life sucking vamps

[leegi0n]

Hey playgrounders,

I want to integrate some vampires into a game I'm running. I've never really used or built any vamps and have come here for some advice on what would be the best path to create a group of vamps that would be NPC'd against a level 9 party. I don't under any circumstances want them to resemble the Twilight or True Blood vampires. I want them to be more like the 30 days of night or dracula vampires. Just depraved, dirty, nasty, vicious punks. The only stipulation is they WILL be under orders of a master at times.

Can someone please point me an appropriate build direction for this?

[That_guy_there]

Standard straight-out-of-the-MM Vampires are your best bet. The template there is the classic Dracula type vampire. They also have Vampire Spawn which are basically weaker undead "thugs".

To add a little more "down and dirty" to a vampire toss a few class levels on the base creature, Barbarian or Warblade makes for interesting almost anime style vampires (kinda like Vampire hunter D if you really stretch the idea).

Also you may want to look into a book by Paizo, "Classic Horror Monsters revisited". IIRC they had some cool things to do with vampires in there too.



here's a link:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/vampire.htm

[leegi0n]

Thank you. I couldn't really find any other "reference" material (other than MM) anyway, so I was planning on using that if all else fails.

[Kelb_Panthera]

No need to wait for anything else to fail. The MM vampire is one of the nastiest iterations of vampirism out there. You've got to get into things like Alucard from hellsing to really beat it badly.

[Urpriest]

If you need a more powerful Master Vampire, consider the Vampire Lord (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/mm/20021018a) template.

Libris Mortis has lots of useful things for lots of types of undead. In particular, there are several feats in there that boost Energy Drain. I could see one of your NPCs specializing in Energy Drain-based combat.