Vampire Lore
What do you know about vampires? Seriously, take a minute and think about it. Off the top of my head I know that garlic repels them, they don’t cast reflections, and that stakes through the heart can kill them. That’s pretty common real-world folklore, right? But if we look at the 5e D&D version of the vampire only the bit about stakes is reflected by the monster description. This is not to knock 5e, or to somehow suggest that their vampire is “incomplete.” Their version of Edward Cullen looks like a perfectly serviceable critter, and definitely evokes that sweet vampire flavor. Moreover, I don’t think anybody wants a point by point breakdown of all the vampire lore from the Wiki page (Decapitate the body! Put the head behind the buttocks! It’s the only way to be sure!). But this kind of conflict between “common knowledge” and game-world knowledge does present a bit of a problem for GMs. If a player meets Strahd von Zarovich and tries to repel him with garlic, does it work? What about decapitation? What about sparkling in sunlight?
All of the above can, in theory, be answered with a relevant Knowledge check. A learned wizard in Golarion might know that garlic offers a degree of protection, while his counterpart in Faerûn laughs at the idea. (A World of Darkness mage flips frantically through his source books to find the setting-appropriate answer.) But no matter what system you’re running in, you’ve got to ask yourself a question. Do you take an additive approach, allowing details about monsters to “become correct” when a player suggests them, or do you stick to a by-the-books reading and only use the published stats?
For my money, I think that there’s good fun to be had with a “the monsters in this world are different” approach. Part of the challenge is figuring out what “rules” the monsters follows. After all, any adventurer worth his salt knows to take an “assume nothing” approach to dungeon delving. But I’ve also heard rumor of a neat variation on Knowledge skills where, if you roll high enough, you can make up a bit of lore and have it become true (e.g. Its vision is based on movement!).
Like so much in this hobby, I don’t think there is a “right” solution, but I’m always curious to hear alternatives. That brings us to the question of the day: When you find that common knowledge conflicts with game lore, how do you handle it at your table?
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So I had a vampire in my campaign, definitely operating on a “my monsters are different” vibe. He was a Baron who was captured, brought to hell, transformed there, and then escaped with a tiefling who became a paladin. ( It’s worth noting that hell was destroyed not long after in the campaign’s history). He controlled his hunger via the smoking of a certain strong-smelling herb, and paid citizens his barony for blood donations. I had some particular rules about vampirism and it’s negative effects. Before gaining fatigue from not feeding, a vampire would gain compulsions like phobias (of garlic and water, or other things), or a need to count or ask permission to enter, among other things. How long you could go between feedings was determined by your constitution score. Stuff like that. He ended up going bad way later when a healing fountain deemed him unworthy of being freed from his curse, so he killed his group and stayed at the fountain looking like a bloated corpse from continuing to drink to no avail.
Was that the end of the campaign?
Nope. It’s actually still ongoing!
Aha! The vampire was an NPC! I thought you were saying that PVP TPK happened.
It’s all fair game as long as you let your players know early on that you won’t be following the Monster Manual to the letter. If you want to be really true to the vampire myth, have him be bloated, reddish and transform into a moth. Then have your players rack their brains about what it is…
It is not uncommon for me to change up my monsters and drop a few hints on the way. e.g. “…the many serpentine heads of the monster leave behind a foul-smelling, orange trickle of saliva…” (the hydra has a venomous bite). Even if they miss them, a high enough knowledge check would alert them that something was off. This also serves as a way to catch metagamers off guard.
The complaint I’ve heard most often is, “What do you mean it has XYZ unexpected feature? If I’m from this world, I should have a chance of knowing that this thing exists and how it works.” I’ve never been bothered by that particular issue, but I understand that it can be a deal breaker for some players. So the question is, do you know exactly how your monsters are different ahead of time, or do you like to improvise the fun details?
To me, the objection that just being from the world means you should know a monster’s relavent traits and weaknesses never made much sense to me. How many people from our world know that male platypuses have a poisonous stinger? Or that snakes can’t slither on glass? How many could distinguish between a king snake (non-venomous) and a coral snake (very venomous) on a glance? The answer is that some can, likely the ones with the relavent knowledge skills or who just stumbled upon the information by chance (read: rolled high on the check). Not everyone does though, even though they are from this world and these can be nasty critters here to deal with. And that’s with the benefit of modern mass media. Why would your rogue from the big tropical city know that girallons in the frozen north have evolved to breath freezing cones of cold?
I think these guys object to the idea that a GM might arbitrarily change a setting detail on the fly, “cheating” the simulation and breaking suspension of disbelief. Just a guess though. Like I said, I’ve never shared that particular worry. If somebody who does get annoyed with it might like to chime in, I’d be all ears for the rationale.
Call me old-fashioned, but I would think that a responsible GM knows how his/her monster works before implementing them, be it modified or not.
Also, it’s one thing to withhold information from your players unless they do some serious research on an uncommon creature, and another to see the druid prepare an Antilife Shell and go “oh…erm… but the willow dryad is actually…[flips through Monster Manual]…an undead! Yes…and as such is not affected by the spell you went out of your way to prepare, despite being among fey… who abhor undead… my game, my rules”.
Weirdly, I just came across a 3.5 template for fey called “Unseelie.” It’s all about turning fey critters undead. It does pretty much what the vampire template does for normal creatures.
This is doubleplusgood in my book. Metagaming on purpose or not, I’ll generally pull out the right special weapon material or energy type to actually damage what I’m hitting, regardless of how we did on the knowledge rolls (though that’s not much of an issue with a wizard who lives on Int). Some part of me feels like wasting a round and then having to justify it at the table by saying ‘Jimbo wouldn’t know any better’ is dismissive of the collective aspiration to succeed that the party holds.
-Actually- not knowing any better, like ‘The Silver Golem has DR 25/Wood instead of /Adamantine’ makes things a critical discovery and success story as the players are actually frantic to try and figure out the unknown that couldn’t possibly have been known before. “Quick, break the table legs and give them to the barbarian! Where’s the druid, why don’t we have a druid? Try putting your wooden holy symbol on the front of your hammer!”
I usually handle this first by grumbling about how my table mates should spend more time reading. Followed immediately by weaseling my why out of whatever’s going on, because if our best plan depends on sketchy out of game lore then we’re definitely in a pickle. Its never really bugged me much, but why not not make a new monster? For example, There’s a ton of blood-drinking life-draining undead beasties that aren’t vampires. If it doesn’t act a vampire then just don’t call it one, right?
Heh. It’d be amusing to have a bunch of villagers complain about their vampire problem, but neglect to mention that it’s a T-rex with the vampire template.
“Aye, the master of yonder castle is an awful beast. He looms above us like a dark shadow, ruling through fear. And when night comes, he reaches through windows and takes our folk, eating us alive!”
This is gold
It seems fairly obvious that the garlic myth came about because Strahd is allergic to it, and people thought the same must be true of all vampires.
Nice try, vampire. 😛
It’s been pointed out before, but a stake through the heart will pretty much kill EVERYONE. I know that it’s supposed to imply that vampires will survive other things that would normally kill a humanoid, but it’s not really a weakness so much as it is an exception to the rule.
To look at it another way, would a vampire view a human’s ability to walk around in sunlight as a supernatural strength?
My grandfather: “If you can pour salt on a bird’s tail, you can catch it!”
Little Colin: “But if I got that close, couldn’t I just catch it anyway?”
My grandfather: “Get out of the house and let me nap, boy.”
First of breastmilk is just blood without the hemoglobin (red blood cells). Each session the infant takes, the breast tissues release increasing amount of glucose and fructose until it hits a max. Then the reverse as they begin the weaning process. In other words, the number of sessions it takes to reach the max glucose and fructose level is also the number of sessions it takes to wean, but that would be three times as long.