Mesopotamian Vampire

[AlexanderHowl]

The Blood Agent limitation means that the blood has to be ingested, poured onto an open wound, etc. Contact is insufficient (that would be Contact Agent).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The Blood Agent limitation means that the blood has to be ingested, poured onto an open wound, etc. Contact is insufficient (that would be Contact Agent).

Well, as the blood is the symbiote with the evil spirit that has the magical power, slight contact with an open wound might do something, but if it's supposed to heal 1 HP and 1 FP per turn, it can't splatter on the person, even if there is an open wound where it splatters, because the majority of the fluid needs to enter the person ingesting it and remain within the subject's system.

The way I read Healing with Blood Agent and Empathic is that as long as a drop of blood touches an open wound, you can heal as many HP in one second as you have HP. None of the Limitations you put on it have anything to do with requiring more than a drop of blood to get the full effect or slowing the pace of healing down to 1 HP and 1 FP per turn.

Hell, the Reliable (+50%) essentially increases the cost of the Advantage in order to deal with penalties for multiple uses per day on the same subject, penalties which wouldn't be necessary except for the limitation of slowing down the rate of healing. Ignoring for the moment that Capped can't be combined with Empathic, the combination of Capped; 2 FP (-25%) with Reliable (50%) would cost more points for an Advantage that can heal much fewer HPs in combat and is pretty clearly worse overall.

The effect that I want is that in order to do heal anything, the vampire has to feed 1 HP and 1 FP of her blood to the subject, which basically represents sucking on arterial bleeding, but could, I suppose, also be some kind of alchemical contraption for blood transfusion into a vein.

Usual use of the reversed Leech would be slower, of course, because nobody likes to risk arterial bleeding on a whim, even if they are technically already dead, but I thought that I'd use the emergency combat use of this as a life-saving method as the basis for the point cost.

I don't really have a preference for whether these NPCs ought to turn out 500 points or 2,000 points, but I object to inelagant mechanical representations and it seems to me that the Healing advantage contains too many mechanics that are incompatible with the effect I want baked into its basic structure.

[Bruno]

I'm pretty sure there's an ingested limitation kicking around, but it might be an accessibility kicker to go with Blood Agent.

[Railstar]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Well, at least it reinforces the idea that this is fairly priced at 15-20 points for each Leech power. Actually using Affliction as the base Advantage still produces odd results, as it requires the vampire to consciously affect someone, who can roll vs. HT and will then have the ability to drink blood from that vampire for several minutes.

Whereas in what I'm looking for, anyone who drinks blood from the vampire, whether that's with the consent of the vampire (the most common, stereotypical use) or by overpowering her (the wicked necromancer, diablerie, blood-addict rape-y way), will drain her blood to the tune of 1 HP and 1 FP and gain 1 HP and 1 FP themselves. Along with other, temporary benefits, as if the blood was a magical elixir and a drug, which might be handled by an Accessory Perk and might cost more, I'll decide once I've decided what it grants.

I think that Affects Others (+50%) is fine as a modifier to enable the Leech to run both ways, especially as the vampire doesn't necessarily have control over the healing bestowed by the reversed form, though it will tend to make the drinker become physically obsessed with the vampire, more easily influenced by her and potentially addicted to the blood, with the more powerful vampires being able to use other Powers to Dominate those who have drunk their blood.

To get rid of the requirement to consciously affect someone, add Always On (-20%).

Maybe, borrowing from Banestorm vampires infection mechanic (Aura +80%, Melee Attack C -30% & only vampire’s bodily fluids have effect -5%), but I don’t like that approach since it costs more points to have less control over the power. Since the recipient needs to ingest your blood, that would be both Blood Agent (-40%) for they must ingest it, & Blood Agent, Reversed (-40%) for you must bleed on the target, so offsets the cost a little.

I went for Affliction because while the victim gains the power to drink blood from the vampire for several minutes, it’s activated by the first taste of the vampire’s blood. It’s the closest I can think of.

I think Leech with Affects Others would run into many of the same issues – it requires a Ready action from the vampire, so they couldn’t be drained by someone overpowering them, it “bestows the effects of the advantage, not the ability to use it”, and so on. As I’d understand it, Leech with Affects Others would only allow someone else to regain HP as the vampire feed on someone else.

That's a great idea!

I do want some vampires to be Addicted to different things, of course, as Mental Disadvantages.

All of them have a supernatural requirement to drain life force, not a preference and not something that can be overcome with willpower, therapy, healing or any form of Mind Control. Even if they drink blood from humans daily, if they don't drain life force occasionally, they'll gradually become more bestial and insane until they are effectively no longer sapient creatures (which for a PC would equal death and for an NPC Ally would be worse than death, because it's now a threat). As such, it seems to be every bit as bad as Dependency, even though it doesn't 'kill' them, because it will destroy the character and replace it with something else.

If I used the Addiction mechanics for that hunger, I'd have to modify it with an Enhancement to represent more than just physical or psychological addiction, i.e. more than just a Physical or Mental Disadvantage, but an actual supernatural one that couldn't be cured, as it was the thing that kept them 'alive'.

On that note, how reversible is the mental degeneration? If just feeding will restore the mind, then Addiction rules will be enough.

If not, if the mental degeneration is mostly permanent, another thing from Horror is that Corrupting can be an enhancement to disadvantages with self-control, so that a vampire who fails a withdrawal roll would gain Corruption points, and those points could represent the mental deterioration.

For Addiction that can never be cured, I’d only make it only a Quirk (Taboo Trait: No Addiction) – because based on totally addictive drugs they would need to make 14 successful Will rolls at -10, something so unlikely that I think a quirk is enough for a difference between it and impossible to be academic.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Railstar

To get rid of the requirement to consciously affect someone, add Always On (-20%).

I might. On the other hand, it's not that much of a Disadvantage. All it means is that foes that have already managed to pin you can gain some some HP and FP, as well as some Per boost, Night Vision to Darkvision (depending on how much they drink) and feel amazing, like from the greatest Molly/coke/crystal coctail ever, from damage they do to you with a very specific (and usually less effective than other things they could do to a pinned foe) form of attack. And these benefits come with risks for them, as they might fall under your influence.

All in all, I'd be inclined to say that the disadvantages of Always On are balanced against the small benefits to the vampire.

Originally Posted by Railstar

Maybe, borrowing from Banestorm vampires infection mechanic (Aura +80%, Melee Attack C -30% & only vampire’s bodily fluids have effect -5%), but I don’t like that approach since it costs more points to have less control over the power.

Oh, hell no. That's inelegant and unacceptable.

Originally Posted by Railstar

Since the recipient needs to ingest your blood, that would be both Blood Agent (-40%) for they must ingest it, & Blood Agent, Reversed (-40%) for you must bleed on the target, so offsets the cost a little.

That's a good point.

Originally Posted by Railstar

I went for Affliction because while the victim gains the power to drink blood from the vampire for several minutes, it’s activated by the first taste of the vampire’s blood. It’s the closest I can think of.

It's unquestionably a legal build and it probably can get me where I'm going. The primary issue I have with it is that I've already run an encounter where a PC drank the vampire's blood* and it never occured to me that the PC should have rolled a resistance roll to avoid getting the ability to gain any benefit from the blood.

I just looked at it like drinking a magical Elixir or Potion (or a poison). He gained certain effects from drinking it, but had to roll to resist certain other effects.

It's cludgy to have to roll to resist whether you gain the ability to do what you are doing. Effectively, vampire blood is a drug and a magical elixir and if you drink it from the source, you will be subjected to a range of effects.

I get that I could use extremely expensive Enhancements to remove the resistance roll against the Affliction, but that seems really backwards, as it would probably make it more expensive for the vampire to 'allow' someone to drink from them than it is for them to be able to use Leech to drink from others.

*With her tacit approval, though it's arguable whether she was of sound mind, having been thoroughly dominated with Sex Appeal, the Power Gaze technique of Intimidation and the Erotic Art skill, for a period of four hours. And the PC was using Erotic Art to apply the appropriate digital manipulation to ensure she remained in a state of compliant bliss while he drank from her inner thigh.

Originally Posted by Railstar

I think Leech with Affects Others would run into many of the same issues – it requires a Ready action from the vampire, so they couldn’t be drained by someone overpowering them, it “bestows the effects of the advantage, not the ability to use it”, and so on. As I’d understand it, Leech with Affects Others would only allow someone else to regain HP as the vampire feed on someone else.

The Ready action seems to be a requirement for some types of powers, but not all. As a GM, I wouldn't have any problem ruling that it required an Attack instead, from the vampire if they are forcibly feeding blood to someone, from the subject if they are forcibly biting the vampire and drinking from her.

Also, if I were to add Cosmic to Leech, to allow storing drained FP in an Energy Reserve where they could be used later, with normal Leech rules, to heal FP or HP, then presumably Affect Others would give those who drank the vampire's blood the ability to access that.

More generally, the way Affect Others is worded, it's pretty dependent on GM judgment for individual powers, whether it's allowed and what, precisely, the effects are. It seems to me that allowing someone else to regain HP and FP along with you as you feed on a third party would be, if anything, more useful for the vampire than allowing someone to feed on them. By Rule 0, therefore, it can't cost more to have the enhancement I'm looking for than it would to have the arguably more useful one.

For simplicity, I think using Affect Others and ruling that this makes the Leech reversible, but that it only affects you or someone else at any one time, is fair enough.

Originally Posted by Railstar

On that note, how reversible is the mental degeneration? If just feeding will restore the mind, then Addiction rules will be enough.

If not, if the mental degeneration is mostly permanent, another thing from Horror is that Corrupting can be an enhancement to disadvantages with self-control, so that a vampire who fails a withdrawal roll would gain Corruption points, and those points could represent the mental deterioration.

It's reversible with feeding, about as fast as HP could be regained. Though having spent a long time out of control might affect the mind nevertheless, using Fright Check mechanisms and suchlike, so that there might be permanent damage from having gone through something terrible, as with any character who had stressful experiences.

Originally Posted by Railstar

For Addiction that can never be cured, I’d only make it only a Quirk (Taboo Trait: No Addiction) – because based on totally addictive drugs they would need to make 14 successful Will rolls at -10, something so unlikely that I think a quirk is enough for a difference between it and impossible to be academic.

Hmmm... but there exist plenty of magical ways to heal both physiological and psychological Addictions in the setting. The requirement for draining life that vampires have isn't treatable by an alienist mage or a wise old priest healer, unlike more common Addictions.

That seems more like Cosmic than a Quirk. Or just a Dependency that can never be bought off. After all, it's the difference between many PCs wanting to acquire the vampire template for the Cool Powerz and then have one of their buddies cast a spell on them to justify buying off the inconvenient Addiction or the vampire template being a horrifying fate that forces them to do things that go against their principles or they will lose control of their characters as he slowly turns into a mindless beast controlled only by his base impulses.

[Railstar]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I might. On the other hand, it's not that much of a Disadvantage. All it means is that foes that have already managed to pin you can gain some some HP and FP, as well as some Per boost, Night Vision to Darkvision (depending on how much they drink) and feel amazing, like from the greatest Molly/coke/crystal coctail ever, from damage they do to you with a very specific (and usually less effective than other things they could do to a pinned foe) form of attack. And these benefits come with risks for them, as they might fall under your influence.

All in all, I'd be inclined to say that the disadvantages of Always On are balanced against the small benefits to the vampire.




It's unquestionably a legal build and it probably can get me where I'm going. The primary issue I have with it is that I've already run an encounter where a PC drank the vampire's blood* and it never occured to me that the PC should have rolled a resistance roll to avoid getting the ability to gain any benefit from the blood.

For Always On, it's -10% for social/cosmetic problems, -20% for physically inconvenient, and -40% for dangerous things. I'd say -10% would fit because the social problem is giving people incentives to drain you.

On the HT roll thing, I'd rule that anyone willingly drinking the blood was voluntarily choosing not to resist. I'd only apply the HT roll if a vampire was force-feeding someone blood and the person was trying to throw it back up.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Railstar

For Always On, it's -10% for social/cosmetic problems, -20% for physically inconvenient, and -40% for dangerous things. I'd say -10% would fit because the social problem is giving people incentives to drain you.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by Railstar

On the HT roll thing, I'd rule that anyone willingly drinking the blood was voluntarily choosing not to resist. I'd only apply the HT roll if a vampire was force-feeding someone blood and the person was trying to throw it back up.

That's a good point and with that caveat, I agree with using Affliction (Leech with a huge array of modifiers), to go with the positive and negative Afflictions that drinking vampire blood causes.

Working without actual point values, I've decided that the effects of drinking vampire blood ought to last at least until the next morning. Sunlight should probably end the effects, both positive and negative, pretty quickly. If you manage to avoid any direct sunlight, I suppose the Per bonus and the Dark Vision/Night Vision might dissipate slowly and any Disadvantages and Quirks caused might dwindle alongside, with the last Quirk disappearing around the time the Night Vision reached 0.

With, of course, some chance of permanent effects, with the most common being a physical infatuation with the vampire ('Admiration: Crush' Quirk) or a feeling of being in love with it ('Admiration: Crush' Quirk combined with a 2-point Sense of Duty [or adding the vampire to an existing Sense of Duty group]), 'Desirous' Quirk, 'Hedonist' Quirk, 'Suspectability to [Vampire blood]' Quirk or full-blown Addiction to vampire blood.

I guess drinking vampire blood forces an Awe check (GURPS Powers p. 85), with modifiers depending on the power of the vampire and the amount consumed.

[Icelander]

This is tangentially related to Mesopotamian vampires, in that the particular vampire I needed to stat has a peculiar social Disadvantage. While Ahhusha may on different occasions appear stylish, desirable or terrifying to various people under various circumstances, her Reaction Modifiers with people who have been around her a while are usually dramatically worse than those who are meeting her for the first time.

I'm basically looking for a Limitation value for an Odious Personal Habit that does not affect initial impressions, but causes Reactions to adjust downwards after having witnessed a personality change and affect any Loyalty check or any other Reaction roll which covers a time period at full value. Or maybe I want that and Mitigators for a selection of several different, mutually incompatible Disadvantages which affect her at different times.

Narratively, the effect is because most people who are around Ahhusha for any period of time become convinced that her emotional responses are all faked and/or that Ahhusha is frighteningly, irrationally disturbed. This is because she seems to act like several different, almost unrelated people.

At times, Ahhusha may act like a fairly normal person in her mid-twenties, a former ishtartu priestess without much in the way of ambition or direction, more interested in sacred herbs, devotional dancing, religious feasts, gorgeous jewelry and fancy attire than in actual faith, who eventually lost her cushy status as one of the naditu class* and now acts as the night manager of a more secular house of hazy, seductive smoke coming from water pipes, dreamlike music, sensuous dancing and other pleasures.

Ahhusha may at times treat her female subordinates as her teenage girlfriends, enthusing about their clothing, jewelry, make-up or lovers. She may even flirt with employees, of both sexes, though she usually seems far more emotionally invested in the girls reciprocating her friendly gestures and girl-talk than in a physical relationship with them.** In fact, if Ahhusha really likes a girl, her need for attention, approval and validation is near constant and may trend toward the sort of excessively clingy, romantic friendships seen between technically heterosexual children or teens in single-sex schools.

These warm spells mostly seems to occur when the spirit inside her is temporarily sated and her Lugidimak ('Necromancer') mistress is asleep or so otherwise occupied that she is not focusing at all on her vampire familiar. When the infamous Gula the Lugidimak is focusing on Ahhusha, the vampire is much more guarded, curt, cold and emotionally unaccessible. This is particularly apparent with anyone with whom she was previously intimate or friendly, who might be caught off guard and even perceive it as rejection.

Whenever Ahhusha feels Gula watching through her eyes, senses her over their empathic link or suspects she might be monitoring her, she treats her employees harshly, demanding absolute obedience, fawning respect and zero degree of familiarity. She does this because Gula is possessive of her, jealous and utterly ruthless. Whenever she discovers Ahhusha making friends, she takes delight in forcing her to ruin the relationship. If she is displeased with her familiar, she may even force her to hurt the person.

Finally, if Ahhusha tries to go too long without appeasing the dark spirit animating her dead body and providing the energy that allows her to simulate life, her usual easygoing nature will eventually evaporate and she'll act out some of the negative Disadvantages that make vampires universally reviled as 'evil'.

In life, she had Lazy, Distractible, at least Quirk-level Lecherousness, a Quirk about liking to smoke cannabis, Quirk-level 'Lack of Self-Confidence', Broad-Minded, Incompetence: Singing, Responsive, Pacifism (Cannot Kill) and Squeamishness (SC 12; Disadvantage Embellishment: Extremly Fastidious about Bathing -1) and a Sense of Duty toward her loved ones and Quirk-level friends. She may also have had some Disadvantage analogous to Chummy, but more focused, in that she'd be infatuated with a series of best friends and unhappy without them.

This is not an exhaustive list, I've probably left out some Disadvantages representing being a gifted, privileged young woman who lacked the motivation to strive for advancement, power or wealth and instead wasted her potential on mostly harmless 'sins'. Passionate about a few things, mostly fashion, music, intoxicants, friends and lovers, but a bit flighty and fairly emotionally immature.

In her current unlife, I've got:
Low Self-Image; Lecherousness (SC 15); Pacifism (Reluctant Killer); Squeamishness (SC 15; Extremly Fastidious about Bathing -1).
Quirks: Incompetence (Singing); Layabout.

Her Laziness has downgraded into a Quirk, mostly because she's had a master or mistress for twenty-three years now and is growing accustomed to working all night, though she still prefers an easy life/unlife.

The people for whom she had Sense of Duty are out of her life/unlife now, both because she cared enough for them not to want to be around them after she was cursed and because her masters had no interest in allowing anyone from the Temple of the Evening Star to discover that the daughter of a former entu ('High Priestess') had been brought back to hideous unlife by an evil spirit.

Of her two masters, Gula is the 'nice' one, which accounts for her Quirk-level low self-esteem having grown into full-blown Low Self-Image. And having to drink blood for substenance and occasionally killing people through draining too much of their life force has downgraded her Pacifism and Squeamishness.

Obviously, she has the standard Mesopotamian vampire Disadvantages, i.e. she needs to drain life force to avoid losing her mind and becoming little more than a feral ghoul and she needs to drink human blood from the source to continue her unlife.

But what Disadvantages ought I give her to further reinforce that while Ahhusha the layabout priestess might have been a nice enough person, Ahhusha the vampire can without hyperbole be called 'evil', even if a fair-minded person might note that her behaviour is prompted by the evil symbiote and not actually chosen, as such?

I'd like her to be able to resist some of the time, so she can still be a sympathetic character, if one tries hard enough.*** I'd also like her 'evil' traits to play interestingly with her personality, either arising from it or being a dramatic contrast.

What kind of Disadvantages should I add?

I was considering Sadism and Masochism, as I see her as pretty passionate and maybe when she does lose control and hurts someone, she enjoys it. And given how the character was introduced, in a scene which more-or-less accidentally, through critical successes and thinking-on-the-fly, became very 50 Shades of Blood, BDSM 50 Shades of Grey / True Blood slash fanfiction, it has been established that Ahhusha very much enjoys being dominated in a sexual context.

It still seems kinda cheap and tawdry, a bit too on the nose for an evil vampire trait. I'd probably like it better if Ahhusha's strong response to Power Gaze was just a personal Quirk, not really related to anything her evil spirit causes.

From her reactions to Rasul's (the PC) Sex Appeal + Power Gaze, it's pretty clear that Ahhusha really likes being submissive to a powerful man during foreplay and sex. I haven't decided if that's a new thing she discovered about herself due to Rasul rolling winning some QCs with margins usually reserved for gods made manifest or if this has always been a preference for her.

I don't think she likes being dominated by Gula, which is probably related to Ahhusha not being attracted to women in the same way as men. And the memories of Ahhusha's first master are mostly negative for her, though I suppose a decade of living in an abusive relationship might influence sexual kinks subconsciously. It might make a difference that she liked and trusted Rasul on sight, somehow knowing he wouldn't really harm her and that while he may have acted dominant toward her, he actually cared more about her feelings than either her old master or her current mistress.****

That being said, if I make her liking for submissive sexual games a Quirk, I still have to find some nasty Disadvantages to represent her evil spirit symbiote.

What would people suggest?

*Because her absolute favourite activity was 'sacred prostitution', more correctly, various rituals of sexual nature, though as one of the naditu she was not expected to partipate in any rites which could result in pregnancy. As a young, warm-blooded woman of strong passions contiually exposed to opportunities and temptations to do what was forbidden, obviously, she eventually did. Often enough to become pregnant, in fact.
**She'll sleep with girls, if that will get them to like her better, but still regards it more-or-less in the light of adolescent kissing and fondling in the single-sex temple dormitories where she grew up, i.e. practice or a substitute for real romantic relationships with men, to whom she is primarily attracted.
***It helps that she's gorgeous, sexy and dresses well, of course. PCs tend to forgive the good-looking monsters a lot more.
****Charisma 5 and four-levels of social talent are pretty useful.

[johndallman]

Seems like Split Personality to me. Read the disadvantage through before you say "no" to that. You may have to adjust the circumstances of the change a bit, but the core of what you seem to want is there.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Seems like Split Personality to me. Read the disadvantage through before you say "no" to that. You may have to adjust the circumstances of the change a bit, but the core of what you seem to want is there.

Yeah, I guess.

Technically, it's not random when the personalities switch and it can be controlled by what is essentially her Patron and the source of her Unwilling Duty, but I might be able to adjust it to fit.