A few tables of vampiric inspiration

-

Vampires are fun. They can be gothic, pulpy, modern, or anything in-between (or outside of this triangle for that matter). Here are a few d6 tables related to the fanged undead, to be used for inspiration for NPCs (or PCs).

1d6 vampire archetypes:
  1. An ancient noble, bleeding their domain dry both literally and metaphorically.
  2. A young-looking debonair type, as keen on inviting others to their life of sin as their as draining blood.
  3. A century-old vampire, regretful, hating their unholy hunger but not strong enough to resist it or end their un-life.
  4. A feral blood-sucker, who no longer has anything in common with humanity other than their general shape.
  5. A pragmatist, using their unnatural power and unending life to amass power in the underworld.
  6. A romantic, looking for love after life. What does a little blood-sucking matter if love can be truly eternal?

1d6 problems they might face:
  1. The soil of their homeland, which they need for their slumber, has been stolen.
  2. They sucked the wrong person dry, and now someone is after them, looking for revenge (or justice, depending on your perspective, I guess).
  3. They have turned the love of their life, but they are not as receptive to un-life (and the prospect of drinking blood) as hoped.
  4. They want blood, but a very particular kind of blood. A virgin? A specific bloodline? Something like that. Only the finest genuine article will do.
  5. A rival is encroaching on their turf. How rude.
  6. An ancestral treasure has been stolen from them, they want it back.
 
1d6 rewards they might give give you, if you help them:
  1. The "gift of eternal life" as a creature of the night.
  2. Money, lots of it.
  3. An inherited artifact of great power.
  4. Nothing, they are rude like that.
  5. Their eternal devotion. This really means something coming from an "immortal".
  6. An ancient and priceless treasure. Guard it well.
Hopefully, this can be useful for quickly putting a creature on the night in your game. Enjoy playing with vampires!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Toppling the pillars of the OSR: against lethality

-
Image
  One of the accepted wisdoms in the OSR (as codified in e.g. the Principia Apocrypha ), as well at the NSR (as defined by Yochai Gal or Pandatheist) is that lethality is good, and a core component of OSR/NSR play, because it means that player choice has real consequence. I do not entirely disagree with this, but I also do not entirely agree. My opinion aligns more with Pandatheist's follow-up post , arguing that "consequential" would be a better term. Perhaps my brain is poisoned with modern "trad" ideology, but when playing longer campaigns rather than one-shots, I find that the characters tend to evolve beyond vehicle's for the players' problem solving, developing interesting quirks and personalities that it would be a shame to lose because of an unlucky dice-roll (because that is one OSR tenet I do still believe in - the sanctity of the dice result). A dramatic death because of calculated risk gone wrong, or a heroic last stand against an ogre whil
Read more

A method for condensed worldbuilding

-
Image
  An important part of playing role-playing games is a shared understanding of the fictional world. A common assumption is that the game master knows everything there is to know about the world, and the players know some subset of this. Of course, what the players know, and what their characters know might not always fully overlap, which can cause issues in the game. What happens when my diplomat character wants to talk about the different empires he has visited in his travels, but I, the player have forgotten, or worse, haven't been told about them? A common way of countering this problem is shared worldbuilding on the fly, having the GM share their power of "just making something up" with the players. However, this may not always be a satisfactory solution. Sometimes it is just nice to have a shared foundation to build on from the start, not having to nail it together while we are actually in the middle of some other encounter. Having a pre-existing idea of the world ca
Read more

Rules are a Safety Tool

-
Image
  I have recently been reading Fabula Ultima (more thoughts on that in a future post), and one thing that struck me is how often the rules text emphasises to not deviate from the rules-as-written unless everybody consents. This feels like a departure from the tabletop culture of allowing the GM to override the rules whenever it suits the game, or come up with their own house rules and expect the table to accept them. However, after further deliberation, it appears to me that this can be because the rules are a safety tool. Many people with more experience and knowledge and me have written about safety tools, so I will not go into deep detail here (see e.g. the TTRPG Safety Toolkit ), but one thing that seems generally true is that they only really work when everybody engages with them in good faith. They will not stop a problem player, who can easily ignore them, abuse them, or just generally cause an uncomfortable situation. What they are good for, is preventing those who want to eng
Read more