The fluff regardless of edition brings up time and again how influential, rich, and powerful the vampires are. In particular clans such as the Ventrue and the Giovanni are renowned as bankers and major business players. But even when you go down to the individual vampire rather than looking at entire clans, you still have business men and women who are multi-billionaires.
So I found myself becoming curious about what exactly these sorts of characters could actually do in game. What sort of infrastructure projects they could achieve or want to achieve to benefit them as vampires. What exactly could a coterie of investment kindred do in the world of darkness?
As an example if even a single elder of the Tremere clan invested in a
doomsday condo, V5 wouldn't have seen the Tremere clan decapitated by the 2nd inquisition.
But when you think about it, buying and renovating an ICBM silo into a hardened chantry that would stand up to a nuclear strike and still not crack, isn't that big of a project. It is a glorified safe room. So what would be a bigger project, something that would merit the attention of several kindred siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars into it.
I could see projects like constructing "company towns" out in the middle of no where, where everything has been built from the ground up to function for the vampiric residents benefit, with an entire below ground city for vampires and a mortal city above that generates revenue and blood. With the city location being so isolated and often in hostile terrain, even if mortals escaped they would have a couple hundred miles of desert to cross before getting to civilization again.
Alternatively what would happen if a group like the Giovanni or V20 Tremere started doing massive public works projects to enhance their rituals. Any one who has seen either of the Full Metal Alchemist anime can imagine a few scenarios, and most other clans would have no clue what was going on because they wouldn't recognize the thaumaturgical or necromantic implications of the projects. Admittedly this falls into the territory of plot point rather than game mechanic, but in truth it is just scaling up what you can do with a haven or chantry.
Even something as mundane as building private military contractor company becomes relatively straight forward. A few contacts, a little dominate here and there, a little ghouling to make the soldiers out perform the competition, and all that is required is the money to make it all happen. A coterie of business vampire characters could potentially bring entire private armies to the table with relatively little effort.
Obviously everything discussed so far goes way beyond the scope of games where the focus is on who wore what fashion to the last party at Elysium, but at the same time in the modern age with telecommunications and international business being what it is, there really isn't much stopping mind numbingly rich characters even from character generation building an international power base of frightening proportions.
Also when doing projects like this, who has authority over it in the vampire society? Does the Prince of the city where the vampire resides have say over what they can do business wise on a different continent? Or does a Prince have to constantly fight off vampiric out of state investors and not be able to call on other leaders to curtail their subjects?
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