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Old 07-04-2023, 10:03 AM   #1
Mr Dalton
 
Join Date: Jan 2021
Default Fungal Vampire

Asking for input.

The idea of this creature is that a vampire's coffin and corpse got infected by supernatural mushrooms and changed its nature. The body no longer leaves the coffin. Instead, its spirit floats around as a sort of sapient cloud of spores. It is insubstantial and invisible, but gives off a strong fungal odor. It feeds by simply moving into your space, draining 1 HP per second, but it's very slow moving, so it's easy to run from, but as long as you're in range, it will just keep coming.

The only way to kill it is to destroy the fungal growths consuming its body, which requires either acid or fire (the mushrooms' roots will stay intact otherwise and regenerate).

This one's kind of a weird one, since, in essence, its mobile body is also its form of attack and even if you destroy the spore cloud, the fungus infested corpse will just produce another one.

It doesn't strictly speaking need to feed on people anymore - the mushrooms sustain its existence, but it's still driven to feed on people. I wonder if there's another way to make that feeding more necessary, though. I'm just not sure what. I thought about maybe it has special powers that it can only use if it's fed within the past 24 hours, but the fact that it damages you just by moving into your space and is nearly impossible to harm in its insubstantial state seems pretty dangerous enough on its own. Or perhaps how far it can travel from its corpse is somehow tied to whether or not it's fed recently?

Since it's a cloud of spores and otherwise impossible to damage, I gave it just one ST. With 1 HP, the spore form is extremely fragile and dies quickly when exposed to sunlight (just like real fungus spores), but even if the corpse is exposed to sunlight, the roots inside the corpse survive unless it is destroyed by fire or acid.
I also thought that it could perhaps have an additional weakness that its spore form can easily be blown away in the wind, but I'm not sure what disadvantage or mechanic would account for that would account for that.

I also had a thought that if it drains someone to 0, the victim's corpse sprouts mushrooms and becomes a kind of fungal zombie. Perhaps that would be built as an affliction? It's not quite the same as dominance, though it works very similar to that.

Some guesses on stats
The Fungal Vampire
ST 1; DX 8; IQ 12; HT 8;
HP 1; FP 8; Will 12; Per 12;
Speed 4; Dodge 7; Move 4
DR: 0

Attacks
Leech Life: The fungal vampire must maintain contact with the target, draining one HP per second of contact.

Advantages
Darkvision, Doesn’t Eat, Doesn’t Sleep, Insubstantiality (always on), Leech (contact agent), Invisibility, Unkillable 2 (Achilles heel: the mushroom covered body can be destroyed by acid or fire)

Disadvantages
Bad Smell (fungal), Dependency (coffin), Dread (religious symbols), Dread (garlic) Uncontrollable Appetite (Human life-force), Weakness (sunlight; 1d/minute);
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Old 07-04-2023, 07:27 PM   #2
Inky
 
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
Default Re: Fungal Vampire

I'm not sure about any of the following.

Is this meant to work like a spirit, or like a cloud of spores? That is, could the PCs (temporarily) kill it with a flamethrower, or would that just pass straight through it?

If it's a cloud of spores, it seems like it's similar to the Body of Air meta-trait, which doesn't use Insubstantiality - instead, it uses Injury Tolerance (Diffuse), which means that area, cone and explosion effects do normal damage but other attacks are limited to 2 HP of injury, or 1 HP for impaling or piercing attacks. (This still seems a bit generous - you could kill such an air elemental by stabbing it 20 times, which seems odd for an air elemental - but if you do use the RAW for air elementals it's presumably appropriate for this thing too).

It also has Vulnerability (Vacuum and wind-based attacks x2), and ST 0, but HP 10.

Powers page 53 mentions a +40% "Infiltration" enhancement for Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) to be able to pass through tiny cracks, implying that a Diffuse character can't do that otherwise, so if you want it to be able to do that without being Insubstantial you might need that as well.

So if the fungal vampire operates like a cloud of spores rather than like a completely disembodied ghost it might have, partly (Body of Air but ditching parts of it that might not apply) -
ST 0 [-100]; +10 HP [20]; Doesn’t Breathe [20]; Flight (Lighter Than Air, -10%) [36]; Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) (Infiltration, +40%) [140]; Vulnerability (Vacuum and wind-based attacks x2) [-20]; and Taboo Trait (Fixed ST) [0]

Or you could use the swarm rules (which use that automatically-does-damage-if-it's-in-the-same-hex-as-you rule), but they seem to cause a lot of confusion and arguing themselves.

As for it being tied to its coffin, I made an odd vampire build a while ago http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...0&postcount=36 of the kind, as in some old folklore, that's a ghost that returns to its coffin during the day, but it was a bit complicated. I made it Unkillable 3 (Achilles' Heel, Damage to original body, -30%), rather than Unkillable 2, because it reappears at its coffin, and it also has Dependency (Original grave, Daily).

If it does work like a cloud of spores, it might work out as something like -
Quote:
The Fungal Vampire
ST 0; DX 8; IQ 12; HT 8;
HP 10; FP 8; Will 12; Per 12;
Speed 4; Dodge 7; Move 4
DR: 0

Attacks
Leech Life: The fungal vampire must maintain contact with the target, draining one HP per second of contact.

Advantages
Darkvision
Doesn’t Breathe, Doesn’t Eat, Doesn’t Sleep
Flight (Lighter Than Air, -10%)
Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) (Infiltration, +40%)
Unkillable 3 (Achilles heel: the mushroom covered body can be destroyed by acid or fire)
Leech (contact agent)
Invisibility

Disadvantages
Bad Smell (fungal), Dependency (coffin), Dread (religious symbols), Dread (garlic), Uncontrollable Appetite (Human life-force), Weakness (sunlight; 1d/minute), Vulnerability (Vacuum and wind-based attacks x2)
It seems like, some vampire stories involve the vampire needing the blood of the living to be "alive" again, so that might be one reason for it to feed on humans. Maybe it can become visible and/or have some ST if it's fed more than a certain amount in the last 24 hours. It would then be able to communicate with the PCs and possibly become an ally, or to be terrifying in even more ways, depending on your mood.

A possible plot development - maybe the mushrooms can only live on corpses and the vampire's corpse is almost used up, and it's trying to lure in fresh supplies!

In a not-very-hard-science science-fiction setting, this fungus might be how "vampires" normally happen.
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Old 07-05-2023, 08:23 AM   #3
Anaraxes
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: Fungal Vampire

What didn't you like about the Dominance model? There's also Infectious Attack (a Disadvantage), if you didn't like just the control-your-victim part.

If it's just the exact mechanical difference (automatic conversion at 0 HP rather than chance based on damage taken), then I'd probably just say that's the way it works. If there's a point difference, it's minor. (I will observe, though, that reaching 0 HP in GURPS isn't "dead". By the Dominance rules, that gives the average human a 50% chance of being infected, having taken 10 points of damage to compare to their 3d6 roll. First death check at -10 HP, or 20 points of damage, would be a near certainty for the deceased. If you want automatic conversion for being knocked unconscious, I'd increase the point value -- not that points matter for building the NPCs or can be used for calculating combat "Challenge Ratings", but it does at least visibly mark the "this version is more powerful and dangerous than the book version".)

For the spore cloud, one option would be to take the description literally and build a second form that can move around. The actual fungus might be a Sessile lump somewhere, while the spore cloud is an Ally. Or, a projected form (see the Projection option for Warp or Insubstantiality). Or, you might start with Duplication, with a limit of 1 duplicate that's not an exact copy of the original, and use the points to reflect the traits of the spore cloud instead of the originator. Duplication has a couple of handy features -- frex, splitting HT with the spore cloud means the source fungus needs to take some time to heal, which is to say grow more spores, before it sends out another cloud, while a dupe limit of 1 means only one cloud out at a time.

Whatever the base, if you want the spores to drift with the wind, give them Flight (Lighter Than Air, Low Ceiling), and they'll drift. Dying when exposed to sunlight is straight-up Weakness (B161). If you literally want it impossible to damage any other way, then Insubstantiality is a good choice. The sessile form might have high DR versus anything that's not fire or acid, to encourage those means of destruction, but not itself be Insubstantial.
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Old 07-10-2023, 09:00 AM   #4
Mr Dalton
 
Join Date: Jan 2021
Default Re: Fungal Vampire

Quote:
Originally Posted by Inky View Post
I'm not sure about any of the following.
A lot of stuff
That gives me some ideas to play with. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to go about using different advantages and disadvantages to get things I want. In theory, you can do anything, in practice, you gotta find the right way.
I think the diffuse aspect definitely works better than insubstantial here. Because my thinking wasn't that it's not physically there, but that it's such a fine mist of spores that you can't really see it and trying to attack it physically is a waste of time, but even then, it would still be susceptible to attacks that fill it's space with fire or something similarly capable of harming fungus.

And part of the reason I steered away from dominance was entirely a setting detail. The setting here is divided into different realms, each one ruled by a lord that has different themes and powers. The lord of this realm has control over fungus. So, the vampire was consumed by the fungus and became a new type of creature under its influence, but the lord itself would have dominion over any spawn the vampire created.

In another detail, the lord also creates this illusion that its domain is a perfectly normal, happy place to live (the whole area has this Stepford Wives vibe going), because the one thing about fungus, is it can be very deadly, but you often don't know that it's there, killing you slowly with poison. So to maintain the illusion, when the vampire came, the lord basically had every citizen move to a new town and now they all pretend that there's never been a town there. So, it wouldn't have a source of regular human life-force to keep it fed once per day.
But on the other hand, I suppose I could just broaden that to the vampire being capable of feeding on any organic life, but it prefers human life and it's uncontrollable appetite only applies to humans.
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Old 07-15-2023, 01:11 AM   #5
Nereidalbel
 
Join Date: May 2013
Location: Ellicott City, MD
Default Re: Fungal Vampire

You could say the Infectious Attack applies to those killed by the spores, and takes, say, 2d+1 days. If people catch on, they can prevent more vampires by burning the bodies of its victims, while trying to track down the source.
Feeding on animals should be fine, but, the Infectious Attack working on them or not is a setting decision.
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