Why are vampire mages so rare? You see them occasionally, but liches are much more common. But being a lich requires years or decades of planning and risks your very soul (in D&D at least), whereas becoming a vampire requires an afternoon.
Why are vampire mages so rare? You see them occasionally, but liches are much more common...
Dylan Bell
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Colton Taylor
People who become vampires aren't typically those who're interested dedicating a lot of time or effort to obtaining power.
Nicholas King
This, plus, vampires need to spend a significant amount of time each night just feeding, and in most depictions are completely inert through the 8 hours from sunrise to sunset. Not a lot of time to focus on studying magic - if you want to be both a powerful wizard and undead, being a vampire is more of a hinderance than a help.
It's more viable if sunlight is merely lethal and doesn't force them to do nothing until it sets, of course.
Colton Edwards
Control and trust, or lack thereof.
Becoming a lich the wizard is in control every step and they don't require outside assistance to be involved.
To become a vampire you need to find another vampire to turn you. What if they decide that once they've started the process of draining your blood maybe they'll just drink you dry and not turn you after all? You might be a dangerous rival, after all.
And control. In most settings, vampires have some level of control over the people they turn. It varies from slavish obedience to just a fatherly bond, but most wizards who are inclined to go this kind of route wouldn't want anyone having any kind of leverage like that over them, even if it is one of the benign ones.
Chase Morris
Hey
Aaron Wright
Expanding on control, even without someone else literally acting as your master, vampirism is almost always about some kind of loss of control. Everything about them are dominated by compulsions, fixations and aversions that they cannot help. I don't think any other *sentient* supernatural creature has been given as many forced behaviours, dependencies and responses to particular things as the vampire.
99% of the time, if Joe Schmuck is leading the charge at the end of a story to stop Count Cockfang, he's made a plan to exploit one of these things a vampire cannot help but do or react to.
Vampires are totally ruled by what they must do, and must not do, as part of their condition. It makes them interesting as a subject but everyone who wants to be one is making a bad deal that they only realize later.
All that said, vampire mages are fun as a concept and villains are full of unwise gambits to acquire power and immortality. There's nothing stopping you from writing one and it's even a good idea as a plotline. Just not *their* good idea. It's a very bad idea on the part of the character. Fuck, it could literally make the villain undefeatable by the heroes' current means and STILL be a bad idea.
Robert Allen
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Matthew Clark
>To become a vampire you need to find another vampire to turn you. What if they decide that once they've started the process of draining your blood maybe they'll just drink you dry and not turn you after all?
A Geas.
Adrian Bell
>Becoming a lich the wizard is in control every step and they don't require outside assistance to be involved.
I'm sorry, what?
Kayden Williams
It's a DIY project.
Brayden Bailey
Being a Lich is a matter of freedom from anything including death and a matter of pure solitude.
If you get a vampire to turn you you'll always be a step lower to that vampire and cannot harm them.
You would need to become a Gen1 vampire by either making a dark pact (still bound by your contractors) or get to be lucky enough to be spared by a succubus after she sucked you dry by making them fall in love and not kill you when they could
Jaxson Thompson
It makes about as much sense as a vampire mechanist. "vampire" is basically just Human+, which means that it applies best to characters with normal human interests and abilities. Its a matter of tropes and player expectations.
If I tell you you've got to fight a wizard, you've got some idea of what to expect.
If I tell you you've got to fight a lich-wizard, you've got some idea of what to expect, and how that may differ from a normal wizard.
The same is not true of a vampire-wizard. Were I to make any assumptions, it would likely be that he was a second rate wizard who was none the less dangerous because of his vampiric vigor.
Ryder Perez
>Not arranging for your sire's death using that heedless gang of murderhobos shortly before taking a leave of absence.
Come on man, it ain't hard.
Ethan Bennett
You will still never be as powerful as vampire pimp daddy u got killed. You might just end up a sophisticated ghoul when your turner is just a mediocre vampire
Josiah Morales
> This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men, he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages, he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command, he is brute, and more than brute, he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not, he can, within his range, direct the elements, the storm, the fog, the thunder, he can command all the meaner things, the rat, and the owl, and the bat, the moth, and the fox, and the wolf, he can grow and become small, and he can at times vanish and come unknown.
> That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us. The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due. In the records are such words as `stregoica' witch, `ordog' and `pokol' Satan and hell, and in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as `wampyr,'which we all understand too well.
Alexander Edwards
Just kind of highlights the irony of it, really. Bram Stoker's Dracula, the archetypal vampire, was a very accomplished sorcerer, and in fact many of his abilities had more to do with that than with being a vampire as such.
Ryder Miller
There really wasn't a clear distinction between Vampire, Werewolf and Witch in alot of the European folklore.
Wyatt Turner
My nigga
VtM clans tremere is the casty wasty, die from blood blasty clan
Elijah Reyes
Part of an ancient order of wizards who feared that their magical might was fading over time. (They were also assholes - you didn't get to vote on the Wizard Council until you beat your master in a magical duel) So, they tracked down an ancient vampire elder (Zalmoxis, an actual bloodthirsty pagan god of I believe the Sarmatians, who in-universe was a vampire), drained his blood, and used it in a magical ritual to turn themselves into vampires.
They're still an order of asshole plotty wizards - they're just now all united by blood ties as well.
Jordan Perry
they found an antediluvian (Saulot) and diablerized him and killed all his descendants becoming a major part of vampire society as the dudes who can cast magic and shit but all deeply distrusted by the older clans
TLDR
You are right except for one detail
Isaac Rodriguez
I'm thinking that most powerful mages aren't particularly thrilled by the idea of being the subjugate to the will of someone else unless they decide to be nice and let you go.
Nicholas Scott
>slow clap
Colton Cox
Think of it as a second apprenticeship. If you're very unlucky, your first apprenticeship.
Austin Walker
Because everything about a D&D Vampire relates to it being Chaotically Stupid Evil levels of CE, and any D&D vampire not CE is usually pure Grade A Evil/Epic level character can barely fuck with on the fuckshit graph of broken bullshit.
Also, functionality wise, because vampires are suitored to sorcery due to CHA reasons. Opposed to Lichdom, there is little to gain as a 2e-3.5 D&D vampire, whereas 4e-5e shafted it all to Fat fuck Orcus and actually made blood magic a thing and forgot to cross-reference the current state of the hidden Elemental Plane of blood. The levelling scheme for styling a vampire to what stereotypes it adhere's to in 5e does away with this, which is okay, and they are exceptionally well picked because they use names from classic horror, so It's one of the few parts of 5e lore I like.
Luke Bell
Also, user, the Monster Manual 3.5 vampirism is incorrect, the full published article is a web enhancement, they didn't even fix it in the fucking errata, it was all fleshed out in this obscure WE, which to note, includes the spiderclimb part not in the fucking thing.
Easton Cook
>Opposed to Lichdom, there is little to gain as a 2e-3.5 D&D vampire
Aside from immortality, there's plenty of social buffs and if you're a power-hungry schemer wizard you could probably use the broader skill base.
Andrew Nguyen
Are they, though? Vampires are often sorcerers automatically.
Thomas Fisher
This is an alternate rule isn't it, this isn't a normal template this is like, a Template-as-class thing ala Savage Species
According to these rules a vampire isn't even undead until he's taken seven levels in being a vampire.
Though I will admit that this is written a hell of a lot better than the Monsters Manual one