Quote Originally Posted by Morty View Post
Speaking of psychotic murderers, an idea for a Hunter conspiracy crossed my mind recently[...]
Mirrors has rules for both extraordinary mortals (which you could use) and a full fledged major template designed to emulate the likes of Heracles et al. It's quite a bit more powerful than Hunter endowments, but it'd probably work unless you really wanted intra-Hunter crossovers.

Now, I come bearing something I promised at the beginning of the last thread. Some changes to vampires: designed to be slightly closer to folklore in some respects, and just a bit more crossover friendly in others. I figured I'd share given that some of you were complaining about vampires not being crossover-compatible on account of their being extremely flammable. Where not mentioned otherwise, the rules are as described in the actual Vampire book (e.g., vampires still have to try to stay awake during the daytime even though the sun no longer sets them on fire.

So, without further adieu...

Damnation and the Embrace:

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The vast majority of vampires are Embraced as described in Vampire: the Requiem. However, it is not unknown for certain mortals to simply not die when they should, instead simply "waking up" an evening or two after death as one of the Undead. Maybe they were hideously evil, maybe they were cursed, or maybe they were just so pissed off that they don't mind damnation if it comes with the opportunity for sweet, sweet vengeance. Whatever the reason, these vampires are the Damned.

The Damned have clans just like any other Kindred; in this variant, the clans are more like different vampire subspecies and don't imply an unbroken chain of Embraces going back to the first member of the clan, although vampires of a given clan are generally similar enough to form alliances based on their common ground. However, the Damned are always the founder of a new bloodline, which always has some sort of symbolic value regarding their mortal life and reason for being Damned. This is how new bloodlines are created in almost all cases. You can either create new bloodlines for PC Damned or just refluff a bloodline that wasn't going to show up in your chronicle anyway. Or use an official bloodline as a starting point and switch a few things around; it's hardly impossible that the same (or a similar) discipline has shown up more than once in the long history of vampirism.


Bloodlines Are Thicker Than Water:

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All vampires have the option of starting with a bloodline at character creation. In the case of most vampires, this is passed down to them by their sire along with their clan, although a vampire who doesn't want to take on her sire's bloodline can reject it during the process of being embraced, begin unlife with no bloodline, and later be initiated into a bloodline compatible with her clan as described in the default rules.

Bloodlines work as follows. Vampires who are part of a bloodline gain another in-clan discipline and an additional weakness beyond the one typical for their clan. The bloodline may also swap out one of the parent clan's disciplines for another. Typically speaking, the swapped discipline should be broadly similar in function to the one replacing it (e.g., physical disciplines should be replaced by other physical disciplines, and mental by mental) but the Storyteller may elect to waive this requirement if the character gains yet another weakness, the bloodline weakness is especially severe, or if s/he simply decides that the bloodline's in-clan disciplines don't give it an unfair advantage over more "typical" bloodlines.


Tasty, Tasty Blood:

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Vampires are not required to drink vampire blood after reaching a certain Blood Potency level. That goes against the entire point of vampire folklore (that they are parasites that plague humanity) and is quite frankly contrary to everything we know about the food chain. However, older vampires do require more vitae to awaken each evening as their connection to the primordial forces of entropy and death becomes stronger. Vampires who don't have enough vitae in their systems to awaken go into topor and lose Blood Potency as described in Vampire: the Requiem.

Blood Potency - Vitae Consumed per Night:

0 - 1
1 - 1
2 - 1
3 - 2
4 - 2
5 - 3
6 - 4
7 - 5
8 - 6
9 - 7
10 - 8


Torpor:

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Vampires who have their health boxes filled with lethal can remain active until the end of the Scene before collapsing into torpor, and if they can clear at least (5 - Stamina, minimum of one) health box(es) of all damage before the Scene ends, do not fall into torpor at all. Vampires continue healing normally in torpor, and once the torpored vampire has cleared at least the minimum number of health boxes they would have needed to avoid torpor in the first place, they can start making a Resolve + Composure roll once each evening (immediately upon healing sufficient damage, and each night at sunset afterwards); success means the torpor ends.

If the vampire doesn't have the vitae to heal sufficiently, use the system as written on page 175 (and probably roll up a new character). Voluntary torpor also works as written (V:tR, p.176).


Mirror, Mirror:

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Long story short, vampires are seriously inconvenienced by mirrors and cameras. However, the nature of this weakness is slightly different from what the majority of vampire hunters (and new vampires) expect. Barring a few oddities (Lasombra, hollow Mekhet, etc...) vampires show up just fine in mirrors and on camera. They show up better than fine, in fact. They show up perfectly. While this isn't typically enough to prove that the vampire is a walking corpse by itself (except in the case of ultra-low humanity vampires and some Nosferatu), it is enough to trigger the instinctive sense that the vampire is a predator, and for humans that pay close attention, the true appearance of the vampire (somehow both sickly and hideously predatory) gives the human a good idea of what they're seeing.

Humans who get a good look at a vampire in a mirror or on camera roll Wits + Occult, with success indicating that they realize they're dealing with something inhuman, although they may not know what. In this day and age though, the word "vampire" should spring to mind quite quickly. Even if it doesn't, the vampire's mental disciplines suffer from the Humanity cap on social interactions for the rest of the Scene when used on the person who saw through their glammer, as her instinctive revulsion limits the effectiveness of the creature's supernatural powers. After the Scene ends, she doesn't necessarily forget what she saw, but the horror is no longer immediate enough to have a fortifying effect.

It's worth noting that seeing the vampire casually walking past a security camera isn't enough to give this roll, in most such cases the camera isn't going to be getting a close enough look at the monster to give anyone watching the footage more than a brief twinge of wrongness. People who already know that vampires exist (and thus what to look for) however, can actively look for vampires on such footage by rolling Intelligence + Occult.


The Accursed Daystar:

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While they don't burn up in sunlight, vampires are weakened by it, and the sun burns away much of the illusion that allows them to pass for human. Whenever a vampire goes out in sunlight, use the sunlight damage chart on page 173 (plus clan weakness if applicable) to figure out how much damage the vampire would be taking a turn. Apply that number as a penalty to all physical ability rolls and reduce the vampire's effective level in all disciplines by that number until his level of exposure changes. This rule replaces the Humanity cap on daytime actions described on page 184 of Vampire: the Requiem.

In addition, any vampire taking a sunlight penalty of three or more cannot feign life with vitae, and the effect of any vitae spent to augment physical attributes is halved (one vitae provides only one additional die to physical dice pools). If the vampire had already spent vitae to activate the blush of life prior to taking the sunlight penalty, he loses its benefits gradually over the course of about ten minutes.

(Note: Out of deference to the movie, I've been considering having the Nosferatu still be burned by sunlight, or at least have that as a weakness of some bloodlines. However, this gives me two problems. One, they'd have to have a pretty substantial advantage to counterbalance that, and two, I'd have to redo the Mekhet clan weakness, since increased sunlight vulnerability would become the Nosferatu's other thing. Maybe I'll just have it be a bloodline weakness particular to Orlok or something like that.)