Vampire

A helpful introductory pamphlet to the nightlife of Hell.

So you're thinking about becoming undead

Vampires in hellmoo are quite unlike the creatures in other sources of fiction.

• You can still get sick.
• You still age.
• You still need to breathe. (i.e. you can still drown)
• You spontaneously combust in the sun.

What does this mean? It means you want to think very carefully before becoming a vampire, and definitely should not be taken for a first mutation.

Basics

So you're a vampire, or considering becoming one. Perhaps you got bit by some jerk in the orphanage, perhaps one of your corporation comrades bit you in order to feed, perhaps you chose to permanently mutate (see Mutations) into a creature of the night. Well, there are some things you need to know in order to get the most out of your new fangs. Let's summarize the basic effects of vampirism:

• You get a +4 bonus to to Brawn, Cool, Endurance and Senses and a -4 penalty to Brains. If you are a permanent vampire (you got the mutation) the bonuses will be +4 and the penalty will be -4. Note that your raw stats are not affected, even if you have the mutation, only your full stats are.

• You are able to heal by feeding (sucking blood) from people (see below).

• Normal food will not provide sustenance, only taking blood from others will.

• The sun will hurt you, and set you on fire. This is the most significant and obvious penalty. The sun will deal out a large amount of sun damage, and if you are set on fire (which is likely), you will continue to take damage until the fire goes out (note that bit players take double the sun damage those who chose the vampire mutation do). See below for details on how to live with this.

• You will suffer a tremendous weakness to wooden stakes, no matter where they hit you. The exact damage multiplier is not important, but it's high enough that a vampire will usually be vanquished extremely quickly in any battle with a competent spear-user wielding a wooden stake.

• Vampire hunters, wielding wooden stakes, will attack you on sight. The list of vampire hunters is:
  • Buffy (has really high reflexes and weapon skill, easily the strongest hunter)
  • Blade (one of the weaker hunters)
  • Callahan (has deceptively good to hit)
  • Neville (middling, he's the one you'll see the most since he patrols FC alot)
  • Tyrone Belmont, Newest of the hunters wanders around where ever he pleases. Uses a whip as his weapon instead of a stake. Unlike the other hunters the police will attack him should he try to kill a vampire in the city.

• You will be able to infect others with vampirism via feeding.

Getting rid of vampirism

Sometimes you just don't feel that fangs are right for you. That's okay, weaklings have rights too, provided they don't interfere with their bloodsucking, albino overlords.

If your vampirism is a disease, which it is if you were infected by a bite from another vampire, you can get rid of vampirism by dying. See above for a list of vampiric weaknesses that can be exploited to cause your death. Even if you update your clone, you will lose all diseases upon recloning, and since vampirism is a disease for you, you will lose this too. If you do not wish to die, there is a vampire cure that can be made.

If your vampirism was gained via the mutation, it is nigh-permanent, just like all other mutations. Nearly no way back, deal with it.

Feeding

Not only is feeding by sucking blood from living creatures the only way vampires can eat (so to speak), it also lets them heal faster, approximately as if they had used a trauma kit.

Feeding works a lot like sex in that you will have to hold an unwilling target, while friends or gullible fools can permit you to feed freely by using allow suck from <x>. Once you are either holding, or have received permission from, a target, you use feed from <x>. Note that, in contrast to sex, you cannot feed from a dead or unconscious target.

Whenever you feed on someone you will have an automatic chance of infecting them with vampirism, whether you are a permanent (mutant) vampire or got your fangs through disease, but the resulting vampires will always be disease vampires. You cannot infect a permanent vampire with the vampirism disease.

When you feed on someone, you also have an automatic chance of being infected with whatever diseases they had, or being affected by whatever drugs were in their bloodstream. This is another good reason to try to feed from hyperimmune people when possible.

It is also possible to feed by tasteing blood spills, but the chances of getting sustenance is rather low.

Dealing with the weaknesses

Vampire bestows great benefits, but you will gain proportionally significant weaknesses. They are so significant that it is important to deal intelligently with them, however.

Loss of Brains

Dealing with your loss of Brains can be done simply by grinding the stat back up in the usual ways or by taking the Swollen Brain mutation (see Mutations). This is probably the least significant weakness, but you should not expect a vampire character to be strong in skills that depend on Brains.

Unable to eat food

You derive no sustenance from ordinary food (though you can eat it) and have to feed on blood to survive. See above for the mechanics of feeding. Because hold causes rather severe stress, even when successful, stress is often a problem for the vampire in the field. Bringing joints, or being able to have frequent sex, is a good way to counteract this. The sewers under Freedom City and Slagtown are filled with relatively weak monsters that are excellent for feeding, but ideally you will feed from someone in your corporation who has hyperimmune.

Weakness to stakes (and harpoons!)

Due to the massive damage multiplier given to stakes against you, there is very little you can do to mitigate this weakness. Getting a high dodge, and trying to avoid getting hit at all, is your best bet. Ideally, you will send your friends to fight stake-wielding vampire hunters, because wooden stakes are quite poor weapons when used on anything but vampires.

The weakness to wooden stakes extends to harpoon guns. Luckily, they're pretty rare at the moment.

Vampire hunters

They mostly hunt in Gangland, FC, and Slagtown. They use wooden stakes and are programmed to instantly attack you, and stakes are coded to do double damage to you anyway, but they used to do 1-10 stab where as now it's been reduced to 1-7 stab. If you do not have over 23-ish to hit on your weapon forget about fighting them, as they will parry your attacks and kill you. Buy levels of dodge from Ghost Dog, or a player so you can run away reliably. Look-ing ahead and using the sewers as much as possible (see below) is a good idea when traveling above ground in the city during dark hours. You should in general try to avoid them rather than defeat them.

Weakness to the sun

The sun is your biggest enemy in game. It is active until 8:00 PM and comes up at 7:00 AM everyday, and is weakest during the morning around 7 until late toward 8 and is strongest around noon. While sun damage does set you on fire it does not in fact inflict burn damage; instead it simply detracts from your HP so any vampire will slowly die in the sun regardless of gear or mutations.

It is still very easy to move about FC and go to your favorite hunting grounds during the day however, which we'll outline here.

• Trauma kits heal using the same timer that sun damage uses, thus negating some (if not all), of your sun based damage when used. By keeping trauma kits you can strategically avoid the sunlight and even never take damage while out in the day if you're careful and find cover from place to place.

• The sewers offer easy cover from the sun while in FC and give you access to the areas around it by finding the manholes which lead to them. You can get to slagtown, gangland, and the crater rim just from the sewers, and a manhole is accessible in Corpclave that allows one way travel to the FC sewers. However the FC area sewers are infested with several types of alligators which will murder you. Strongest are Crocodiles, then Alligators, then Caimen. Each is strong enough to kill any newbie, nevermind a vampire. Also note the red tile in the upper left FC sewer area, this is the bug queen's lair and she is a boss-like enemy, but isn't particularly tough if you aren't a newbie.

• Endocrine booster modules (sold in Corpclave, Botany Bay, and Maas Neotek) sell for around 5000 and may increase your HP max when used, but the chance for his happening decreases the higher your HP total is. They are one of the few ways a vampire can really become harder to kill (besides gear and skills like dodge, which are essential) and will keep you alive longer in the sunlight by giving you more HP. 50 max HP is better than 30!

In practice, the sun damage is rarely instantly lethal to a fully healed vampire, even in the middle of the afternoon, and it is often possible to make quick outside runs without taking damage at all. The sun deals out sun damage, which is highly variable -- and good luck finding sunscreen! It secondarily causes fire damage, which means you can use appropriate clothing to protect yourself, as well as taking the Firewalker mutation to get fire resistance, but you are still vulnerable to the primary sun damage.

Getting around via the sewers

The sewers cannot take you everywhere, and the northern parts are not yet fully developed, but they are essential to evading both the sun during the day and vampire hunters during the night. There are six main entrances and exits from the sewers that are useful:

• South of the Orphanage.
• South-west of Sharpton Projects.
• South-east of Bradbury.
• North-east of the Rough Trade.
• At the bridge to the eastern outside areas.
• To the south, in the crater rim.

Go through the sewers and make sure you understand how to get to each of these, and how to find them from outside. There are a few more entrances, but the ones listed above are the most useful.

Adamant Canyon

Adamant Canyon is the location of the vampire mutation. You may need to dodge or otherwise deal with potentially hostile rock leeches and ghosts on your way to the mutation spot itself. Full progression of the vampirism disease is required to get the mutation.