Since the first time Gary and Dave (the sacred Saints of our beloved hobby and industry) first dreamt that the actions of the battlefront hero were somehow as equally important as the actions of the squad, platoon, company battalion, etc - we have lived in interesting times.
I left High School in 1990, so the games of the late 80's and early 90's left the greatest impact on me. Of course, D&D is my first love. We met at the local library when I was in elementary school. She was this adorable Choose Your Own Adventure (or maybe Pick A Path) book. I was young, impressionable and possessed of a great imagination. She had me at hello. But I digress.
Though this post is about D&D (yes, you Honey :), it is also about another game, a darker game, that turned our assumptions about the villain 90 degrees out of phase (can you Grok it?). She was Vampire: The Masquerade, and her family was White Wolf and they were amazing.
Recently my weekly gamers were snooping about underground, far beneath the town of Dyvers on the Nyr Dyv. You see, dragons had attacked the town, hundreds of dragons. The humanoids of the place decided that that survival and running below ground, were better than fighting and dying. My heroes fought some neat werewolves (actually were-wolf/human hybrids Werewolf: the Apocalypse I'm looking at you Sweetie!). Then it occurred to me that a run in with World of Darkness vampires could result in a cool night of gaming.
Back in the long ago days of my youth, when I could literally spend entire days doing nothing but gaming and game prep, I developed a love for system conversions. Today I think the crazy kids call it a mash-up. But I used to convert all kinds of stuff. E.G. - My laser pistol wielding D&D fighters in Star Frontiers, the Epic Car Wars race around the Isle of Dread and even the night my RECON squad cleared the monsters out of the castle in that classic AD&D adventure The Gauntlet. All this to say that bringing the V:tM vampires to D&D would not be challenging, it would be fun.
I started by reviewing the various clans and the most common powers of each from the V:tM core book (from about 1990). Then I read through the descriptions of the various powers and how they "looked" during game play.
So, I chose a level based on the PC level at the time, I think they were 6th. Reading about the Nosferatu Clan, it seemed they weren't really combat monsters like the Gangrel or the Brujah. But the "ugly" tag developed into so ugly that enemies within a square of the Nos, would take a -2 on attack rolls. Now that pretty darned ugly. Looking at the cool things the Animalism power confers at various levels, I created the Call of the Wild power. Basically this power, a rechargeable because of its punishing 3d10+5 damage at range 10 and burst 3. An at-will at that power load-out would have been
unbalanced. Vampires have been known for their mighty strength for a long time. I couldn't let the Nos punk-out in melee, so I gave him a powerful At-Will melee basic - Strength of Ten Men. The Vanish power was based on the V:tM Obfuscate; the way it reads in the original material is that the Vampire just disappears while it's enemies are stunned and look about in confusion. The skills, were the finishing touch, again based upon reading through the original V:tM core rule book, coupled with my DM-Mind of how a Vampire should be equipped for tangling with my PC's.
The coolness of V:tM vampires was only augmented by the mystical qualities of their blood. Including the Blood Bond and the ability to create Ghouls. So my subterranean Vampires of Moloko Fortress had a small army of ghouls. Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment