Which makes perfect sense, given that they "reproduce" "asexually", which usually means things diverge a lot. Each vampire inherits their vampire traits from one other vampire, no "gene mixing" occurs, so if anything changes at all it stays changed.
There's no need, in fact, to get too complicated about "why the vampires don't take over the world". Remember,
Twilight made no sense about this whatsoever, as several previous posters have mentioned, and it was a big success, albeit that was probably for the sake of the romance rather than the adventure with most people.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer before it also made no sense about this ("because of the Slayer" is exciting but obviously doesn't add up), and was also a huge success, even as an adventure story.
However, getting complicated about "why the vampires don't take over the world" is fun, so I'll join in.
This has already been discussed in the "Early Vampires" thread, and the stuff about new vampires being competition for food and it only working if the vampire can expect their "offspring" to be loyal to them still applies. The only difference is that these are different vampires with different properties so some of the issues are different.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
Also...there had to be a first vampire to start the chain of 'infection'. Maybe there just haven't been actual vampires all that long, just a few centuries.
If there are more than one 'progenitor' vampires, then maybe there are vampire tribes, vampires 'descended' from different 'first vampires' and they don't get on. It might be that they never gained control of the world because as soon as one tribe starts to pick up power and I influence, the others combine against them and pull them down.
Which suggests that maybe vampires have been beaten to the verge of extinction, or even entirely wiped out, more than once in the past, but the scourge reappears when a new first vampire happens. A goal of the campaign might be to learn how first vampires happen and how to stop it. Maybe that the Ultimate Secret of the senior vampires.
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That's like the older werewolf legends. If I remember rightly, they referred to two types of werewolf - sorcerers and others who had deliberately made themselves werewolves by black magic, and people who had been cursed to be werewolves, sometimes, though not always, by being bitten by one. The vampire equivalent might be something more like a "lich" in Dungeons and Dragons, somebody who deliberately cheated death by using magic to become a vampire. In this scenario, vampirism is a curse, not a species, and a curse that if it happened once might happen again.
Building on Maximara's "many types of vampire" idea, maybe being able to make other vampires could itself be a rare trait, with most "first vampires" being isolated incidents who don't have this ability, and those vampires being able to do the same "and so on
ad infinitum" could be even rarer, and the appearance of a "first vampire" who is both powerful and able to "reproduce" might be a rare "perfect storm" event.