The power level of witches is a general question that has to be answered early. 'Magic' is basically the best power, because it can do whatever you want it to do. In the oWoD witches > witch-vampires > ordinary vampires and the degree of imbalance was so stark that any Mage-Vampire crossover was a question of how quickly all the vampires got exterminated. Thaumaturgy was generally the best discipline and it only got better as the game went on and you became able to do more and more with it.deaddmwalking wrote:If witches are more powerful than normal humans, why wouldn't vampires want to convert them? And if witch-vampires are more powerful than witches or vampires, why aren't they running the show?
I think it's a pretty important question to answer early.
Even in modern urban fantasy with vampires media you have the problem that witches - or at least 'magic' tend to take control of the plot fairly swiftly. Remember, everyone is a superhero, but Vampires tend to top out as Captain America and Werewolves as Wolverine, while Witches become Dr. Strange. And Dr. Strange rules the roost in that scenario with even a modicum of preparation. So if you're going to have witches alongside you vampires, or if you're going to let your vampires be spellcasters - and these are both things you absolutely want in your game because the playerbase wants those - you need to find a counter balance to restrict the capabilities of witches.
Yeah, I was hypothesizing a possibility to address a linked series of problems.Omegonthesane wrote:The primary reason to suggest witch-vampires was to explain why vampires were super rare until Dracula, by implying that originally vampirification could only be done by the Super Ritual until Drac pioneered the method of exsanguinating the new convert and feeding vampire blood to the corpse as a much quicker way to go straight from human to vampire without the intermediary stage of becoming a witch and remaining interested in the kinds of sorcery where your flavour of immortality is vampire instead of "undead not requiring further blood drinking" or "pact with Cthulhu" or "Force goat" long enough to be able to self-convert.
It has the wrinkle that all elders that are older than Dracula are witch-vampires instead of single class vampires who never retrained, but that isn't the worst thing.
1. You really want your Vampire society, and 99% of your living vampires, to trace themselves to something only modestly old. it just makes all sorts of things about the world-building so much easier. Dracula, being nominally based on a real person who lived during the 15th century, is incredibly facilitative in this way. It make the pitch so much better. You, new vampire, are part of the great heritage of Dracula, you now live in a society that follows his fundamental laws, the Prince rank and dominion is modelled off his historical rule of Wallachia, his legend lives even into the present day, etc. White-Wolf got a lot of mileage out of the whole 'Cainite' pitch, and Dracula is probably as good as its going to get without going back into ancient times.
2. Frank rightly pointed out that even if you do this you don't want Dracula to be the very first vampire, you want to have vampires that do stretch back of the dawn of time to rise up as nefarious horrors to serve the needs of your campaign.
3. The consequence of this is that Dracula has to be special in that he acquired/discovered/or otherwise figured out a way to spawn massive numbers of vampires that no one else could previously do (in-character he has a motive for this, he wanted an army to fight the Ottomans, you just need a fluff-based mechanic). I thought about the vampires-as-witches model. Frank rightly pointed out some problems with this, and I largely agree there.
Given these things, you still need to differentiate between pre-Dracula vampirism and post-Dracula vampirism, which of course requires that you figure out how vampirism got started in the first place. In the oWoD vampirism was a divine punishment inflicted upon Caine by the Abrahamic God - which is a great hook but it completely nonviable as a way to functionally build your game.
In that vein, I think you want to have vampirism as the primary - perhaps not only, but certainly the easiest by several orders of magnitude - means of immortality available. People have always desired immortality, so as long as vampirism if immortality option #1, #2, and #3, then you'll get people turning themselves into vampires. You also want the option to be non-religious, to avoid nefarious badness, and you want it to be multi-cultural, to avoid coming across as racist.
It occurs to me that an alchemical option is possible. If you initially became a vampire by brewing a Grand Blood Potion, that would fit a lot of cultural milieus. You get formal schools not just in the West and East Asia, but also India and the Islamic world, and traditional herbalism/shamanism can get you most of the rest of the world with only a little bit of stretching. The history of humans putting weird stuff in their bodies for mystical purposes is fairly universal. This would also generate a linkage with witches - since alchemy tends to be a fairly traditional component of most forms of magic - and would induce that most pre-Dracula vampires still would have been witches or at least people deeply involved with witches. Ex. if you want Qin Shi Huang or Nero to be a vampire - and you totally want that available as a campaign option - he doesn't have to be a witch, he could have subordinates for that. So long as these potions are extremely difficult to make because they require super rare and expensive ingredients (gold, flowers that bloom only once a decade, rare insects, etc.) and being one hell of an alchemist, with a nice and high risk of lethal failure thrown in, then that would keep the number of historical vampires very low.
