Not all undead are created equal. The quality of unlife depends greatly on how one ends up there. Even among a common group, two members can be unrecognizable as the same monster, depending on how their post-life has progressed.

Cover image by Marco Bucci

Art by Tyler Jacobsen

Vampires

The lay person thinks there is one type of vampire. Usually they imagine Count Dracula, or some other great monster. Someone with a casual interest knows there are many types of vampires. But this is where a small amount of knowledge can lead one astray. All vampirism stems from the same ancient blood curse, and (almost) all vampires start the same way.

Infection. There is one main way to become a vampire: Being killed by a vampire. If a vampire drains your blood, you will die, and at the next midnight will rise. This will not be the glamorous unlife of sipping blood from wine glasses one might imagine. You currently only have the dregs of a life essence and a weak curse animating your body. You will awake with a hunger unlike any felt by the living.

You are not yet a vampire. The curse has only 2 effects at this point: Sunlight will kill you; and the insatiable thirst. You are dead, but the curse requires one conscious sin before it takes you forever. The moment you drink the blood of another sentient being, you belong to the dark forever. Most vampires burst from their graves and kill their loved ones that first night, remembering the way home but are taken by the hunger at the sight of warm flesh. The willful and the smart will hide until dawn, letting the light bring them to rest.

Sated Thirst. When you drink the first sip of that dark sacrament, you become a vampire fully and truly. Your fangs grow in. You can no longer sustain yourself on anything but the blood of sapient beings. You’re fully undead now, and do not age. Other than that, you seem like a normal person again.

The hunger will return with the next night. Most young vampires can go at most three days without feeding. You won’t notice at first, but you’re changing with every kill. Your empathy dies with each life drunk, until only your conscious mind can remind you that killing is wrong. You get stronger, slowly.

Art by Johan Grenier

Growth and change are foreign to dead flesh. The curse will try to make your body better, but it is not and has never been a living thing. It uses the life force of everything you drink to reshape you, and those may not all be human. Over time, your body will twist, eventually becoming monstrous. It takes will, knowledge, and preparation to remain human looking for long. But you will grow strong. A vampire that lives for centuries will have inhuman strength and speed.

Most of these vampires end up subservient to those who turned them. Not all higher vampires can control minds, but those that do will enslave those they turn. Otherwise they will keep their spawn in line with a supply of blood, promises of power, and good old fashioned violence.

Inheritors. Some mortals seek the favor of powerful vampires. Some vampires seek notable, loyal, or interesting mortals as companions and allies. Eventually, the bargain goes, the vampire will turn the mortal. When they awake, they are fed the blood of the vampire that turned them (Traditionally they’re fed several mortals that night as well, as a birthday present from their sire). Some lesser vampires are uplifted in the same manner, after years of service.

Drinking the blood of a vampire gives you their particular curse, and awakens the new vampire to greater heights of power. Many older vampires have very unique curses, gained in ages past from blood rituals. This leads to families of vampires with similar afflictions to each other, each sharing a particular brand of Old Blood. Note that this drinking of blood does not have to be consensual, it can be stolen through trickery or force.

Some call these “True Vampires”, as opposed to “Lesser Vampires” or “Vampire Spawn”. They certainly seem different. They usually look more human, as the sires help their spawn grow. This kind are very difficult to kill without sunlight. Little physical damage can kill them outright, even a decapitated true vampire will live on, and can regrow the body with enough blood. Only incineration, disintegration, or full pulverization can kill them.

It is not generally possible to gain the abilities of two vampire families this way. Curses rarely cohabitate, and most have extreme and contradictory effects even if you could. Many vampires have been lost to total beasthood experimenting.

Art by Jason Chan

Old Blood

The following is a list of vampire bloodlines and the powers and weaknesses they gain. They do not all form right away, only slowly over time, like all vampire powers.

Dracul

Charm and hypnotisation

Transformation into a bat

Transformation into mist

Paralysed by a stake to the heart, or by decapitation

Can’t enter a home without permission

Can’t cross running water

Monstrous looking

Baobhan

Can take the form of whoever they eat

Can take the form of animals

Can see in total darkness

Vulnerable to fire and silver

Dumnezeu

Extreme physical strength and grace

Heightened healing

Inhuman body control (Bending limbs unnaturally, changing temperature, moving internal organs, etc)

Art by Sarafiel

St. Claire

A bat-like body hidden inside a human skin-suit, which can be regrown at will

Can fly in bat form

Get drunk after feeding

Lilithine

Powerful affinity for sorcery

Can fuel magic with blood

The mind expands, gaining the ability to think as if in slow motion

Can fly

Gain very little strength

Can’t do magic if they haven’t fed recently

Repelled by holy symbols

Gregorian

Powerful psychics

Can read minds, communicate telepathically, and implant thoughts

Dreams become real to them. They can invade others’ dreams and feed on them there, or drag others into their own nightmares. They can bend the fabric of dreamspace, changing the dream at will.

They can hide inside their own dreams.

They are susceptible to people with strong wills and disciplined dreams, who can also shape the dreamscape around them.

They are vulnerable to whatever the local culture believes vampires to be vulnerable to.

Alternate Paths

Bloodswirl Beasts. Combining two varieties of blood into one body had generally disastrous consequences. The curse feeds on two separate sets of instructions for molding your body, and each inch fails to match the next. But, the resulting thing does gain the powers of both bloods, as well as all the weaknesses. In addition, they become obviously malformed. They gain a fear of all light, not just sunlight, and will shirk away from a small match flame. They go mad, and start to hallucinate, and to have memories that are not their own.

Exotic Blood. Some lesser vampires seeking power have no access to the Old Blood for ascension. Another option is to seek different bloods, to achieve a lesser variety of true vampirism. It’s rumored that the original Old Blood, and perhaps the curse itself, was derived from an angel’s blood.

Art by Bigface

Dryads or Ents. Druids who fall to vampirism often follow this route, to regain their connection to nature. The vampire will eventually follow an urge to bury themselves. From that spot, a Hangman’s Tree will grow. Pale white from root to leaf, bark gnarled into the face of the vampire. The roots will grow far and wide, infesting whole forests underground, away from sight. Anything sapient sleeping above the roots will be grown over and consumed in the night. As they grow older, their minds return to them, and even the capability of speech returns. They bear dark wisdom for supplicants who bring sacrifices into the killing woods.

Art by Wei-Zei

Dragons. Perhaps even more difficult than subduing a true vampire, the amount of vampires that have supped on dragon blood is blessedly few (And the amount of dragons raised as vampires even fewer). A dragon is ego and will made flesh. Dragons twist the world with their very presence, and these vampires do the same. The area around their lair changes to suit their conception of a vampire’s domain. No one will notice their castle growing extra rooms, the daytime sun dimming, the mountains leering inward. The vampire itself will gain the ability to fly, to bend others to its will with magic, and to disappear into the shadows.

Art by Charlie Bowater

Fey. After eating a Fey creature, a vampire’s diet will slowly change. Fey are creatures of relation and emotion, not matter, and each Fey they consume lessens the cravings for the blood of the body. Eventually, these vampires will stop drinking blood all together. Instead, they get their life force by eating the emotions of others. If they touch a person, or make direct eye contact, they can drain all their emotions. If they’re careful, they can leave the person alive. Otherwise, they risk killing or crippling the target. They also slowly morph as they eat Fey, gaining their exaggerated looks. Extremely beautiful, or extremely frightening, any form good for causing massive emotion in mortals.

After eating a Fey creature, a vampire’s diet will slowly change. Fey are creatures of relation and emotion, not matter, and each Fey they consume lessens the cravings for the blood of the body. Eventually, these vampires will stop drinking blood all together. Instead, they get their life force by eating the emotions of others. If they touch a person, or make direct eye contact, they can drain all their emotions. If they’re careful, they can leave the person alive. Otherwise, they risk killing or crippling the target. They also slowly morph as they eat Fey, gaining their exaggerated looks. Extremely beautiful, or extremely frightening, any form good for causing massive emotion in mortals. Outsiders. The things from the impossible geometries beyond our world do not have blood in the common sense. But when they force themselves into our worlds, their bodies are bent into forms our universe understands, and that includes blood. The blood is just a representation of some other thing from their universe, but here it gives a conduit for the vampire to steal the strange life force.

The vampire gains an outsider’s wisdom. They know the true names of the stars. They can see the great things stalking the earth we refuse to see. They can step sideways out of the world, like a drawing stepping off a page. They can bring the same body part into the world two or three times, like an escapee from a mirror.

Denying the Curse. There is a chance, before one takes the first bite, to retain some humanity. You crave blood, but can still sustain yourself on food and water. You’ll never feel satisfied, but with enough willpower you can live on for years. If you find some other source of power to supplant the flickering candle flame of your life force, you can even grow strong again, and benefit from agelessness. There are two main types of cursed.

Curse Martyrs. Holy warriors live in opposition to vampires, and so are at high risk of infection. These turn to the light of the gods to sustain themselves, if they choose not to kill themselves. They walk a fine tightrope, since divine power is both destructive to the curse and a huge body of life for it to feed upon. Most Curse Martyrs describe the sensation like being burned alive from the inside. But they rapidly gain the strength and speed of the vampires, a gift they turn against vampire kind. They must maintain extremely level heads and perfect adherence to doctrine. Falling now, drinking a sip of blood will lead to the curse devouring energy from the well of power, twisting the martyr into horrifying shapes, perversions of angels.

Art by Fromsoft

Charnel Beasts. Animals have a life force, just a very different one than sapient beings. Cursed who refuse to eat humans will often try devouring livestock, and finding it does not sate the thirst. Eventually they will cobble together enough life from the animals they eat to start the vampire transformations. They will twist into bestial shapes quickly, as the curse learns the shapes of the beasts they eat. Charnel Beasts are unique among vampiric creatures in that they continue to grow larger with each meal. Their minds also turn more animalistic. Not necessarily dumber, they are often inhumanly observant, but simpler. The oldest are hulking monstrosities, grabbing whole cows in one clawed hand. Despite this, they are almost certainly the least dangerous vampires, with relatively weak thirsts and enough love for humanity to willingly walk this arduous path.

The Blood Fast. Some vampires manage to hold on to some level of humanity. Many feel great guilt over the lives they take, and some seek to atone. Quitting blood is very difficult, and is sometimes fatal. Young vampires take three days before the hunger becomes consuming, and older true vampires take up to a month. At that point, the vampire must have extreme willpower to prevent losing control. Many attempting this chain themselves up for the first step of the journey, but that won’t save the mind.

The first hurdle is keeping oneself from going feral. The mind will begin to atrophy for lack of blood, and most vampires will sink into a bestial mindset. This is what happens to vampires who are unintentionally blood starved. Those doing it intentionally must do mental exercises to maintain human level intellect. Those who are succeeding will reach a meditative state of slowness. They are incredibly slow of mind, for example: taking a day to make one move in chess.

The next step is choice. They must repeatedly put themselves in a situation where they could drink blood, but choose not to. 7 times they must be presented flesh and deny it. After each success they will have increasingly horrific hallucinations, formed from the psychic impressions of those they killed at the moment of death. After the 7th nightmare, the vampire will snap up with a mind clearer than it has been since they died.

The vampire will go blind at this exact moment. Their empathy will return to them, magnified a hundred fold by the mass of stolen life inside them. They gain a sense that detects sapient beings and their current emotional state, replacing their sight. The start seeing prophetic visions a few moments in advance, those these may just be normal extrapolation from the information granted by their new sense. The hunger remains, but they only need willpower to resist when there is a helpless person or spilled blood. If they willingly drink even a drop of blood, their eyes reopen and everything they gained is lost.

Deeper Blood

There are further, more frightening things that come from the bloodlines of vampires. These are the next steps a beast of the night takes.

Art by CD Projekt RED

Elders. Vampires consume the life energy of a huge number of creatures to sustain their immortality. Most are killed eventually, but there is no upper bound to a vampire’s life, and they get stronger with each corpse left behind. The longer one lives, the longer it is likely to live. And so, there are some truly ancient beings out in the world.

No one knows the exact point true immortality is reached. The church maintains that it happens upon the 66,666th person eaten. Scholars say 1000 years from the night they rise. Either way at a certain point, a vampire can no longer truly die. If fully destroyed, even by sunlight, they will stitch themselves back together the first time blood is spilled at the site of death, even centuries later. Like all true immortals, they can only be killed forever on the night of Samhain, as the afterlife draws near.

Of course, at this point, they have a myriad of other powers as well. Even with none of the Old Blood in their veins, an elder vampire will be strong enough to rend steel with bare hands, run faster than a hawk can fly, and smell drops of blood for miles around.

Blood Saints. The quality and source of blood has a great effect on the vampire. Vampires can drink the blood of other vampires. What becomes of a vampire who only feeds on vampire blood? These are the blood saints. The concentration and levels of curse inside their body is extreme. They quickly become top tier specimens of their bloodline, showing exaggerated versions of the powers of their brethren.

There are many hurdles to this path. As covered before, the blood must all come from one line of vampires, or from lesser vampires, lest they fall to the bloodswirl. And vampires make difficult prey. It may seem odd for such independent and cruel creatures, but most blood saints are fed voluntarily. Whatever a family can spare is fed to one or two saints. This is because they offer a benefit to any bloodline that has one.

The blood of a blood saint is a valuable thing indeed. It is the safest way to raise a new true vampire. No chance of mishaps, or mutations. In addition, the concoction is a powerful elixir, healing and strengthening the vampire who drinks it. Most importantly, it is a potion that cannot be used by any rival families, the main threat to any vampires. As long as it is kept away from lesser vampires, it is a powerful boon, one that the most powerful vampire families have taken advantage of for ages.

Bloodline Root. All of the old blood was created. Each bloodline started with a single vampire, who wrought their specific blood curse in an intricate ritual. The specifics of the five rituals that created the five old bloods have been lost, destroyed by the vampires they created, lest other rise against them. But the original dark arts that they used to divine the rituals still linger in the world. One could invent a new ritual. This is also the other way to become a vampire, besides being turned by one.

This always involves the killing of an angel. Imbibing the blood of a celestial being is the sin which brings the curse. There are many things in the universe which could be classified as angels, besides the classical winged being of light. The Gregorians are said to have used the angel of an old god, 12 feet tall and covered in eyes, in the ritual that birthed their bloodline.

Depending on the angel, and the gods from which they’re birthed, a very different vampire will emerge. The weakness to sunlight and the thirst for the lives of the living are the only consistent traits. The sun, because it is a portal to heaven’s light, and the life force because the curse divests them of their own life force. And then, any vampire fed on the blood from the original will have the same set of powers, forming a new bloodline. There are many minor bloodlines competing with the main 5, though none yet strong enough to overthrow them.



Art by Shen Comix

This is a preview for the other undead’s progression chart 😉