Shepherds and Organizers
A Designer's Note on Localizing Paint the Town Red
When we began adapting Paint the Town Red for contemporary Portland, the project seemed straightforward enough. The game's historical settings—Rome at its imperial height, Charlemagne's Aachen, medieval Ghazni—felt distant from players' lived experience. A modern setting would make the themes of gentrification, community displacement, and systemic oppression more immediate and visceral.
What we discovered was that localizing a vampire game forces uncomfortable questions about power that historical settings can safely abstract away.
The Seductive Appeal of Solidarity
Paint the Town Red's rulebook concludes with a call to action: "self-fulfillment is ultimately fruitless without violent opposition to colonialism, culturally conservative behaviour and imperialist greed." Reading this, we initially assumed vampire characters could serve as supernatural allies in contemporary social movements. The mechanics seemed to support this—Bonds form with communities, Factions represent oppressive systems, Chaos accumulates when you disrupt the status quo.
Our first Portland scenario, "Rosa's Last Stand," emerged from this reading. We framed vampire PCs as community organizers with supernatural abilities, supporting immigrant businesses against developer predation. The vampires weren't saviors but partners, their undead perspective offering unique insights into systemic oppression while respecting mortal agency and leadership.
The scenario worked mechanically. Players could use vampire abilities to research permit violations, coordinate security for community meetings, or influence hostile bureaucrats. Success required understanding existing organizing networks rather than replacing them. The game's themes of entropy and resistance mapped neatly onto contemporary struggles against displacement and cultural appropriation.
But something nagged at us. The more we developed the scenario, the more we realized we were dodging the fundamental question vampire fiction always poses: what does it mean for apex predators to "help" their prey?
The Uncomfortable Mathematics of Immortality
Paint the Town Red doesn't shy away from vampires' predatory nature, but it frames blood-drinking as social rather than biological compulsion. Vampires feed to feel human, not to survive. This seemed to create space for ethical feeding practices—blood banks, willing donors, feeding only on "bad" people.
But the Portland setting made the power differential impossible to ignore. Vampires in our scenarios weren't just stronger or faster than mortals—they possessed centuries of perspective that made them fundamentally different kinds of beings. A vampire who'd watched Rome fall and empires rise would relate to mortal struggles differently than we initially assumed.
This led to uncomfortable questions. Would a being who'd lived through multiple cycles of revolution and reaction really believe in the permanence of any political victory? Could someone who'd seen every reform movement eventually co-opted or destroyed maintain genuine faith in organizing work? Most troubling: if vampires formed Bonds with vulnerable communities while secretly feeding on them, what kind of "solidarity" was this really?
The mathematics became stark. Vampires live for millennia; mortals for decades. Vampires possess supernatural abilities; mortals rely on collective action. Vampires understand historical patterns; mortals experience immediate crises. The relationship couldn't be equal no matter how good the vampires' intentions.
The Shepherd's Dilemma
This realization led to our second Portland scenario, "The Shepherd's Dilemma"—the B-side to Rosa's aspirational A-side. Instead of community organizers, we framed vampires as protective predators. They might genuinely care about mortal communities, but from a position analogous to ranchers protecting livestock rather than equals organizing together.
The shepherd metaphor resolved several narrative problems. It explained why vampires would act against other vampire factions—not from moral superiority but to protect established territory from rivals using unsustainable extraction methods. It acknowledged the affection immortal beings might develop for mortals while maintaining honest power dynamics. Most importantly, it provided a framework for vampire "community organizing" that didn't require pretending the relationship was equal.
This reading proved equally consistent with Paint the Town Red's mechanics. Bonds represent emotional attachments that transcend species lines but don't erase power differentials. Factions become competing approaches to vampire-mortal relationships rather than simple good-versus-evil conflicts. The game's themes of entropy and cycles remain intact—mortals build, lose, rebuild while vampires endure and adapt.
Two Readings, One System
The A-side and B-side scenarios use identical mechanics to tell radically different stories. Rosa's presents vampires as junior partners in mortal-led movements. Shepherd's presents them as benevolent predators maintaining sustainable prey populations. Both interpretations find support in the game's text and themes.
This suggests Paint the Town Red's political framework is more ambiguous than it initially appears. The game calls for resistance to conservative hegemony, but doesn't specify whether vampires join that resistance or simply prefer different forms of exploitation. The "collective action" the rulebook endorses might mean solidarity across species lines, or it might mean vampires coordinating their territorial interests against rival predators.
The Portland setting forced us to confront this ambiguity in ways historical settings didn't require. When vampires operate in medieval Ghazni or imperial Rome, the power structures feel safely distant. Contemporary gentrification in Portland implicates players in recognizable systems of oppression, making vampire complicity harder to ignore.
Toward Honest Complexity
Our Portland materials don't resolve the tension between these readings—they embrace it. The scenarios can be run as written from either perspective, allowing players to discover their own comfort level with vampire-mortal power dynamics. Some groups might maintain faith in supernatural solidarity while others explore the darker implications of immortal perspective.
This complexity feels truer to vampire fiction's enduring appeal. The best vampire stories don't offer easy answers about predation and care, dominance and affection, immortality and mortality. They force us to examine what it means to have power over others and how genuine care can coexist with fundamental exploitation.
Localizing Paint the Town Red taught us that contemporary settings don't just make themes more immediate—they make contradictions harder to ignore. The game's call for collective resistance remains powerful, but Portland's vampires must grapple with whether they're part of that resistance or sophisticated obstacles to it.
Perhaps that's the most honest reading of vampire politics: not heroes or villains, but complex beings whose very existence poses questions about power, care, and the possibility of ethical relationships across unbridgeable differences. In Portland's rain-soaked streets, even the undead must choose how to relate to a world they can influence but never truly join.