I think it's a bit silly to expect all these things to match up in any kind of reliable categories and whether something is or is not "a zombie". They were mostly invented separately by people who weren't thinking about the others. It probably works better to compare things based on how they work.
For instance, there are stories of beings that are undead because they deliberately used magic so that they wouldn't stay dead. "The Mummy", for instance. Then there are ones that come back because they did a bad thing, and ones that come back in revenge because somebody else did a bad thing, and there are things where it's basically just supernatural "natural history", as with vampires that are vampires because another vampire made them into one, making them almost like a species.
I don't know whether Dr. Bright can be classified as a zombie, but I'm sure he'd say he was if he thought it was cool.
Personally, when I think of the word "vampire" I'd expect that to mean something that is humanoid, drinks blood, is nocturnal in some sense (whether that's "dies in sunlight", or "nocturnal like a nocturnal animal", as often seen in kids' fiction, or "special powers work only at night"), and has in some way come back from the dead. But if something had only most of those features I'd still count it. Hence why we think of those legends from other parts of the world as "vampires" even though that name belongs to a different story from Eastern Europe - they're not exactly like, and the stories presumably aren't in fact related, but they're like enough that you tend to think of them as "the same kind of animal". And if you were writing a story, or a game setting, where all these things were real, it would be believable to say that they
were the same kind of animal, just local varieties.
Anyway, I think maybe we've lost track slightly of what kind of vampire this thread is supposed to be about. Trying to say anything that applies to every kind of vampire, as we've just been discussing, leads to gibberish. The original poster said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Thayne
The Vampire template in Basic Set is very Stoker-esque, but a lot of more recent vampire fiction is quite far from the Stoker mold. The general tendency in more recent vampire fiction (from Anne Rice to Buffy to True Blood and the Vampire Diaries) seems to be in favor of giving vampires neither quite so many powers nor quite so many weaknesses.
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I do think I see what he means there. There is a bit of a common thread. Twilight is probably in the same tradition, though it's an outlier in that it gives its vampires a ludicrous level of powers. Then there's A Discovery of Vampires, which I think was intended as Twilight for grown-ups, but makes a much better fist of making its "natural history" hang together. What else?