Vampire

A helpful introductory pamphlet to the nightlife of Hell.

So you're thinking about joining the 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 take vampirism as a first mutation.

Basics

So you're a vampire, or considering becoming one. Perhaps you got bitten 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 bonus of +1 - +4 to to Brawn, Cool, Endurance and Senses and a corresponding -1 - -4 penalty to Brains. If you are a permanent vampire (you got the mutation) the bonuses and the penalty will always 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 or monsters (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. They will also track you around the city, so be careful not to hang around too long in the areas they patrol. The list of vampire hunters is:
  • Buffy (has really high reflexes and weapon skill, the second 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 The newest, and strongest, of the hunters. Wanders around whereever he pleases (including all of Freedom City, the Sewers and occasionally the Crater Rim). Uses a 'Vampire Killer' 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 vampirism

Acquiring vampirism (in order to get the mutation, or just for kicks) is as simple as asking a vampire you know to bite you, or, if you have neither friends nor acquaintances, asking in tradenet or chatnet. Few people will turn down a free lunch, but if you're really repugnant then at least nobody turns down a lunch they get paid to eat. In the event that people would rather spit on you than take your money, or you just hate everybody with a visceral passion, Boozer under the Crack House's porch (in Gangland, not to be confused with the Crack Mansion) will be more than happy to bite you if you attack him. Be sure to diagnose yourself after being bitten to ensure you have the disease, it's not a sure thing.

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. Deal with it, you pansy.

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 two points per heartbeat - the more you feed at one time the higher the healing).

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 with them intelligently.

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 or Empath mutations (see Mutations). This is probably the least significant weakness, but you should not expect a vampire character to be strong in skills that rely 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. Fotunately, feeding will reduce your current stress by 75 points. Other ways to reduce your stress levels include being able to have frequent sex, or raising your cool via jewelry. 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 - a high dodge is essential for escaping from scrapes with the tougher hunters, unless you're able to run right past before the fight has begun.

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. A single hit from the sun can cause anywhere up to the low 20s in damage, not including the subsequent 'on fire' status.

It is still quite possible to move about FC and go to your favorite hunting grounds during the day, however. Some strategies for doing this include:

• 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 move quickly 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, even a newbie 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 $4500 - $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!

• The Phaser and to a lesser extent Blink mutations are a good choice for Vampires who want to travel during the day. Simply set your memorized 'phase' location to the spot you wish to travel to during the day (for example, right outside the Mine or outside your apartment) and step in as soon as you've phased. The disadvantages of this are a moderate focus requirement (somewhere in the mid-teens for reliable phasing), mutual exclusivity with Medium and Leapfrog, and the fact that you can only phase to your one memorized tile on the map. Blink will allow you to travel to any area, but has a much steeper focus requirement, is far less accurate in terms of where you wind up, and will frequently result in 'tele-fragging' or blinking to the completely wrong area.

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.

Susceptibility to mental illness

Vampires who become hungry (once the hunger bar turns red instead of yellow, approx. 75 points) are prone to accruing mental illnesses. For this reason it pays to be well fed at all times, even if that means breaking off from what you're doing in order to feed. It's also advisable to have a friend with high medic skill (20+ is alright, 25+ is perfect) in case you do forget to keep track of your hunger and wind up with the crazies.

Getting around via the sewers

The sewers cannot take you everywhere, and some 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 several main entrances and exits from the sewers that are useful:

• South of the Orphanage.
• North East of Vice City
• South-West of Sharpton Projects.
• South-East of Bradbury.
• North-East of the Rough Trade.
• North-West of Nukem Academy
• At the bridge to the eastern outside areas.
• To the south, in the Crater Rim. (Note that there are two exits into the Crater Rim, one at the Juicer Camp and another via zipline that comes out at the Crater Rim Helipad. The latter is one-way.)
• To the Wasteland, in the South-East section of the Sewers.

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 Depths is where the vampire mutation is located - it is advisable to be reasonable at climb (15+ total) to get to the mutation, and that's assuming you plan to either die or be rescued by a friend once you have it. You will have to pass through the very cold Weezer Dam area to reach the Canyon, and at night the Canyon itself is pretty chilly. This means it's wise to bring either warm clothing from Austen's Furriers or else take the Yeti Skin mutation. There are two thirty meter climbs into the Canyon from the East side, both of which are 'trivial', and two more of approximately 15 meters to the depths. Your ropes will not persist for long down there, and the later climbs are considerably harder to make it back up than the first two. Either learn to throw, bring a friend to drop you ropes, be exceptionally fast, or kill yourself once you have the mutation. The mutation spot itself is located on a small island out in the Depths' river, you will have to swim to the North-East corner of the island to walk onto the shore and then head around it until you come to a down. At the bottom of this crypt is the mutation spot. You will need to dodge or otherwise deal with potentially hostile rock leeches and ghosts on your way to the mutation.

Full progression of the vampirism disease is required to get the mutation - this means -4 to Brains and +4 to Senses, Endurance, Brawn and Cool. Expect to wait about half an in-game day for this to happen.