101 Vampyres: Poetry, Stat Blocks and Life Draining Monsters

 Introduction 

I have a goal, a dream if you will, a vision of a future where a man can run a campaign with only vampires and never tire of them. Where players never grow bored staking their hearts, chasing them along dark alleys and never cease fearing their turning bite and hypnotic eyes. Well, be the change you want to see in the world. This is the introductory post for what will hopefully be a long series on vampires and stretching my creative limits to create 101 interesting and useful vampires, or vampire-adjacent monsters. But first we must discuss how vampires translate from folklore to RPGs. 

Vampires are endlessly fascinating. If you stretch your definition a bit, as you must with most anthropological concepts which defy categorization (nerds, especially ones with degrees love categorization), nearly every culture in the world has some version of vampires, demons that suck life, devils that drain blood or spirits which rise from the grave to feast on the living. 

They are doubly fascinating when used in RPGs and I think this is due to their conceptual density and how they often force the rules to bend (or break) around them. When you discuss vampires, you're often discussing the myriad other tropes which surround them; aversion to sunlight, garlic and holy symbols, their inability so cross running water, their speed or strength or perhaps their allusions to nobility, classism and their predatory habits. You could also discuss less well-known tropes like their hypnotism, obsession with counting and control over or aversion to animals. Much less well-known, a virgin horse and boy would be used to identify a would-be vampire's grave by balking at it and refusing to cross, though in Serbia it was a black horse, associated with the underworld, which would stop at the grave. The density of these tropes slowly declines as you move outwards from popular culture and into the realm of the anthropological but remain evocative and useful. 

Everyone expects at least some of these tropes in their game when dealing with vampires and this makes them fantastic monsters to use. Everyone knows trolls must be killed with fire and any subversions of this trope often feel cheap, but vampires have enough interesting components to subvert, invert or lampshade so as to be switched up on a setting by setting or even campaign by campaign basis.  They lend themselves well to all levels and styles of play, especially in the OSR where you must employ creative measures to kill them efficiently. They fill out almost any part of the Dungeon Checklist , especially Arnold's #3, Something to Kill You, where they can be telegraphed easily (a mysteriously clean empty coffin) and avoided easily (cross a convenient stream or patch of sunlight) for low level adventurers. They reward planning ahead and choosing proper equipment, harkening all the way back to Classic 1974 D&D with a clove of garlic right alongside wolf's bane and a mallet and stakes.  

As for bending the rules around them, a bestiary would be remiss to not include their weaknesses but they rarely fit into existing game mechanics. Both 5e and 3.5 "fudged" these weaknesses into their Monster Manual entries, with it being long-winded Trait in 5e and a special subsection in 3.5. Curiously, in 5e they may cross running water at the expense of 20 acid damage a turn, a ludicrous decision in my opinion. Like hammering a pair of pliers into a wrench. I think this is not an issue of vampires being outliers, but the whole structuring of monster stat block/lines to begin with.

I think this is indicative of issues with modern bestiaries. They are bloated with so much raw information its can be difficult to even determine what the monster is even supposed to do, at least tactically, let alone within the fiction (A whole blog has been dedicated to parsing the behavior's of 5e's monstrous compendiums). I doubt very much I need to know a vampire's "Skill Focus (selected Craft or Profession skill)" nor their "Perception +7" bonus in play but there you have it. Tactics and fiction should really be seamless and identical. The fact that I'm even making the distinction seems indicative of the problem.

Interestingly, 4e gets the closest to what I'm looking for, at least partially (its certainly the smallest block in new school D&D). Its vampire spawn have a trait called "Destroyed by Sunlight". If they can't get out of direct sunlight in one turn, they are turned to ash and destroyed. Mechanically light. Short, sweet and poetic.

Monsters need poetry. They require evocative language to inspire DMs to use them. I think one of the best monster manuals I've seen, if not the most efficient, Luke Gearing's Volume 2 Monsters &, a reinterpretation of the monster half of the 1974's Original D&D Monsters and Treasure booklet. While certainly not a tactical book, I think it gets closer to the heart, mystery and magic of monsters. Vampires especially need this. 

Coding and Poetic Stat Lines

I read a blog post somewhere recently (and shame on me for not saving it on one of my rabbit holes) where monsters were described (in all caps!) by their WANTS, NEED and DESIRES and probably some other right-to-the-point words. I think it helps "code" monsters e.g. make them versatile by giving them parameters they act under or stimuli to respond to. It takes precious CPU usage off a DMs already fried brain. 

<Tangent. You could additionally write more specific stuff. I had a green dragon who always ran away as soon as he lost 25% of his HP. I had a mad yeti, burned in the face from a prior encounter, who wouldn't fight near flame and would flee if he took more than 10 fire damage. At some point you move away from "code" to just preparing unique, specific reactions to events.>

This may seem paradoxical, poetic interpretations of monsters coupled with "code" to "program" monsters, but I think it works well in action.  For example, here's one for one of my favorite monsters, the phase spider. 

Phase Spider

HD 2/AC Leather/Damage 1d6+1

When spiders nest in wizards' towers, her strange brood will outgrow her and parasitize a wizards magic like a leech. It grows, eating its siblings like sharks in the womb until one remains. This is the phase spider. 
It jumps between worlds, taking nightmares to lands Here, Imaginary and Ethereal.
It weaves webs that real dreamcatchers are made of and hunts you from dimensions you cannot see. 
What will be left of you when your spirit is caught in its web, but your body moves on? 

WANTS: To eat things that dream, to drain life from magicians 
NEEDS: To eat, to survive
AVOIDS: Bright light, large flames (small ones it puts out with spittle) 

DESIRES: To spin webs anchored between worlds

 

Perhaps WANTS and DESIRES is superfluous, but I feel like DESIRES implies a sort of advanced, premeditated motive. A wolf wants to eat you but a werewolf desires to taste the fear in your blood. You could string quite a few more of these along but I think more than 4 begins to increase the signal: noise ratio. For more powerful or unique monsters, you could give them unique codes perhaps the evil priest SUPPLICATES demons but then again you could put "supplicate demons" under DESIRES. Perhaps DREAMS (of) or PERISHES (if) could be used for specific flavor or to signal weaknesses. Let's see if we can conjure up a classic Dracula-type with this format.

Vampire (Classic) 

HD 7/AC Maille/Damage 1d6+1

Take a man of nobility, in life who lusts for life, for the finer things, for flesh. Make sure he would do anything to get it. Make sure he can lie, as all good nobles can. Curse him and cut out his tongue so he cannot taste and drain him of all his blood. Bury him in the soil of his homeland. This is one of the paths a man may take to immortality. 

DESIRES: To seduce you, to control you, to live in luxury

NEEDS: To feast on the blood of the living

AVOIDS: Sunlight, holy men, mirrors, others like itself

DESTROYED: By sunlight, stakes of local wood to its heart, decapitation and fire. Nothing else will work for long. 

I like it. Next post I'll discuss how I plan to define a vampire, some fun ideas I have for them and some biological sources of inspiration. 

A New-ish Campaign

 

I've never played a Zelda game but that's pretty raw. 

I did it. I slew the greatest beast the hobby has: THE SCHEDULE. About two years ago through sheer force of will I carved out a chunk of solid time-stream dedicated to D&D and gaming on Thursday nights and got some other busy adults to do the same. It's wonderful. But its online and online games just don't hit the same as in person games sometimes. As such I have used up more mojo and wrangled a group together for a Sunday evening game of either B/X or Original 1974 D&D for an in person game! Now that the hard part is done, I have to do the other hard part and prep the damn thing before next Sunday. Luckily everything a DM writes is never wasted; if you get nothing else from this post understand that all prep, even unused is just biding its time to be used again. 

The Challenge: A Campaign within 50 sq miles 

I want to run a sandbox hexcrawl I never got to use and maybe throw a few old modules on top of it as well. I'll also draw from my last few years worth of dungeons that can be reused for fresh faces. And I want to cram it all into 50 sq miles worth of space just to see how a small scale campaign with a real tight focus feels. 

Goals: Put together everything I've learned reading blogs and running game to make a tight focused sandbox game. 

First we'll need a map. 

 

Hey look, a map.

With each hex being 6 miles its 72 x 60 miles which is close enough to 50 x 50 for me. Maybe I'll cut off the last two columns if I can't find anything inspirational to put there. 

A point of light setting, the only friendly civilized parts of this region are the two forts with towns and the town in the center, Tarnburg. Putting them in the middle makes it less likely to wander off the maps back towards civilization, The forts are ruled by a feuding baron and duke, technically part of the same empire but like the houses Harkonen and Atreides on Arrakis, they despise one another and secretly aspire to conquer the other. A few conflicts prevent this. For one the giant fucking moon that hovers over the desolate wastes in the middle of the map. 

Conflicts 

An enormous moon, probably a few miles wide, warped into existence a few thousand feet above the lush grassland about a century ago. It immediately began sucking all the water up from the region with some kind of tractor beam/reverse gravity, drying up the marshland and plains. 

<Tangent. I much prefer plains and savannah over woods in my games. Maybe my characters were abused one to many times in endless same-y forests of the games of my youth but I find flatlands much more inspiring. The megafauna and ecology of the Serengeti are endlessly inspiring especially when extinct creatures of the past make up part of the food chain. If I need forests, a copse of plains trees will do fine>

A local Conan type flew up there in a chariot pulled by cockatrice, or so the legends go and disappeared. While he never reappeared, days later, the moon made an enormously loud pulse, with a shockwave like Krakatoa, destroying the town beneath it and further flooding the region from the tsunami that followed from the water of the Great River. It now only intermittently sucks up water and a hundred years later he's worshipped as god-hero and saint by the locals, his priests forming a cult of bodybuilding, swordsmanship and athletics. The cockatrice (think more velociraptor that turns you to stone instead of chicken) has become a locally protected animal and to kill one is considered bad luck, at least by the hero cult. Ordinary folk avoid them.

However, the moon continues to be an issue, sucking up precious water at a much slower rate, but every full moon releasing some and dripping all the time but not at equilibrium and every month, the dry earth creeps closer to the food supply of the region. The ground, sucked dry of its aquifer, can barely hold the water, leading to flooding. Huge puddles, like shallow lakes appear and disappear with the weather. And during the thunderstorms, the Eelmen raid. 

Eelmen 

The Duke and Baron each were tasked with dealing with the forces of Chaos to the West, a land in permanent dusk. The Eelmen rule it, under their brooding and petty Eel King. Nobody knows where eels come from, only that Eelmen are made from them. Obviously, the answer is spontaneous generation, arising wholesale from the guts of river mud, crawling to the river and swimming thousands of miles upstream like medieval rats from cheese cloth or goblins from refuse and negative energy. The Eelmen catch them and grow them in cold pools and feed them a diet of human blood, ritualistic fat and bones, so many bones. Often they'll simply toss still living humans they capture into the pools, and like piranha, the elvers strip them of flesh. The fat makes them crave the calcium in the bones of these unfortunate souls. They will need it for what happens next. They grow huge and contort, rubbery skin thickening, primitive lungs ballooning in too-tight ribcages and pectoral fins stretching as heavy bones grow painfully in them forming long thin razor sharp four-fingered hands. The slimy mutants are dragged from the pool, forced to take on air, cough up dense phlegm from pharyngeal jaws and given a hooked spear, the signature weapon of the Eelmen. 

This YouTube video is 15 years old. It only went up to 240p. But it is exactly what's in my head. Exactly. 

Eelmen are made, not born. And they are made to hate. Proud, agile and clever they embody all the worst traits of their hungry primitive kin. They use hit-and-run tactics, ambushes from the pools that form in the desolate lands under the moon and raid under the cover of dark during thunderstorms. In combat they are merciless, hooking with spears, tripping and disemboweling, coming to finish off a foe later. With two sets of jaws they are infamous for biting and not letting go, even in death. In fact, if losing a battle to a mighty foe they may simply latch on before being killed to slow their enemy down, giving their comrades an advantage. They do this not to aid their allies but to spite their enemies, ultimate sore losers when their deadly pride is wounded. Their bones are cartilaginous and they can squeeze into spaces of creatures a quarter their size, lacking collar bones like cats. Their two weaknesses, besides arrogance and love of betryal, are their slow speed on dry land, slithering (or sidewinding to "run") and their need to stay damp. A dry Eelman will suffocate within a few days, but not before making others around it as miserable as it can.   

 They despise each other only slightly less than the other denizens of the area. It is because of them that the Baron and Duke are afraid to openly attack one another. Like a Mexican stand off, all three factions are waiting for the other to play their hand. Simultaneously, all three are trying to ascertain the secrets of the mystery Moon, gleaning great power within if the remnants that fall from it occasionally are anything to be seen. So they send adventurers! (A rival adventuring party of Eelman would be fascinating).

I have a few other conflicts going on in the background I may incorporate as well. Elves being up to no good and something about a Rainbow Veil being shattered and its denizen pouring into the Mortal World to stop the Unreality from entering will be present. But we can save that for a later post. Next post on this new campaign we'll churn out some hopefully solid encounter tables. 

Abounding Inspiration and Giant Mosquitoes

 Back last year when I ran my 5e Cowboy game Ghost Town Gunfight (which did not take place in a ghost town but did feature many gunfights), I threw everything just shy of the kitchen sink into the game. Following the advice of the Alexandrian I made a 12 by 12 (or 10?) map of the wild lands of Crickscross, so named for the two rivers that converged at the center of the map where the only "civilization", a town of the same name lied. Keen on making sure every single hex had a unique permanent location in them, the kitchen sink was not enough. I think I got to maybe 100 odd locations keyed and cheated by making one region of the map devoid of encounters on purpose (my homage to the great Arnold K). 

One of my favorite things that came out of the campaign was the large beasties that appeared on the bounty board. A true sandbox, the players had a bounty board in the Red Raptor Saloon which was updated, graffitied, vandalized and shot by bandits weekly. It was also diegetic, an actual forum post updated once a week and adding to the body count and reward of several infamous beasts was one of my favorite inside jokes. 

That bastard! Boots are expensive. Tello did make it home btw. 

While Ol' Imp (bounty described above) was my favorite, a Sarchosuchus I led to the players to believe was a dragon, another of my favorites, the main character of this post, was La Mosca.

Not the main character

La Mosca, as the name implies was a fly. A giant fly. A giant mosquito even. The inspiration came from a text post I saw ages ago. I couldn't find it off hand but it was something to the effect of the "-ito" diminutive in Spanish as it is used in mosquito implies the existence of the much much larger La mosca. Some argue that this would just mean "fly" but these people have no soul, think the curtains are just blue and their poetry sucks and should be avoided at all costs. 

Inspired by post, here is one 5e Mosquito, Giant. 

I might be a bit off on the proficiency bonuses but its been a long time since I've made a monster for 5e. Its a frivolous art, and besides I've moved on to B/X. As a challenge to myself, I converted it to Basic. 

La Mosca

Mosquito, Giant 

• Armor: 3 
• Hit Dice: 6
• Move: 60 (20), 240 (80)
• Attacks: 2 claws, 1 bite. Special 
• Damage: 1-4/1-4/2-16
• No. Appearing: 1 
• Save As: Fighter 2
• Morale: 6
• Treasure Type: 
• Alignment: Unaligned 
• Special. When La Mosca bites, the target must save vs paralysis. On a success they take half damage. On a failure they take full damage and automatically take the bite damage next round unless they succeed on another save vs paralysis. 

I used the dragon section as a reference. La Mosca is at least as fast as a dragon in air but much less so if it ever lands. Which it would, to hunt players into any tunnels they might to escape through. Just imagine the horror of running into level one of the dungeon and hiding only for its 15 ft. proboscis probe in after you. That's right, they can bend. Also, the mouthparts of the female, saw their way into your flesh. At 1000th your size its painless. Scaled up to the size of Cessna and it probably sounds like a goddamn chainsaw and just tears humanoids to shreds and slurps up the viscera. 

The cartoon on the right could be its own damn monster. 

Interestingly mosquitos have preferences for prey within the species they parasitize. They prefer O type blood amongst other things and their preference for you is inheritable. The magical/mythical inspiration for this is fertile ground. Imagine your great-grandfather helped slay a legendary giant mosquito and now its spawn prefer the taste of your blood, like some kind of karmic balance. Maybe it curses you, so that when you kill it, mosquitos shall not rest until they have drank blood equivalent to what you've spilled this day. How's that for dramatic. 

Alternatively, here's a house rule I use to occasionally torture certain players. Have them add their Charisma score to their Constitution score. This is their Vitality. Certain types of monsters, at least ones who prefer to east people or drink their blood, can sense it and whoever has the highest vitality score becomes their target. Vampires and mind-flayers may exclusively choose to devour the most Vital people. For a folksier, feel add +5 for being a virgin or maiden, though sex is largely irrelevant for some monsters. Consider +/- 5 for horrid crimes the individual has committed depending on whether the monster's taste is for the innocent or corrupted. I imagine La Mosca could care less about the deeds that weigh on your soul instead sensing Vitality and the magic of life and figuring your blood give its spawn the best chance at survival. Perhaps its spawn are even pickier and prefer the blood of sinners, saints, wizards or thieves or whatever its mother preyed on the most. Ooh lets stat those...

Hunter Moscas

AC as leather, but incredibly quick

HD 1-3

Hunter. Depending on how it was bred and what its mother fed upon the hunter is extremely adept at finding a certain type of person based on what their blood has done.  Typically used to find thieves or wizards, it can track a target by smell on a 5 in 6 while within 12 miles (1 hex) of it. However, they can easily get confused and will always route towards the nearest instance of their prey, not necessarily the one you're hunting. This is an innately magical effect.

<Tangent. All things are innately magical. To quote Pratchett "And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time..." -Small Gods>

Bounty hunters will tie long brightly colored streamers or cloth to them and carry at least 1d6+1 moscas on them in light bamboo cages or just angrily netted up. They then release them and split up, following each bug as it splits off from the rest. They will wear salves that the moscas detest but will tolerate if starved enough. Plenty of inexperienced hunters have been found desiccated and dead, cages empty. 

They could be avoided by changing your biology or with plenty of smoke. Dehydrating yourself so you perspire less might help (-1 in 6 every day you don't drink water) as would drinking some kind of hemolytic poison (this of course causes other issues). Smoke may deter them depending on how starved or large they are. Outrunning them may be impossible without favorable winds or exhausting horses to death or both but every hex you are ahead of them contributes -1 to their hunting check. 

Mage Moscas

AC as leather

HD 1-2

Magician's Blood. Having drank the blood of a magician, the young mosca metabolizes the latent magic in potent wizards blood and gains magical effects. Choose a spell the wizard knows. It can cast that spell a number of times equal to its hit dice, though its primitive brain may not know how to use it properly, instead reflexively. If you capture the mosca and drink the blood within you gain a single use of the spell instead. If you inject the blood directly into your own system and it reaches your brain you can prepare it every day as a wizard does. However, without the mental training required to keep a spell in your mind, it tries to claw its way out. Just as well curses and other magical maladies can be transmitted via blood just like disease (a disease is after all an imbalance of humors caused by magic or demons. A disease is just a curse by another name or a demon who goes by Consumption, Anemia or Cancer). Every day you prepare the spell, save vs wands or else lose a point of intelligence. The first time you fail roll on your favorite curse/disease table. 

Some Magical Diseases. Successful saves may slow or negate progress of some maladies. (I'll add more as time goes on!)

1. Slumbering Fever. Everyday you have this disease, you require 2 extra hours of sleep, cumulative. When you reach 24 hours, you sleep forever. Chewing the leaves of certain stimulating plants or boiling them into a potion (also called tea by some) can stave off the sleep but there is no herbal cure.
2. Malcontentia. A moral disease also communicable by acts of cruelty. Causes hypersensitivity, especially to light, paleness and bouts of mania.  Every time you would take damage from a physical source, take 1 extra point of damage per die of damage. Those infected tend to make their way to dark dismal places like caves and swamps. A favorite of black dragons.

On Archetype: Cowboys and Crusaders

One of my most successful Fantasy Role-playing Elfgame campaigns (at least in terms of length and insofar as one can describe their own campaign as successful) was about cowboys. I don't know why I chose cowboys, but school was hard, I had every hex of 12 by 12 hexmap to fill in and doing a western drawl is fun and easy.

The pitch was simple. Same homebrew world we were used to from college, in some far flung, untouched-yet-by-PC land but with all the tropes of the Wild West mixed mercilessly with tropes of Fantasy Land. Wield six-shooter with sword! Lasso up a dragon! Goblins with cowboy hats! Truly the mind races at the possibilities. 

Now D&D not being medieval, at least in its original incarnation, is old hat by now. Gygax and Arneson's conception of the world was more pulp fiction kitchen sink than historical journal bibliography and its mode of play was more Manifest Destiny than feudal hierarchy. If you want that go, play Pendragon (seriously go play Pendragon). Classic D&D famously had more references to Barsoomian Mars and its fauna than it did to nobility or princesses. 

This guy is technically a Disney princess.

However, what surprised me most about running this pastiche of Wild West and bog-standard fantasy was how easily the players grokked it. I had run a fairly typical high fantasy game up till that point (not that you can run any other kind of game with 5e) with its milieu of emperors and dragons and flumphs. And yet there seemed no cognitive dissonance between the setting and the players. 

To be clear, it is not the suspension of disbelief, that I found interesting. Players generally accept anything you put in front of them as long its internally consistent. It was how quickly the players were able to navigate the new sandbox ...conceptually? They had no issue using the knowing the saloon was where to find rumors and where the bounty board was and understood that bandits with six-shooters were not to be trifled with. I think what I'm saying is tropes and cliches are strong and useful tools for running a game, especially where genre is an element. Cliches when not overused (or riffed on) are mental load bearing structures. 

This post really knocked it out of the park in terms of "mental load bearing structures". At first glance I worried that maybe I'd created a boring setting full of "path of least resistance" type NPCs and quests. In retrospect I think instead I did a good job of taking some concepts to interesting conclusions. Missing sheriff? Turned by a vampyre into a fledgling toadie who used cenotaph portals to get into town and bypass its invitation requirement. He damn near ended the game with a TPK when he used his supernatural speed to blow through 4 six-shooters in as many seconds. Plus his star was pinned right though his flesh. Gruesome. I think I added enough interesting material for it to pass the Wicked City Test (though publishable is another matter).

Just gonna leave this right here. 

I think the marriage of two genres with strong archetypes is a bit like rebar and concrete. A duel with a corrupt sheriff is a good baseline. Knowing the local Bloodmoon may instill him with the power to return as a revenant? Maybe a bit cooler. 

All in all we played every week for nearly a year and a half. There were train robberies on the backs of raptors, morlocks with primitive gatling guns and the blowing up of at least one purple worm with a barrel full of gunpowder and nails. Calling the local cleric of a great dragon religion padre never felt more out of place than anything else.