suited. The party just doesn't have the knowledge necessary.

Unless of course we're talking the traditional wolfman looking werewolf, which means it looks humanoid as much, if not moreso than canine. Plus, it also means that if you were well equipped to deal with a normal big bad worlf, you'd be fucked, because you'd lack silver.



For the bone golem, true. At least at first. Chances are a normal person would flip the fuck out, run like hell, and then convince themselves it was something else. Anything else. Maybe someone making a movie, maybe something animatronic.

People rationalize all kinds of shit. A LOT of the modern Urban Fantasy books (Dresden Files, the Blood Rites series, etc) make the point that in those worlds, scary big bad spooky shit stays hidden less because of efforts on it's part, and more on the fact that humanity refuses to believe. And those that do are dismissed out of hand as whacko.

And of course there's the fact that seeing shit that doesn't fit into your reality has a high probablity of making you more than a little crazy. Hell, people end up in therapy for years if they have to kill a person out of self defense, or as an accident. Add in stuff that's not supposed to exist? Most people are going to fall apart on the spot.

And yes, I have a very low opinion of humanity as a whole. But I also believe I know my own threshhold. I can keep it together while being threatened at knifepoint (and have done so). I've stepped in the middle of a domestic abuse situation involving total strangers (Guy smacked his girlfriend around in the mall parking lot while I was in college). I suspect a gun migfht make me get a bit weak kneed, but I wouldn;t freak out. But Zombies? Werewolves? Vampires? A fraggin Bone Golem? I can almost guarantee I'd be doing a lot of running, screaming, and probably end up awake for a couple nights with my mind scrambled. After that, I might pull it together, find a shotgun, and hunker down in a basement somewhere hoping to protect myself.

<shrug>

Now, granted, that Bone Goelm of yours is gonna rip the hell out of shit, kill a lot of folks, and mentally scar a lot of others. Then the military would show up, go "what the hell is that?", and then blow it to pieces. Technology will win over big dumb monsters. But against the rest? We're fucked.

No, people don't rationalize all kinds of shit. People, in fact, wholeheartedly believe all kinds of fantastic shit, particularly when they have a personal experience that they subjectively connect to that fantastic shit. Human beings are masters of what is called magical thinking. It is the result of our evolved pattern-recognition abilities combined with our evolved social abilities. It's useful for survival. When we experience something we connect the dots to determine what we experienced. If the dots involve something that could be ascribed to a well-known folkloric creature or phenomenon then we are apt to believe that explanation. If something looks like a vampire, talks like a vampire, and drinks blood like a vampire most people will try to stake it in self-defense.

Now, it is unlikely that the scientific community or the world at large would believe tales of a supernatural creature without very convincing evidence, but that evidence won't be hard to find if such beings are real. Once real objective controlled experiments prove the existence of the supernatural all bets are off.

First creepy crawlies can still be horrifying in general because while the peasant in the first example would very likely half a knife as well as a staff while out and about, most people are remarkably unarmed when going to visit grandma.

Hellhounds can come in from the NAN and Prey on people in the barrens who have trouble affording food much less a weapon. And if you're homeless anywhere watch out for sleeping near drains. The devil rats will get you.

But yes in general the sort of things that would threaten people in GURPS fanatasy would fail in Shadowrun (or most other contemporary settings) in a pitched battle. Though you can get around this if you're having to maneuver through tight terrain and you don't know where they are.


This, I think, is a good thing. It means that in SR the threats tend to be more interesting than just killing stupid stuff. Wendigos have their followers and won't be obvious. Heck in SR even the ghouls are smart!

I think it's just like Batman vs Superman. The answer is up to the writer.

I am a fan of modern weapons "pwning" old fantasy threats. In many movies and novels, it seems so constructed to see "monsters" being a threat - usually, the humans have to be written dumb as posts for it to work.

(Jurassic Park is a good example for this kind of stupidity: "Hey, we're gonna go to the generator. There are nasty raptors out there, and we're in the weapon chamber. I'll take a flashlight, and won't bother with any of the dozens of weapons able to kill the dinosaurs in here.")

Incorporal threats work better, and feel less forced, unless they overdo the "That can't be" stuff - once you have one example of supernatural threats proven, why would you act dismissive again when the next shows up in book 2?

There are contemporal fantasy novels that do this decently. The Anita Blake Novels - before the series turned soapporn - showed a world where humans lived with crawlies. There was still the unknown, and general humans were not versed that well in monster lore, but people wore crosses against vampires, there were "ghoul exterminator teams" keeping cemetaries clean, and the police had a special section for supernatural crimes.

I think it depends on which version of whichever beastie you're going up against.
Looking through books, movies and RPGs, Werewolves/Vampires/Liches/etc are portrayed in wildly different way...
...So that variation would be enough to cause problems ["what do you mean holy crosses don't work ??" or "the Werewolf can only attack on a full moon"]

The last decade or so has done a big job of humanising Undead and monsters of all sorts [Urban Fantasy has a lot to answer for].

A vampire who's just someone suffering from the virus is a pale shadow of the dead-but-walking creature from the past...
...And shooting someone who's already dead and whose body is animated by sorcery probably isn't going to be as effective [the wonderful examples from CoC of creatures not taking as much damage because their very nature is fundamentally different might be applicable here]


Almost by definition a 1000 year old Lich can probably do many things that are way beyond a normal - like move around after being dead, for a start.


Depends on how those beasties "work" in your game...
...CoC ghouls aren't the same as D&D ghouls or even SR ghouls.

But, you know, ammo does run out [the World War Z book is good for things like this].

What about the immunity to normal weapons rule? Does that mean that copper jacketed bullets or lead shot can be healed almost as fast as the wound is caused or does it mean the bullet didn't even penetrate the skin to cause the damage in the first place. So shooting a vampire in the head, point blank might only cause whip lash as his head is knocked backward and piss him off. Maybe the whole silver thing is so that only that one metal, because of an allergy, can even begin to do any damage.

I always pictured immunity to normal weapons as still making the hole (bullet, sword, or otherwise), but the creature just isn't that affected. What does a lich care if he's got an airvent through his chest? He hasn't used his lungs in a thousand years! Just adjust the description to show how much it's affecting him. A shot that doesn't penetrate his immunity, that just plunges through his gut and doesn't bother him a bit. Something that causes a bit of damage, that could be a bullet that took an integral chunk of matter with it, like the shoulder or the sternum or an important joint.

I also like how WoD vampires are handled. They're not immune to bullets, but bullets only do bashing damage (so to kill a vamp with a gun, you have to fill up their health boxes with bashing damage, then keep shooting to start inflicting lethal). This is explained as being due to their lack of important insides. They only need their heart and their brain, so any other damage done might indeed slow them down due to tearing apart muscle and bone, represented by the wound penalties, I guess. (and if you take a called shot to the head or heart, you can inflict lethal damage with a gun). Werewolves are similar. You don't need silver, but it's sure helpful. This way, it keeps their classical strengths and weaknesses in play, without making them completely immune.

Anyway, aside from game systems and just in general, I think it's good if old school creepy crawlies at least throw humans off, but remain ultimately defeatable (even if they're really, really tough). I don't like absolutely undefeatable baddies, that's not very interesting for me. The tension really lies in those situations where the good guys might win, or might lose. If it's a forgone conclusion either way, I just don't find it very engaging.

Look, if the creatures of myth return to the world, you better hope it's just European and American constructions because the shit the rest of the world believes in won't go down like a little bitch under a couple of 5.56.

Seriously, Asian ghost stories always end with "And then they all died/went mad/pulled their eyes out/were cursed for a thousand generations." Peruvians have a vampire that eats your fucking fat.

But yeah it really boils down to what sort of "rules" these creatures obey. If they're "realistic" monsters that have to obey at least some of the common laws of the universe we'd probably do alright since all the typical ways of kill them would still work. It also depends on the "size" of the outbreak and again, how much of the "rules" they have to obey.

Take zombies. First off, what animates them? Are they 28 Day later zombies that are just pissed off virus infested crazies that still go down like a sack of bricks when you bleed them to death? Or are we talking the shambling dead that only die from headshots or total dismemberment because they're being animated by *Joker hand wave* Magic. How is the disease spread? Bites only? Contaminated water? If it dies it walks? This apply to all living creatures? Is there zombie bacteria now? Because that would totally fuck us up. Hell a zombie parasite vector would probably be sufficient to infect enough people to make this into a real epidemic.

World War Z is a fun book btw.

But yeah, I think unless you lay down some basic "rules" it's kinda an overly large question.

Peruvian vampires need to go to Austin, Texas. Wow, fat armed Texans vs. vampire invasion. That would be the pwn.