Vampires
The boredom of affluence can lead to moral numbness, and then to atrocity. Centuries ago, a venerated and secret social club slipped down this path. Generations of entitlement and a cushioned existence led its members to become unmoored from any sense of danger. They dipped their toes in demonism, then jumped in with both feet.
The profanity chalked on their ballroom floor whispered a single word aloud, again and again for years. It promised the perfect gift for a beast who has everything: Immortality. This perversely wealthy gaggle would meet up to listen to the whisper, making the heart-racing danger into their little hobby. But eventually they acclimated, and the sound grew to bore them. With enough trips to the well, they felt they had earned the right to drink from it.
A generation of aristocracy went missing, hidden away for weeks. The rituals were persistent and willful rejections of decency. The partygoers ignored their need for food and water, until those needs faded forever. At the end of the final task, the beasts that survived stood in a circle. Spirit and body that once filled them now lay discarded at their bare feet. Something vital floated among the meat, and nothing should survive without it. Now it was all the same steaming, rancid puddle. The emptied nobles then invited their teachers to join them from under the ballroom floor. The demons accepted the invitation. They climbed in through the top and empty chests pushed outward again. What filled them still dwells in some of us today.
The vampires standing in the Beast World’s peripheral shadows are descendents of this social club. Each and every one wears the whispering demons’ curse with pride, and from seclusion, each carries out the horrible task of their passenger.
The Beast World isn’t a treacherous place. Even with a new threat underfoot, beasts and brethren rarely experience mortal danger. Travelers walk the roads of the homelands without fear.
But there are some roads one knows to take the long way around.
Menace in the Shadows
Few people have met a vampire. They prefer to sit surrounded by tarnished fineries from their own time, waited on hand-and-foot by their herd of thralls. Vampire lairs are a cross between repulsive and obscure, protected by perception-altering wards and hushed horror stories about people who wander toward them.
A vampire’s manor is never hidden, exactly, but sits at the forgotten edge of their living homeland. A vampire’s life is hardly idle, though. They carry out their machinations over decades, playing agonizing games of harassment against their enemies. The stakes of the game intensify with time, escalating to torture and violence.
The most potent satisfaction a vampire can earn is watching an old enemy snap from dismay after years of toying with them. Between active moments of this game, vampires distract themselves with wanton hedonism. They watch their thralls perform extreme, violent “theater.” They entertain their fiendish families with grandiose dinners they can only pantomime eating, while bragging about their conquests and comparing the size of their holdings. All of it is a perverted farce acted out while waiting for their archenemies to be ready for harvesting.
Servants of the Unspeakable
A vampire dresses up in a costume of power and influence. Close inspection reveals the moth-bitten stage wear of their royal robes. Their only authentic identity is as a puppet animated by the power of their demon master.
As their unfortunate archenemies learn more about them, they sense the person’s will strain against the passenger’s. Deep in every vampire, they ache for a way to cut the strings attached to their unnaturally long life, and some would even prefer to die. The ancient contract makes this desire impossible. A vampire cannot destroy themselves, nor can they willfully defy the demon inside them.
Any attempt to step out of line or shirk their violent responsibilities results in a night of full demonic control, a frenzy of wanton murder. Dignity, intrigue, and subtlety are abandoned when the demon takes control. A vampire’s thralls are killed and their possessions destroyed as punishment for their insolence. A vampire lives on a thin wire balancing their own desire for adoration and largesse with their own masters’ fundamental drive to bring existence to ruin.
Vampires are demons’ greatest victory and their most potent weapon against existence itself. The fiend filling the physical void in every vampire craves destruction, which they satiate in the short term by biting the necks of their thralls, drinking blood until the thrall is at the edge of death. This satisfies the passenger’s hunger for a little while.
A Zoo of the Willful
Vampires carry out their schemes through the use of their maniacally adoring cults. Their minds are stolen by a vampire’s demonic power and replaced with ugly, infinite lust. A thrall lives every moment of their life to earn a few seconds of their master’s attention; the graze of the master’s hand is enough to send them into barely concealed hysterics.
The only affection a vampire’s mind allows them to experience is avarice for an interesting or rare servant. Vampires long to plunge famous, powerful people into the abyss of devotion their gaze can force on a mind. A meeting between vampires is a boastful comparison of herds concealed in layers of politeness and pageantry.
A beast, brethren, dragon, or other willful creature who surrenders to thralldom is unbreakably obsessed with no hope of rescue. Even after years removed and rehabilitated, a former thrall is wracked with feverish dreams of their master.
Sires of Chaos
Fiend-vessel spawn are the offspring of a vampire and a thrall. These wretched folk carry a shadow of their parent’s power as well as immunity to their enthralling gaze. However, they age normally without a demon inhabiting them. They share their parent’s empty veins and thirst for blood, but without the intruder’s presence, there is no punishment for ignoring their fell cravings.
When a vampire is slain, the intruder within escapes back to its summoning stone. These immense rock slabs were torn from the floor of the social club in which the vampires performed the original ritual. They sit in the deepest, most secret alcoves of their manors. The demon leaves behind the rotten husk of its former host, and it calls out telepathically to the dead vampire’s children. It must find a new vessel from among the spawn.
Every spawn reared by a vampire is a potential heir, but there isn’t enough power to go around. The contest to inherit the intruder is brutally violent, and it kills the losers. The victor descends into the dark sanctum of the unhosted intruder and performs the ritual of consumption.
Exceptions of Greed and Good
There are a few anomalies among fiend-vessel spawn. No willful creature is born evil, and some vessels choose to reject their destiny and hold onto their mortal parent’s nature despite the intruder’s call. They live among other beasts and brethren as the rarest creatures known to exist: fiends without malice.
Impatience and avarice drive some spawn to the other deviation from the unnatural order: attempted patricide. They plot against their vampire parent, waiting for the opportunity to kill them. The stakes are high—a vampire rarely suffers a murderous spawn to live.
With all these liabilities, most vampires would prefer not to rear children. However, the intruder within them knows that without a host to inherit the power, their quest to sow destruction ends. Therefore, intruder demons are sure to reward the inhabited with flashes of true emotions and passion when they successfully reproduce. These moments of connection with their mortal selves are valuable enough that all vampires rear many potential vessels.
Abyssal Pets
Another of their intruders’ gifts is the ability to call minions from beyond existence known as batwolves. These enormous creatures appear as black dire wolves with enormous, leathery wings. They stalk in darkness using echolocation and can change shape into either of the animals they borrow their anatomy from. They circle their master’s manor as sentries, and aid thralls in spying on the vampire’s enemies.
Like its creator, a batwolf draws power from blood. They are ferocious when given a purpose, but also have unique weaknesses. Their loyalty is easily turned with the use of cold iron, and the unfamiliar innocence of a child confuses a creature that has only known wickedness.
The Archenemy Game
The terms of the original pact require a vampire to seek a twisted partnership with a righteous-hearted enemy. They are doomed to repeat a cycle of raising up and destroying enemies over an eternity of lifetimes. They are numb to true pleasure or satisfaction until the moment of triumph over an archenemy.
Invitation
The cycle begins with a search. Thralls scour the world seeking a young warrior with a moral spirit and the potential for greatness. They lurk in bars and bethels, waiting for the right candidate to bring to their master. When a suitable paragon is found, a batwolf brings a letter to their home, written on old parchment, and wax-sealed with the symbol of a forgotten noble family. This is an invitation to dinner. One ignores it at their own peril; to snub an immortal evil is to bring woe to any part of one’s life not under constant and powerful protection.
Initiation
After arriving at a vampire’s manor, the invitee is treated to hospitality a queen would consider overbearing. Thralls try to pamper the guest in a way that might attract a shred of acknowledgement from the master, entertaining them until dinner is served. Over a five-course meal, the fiendish host explains the terms of their new friendship. Every vampire exists to lurk at the edge of a righteous warrior’s life as their archenemy. The host announces the beginning of the beautiful arrangement and congratulates the good-hearted adventurer on their luck. The guest is sent on their way, as thralls and batwolves alike are ordered to give violent pursuit until the vampire’s new archenemy is past the edge of the manor grounds. Excited thralls are promised a kiss if they can draw blood, while batwolves stalk the fleeing hero without mercy.
Escalation
In the years that follow, the vampire toys with their archenemy in the name of spurring them to growth. If the vampire decides their enemy has become complacent, some “motivation” is sent forth to visit tragedy on their lives. Care is taken not to spoil an archenemy with too much grief! An over-punished foe becomes unresponsive and loses the will to improve themselves. The archenemy is regularly reminded that someday in the future, they will have the opportunity to rid the world of the vampire forever. The master even orchestrates gifts in the form of small triumphs for the archenemy to bask in while on the road to ruin.
Culmination
When the archenemy is confident enough in their abilities (or the vampire deems them to be at peak potential), the two will face each other again. This final battle is the culmination of what the vampire considers a work of fiendish art. Creative and elaborate traps maim the warrior, but the vampire is careful not to end the game too soon. If all goes well, the vampire destroys the hope and life of a righteous and worthy opponent. After hours of taunting and tormenting, the fiend delivers the killing stroke. This earns a flood of rewards from the demon: the Year of Bliss. The vampire drowns in pleasure, satisfaction, and every orgiastic emotion at once for twelve full months.
Or, the vampire is destroyed. The archenemy prevails and destroys both tormentor and their demonic source of power. The vampire is free from the endless cycle of violence, euphoria, and withdrawal.
The circumstances are different every round, but a vampire always wins this game.
Vampire Hunter: the Proto-Delver
Vampire hunters were the main characters of beastlings’ bedtime stories and games of pretend for centuries before the Dungeon. The most beloved bardsongs and poetry chronicle the original warrior heroes’ adventures, and they still trek across the homelands today.
Most vampire archenemies have the title forced upon them and carry it as a curse. Vampire hunters seek to relieve such wretched souls of the burden by breaking the intended sequence of the archenemy game. Hunters accompany archenemies to their “final battle” early, using powerful magic to overwhelm the fiends and burn them out of the world.
Vampires don’t treat hunters with the same theatrical, will-they-won’t-they playfulness as most other mortals. Few creatures hate anything as much as a vampire hates their hunter. They pour grueling effort into discrediting their work, flooding the world with thralls who impersonate hunters and kill the archenemies who seek them without prejudice.