How do we save vampires?

I think they'd be most useful in the mines. There's no risk of exposure to sunlight, they are super strong and don't tire, and they're immune to many toxins and poisons you might encounter there. You'd have to be wary of revolts of course, but I can definitely see it working out. You probably want to keep them all half-starving and dependent on some weekly blood ration to stay alive to discourage them plotting and fighting back, because if they all turn on you it's going to be a complete nightmare to try and get them out of those mines.

Oh, wait, you said SAVE.

>How do we save vampires?
In Lucite Acrylic

Are these games still worse playing or did they age like fine milk?

Has anyone ever done a decent Soul Reaver tabletop game?

We pray over the ashes after they die I think? Then their souls can go free or whatever, right?

My master taught me that the soul leaves the body upon their true death, and the 'vampire' is indeed a devil inhabiting the body of one of gods children.

Or, rather I think thats what he meant by "Kill it! Its not her any more! Kill it AAAAARGGH."

Drop the whole secret victorian society with shitty porn plot, keep them antisocial and act as individuals monsters with territories, drop the bishounen shit and make them monstrous and ugly.

Any self-respecting vampire would save himself.

So, back to Dracula?

For marriage?

Give them more dosh.

All but the 1st Blood Omen have aged quite well. Some would argue that 2nd Blood Omen was never good to start with but I honest'y didn't mind it.

Shove a wooden stake up their ass instead.

Go back to 1992, pretend everything since never happened.

Honestly this. A lot of Vampires suffer from one of two things;
>Spreading too thin
Oh, we have sexy vampires, monster vampires, ones that turn into bats and super sneaky ones too! WoD is my prime culprit in this, and Vampires are pidgeonholed into a peculiar world where they all blend in with oneanother because "oh you're a sexy vampire, so am I! But I like dance and you like sculpture, aren't we different?" Twilight also did this by giving every single Vampire a special power unique to said vampire. The other flaw is;
>Doubling down on a single type of vampire.
When every Vampire is exactly the same because there's no other way to be. A mindless abomination, a lord in a castle or something else. But every Vampire is like this.

Warhammer gave you five Vampire Bloodlines, 3 encompassed the traditional Vampire tropes. One sexy, one Lordly, one Monstrous. Then you get Blood Dragons and Necharchs. The five Bloodlines have enough identity in them that none are heavily diluted thematically, and yet there's a little bit of nuance to them that gives you wiggle room. Strigoi aren't all feral monsters, some are trying to rebuild their own little Strygos kingdom, a Necharch is a mad scientist, who's also a Vampire! Or they could be Indiana Jones.

Hugs

Or smooches

What's wrong with them?

Hey, the earlier seasons of Buffy was pretty fucking good.

Terrible idea

What is the issue with vampires?

>How do we save vampires?
>Posts 5e Strahd
Get the fuck out.

Really big piggybank?

Full back to Eastern European folklore, wretched corpses filled with SIN, the result of satanic/evil pacts or just Draculas because Dracula did vampires really well with Drac being an absolute fucking monster and Lucy being a horrible perversion of natural life. They can have definite origins in devilry or just be some nameless, inexplicable evil from the beginning of humanity. Maybe there's a first vampire from which all are descended, maybe vampires just started appearing in the past.

A whole bunch of weird powers like shapeshifting into wolves and rats and bats, weather control, commanding beasts, overtly malevolent of not outright evil, a bit of super strength or speed, stuff like Dracula being able to just get into rooms somehow, hypnotism, sorcerous knowledge and more.

Each vampire can have a number of these unholy powers, but not all, it allows for variety with encounters. I think they ought to be ugly, monstrous, verminous, I'm a huge fan of Nosferatu, it's my favourite visual representation of a vampire. They should be a threat, always, even the most wretched corpse-thing hidden away in some isolated village should be treated as a potential catastrophe.

It’s also a game module where you have to find a series of anti-vampire magic weapons to face him.

CARLOS

...

IDK about strahd, but could be the case

There's a reason Dracula is a classic, my man.

Make them horrible, parasitic abominations who treat the living as prey and burst to flames or turn to dust when exposed to sunlight.

A vampire does not love, a vampire lusts. A vampire is not a lover, a vampire is a rapist. A vampire does not give, a vampire only takes. And a vampire takes life (not necessarily blood) because it has none of its own.

Already done.

>what if the vampires...were like...bugs
Absolutely ebin and not at all original

Recognize vampires as an entire massive archetype of creature and draw inspiration from world mythology. Malaysia alone has like 6 or 7 different types.

If you want there to be nosferatu, pretty boy twilight vampires, Romanian counts, and all the other classic bloodsuckers then so be it, but I suggest going weirder. The Aristocratic Mosquito aesthetic of Darkest Dungeons Crimson Court was an excellent start.

Men made entirely of leeches, amalgamated into mockeries of human form. Packs of chupacabras, hungering for more than just goat blood.

I mean, lots of people know about the vampiric severed womans head with prehensile entrails dragging beneath it. The Penaggalan.

To answer your question, OP, I think if you want to save vampires you need to diversify. Shake it up. Look at old tropes in a new way, or change the definition of "vampire" to something a little broader.

I suggest making a short adventure featuring a very stereotypical Dracula type dude calling all the Vampiric Clans of the world for a council, and your party of low level adventurers dealing with the bored entourages of these oddball vampiric nobility snacking on townsfolk.

That's what they said about Anne Rice. The next emo love draculas are just around the corner, user.

Your first vampires aren't old enough.

Take more cues from "30 days of night"

Is that a vampire ape?

They're all apes. Lilith is the archaic hominine in charge.

Mor important question regarding : is this by Mignola or just someone trying to ape him?

>Toreador, Brujah, Malkavian, Gangrel, Nosferatu, Tremere, Ventrue

It isnt Mignola, when Vampires show up in his stuff they're very much the 'classic' kind, since growing up he loved Dracula.

You're right that it doesn't look like Mignola, but Mignola loves many vampires.

Just do what Red hook did. I fucking despise the mosquito fucks

Good idea, I always hated that cringy cliche

I'm quite Rapturous about them.

I know, it's my favourite classical book

Vape before it was cool

Make them ugly and irredeemable again

>classical book

It doesn’t have to be original to be good, and the lore from DD vampires is really strong and true to vampires.

>tfw literally everything is the Ancestor’s fault
Is there anything he didn’t fuck up?

Golconda?

I would:
>Vampire is a force more than an enemy
>Only one or very few exist, and they're not friends
>Effectively immortal. Killing vampire only halts vampire. It'll just take another corpse or ghoul
>Vampire wanders from town to town, leaving ghouls behind
>Weaknesses are still there: stake, running water, needing permission to enter house
>No real or decipherable motive, but it has an intelligence and can blend in, but never really gets human behavior down

I think some cool scenarios might be a stranger in the woods outside a village where people disappear in the night, or maybe a hospital being taken over from the inside and used to lure victims in under the guise of treat for a plague. Another might be having the players be hunters who follow the trail of dead villages trying to head the vampire off.

I've tried several times, but the more I get into it the more I realise I don't know what the hell I'm doing or sometimes even where to begin. I've still got notes somewhere, but I decided to play more different games and learn from them before taking another stab at it.

It should be clear that they aren't human and they will devour you.

Department 9 books did vampires well as a mixture of magical and ''biological'' vamps with them being extremely strong and fast, and the older they are the stronger they get so some of the older ones fly and crawl on walls

Also that movie priest with Paul Bettany

you mean Gehenna?

Basically the first thing you can do to make your vampires unique is change their animal associations, and in turn their weaknesses. Maybe a vampire of stagnant waters turns into a manta-ray? Maybe a vampire when it dies discorporates into swarms of spiders that quickly skitter away to reform somewhere else.

They're ultimately a bloodthirsty savage predator wearing a veneer of a civility. This veneer is important to preserve, since without it the vampire is nothing but another bloodthirsty monster, and at that point why are you using a vampire?

>noone has posted him yet

What about Racial Deviations in Vampires? Why would a human and a dwarven vampire be the same? What about a dragonborn? An Aasimar?

They are the second worst thing in the game Fucking weald man, fucking weald

Huh, that’s a plan. I’ll run a Dragon Born Vampire as the villain in my next campaign.

Or, Lizardmen.

some 5 star suggestions right here

what is this? my search results were unhelpful

it's made of pain and waifus

Being beautiful can be scary if you push it far enough tho.

I like my vampires as just selfish assholes

Darkest Dungeon. Their vamps are basically horrific mosquito men.

Let them die off. They've had a good run. We don't need to see anymore for a couple of decades.

It’s more that they were orgy-having nobles drunk on family money with their siccophants in tow, and then get turned into horrific bug men who happen to be Victorian assholes.

Because one of their own kills a vampire and decides that it would be fun to MAKE WINE USING HER BLOOD.

Stop making them a race of blood-drinking humans and start treating them like the alien-minded cannibalistic supernatural entities they are.

We watch the original 1924 Nosferatu, at night, with the lights out, in an old creaky house.

i dont mind human looking or even beautiful vampires. it actually works as a sort of predatory camouflage if you do it right.

thanks user

I've always liked to run them as junkies. Reasonably charming, possible to empathise with, but when the chips are down, they're going after their fix. Desperately manipulative.

God all these terrible contrarian suggestions ITT. Is there really a significant fanbase of "vampires" that want them to be generic mutant monster with a slight blood affiliation? Or is it just a very vocal minority.

Well he specifically didn't think it'd be fun. Just fun for everyone else

The answer is obvious

We need to suck more dicks

Humanizing them too much led to the issues in the first place and made them into just pasty stronger humans/elves with all negative or monstrous traits gutted or left as nothing but window dressing.

My favorite Vamps will always be powerful people with unlimited time on their hands.
Maybe not as powerful as werewolves and the like, but they can simply hop in a coffin and wait out the competition. It also helps that they have unlimited time to acquire resources and can just down some blood for a power boost.

The downside is the habit of shriveling up if they run out of blood. Better hope you've got some crazed cultist willing to stick their neck in your mouth if that happens, cause you certainly aren't doing a lot of hunting when you've got the physique of a 90 year old on a hunger strike, not to mention the fact that your horde of concubines won't find you so attractive when you look like a goth re-dead. Sunlight drys you right out too, making it child's play to finish the job if you're outside too long.

Point at one person who said vampires must be "generic mutant monster with a slight blood affiliation".

What is a man?

Use Wiezdim lore for Vampires

>How do we save vampires?
You open an account at the Blood Bank.

I like the idea of vampires growing more monstrous with age. Or maybe degenerating into mindless beasts if they don't feed on human blood.

Wiedzim

I like the idea of different vampires bloodlines (each with their powers and weaknesses) being derived from different blood sucking animals.

Unfortunately, the only bloodsuckers that come to mind are bats, mosquitoes and leeches.

Hmmm, only female mosquitoes drink blood.

That doesn't mean that bloodline wouldn't have males, just that they'd probably work differently.

What about bedbugs