Vampires and northern areas

[Starshade]

One question who has bothered me, is, i know its supposed to be Vampire rules for dealing with areas north of the polar circle somehow. How do you do it? any book or supplement who deal with it specifically, or is it somehow in the basic book who ive overlooked?

[SurlySeraph]

With regards to sunlight, you mean? Get a set of day length tables and houserule it.

[Tsotha-lanti]

English, bloodsucker, do you write it?

What game, and what specifically are you referring to? In most systems, the sunlight issue is exactly what makes northern regions more hospitable to vampires. However, actual polar regions are not that useful - there's no prey there, and specifically no humans, or at least dense settlements. A single vampire needs a population of some hundreds or thousands of people to keep it fed indefinitely (depending on how it feeds; if it must kill someone every night, it needs something like a hundred thousand or more; this varies by setting and general mortality, of course).

In some systems, vampires actually have to rest X hours (8, 12, whatever) in a coffin every day, in which case the absence of sunlight is not really a bonus. In most, though, they just have to avoid sunlight, in which case a day like today (sunlight from something like 8:20 AM to 3:20 PM here) lets them be way, way more active. In a modern-day game, wintertime would let vampires take part in a lot more of society, being out from 4 PM to 7 AM. (I actually just watched Let the Right One In, where this is subtly apparent. Cool movie, incidentally.)

The Finnish RPG magazine, Magus, actually ran a cool series of articles once upon a time, on VtM Dark Ages set in Finland. A heavily forested country with long, dark winters? Oh yeah. (Of course, it's also very hospitable to werewolves, by virtue of heavy forests and a population concentrated in a few small areas. Finland's population density, to this day, is very low.)

[Starshade]

Wintertime is no issue, would be a paradise for them. :smallamused:
Summer, where there is perpetual light in some places, as northern scandinavia.
Where i live, is in the "white night" region, without direct sunlight, but where i can sit outside and read books all day and night long if i wanted in midsummer. If a Vamp could be outside then, he'd be able to walk around on a cloudy day all year long, almost in Buffy style(where spike run around smoking under a leather jacket :smallbiggrin: ).

So, there isnt any rules? Homebrew is fine, and i was thinking new WoD btw, Requiem. :smallsmile:

[Prometheus]

For the record, 40 days of night was a terrible movie (it was based on this concept). That said, it does bring an interesting dynamic to a game. In the movie Pitch Black, for example, the day cycle is so rare that there is essentially a dramatic ravage of the landscape, every so often, caused by the domination of these creatures. It can work nicely as a deadline.

[Kurald Galain]

The answer is probably that very few vampires want to live there. Nobody is forcing them to, after all.

[Doomsy]

Vampires are not wilderness creatures, not the Stokerized versions of the modern day that infiltrated into D&D anyway. They need to feed regularly and that alone makes the small polar populations totally insufficient - they would go through them like a hick with a six pack.

Which, besides alerting their most dangerous predators (their own prey) to their presence, also leaves them starving in the middle of nowhere in an extremely hostile, uncomfortable environment. Where the long nights are countered by very long days. Depending on the region and interpretation of 'daylight causes damage' rules, this could mean that the vampire is effectively trapped in its lair for months.

[kopout]

An interesting idea is a vampire that dose not have to kill when it feeds taking a group of humans north of the arctic circle and establishing a colony, possibly using fishing to sustain itself or magically supported plants, and then using that as his food base/kingdom, If he told them generation after generation that there was nothing but snow and ice outside the colony they would never leave. during the"day" the vampire would not leave his home and sleep , at "night" he would come out and hunt. If he didn't need to kill he could get away with a small "farm" of content "livestock" that would probable never be threatened by vampire hunters and other vampires.

[ChaosDefender24]

Enjoy the Shadow Sun Ninjas..

[kopout]

Enjoy the Shadow Sun Ninjas..

Are you replying to mine? Has it already been done!?:smalleek:

[Semidi]

Well, in nWoD, I don't think the creators expected people to want to play out 30 Days of Night situation because 1) vampires lose 1 point of Vitae when waking in the evening, 2) there's not any rules regarding it that I can think of. I know of some characters who stay awake during the day in their haven because they're Ordo Dracul and can do that sort of thing. I think the player just takes the blood hit in the evening anyway despite never sleeping.

However, living in the frigid north is like an uber-bad idea for vampires.
1) Lack of dependable food source if they're over BP 2 or don't have Coils of Blood 2 (in other words, can't feed from animals). I guess it would be possible if the vampire had a good sized herd. In Requiem, there are roughly 50,000 people per-person, sometimes a little less in major cities.
2) Werewolves live there (see: fury, vampire killing machines). Even bad-ass elders have a healthy fear of lupines because they operate in packs.
3) The summer time hours would restrict a most vampires to his or her haven; if they're not Ordo or have exceptionally high composure and resolve, then they're also going to fall into extended torpor due to starvation. This is because, even if the vampire isn't in the sun, they still fall into daytime torpor if they don't make the proper checks (need a success every minute and everyone gets 1s).

Also, just about any sunlight at all causes the vampire to get aggravated damage (see: the bad kind). It might be possible if the vampire had the Ordo Dracul coil of banes (I think 3). However, the vampire is still going to frenzy constantly unless the vampire has a LOT of Resolve and Composure. I think there's also a few devotions one can have that decrease lethal damage to bashing (assuming this character already has resilience 5 and gets lethal damage from light sunlight), but this character is still going to need loads of blood to survive.

So yeah, if any vampire could live in the icy north, it would have to be an elder vampire who is part of the Ordo Dracul. Preferably this vampire would have high ranks in Animalism (3 or 4 is all the vampire would need), Resilience (as much as possible), Protean (4 just about needed, 5 would be nice), Coils of the Dragon (Banes and Blood just about needed at 3). As well, this vampire should probably have herd 5, composure 5 (or more) and Resolve 5 (or more).

This type of character might actually make an interesting NPC.

[Thurbane]

For the record, 40 days of night was a terrible movie (it was based on this concept).
Really? :smalltongue: I'd say it's one of the better horror movies I've seen in the last few years. But this is really a discussion for the Media forum... :smallsmile:

[Prometheus]

The problem that I had with 40 days of Night was that they tried to make it a zombie movie, but it didn't do a very good job of being a zombie movie.

Now that I think about it, what I really liked about the alternative night-day cycle that I was describing was that the time of the vampires was rare and therefore all the more ominous.

[lisiecki]

In OWD they established some where that vampires have to sleep X number of hours per day in order to get willpower back.
And as they lose more and more of it, they go more and more nuts

[Quincunx]

Check old World of Darkness Victorian Age Vampire book. In its European tour, it touched upon the Nordic countries, and the relevant fluff was one region where ghouls were very nearly of equal status to vampires.

[archmage45]

While the movie may have sucked, the graphic novel it was based on was great!

[Keld Denar]

A lot of people I meet have misconceptions about the arctic. I work in Prudhoe Bay, about 115 miles north of the Arctic Circle and on the Arctic Ocean. Granted, its not QUITE as far north as say....Barrow, but its still pretty freakin far up. Today is December 1st, about 20ish days away from the Winter Solstace, the longest night of the year. Its dark outside right now until about 11:30 to 12 noon, at which time the sun kinda comes up, does a funny loop low in the sky, and then goes down again just before 2 pm. That leaves about 2 hours of weak daylight during the day. Its hardly dark 24 hours, even at the solstace.

In the summer, though, its wierd, because the sun doesn't set until about 3ish am, and is usually coming up at around 4:45 when I drive to work. This would be again within a month of the Summer Solstace. That would give vampires about 1.5ish hours of "night" to hunt, although its twilighty all night long, so I don't know if that would change things.

They do have "normal" days and nights here though. Around the equinoxes, the balance of day/night becomes pretty equivalent. This period of time shifts quickly though, do to the tilt of the earth.