Morph, Needs Sample. Clarification

[Henchman99942]

Taking the limitation for Morph:

Needs Sample: Only for Morph. You must physically sample anything you wish to take the form of. If your target is living, this sample must be fresh – you can’t sample a rotting corpse. -5% if you need only touch the target; -15% if you require a drop of blood, strand of hair, etc.; -50% if you must eat the whole target.

Is this sample required in order to add a template into memory? Or is it required to morph into the target?

[Refplace]

I read it as into memory, though if you forget it youll need a new sample.

[Henchman99942]

If a vampire with Morph as part of their template takes the form of an animal (template), do they now breathe, have a heart beat and so on? Is their undead aura gone? Can they now be killed easily, losing their unkillable advantage?

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Henchman99942

If a vampire with Morph as part of their template takes the form of an animal (template), do they now breathe, have a heart beat and so on? Is their undead aura gone? Can they now be killed easily, losing their unkillable advantage?

Morph works by replacing the creature's racial template with a new one. So, by default, yes, a vampire will normally have Unkillable as part of their racial template, and animals don't have Unkillable, so a vampire that morphs into a wolf will lose Unkillable. However, the GM is free to tweak this - if vampires turn into an undead version of animals, then special racial templates for those animals with the relevant traits applied should be built.

Or, even more simply, just say that the vampire's relevant traits aren't part of their racial template for purposes of Morph, and then they just carry over. So, for example, if your vampires have Unkillable 2 [100], Doesn't Breath [20], Doesn't Eat or Drink [10], and Immunity to Metabolic Hazards [30], plus a bunch of other vampire advantages that add up to 300 points total, and you want to let them turn into animals, but keep all the traits I listed above, you'd price the vampire template, for the purposes of Morph, at 140 points (the full 300 - the 160 points of the traits you want to keep). The vampire could transform into any animal whose racial templates was 140 points or less, and they'd still have the traits listed above, making them an undead version of the beast they transformed into.

[ericthered]

Animal templates for morph are odd in that only some traits should be brought across at any given time. For example, most of the time only physical traits should be applied without the IQ-5. Its also a classic to have the altered form be something extra beyond just the base animal.

Most of the time morphing should drop some of the racial traits but not all of them. It should be clearly specified in your build which stay and which go when you transform.