Designing Draculas
March 15th, 2010
Hello everyone. For those of you just tuning in, welcome to the Necromancers of the Northwest website, to the Dark Designs column, and finally, to Vampire Month. What makes it Vampire Month? The fact that we recently released a free bloodsucker-centric supplement, Liber Vampyr. And what’s so special about vampires that we decided to give them their own supplement? It’s funny I should ask, since that happens to be exactly what I want to talk about. Convenient, huh? (For those of you wondering if we’re REALLY going to devote a whole month to vampires the answer is no. You can go ahead and breathe a collective sigh of relief now.)
Vampires have been a part of the human imagination for centuries, possibly millennia. There’s something about them that really gets under your skin and hits you on a deeper, more basic level. Perhaps it’s the fact that they feed solely (typically) on us, and the thought of not being at the top of the foodchain is fundamentally unsettling. Perhaps it’s the fact that despite being so depraved, uncaring, and decidedly inhuman, at the end of the day we know deep down that the vampire is really all too human. Perhaps it’s simply the sex: even in older Eastern-European vampire legends the monsters draw sustenance from the milk of nursing mothers, rather than from blood, and in recent years the sexualization of the vampire is quite thorough and complete. Watch girls swoon when you mention Edward Cullen, for example, and you’ll know what I mean.
Speaking of Twilight, it’s true, I won’t deny it: the recent surge in vampire popularity did have something to do with the decision to start with a vampire book. Of course, in fairness, the fact that our company name is “Necromancers of the Northwest” had something to do with our first product being all about undead . The fact of the matter is, I personally have been a fan of vampires in my fantasy for quite some time, at the very least since I first got my hands on the popular “Vampire Embrace” mods for Morrowind, and possibly before.
Even just being a vampire-o-phile isn’t enough to put together a book like Liber Vampyr, though. The real, final thing that caused Liber Vampyr to be chosen as our first major project (especially because big projects like this were not our original plan, and the idea that first brought us onto the big project format was definitely not vampires, though those are both stories for another day) is the fact that Dungeons and Dragons has always had a hard time handling vampires. (Well, at least since 3rd edition. I never played enough AD&D to get a feel for how it handled vampires.)
With the exception of a few rare tidbits in places like the depths of the Dragon magazine archives, 3.5 supports only a single kind of vampire: every vampire is afraid of garlic, can turn into a bat, and turns to dust in the sun. This is fine to a certain extent, and the designers clearly put some thought into including as much of the popular vampire mythoi as they could, considering they were working on a single template. But the fact is, when it comes to vampires, no two sources take them quite the same way: compare Edward Cullen to Nosferatu for extreme examples, but comparing either of them to the vampires from Anne Rice, Trueblood, Moonlight, Buffy, or White Wolf’s Vampire: the Requiem will leave you with no two sets of vampires being quite the same. Simply put, while the 3.5 vampire (and its Pathfinder upgrade) do a good job of being a generalized, middle-ground vampire, there isn’t any support for using different kinds of vampires. In fact, the Monster Manual vampire doesn’t quite fit ANY of the above examples of vampires in media. Even if it’s accomplished nothing else (and I personally happen to think that it has), Liber Vampyr provides rules for a wider range of styles when it comes to putting blood-drinkers in your game.
The idea that the vampire template is only worth a +2 CR adjustment is frankly laughable. A dominating gaze, at will? Respectable bonuses to nearly every ability score? Not to mention the ability to drain both constitution and raw levels? The fact that they’re practically unkillable—something which should probably be a major selling point—is easily near the bottom of the list of cool powers the template provides. It’s clear that the CR adjustment was designed to reflect the numerous weaknesses also inherent in the template, especially the weakness to sunlight. There is, I have found, a fatal flaw to this reckoning, however: vampires don’t really have to go out in the sunlight. They don’t need to be submerged in running water often, either, and they certainly won’t starve for lack of garlic. I have never heard of a dungeon master going out of his way to exploit these weaknesses on his own villains, and though I have seen them try, I have never seen player characters exploit any of the crippling ones. In fact, with that dominating gaze a vampire rarely needs to do more than gain the element of surprise to defeat a party that supposedly should be able to handle him without too much difficulty. Add to this the fact that vampires, by nature, tend to be the big, bad, boss villain rather than a horde of mooks, and you have a recipe for a TPK almost every time.
But the place where the vampire really suffers the most is in being accessible to player characters. At a whopping +8 level adjustment and requiring a minimum of 5 hit dice, a player of 3.5 D&D needed at least an ECL 13 character to even consider being a vampire. The level adjustment might have been fair (certainly fairer than the Pathfinder system’s +2 LA version), and the protection afforded by fast healing, DR, and gaseous form might even have made up for all those lost hit dice, just like the ability score points and special attacks helped make up for the lost base attack and class features (unless you were a spellcaster in which case you made sure to stay away from vampirism). Yes, you could be kind-of competitive after taking the vampire template, which is more than can be said for a number of monster races (such as the Mind Flayer). There was just one niggling little detail, though: as a PC, who has to deal with the day-in and day-out of adventuring instead of just appearing for a single scene or two and then disappearing in a cloud of gas, those weaknesses really start to matter. Especially that sun one. Maybe your party is reeeeeally understanding (or you’re playing an all-vampire party) and they’ll agree to only travel by night. And maybe your DM will have his NPCs accept that at face value because he doesn’t want to create too much of an unnecessary and potentially problem-causing hassle over it. But, it’s not like the vampire template really required you to feed on blood (in fact, the only real reason to ever do so is if you want to kill someone) so if you ignore all the weaknesses you’re basically just some guy who can summon bat swarms and dominate people with your gaze. Simply put, vampires weren’t that fun to play.
I am confident that Liber Vampyr fixes all of these problems. I could tell you how and why right here, going on for another…well, let’s just say I like the font of my own type. Perhaps instead you’d rather head to our download section and take a look at the book yourself. I’m confident you’ll like what you see.
Join me next week when I’ll discuss an unexpected side-effect of our new rules and how it might affect the mental health of your players. Until then, may you never vant for blahd. (Oh, come on. I had to at some point.)