Vampire

A helpful introductory pamphlet to the nightlife of Hell.

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 +3 bonus to to Brawn, Cool, Endurance and Senses and a -3 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. 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. A list of vampire hunters is:
  • Blade, who usually haunts Gangland.
  • Buffy, who is most often found in Slagtown.
  • Neville, who spends most of his time in Slagtown but occasionally wanders into Freedom City.
  • Callahan, who wanders around northern Slagtown, particularly around the Bradbury.
  • Tyrone Belmont, Newest of the hunters wanders around where ever he pleases.
• You will be able to infect others with vampirism via feeding.

Note that, contrary to what you might expect, vampirism is not:

• Unlife, so you will still need to breathe and you can drown.
• Immortality, so you will still be susceptible to diseases.
• Immunity to anything but a stake through the heart. In fact, you do not gain any damage resistances at all, you merely gain a severe weakness to stakes in particular.
• Something that turns you into an automatic superman. You get only what is listed above, if you want to have other powers associated with fictional vampires (flight, angst, etc) you will need other mutations. See Mutations for a list.

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 below the Bradbury past all the zombies.

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. Once you are either holding, or have received permission from, a target, you use feed from. 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 taste ing blood spills.

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

The vampire hunters that attack you on sight (Buffy, Neville, Blade, Callahan), are primarily dangerous because they are skilled spear-wielders with wooden stakes. Look-ing ahead and using the sewers as much as possible (see below) is a good idea when travelling above ground in the city during dark hours. You should in general try to avoid them rather than defeat them.

Weakness to the sun

This weakness is the hardest one to circumvent because you are affected by it every time you go outside during the day. Remember that you are safe from the sun during the dusk, night and dawn, and take half damage during morning and evening. You can check the time with the time command, which is very important to you as a vampire.

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.