These are the last two concepts I had made for Runescape’s vampire quest, Lords of Vampyrium.

The one above is Drakan’s Throne room (the Big Baddy), on top of the castle.

We had pretty messed up ideas about this bunch of environments.

As I said before, I definitely wanted to avoid all the clichés about vampires, especially the Gothic architecture bit.

In this regard, this was helped by the fact that, in Runescape, vampires come from another dimension.

So, using a visual language that looked a bit alien would have made sense, and at the same time dodge the overused North European architecture entirely.

The throne room was supposed to be roofless, so that greater vampires could land and take off from it at will.

From the outside, the top of the tower would had looked as if surrounded by a moving black cloud of crawling figures.

I doubt my colleagues eventually had the time to squeeze that purely cosmetic animation into the game, but in our minds it would have looked cool.

The room also had only three walls, so that actually Drakan could dominate both the throne room and the city at his feet from his seat.

The walls were supposed to have alcoves carved all along their length, where important vampires could look down on supplicants from the shadows.

The big bunch of figures behind Drakan’s thrones were in fact paralysed humans kept alive though magic means, whose blood would fill the complicated designs on the floor and at the same time provide “refreshment” for the vampire’s boss.

In our view they would look like a complex of statues, moving ever so slightly, sometimes looking at the camera with desperate eyes, just kept alive for decoration (and I guess to make some kind of point).

I doubt Runescape engine would make it justice, but hey:)

The big hole in the middle was instead the Blood Pit, which was supposed to be used as a dump for Drakan’s victims and as a larder.

I’m not sure that actually made it into the game in that form, but the image below shows how we envisioned it during our brain storming.

Now that I think of it, I wonder how this level looked in Germany. You can’t show blood in German games, and damn, we filled the place with it.

Anyway, these were all the vampires I had.

I still have a bunch of small concepts I made sometimes last year (which I might post next week), and after that I guess I’ll have ran out of old Runescape stuff for good.

by Paolo Puggioni