Vampire

## **Lore of the Vampires**

* Vampires are a race of predators who feed on blood. They were once humans transformed by a conscious act of will, known as the Embrace, into powerful creatures of the night. During the Embrace, a vampire drains a candidate of all their blood and replaces it with a small amount (generally a single drop) of their own. This causes the corpse to rise as a new vampire, usually instantly. The vampire who initiates the Embrace is the Sire; the new vampire is the Sire's Childe.

* Vampires have every manner of supernatural power, such as turning into animals, flying and wielding the strength of a dozen men. While these powers are not universal, vampires have unique abilities known as Disciplines, which can grant individual undead capabilities such as these and more. The sunlight burns vampires, however. As part of their curse, vampires recoil at the touch of the sun, its vital rays scorching their undead flesh. Vampires typically spend the daylight hours in the cold sleep of undeath, and only the most resolute can shake off the weight of the day’s forced slumber for even a short time.

## **Mechanics**

* Vampires aren’t destroyed upon being staked through the heart, they’re held in stasis. A vampire’s body slowly withers and turns inward while trapped in this state, desiccating and becoming ever more corpselike. Garlic and running water do not repels vampires. Such notions are nothing more than old wives’ tales, cultural biases or perhaps the banes of certain bloodlines of Kindred. They are also not repulsed by crosses and other holy symbols. But there are rumors of the devout sometimes being able do affect the Kindred with miraculous aspects of their faith. Curiously though, the Kindred don’t show up like normal people on camera or in mirrors. Their features appear obscured in photographic media (including video footage) and reflexive surfaces. They can temporarily counteract this effect, but the “default” is a sort of occlusion. The same is not true for voice recordings; vampires’ voices are captured normally on those.
* For the Kindred, the act of feeding becomes highly sensual. The process of taking blood is euphemistically called the Kiss or feeding - and a vampire leaves little to mark her passing if she is careful, cause all a vampire must do to heal the wound left by her feeding is to lick it when she’s done. The vessel feels ecstatic when the feeding happens, and the vampire undergoes a heady rush as well. Certain vampires sustain their undeath by drinking the blood of animals, but rarely for long, as either their tastes or the needs of their cursed bodies force them to seek human blood. Although vampires do not appear to age, and some survive for centuries, the Kindred use the word “undead” rather than “immortal” to describe themselves. Vampirism is a curse, not a blessing. It does carry with it great power, but the state of being a vampire also brings with it numerous detriments, not the least of which include the internalized rage of the Beast and feeding on human blood
* While a vampire might believe that he feels an emotion, what he actually feels is the echo of mortal emotions that the remnants of his soul apply to his current experience. That is, a vampire who feels angry might indeed be angry at the subject of his ire, but the resonance of the emotion actually comes from some situation the vampire dealt with in life. This condition results in many strange situations. It should be noted, that while the act of feeding replaces all physical urges, vampires can still indulge in sex and even take pleasure from it. Curiously, however, the emotional aspect of sex vanishes after the Embrace. A vampire might enjoy the physical sensation of sex, butno more than she enjoys a particularly savory smell or the touch of a luxurious fabric