How do you prefer your vampires? Why?

choose your flavor

That could happen, of course. But your run of the mill vampire must still have some qualms about certain actions or retain enough sense to not go take a bath in peasant entrails for the sake of self preservation.

It is a monstrous person. A monster nonetheless, but he or she can still be reasoned with. Or at the very least not act like a ravenous beast.

because if i wanted a murder monster i can just use a bear or something.

the point of vampires is the human/monster internal conflict.

Sympathetic, but still a threat regardless.

Classy, polite, hospitable, honor-bound, irredeemably evil. Because every setting that tries to do something "unique" with them is fixing what ain't broke.

Are there vampires like dio elsewhere? You know the freezing powers and the boiling blood shot from his eyes

Kain, final answer

>Left
>Closest to kain
>Right
>Shitty low born blood mixed with low born human blood creates this

I prefer them to be mostly human but unaging, unholy and unable to access the afterlife.
Probably most of them would be cynics who grow to slowly hate humanity due to them growing wise over centuries and seeing the evil humanity commits upon each other.
Also they can still go out in the sunlight, they're simply more powerful in the cloak of night so most vampires are night.
They require a weekly ounce of blood to live but this doesn't have to be from humans, it can be from any creature although vampires grow attached to the taste of certain creatures the same way some humans prefer ham, some humans prefer chicken and some humans prefer beef.
How do they turn?
Either they are sorcerers/witches who used a spell to turn them into a vampire or they were a friends with one who offered to perform the spell on them.
Why do I prefer it this way?
Realism, inherently good or evil creatures are uninteresting and foregoing afterlife just for an extended human life seems like a pretty decent price to pay assuming the setting has an afterlife also dying to sunlight is way too huge of a weakness.

The point of vampires is to describe abusive people in larger-than-life terms. They're not conflicted or secretly good; they're beasts in human skin, devils in plain sight. They trick you into thinking there's good in them and that you're the one who can bring it out (a very tempting and flattering thing to believe about yourself, as it makes you special.)

THE WORLD WILL DROWN IN VLAD

>All murder monsters are the same

A bestial vampire can hardly be compared to a bear, not only because of its powers, but because it has been human and retains a sort of intellect due to it.

Human-looking, very inhuman inside. Perfect manners, only to lure you. Will completely drop the masquerade once it's feeding time, though.
Not romantic, or at least, not the kind of romance you get out from. Same as said.
I also like them will all the silly magical flaws.

That's what they want you to believe,

The old folk tales kind - terrifying, monstrous undead leech, bloated with blood. Vaguely humanoid, with piercing, mesmerizing gaze. Burrows down to its coffin come dawn, decimates the area of anything warm-blooded by night

Humanoid, aristocratic and haughty. Also highly manipulative and predatory. These are monsters that are well designed to screw with people psychologically. I don't like vampires as good guys and I'm not entirely fond of just making them hideous scary monsters. Appearing youthful and physically attractive is entirely optional. Monstrous true form is also optional. If I were to choose some examples, Castlevania's Dracula is a good one, as is the Interview with the Vampire (movie) version of Lestat de Lioncourt.

I don't like vampires as heroes or good guys because it often goes into territory I find really lame. There have been a few good vampire characters I've enjoyed, but even then I feel like vampires are better used as devious monsters than sympathetic heroes.

I generally dislike purely monstrous magic zombie vampires because I feel like there are plenty of other monsters that are better suited for that. The idea of going back to that feels shallow and contrarian to me. A little rebellion against the popular, different for the sake of being different. It's total hipster shit a lot of the time.

>left: temporary form/original form, difficult to maintain, used for interaction and subterfuge
>right: current natural form, used for combat and casual activity that does not require subtlety or espionage

The more powerful the vampire, the more humanity they give up to reach that power. Over time it becomes increasingly difficult for them to maintain the humanoid shape, as well as convincingly utilize it without it seeming fake or overly rehearsed. At the point where they become totally monstrous in form, many will have opted to delegate more mundane dealings to their servants and lesser kin, and would likely be seen as outright devils instead of undead.

It is not that they become truly bestial in mind, but that they reach a point where they become so incredibly contemptuous and detached, that they are barely able to interact with lesser creatures, even their own kin, without it seeming extremely patronizing. To them it is like allowing an ant at a picnic, to talk up at a human who is crushing the little insects that dare to show themselves.

Empathy, morals, humanity, mere mortal obstacles that shackled them from attaining true greatness.

The Master in Strain was great, until they decided to reveal his face.

So if I had to choose, I'd choose the enigmatic, almost wraith-like vampires that consider humans nothing but cattle for their kind.

>dreadlords but no Kain

I mean i guess you could argue they're vampire-inspired...

I love the Vampires that are aristocratic and depraved but still pass as 'normal' humans, they've got magic and all the supernatural strength and abilities from their immortality. I just love the cheesy eastern european nobleman vampire Count more than anything else.

I don't mind the monstrous vampires but I like them more as WHFB Vargheists, Vampires that give in to their bloodlust.

I very much liked (and was very much spooked by when I first read the book) by Stoker's Dracula.

maybe it's just me. but vampires are more interesting when theyre not just murder monsters that kill for shits and giggles.

They're still people,but whos nature requires they at least occasionally do terrible things. how they cope with that can drive a lot of story.

...

Anything but Twilight-esque sparklepires, ex nuMagic's Sorin Markov and his get.

Both of the OP image. I want the vain, smug noble who knows he's better than you and is classy. However his narcissism gives him a complex that when faced with an equal, he will go full horror mode and rip and tear.
Witcher 3 did this pretty well.

A feral to high society life cycle, they're parasites and they do have multiple stages.

Starting off the Vampire Coven will host a massive blood feast, draining and feeding on as many chattel they can get their hands on. From there they dump the currently unconscious thralls outside in a large prepared ritual pit normally filled with blood and far away from polite society. The thralls will wake and bind themselves into smaller packs with the strongest of them commonly turning on the slower to wake ones and trying to absorb whatever nutrients they can.

They'll end up staying in the wastes for a few decades on average slowly building their intelligence (based on the intelligence of the animals they're draining, a pack that finds themselves near human settlements might develop faster).

Once they develop close to human level intelligence they will be lured back to their coven of birth due to latent psychic influences. This is the most dangerous stage of their life cycle as they are not able to quite blend in with society at this stage and can be purged by a vigilant town guard or paladin order in relative safety.

Once they have finished their development they are taken into their coven and move up the hierarchy from there.

>dreadlords but no San'layn, the only actual vampires in Warcraft

Sorin's vampires aren't even close to sparklepires. They're basically aristocratic crazies who go into blood frenzies when they feed, but pretend to be more civilized than everyone else because their great great grandwhatevers decided to get a demon to fix their starvation problem. All while Sorin keeps stacking the deck vaguely in their favor because he's a douche.

Not to mention the whole "oh shit, the falkenrath have literally gone blood crazy and are now just flesh eating murder bandits" thing that happened in Shadows Over Innistrad/Eldritch Moon

...

Yeah, no, that's sunlight-sparkling glampires in a nutshell. The stupidity of the Eldrazi business in no way mitigates the smugly superior unholier-than-thou metrosexual fujo pandering bullshit of regular Innistrad. Shit set, shit plane, shit tribe to make the evergreen "sapient black" race... but then it is nuMagic, so shit is par for the course.

monsters masquerading as humans

legacy of kain vampires, best vampires
they start of human looking, then devolve.

...they aren't even monoblack dude. They're B/R. I'll agree they're shitters though, but they're not glampires. More like slamming bohemian nobility into cannibalism at full speed and keeping all of the attitude.

Got room for time paradox vamps?

RAZIEL, WHAT CRUEL MACHINATIONS OF FATE KEEP YOU AWAKE AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR?

Char-grilled and well ventilated, with a side of garlic.

Utter monsters who know they are monsters and revel in what they do.

Oh Raziel

>They're B/R
Sure, and Gaea's Skyfolk means elves show up in blue, but Magic vampires are core black. With the exception of aetherborn (which actually had aetherborn Vampires), it seems like when they want a sapient black race these days it's typically the vampires that pick up the phone. Dunno why. I guess it has something to do with the mandate to make everything more human centric. Vampires are just pointy teeth humans, like elves are pointy ear humans, so I guess that works for their marketing strategy.

Dead.

As a character, I feel that Hannibal Lecter makes for a better vampire than the vast majority of what you'll find mentioned here. Take that as you will.

Yeah, it's pretty dumb honestly. I think I'd be more fine with it if they were less humanlike and more like pic related in design. I'm fine with them being human-acting, but at least make them more unsettling than just "pale weird humans"

I prefer the Mads take on the character.

It's a difficult comparison to make because the movie version was a known monster and used that to his advantage, the tv version has trying to appear as little like the monster as possible (even after capture). They feel more like two different attitudes the same character might express in different situations as opposed to two different character.

TV version would make a nicer vampire for it I think.

Looking like left but psychologically right.
They look human and talk all seductive like but if you actually try delving you find out it's all lie. The creature is an animal, it only cares about eating and reproducing. Humanity, emotion and philosophy are just clever tricks to get what it wants. It holds no beliefs and feels nothing for us.
It's a spiritual uncanny valley.

Personally I think that is something that is fundamentally terrifying. It's a fear of alienation, a fear of forming relationships, a fear of ourselves and our own motivations.

The cleverest of them would appear like but any class would be pure windowdressing. The creature doesn't care for fineries it only knows humans respond well to that behaviour.
The younger and more inexperienced are like pic related: creepy in their failure to imitate genuine humanity but dangerous in their dauntless aggression.

I grew up with Sengir Vampire and later Repentant Vampire, both of them visibly monstrous, so I have a real hard time accepting the modern pretty boy approach. Seems dumb to complain about the loss of grittiness in a card game but the "MtG feel" that got me into the series doesn't seem to be there at all anymore. Everything is so safe and sanitized. The characters can't even be in conflict anymore after the Garruk/Liliana incident, any hope of them ever growing a second dimension to their characters is gone.

I would argue some of that, but seeing as I grew up with the same cards and actually remember taking a break from magic when Lorwyn came out because I was an idiot and thought that it was too lighthearted and childish (and in doing so, missing shadowmoor) I get exactly what you're talking about. A lot of early MtG was very rough and visceral in how it depicted things, and I miss a lot of it. We get glimpses every once in a while, but it's not quite the same.

At least I still have the old MtG books. Those things are pulply, terrible gold.

Well that only goes for the third/fourth generation of vampires, the ones originating from Kain.

Even the tone of the cards just isn't the same I mean compare this art to the reprint they did

Incredibly powerful to the point where it's nearly suicidal for even the most trained hunters to go after but not so monstrous that they're just mindless beasts that cannot speak or think

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Td_aETp4I
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd0Krz2Fsl8

...

They've lost a lot of good artists over the years. I mean hell, what happened to Ron Spencer? We've still got Rebecca Guay and Pete Venters on staff, but damn, a lot of these old artists were half the reason I started playing.

What movie?

Nightcrawler. Gyllenhall plays a sociopath who decides to be an ambulance chasing photojournalist in the heaviest phase of "it bleeds, it leads"

I like my vampires human on the outside, monsters on the inside. I like them playing at humanity the same way an anglerfish plays at being a light. Just long enough to eat you.

You'd like pre-End Times Vampire Counts.

I like a combination of both. Aloof yet elegant and refined people who are the living definition of "aristocracy", but can at a moment's notice turn into unholy beasts that will jump at you and rip you to shreds, then feast on your corpse. Moment after which, they'll just stand up, dust themselves off and go for some clean and possibly not shredded clothes. Also they have no interest in sex whatsoever, at least compared to just killing whoever they baited into their room alone. Pretty much nothing good ever comes out of vampires and romance.

As an additional point, I really liked the idea in The Witcher: Wine and Blood that some vampires who live for extremely long times eventually just stop giving a fuck and go live in a cave, no visits allowed.

...

OWoD.

Mighty generals.

Danzig?

Kain, easily
Pretty sure he's the third guy in the first row. That's how he looked in Blood Omen.

pic related

he looks like a fucking muppet, what the hell
I caught the first few episodes but dropped it because I got busy with other stuff and I've been wondering how it was doing. I'm glad I dropped it in retrospect.

shart

Better than when people think it's that other dubstep faggot.

I don't care so long as they are willing to fuck me.

Like a Lich, but not concerned with magical advancement and more with their own personal gain. Basically an undead dragon, always looking for greater wealth, power, and luxuries.

Now that's the kind of thinking I like

...

Does this make us the Darkside?

/thread

>spiritual uncanny valley.
I like how that phrase sounds.
What a charming way to express this idea.

I don't see Mannlet or Edward in there, so I pick all of them.

Not my favorite but an underplayed concept that I do enjoy, vamps as more insectoid/mosquito.

How I prefer em is capable maintaining their mental faculties with practice and will and keeping their blood lust in check to the point where they could feed non-lethally. But many of them seek out the curse, which can be transferred either through arcane shit or by other vampires, as a power play that feeds into and off of their own natural evil and corruption. I like them similar to dragons but capable of more secrecy as opposed to raw power and working on shorter terms than drags.

Google up the vampire from the Phillipines, known as the Aswang. Or Tik-Tik.

I love vampires so much, and they're one of my favorite monster archetypes, just because there are SO MANY incredibly different and varied ways to represent them but each and every one is valid, AND they can exist simultaneously in the same setting. Some stories are explicitly about different types of vampires feuding or warring, even.

Any of ya'll seen What We Do in the Shadows?

Haven't seen whatever you're referencing, but I feel much the same about vamps. I wish people made more of an effort to mix it up with other mythical creatures, like werewolves, for example. They're almost as popular as vampires, but they feel like a copy/paste wherever they end up.

Left - Transform - Right
Terrifying monstrosities that hide behind the veneer of humanity
What emotions they have are muted, pale imitations of true feeling serving only to allow themselves to better deceive their prey
The only thing they truly feel is hunger

Varied, due to different bloodlines that manifest in different ways.

I'll try bottom left.

Castlevania's Dracula is both of your pictures. Also a mighty warlock and an eldritch abomination.

Forgotten Realms is actually pretty nice, because it has elvish werewolves, that are lawful good. They aren't murder monsters, and can only transfer the "curse" to another if the entire process is completely consensual.

I once designed a system where every type of undead was motivated by a certain feeling or emotion

skeletons were obedience
ghouls were hunger
ghosts were "unfinished business"
liches were curiosity
and vampires were covetousness

Vampires are locked in an eternal struggle to take the things they wanted in life. A vampire who was a spurned lover in life might collect beautiful women as his vampire spawn. The younger brother to a duke might attempt to kill his brother's heirs, and rule the throne. Whatever their pursuit is, it always revolves around taking something from someone else, and it never brings them any real satisfaction.

The thing about werewolves is that they're really in a much tighter box than vampires are. Werewolves have three options: the tortured victim (the classic Larry Talbot "lock me up!" type), the bestial monster that embraces their animalistic bloodlust, and the master who keeps control over their beast form and retains some semblance of goodness. Any werewolf you make is going to be one of these three things as a rule. I can't think of any way around it.

Aesthetically, though, my favorite werewolf that I think I've ever seen is actually the werewolf from the Harry Potter movies. I love how gangly it looks, it really hits that uncanny valley of not-human not-wolf almost perfectly. Too many wolfmen just look like people in dog masks, and that's a cool look too, but I love the ones that find a creepier medium. The big fuzzy "wolfman" (Larry Talbot again) is my second-favorite for its simplicity, though.

Also: I highly recommend What We Do in the Shadows if you like vampires. It's a comedy from Flight of the Conchords, if you liked This Is Spinal Tap and like vampires you'll love this.
youtube.com/watch?v=Cv568AzZ-i8

Obligatory Yupiel post.

It's like one of those flower-mimicking mantids

I like my vampires both unrepentant and tragic. Perhaps some vampires brood in their castles and spires and regret whatever action or event caused them to become bloodthirsty monsters that sapped away their humanity. Others on the other hand embrace their new predatory lifestyle, and fashion themselves mighty kingdoms with undead vassals and servants. I like them to be a mixture of monstrous and beautiful, with lingering bits of the person they were before hidden beneath mutated bat-like features. They might act noble and with grace, but underneath it all is a carnal desire to feed on whoever it is they're attempting to sway with their false etiquette. Some might still believe in being noblemen, but none can deny that they need constantly feed on the blood of others.

So, the Vampire Counts. I don't like vampires that are so effeminate and pretty that they could be taken for flawless humans. But at the same time I don't like my (main) vampires to be too monstrous. They still need to have a lordly authority about them. It's a balance. I like the curse to show, and for some to embrace it and others to hate it. But no matter which they do they all have to hunt and feed.

I like Dresden Files' mix of things, where vampires are just a supercategory including "supernatural predator that eats humans and used to be human". There's the full gamut - Black nosferatu walking corpses from Slavic countries, White aristocratic incubi/succubi from Western Europe, Red camazotz that pretend to be aristocrats from Latin America, even Jade chi-eaters from Southeast Asia. I'm bettin they're Jiang-shi. Also betting that the human eating supernaturally predatory ghouls are actually the oldest vamp Court with an extremely dead language that no longer holds any political clout and is only good for muscle. The superghouls are just really old and strong.