Bloodlines: The Legendary features a Daeva bloodline called the Gulikan who fetishize scents and use perfume potions as part of their seductive and destructive dance with mortal prey. With the movie, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer out now, this thread at Shadow n’ Essence has popped up linking the movie’s sinister protagonist with the Gulikan. And rightly so. I read Peter Suskind’s novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, back in 2002 and was simultaneously spooked and enchanted. Here we have a book with a grotesque, barely human protagonist anchoring a story of incredible literal sensuality. Remember that, despite what the MPAA might imply, “sensuality” doesn’t mean sex.

In Perfume, Suskind takes us to 18th-century France through the nose of an all-but-blind character with a hypersensitive palate. He makes excellent use of his medium to tell us a story through details that can’t be conveyed in film or music: the smell of caramel, the stickiness of an abbatoir, the smell of blood. How director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) fares in bringing a story about scent to the screen, I don’t know. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I admire him for trying.

Suskind’s novel, though, stuck with me. When I was seeking out real-world inspirations for legendary vampires for Bloodlines: The Legendary, Perfume came back to mind. It’s a great example of what we tried to do with that book: find a vampiric quality in familiar (and ideally scary) concepts that are not typically associated with vampires. That is, we wanted scary, high-concept ideas with roots in the audience but that weren’t based on exhausted vampire myths. This sense of innate familiarity, I hoped, would create something like the familiarity you feel when you read a myth with resonance in your own culture, but without losing the newness you want from a book of new bloodlines. Thus it’s easy to believe that these bloodlines represent (or had spawned) ideas that are a part of Kindred culture even if the bloodlines themselves have never been known first-hand in your chronicle’s city.

The idea, after all, was to explore ideas that were legendary among vampires, not vampires from real-world legendry. It’s easy to confuse the ideas and I wanted to provide the authors with a bit of method they could use to translate their ideas into the style of the book. When you consider the wide array of oddball concepts in that book, and the common sense of mysterious but sort of wry reverence they’re all given in the text, I think it worked. I mean, there isn’t a single idea in that book that can’t be seen as funny — which gives each idea a sense that it’s actually been through the wringer of the masses, the pop-culture filter — and yet each idea manages to be creepy, unsettling or outright horrific on some level when you’re actually with them on the page. The authors of that book did a great job.

Chris Kobar wrote the Gulikan in Bloodlines: The Legendary from a simple note I gave him to take a look at Perfume and invent Daeva who are driven by scent. We didn’t want to mimick Perfume’s character, we wanted to evoke Suskind’s voice and see if we could do what he did in his novel. In short: unsettling sensuality. Kobar delivered. He traded Suskind’s France for Istanbul, which was a brilliant choice, and gave the Gulikan a passion, rather than a cartoonish obsession (which is one of the red flags that a bloodline hasn’t been explored enough yet). This is why I chose to use the Gulikan in my own chronicle. (But don’t tell anyone — my players don’t know that yet.)

In case you’re curious, Chris Kobar also wrote The Carnival for The Legendary. There’s another example of a bloodline that could go off the rails into comedy at any moment, but doesn’t. They were so captivating, we put them on the cover.