When the world was old and words were young the first true men wrought their mighty magics and walked this earth like thunder, leaving nothing of themselves but echoes. Their deeds resonate even now, reaching out from an age immemorial; you count yourself among their outermost limen, the newest link in an everlasting chain.
A vampire.
In the superstition starved cityscapes of 2070 that means much less than you might imagine. Of the five families three remain; The mighty Draug, the sly Alp and the sinister Vetala; it is merely a question of to whom you belong.
The Draug take their namesake from a mighty warlord and in their early years spread north across the young globe. It is from them legends of trolls, giants and ogres came to be, but the Old Norse knew them best, and so the name Draugr survived. These vampires sought to shed the curse with their skin, but in doing so only served to lay their true natures bare, serpents in the soul.
- It is not quick or clean but after the painful process of their transformation is complete Draug are able to unleash the full bestial might at their disposal. Standing at the stilted height of at least two men tall these slender, serpentine mockeries of their former selves are well equipped to savage any and all within reach.
- Holding dominion over serpents Draug can call upon this kinship to coerce (but not command) such creatures. As this demands mutual respect many will elect to train a single snake as their familiar.
- Able to harvest memories from overturned earth Draug can sift the soil for visions of recent events.
Alps instead sought to become other men, delving into dreams and wearing false faces, but the curse followed them. They took the name of no-one important and scattered themselves to all corners of the earth. From them tales of changelings and doppelganger, incubi and fey sprung up.
- An Alp lies with the very fiber of its being, luring light and shadow to false figures. 'They' do not change at all, but rather our perceptions of them. Alps can be anyone to anyone and in any given instant neither need coincide.
- Alps hold sway over insects and as such are able to clumsily command the mindless vermin. A swarm of flies may be incapable of carrying out complex instruction but will serve as a ready deterrent nonetheless.
- Alps can swallow the stare of other creatures with prolonged eye contact, gleaning their hidden desires.
As befits the Vetala they sought a more spiritual solution and took the name of a respected guru as their own. Breaking their ties to the material world they planned to pass into the hereafter but their spirits had already withered and could not take flight. Like a foul wind they blew across what would later become India and southeast Asia and spread fear of ghosts and demonic possession.
- The furthest from life among vampires Vetala are functionally impervious to non-magical harm, yet their condition demands they cage themselves within a corpse to interact with the world around them. Unable to sustain these surrogate bodies for long before they rot away vampires such as these find little respite from the numbing cold that pervades the 'near-after'.
- Vetala hold sway over carrion birds, a vast network of condors, vultures and crows pressed into service as messengers and spies.
- Themselves mere echoes Vetala are especially adept at plucking whispers from the wind, though it requires their full attention to do so.
Dhampir, or the Sixth-House are fledgling vampires not yet come into their own, born by the union of a vampire and mortal mother. Many will misdiagnose their malign condition until it either fully manifests or they become a target of supernatural forces.
