Tell me about the vampires in your setting /tg/, do you have your own subversion of how they are portrayed, or do you play them straight? After reading the Vampire Counts army book I want to try and change how a vamp functions after drinking large quantities and/or special types of blood, like a dragon's.
>>44551424
I guess I subvert them. Was never keen on vampires, so I instead tied them into the same undead family as liches. It's all linked up in blood and death magic, and all for immortality. Through various means, mostly blood sacrifice, a sorcerer can become a vampire, an immortal undead monster blah blah you've seen it all before. Their bat-shapeshifting, blood magic, and allergy to sunlight and god isn't just disease side-effects, and is tied into their magical power. All vampires used to be some kind of mage. They can spread their influence by corrupting the blood of thralls through kinky biting, but it never goes full-on vampire plague on its own). Vampires must consume the blood of the living to fuel their immortality, but those old enough can ween themselves off of it, becoming even more magically powerful at the expense of their flesh. So the oldest vampires still kicking around are skeletal liches of limitless power and ancient knowledge.
pic unrelated. I didn't really have anything else for vampires.
>>44551424
It's sort of a subversion on the "noble monster", big castle and fancy jews kind of thing. They used to be powerful noble families, but after over-hunting and expanding their broods beyond any ability to sustain themselves they started to fall apart. So they were forced to engage in aggressive expansion to keep their bloodlines from starving, but in addition to their ailing state and unwillingness to let internal grudges die, their armies were eventually worn down and they were defeated. Most of them now live in decaying manors, shabby apartments, or abandoned estates trying to hold whats left of their families together and clinging to past glory. With the exception of a select few families that have managed to reclaim their old holdings or integrate into society, they're more like glorified drug addicts than anything else.
>>44551424
Inspired by ancient steppe cultures, or at least how historians back when talked about them. Roving bands/clans live in the high plains, riding giant bats and berghasts. Keep bats like hawks too. Live in the cave riddled hills during the day and ride out at night to fight each other for turf or raid nearby settlements for blood. Not very clean eaters, they really tear into their prey when eating them.Think Daybreakers if you've seen that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q63mRR3d7ck
Pretty diverse physically, depending on lineage. Vary from Nosferatu looking to more bat like. Invariably monstrous. All male, though it's up in the air if it's a physiological thing or a cultural one. The male Bloodlords just refuse to sire women.
The big change I have on mine is that once changed, the fundamental personality of the vampire doesn't really change, and the hunger for blood is no more intense than normal hunger. So they usually just hit up butchers and get really raw meat for the blood fix, because holy shit, who just goes out and murders people? One of the main vamp characters hates Vlad the Impaler for being a fucking psychopath and perpetuating all these rumors and superstition.
>>44552039
Other end of the vampire spectrum.
>>44552136
And the absolute most human-like you will ever find. The youngest and least powerful vampires.
Necropscope levels of fucking horror.
Inhuman parasites, abominations, utterly alien and devoid of all but the most base elements of humanity.
They do not seduce, they enslave, they dominate, they corrupt.
>>44552125
Most vamps just keep to themselves due to low numbers from in-fighting, some of them are really nostalgic due to being kind of physically and mentally locked into the age they were turned. The big thing I didn't change was the how the vampire who creates a new one has almost total control of the spawn. Unless they intake a massive amount of blood which lets them break the control.
They deemed as Vermin and thus have only two options - be hunted down and exterminated or become a property of the state and serve the country.
If the second option is chosen then they are kept at the Vermin Application Facility, which they only allowed to leave under a supervision of an officer.
They are revenants who, for unknown reasons, came back to life . They are stronger and lighter then a human, can meld with shadows and mists and haunt human minds, making them ether very agitated or very relaxed.
No vampires in my setting, but you have bat people dressing like vampires because it's their fashion
They're just black people, and they leech money instead of blood.
Pic related
They generally suck.
>>44554316
>>44554316
>>44554316
That was an awful movie, just for the record.
What are some neat powers a vampire could get from draining blood? Like if it drained a giant it could get stronger, or a dragon to resist fire, or maybe a demigod and it never needs to feed again.
>>44553718
That's kind of cute.
Vampires can survive on nonsentient blood but are affected by the blood they consume - if a vampire drinks exclusively from rats it will become scrawny, wiry and with a mind that's attuned heavily to hiding and consuming and survival.
Vampires do not all drink blood. Some have found a way to survive on the emotions, spirit or time of sentients. All will still drain it - so you'll end up with depressed, monotonous, grey people; people will only the tiniest fraction of a soul or people who age well before their time - but they don't need to take the blood directly in these instances.
>>44555688
Off the top of my head -
Mage - Stronger magic
Merfolk - Waterbreathing
Lesser Demon - Some kind of infernal power
Undead - Harmful to the drinker
Gnome - Some kind of craft related skill, or manual dexterity improvement
>>44551424
They all have shadow caster spells
The more powerful and ancient a vampire becomes, the more weaknesses it acquires.
>Day one vampires can walk about in the sun, touch holy symbols, and eat all the garlic they please, but they have no abilities beyond being undead.
>The oldest vampire in the setting is approximately 6000 years old and can only feed on birds, fish, and reptiles due to acquiring an allergy to the X and Y chromosomes. Of course, he also can't enter a body of water, and has the counting weakness applied to the grains of sand on a beach. To support his existence, he has to sleep in his grave dirt every day or take penalties to physical ability scores that cripple him.
Ded as a significant force..Secretitive, bored, powertripping, magical artistocracy fragmenting into occult cults trying to fuck eachother over before getting fucked over by other cults, and secret societies. Theres like a dozen true vampires left who are smart and ascetic enough and even they barely practice the blood rites anymore. Their offshoot the bodycult got hold of a major relic, the Chalice of Shaping, the source of ancient vampires and blood magic but they were dumb fucks and started mutating themselves for phyical power, acid resistance and the likes. They got wiped out when their nominal allies, the deathcult sold them out and decided to go legal, form a death knight order and be a part of the gubmint. The death knights even got to hunt down a few true vampires in some incredibly metal midnight showdowns.
I just feel they are really spent as an idea on their own. Played straight is boring, and subverting them is boring with edginess. The suspense and eerie charming pull of the Count is pretty hard to replicate in a tabletop game anyway.
Vampires are a result of a demon that represented the bloodlust of nature. It killed with no regard and wasted it's kill only feeding on blood when it hungered and would destroy indisciminately.
However it could not do anything by itself and had to posses a body, usually a human, to do it's thing and whenever someone would "Kill it" it had a boon that allowed it to take over and control the body of whomever killed it by feeding on their bloodlust and overpowering them.
This came to a stop when a warrior, a paladin, fought and defeated the demon and as it tried to control her she managed to wrestle control through her own strength of will thus killing it and acquiring it's powers. She would become the first vampire and the act of creating more involved giving a bit of the demon's soul after you had drained the victim of blood and feeding them your own. If you failed to control it you became a ghouled beast under the control of the one who raised you. Succeed and you became a vampire as well.
The only weaknesses they have is that they can't eat or drink anything other than blood and can't come out during the day due to the nature of the demon's boon that granted it it's power and they are undead in the since they had to die first in order to be reborn as the monsters they are.
The most common kind are the very much mortal and not undead blooddrinkers who do so to gain more spiritual power by drinking the blood of an equal, as per the Law of Consumption. They use this spiritual power for their own gains, often to work acts of magic, or improve themselves.
The less common are the truely "immortal" and powerful blood-drinkers. Those who have drank so much that they're more demon than human, driven by their lust for blood and power. They're beyond life and death, have incredible spiritual power, and often sire vampiric cults, served by many of the former kind of vampire.
They've got a flaw in them that causes them to constantly leak life energy into the void, they're essentially drains on reality itself. Vampire is a very wide range of things, from the crawling, pale, batlike Nosferatu to the bestial, shapeshifting Vrykolakas, to the classic Romanian Count Strigoi. A Vampire is literally any blood or fluid sucking creature in this setting trying to fill the void they have with the animus of others.
The only notable Vampires in the campaign I'm brewing in this setting are the guard Chupacabras owned by the local sect of the Latin Kings, and maybe one lurking out in the backwoods of a Boy Scout camp.
>>44551424
Well, I got basically three settings with three different versions (a lot more given one has multiples)
An urban fantasy collab (and a lot the rules were established by my partner) of mine is fairly straight forward. They're not adverse to holy symbols though, garlic mostly offends them from their heightened senses (though it makes me wonder about onions then or raves), they get stronger with age, and after more than a hundred years or so tend to lose the sunlight weakness, though it does irritate the crap out of even some of the oldest.
My straight fantasy setting, 'vampires' are basically what happened when a group of poor sods suffering from Fallout-like radiation horrors of a dead, god-eating monster finally stablized their mutations and no longer were sprouting extra limbs. They still need to eat a lot to maintain their ridiculous metabolisms so it's less 'drink blood' and more 'eat the whole damn animal'.
Lastly there's a super hero setting where there's about seven different types of vampires (meant to play on the idea of how each culture tended to have their own ideas of vampires and how they work) and these types ended up organized into houses that all serve under Vlad "Dracula" Tepes himself. There used to be more types of vampires but he kind of wiped them out.
I've had two settings where I've used vampires.
The first I used them as the bad guys, pretty traditional Vampires , plae, bloodsucking, immortal, etc. I set them up as the Ruling nobles/royals with various warring clans, had a whole byzantine political thing going. Essentially the unturned humans made up the peasantry/merchant classes, with the vampire lords/ladies having the right to feed on the peasantry, prima nocta style.
The second was early this year, and was essentially What We Do In The Shadows with all the tropes/subversion of such, and wasn't serious at all.
Both were pretty good campaigns, 7-8/10
>>44551424 (OP)
They've been humbled.
Standard vampire schtick, and in their backstory they ruled over their own nation with human cattle. This all came to an end when an uprising came that they couldn't put down, and began to get starved out by their own serfs. Think the French Revolution if it lasted twice as long and was ten times as bloody.
A vampire now's usually homless, or a migrant worker. Anything else means catching attention from the revolutionary vampire hunter state dedicated to hunting them down with no respect to borders or kings.
>>44555951
hell, then what's the point of being a vampire?
You make it sound more like a cautionary tale.
In my realm, the first vampire was created when a priest of the sun god decided to give up his humanity to the god of corruption in exchange for his sister to be returned to life. God of corruption gave him vampiracy and his sister was raised as an undead thrall.
My vampires have the same powers and weaknesses as classical vampires;
>direct sunlight
>holy water
>no blood
This is due to the sun god cursing vampires from stepping forth into his 'heavenly glow'inspired by that one screenshot with vampires worshipping pelor as the great destroyer. Holy water is due to the essence of the gods of which it has been imbued and the blood is to fuel the blood magic that is keeping them immortal.
Vampires naturally have the ability to turn into large batlike creatures and necromancy, due to the pact with the god of corruption
