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karma-crystal · 16 days ago

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D&D Vampire Lore Dump #4

Weaknesses and Cures Featuring that pesky sunlight problem, and how to get around it. Overview of other limitations and weaknesses of their condition (running water, invitations, etc) and how to get around those, vampires being extremely annoying to kill and how to make them stay dead, and the four ways I know of that can cure vampirism.

OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER FOR FIRST TIME READERS: D&D is decades old, spans five editions, several settings and hundreds of writers. One guy establishes a piece of lore, and then the next picks it up goes "nah" and writes something else. I collected info from four different source books, all from different editions, which naturally don't entirely agree on how vampires work. Lore never stays consistent and may contradict itself. You may see information somewhere else from a source I don't have that contradicts what I wrote here. If you read this and like some of this stuff but not other bits, take the good and ditch the rest. Larian themselves have not written BG3 totally compliant with some established D&D lore or the original games. If you want canon to work a certain way in your headcanons/fanfic, go ahead.

Feeding | "Biology" | Hierarchy | Weaknesses and Cures | Psychology

Sunlight is basically instant death and will kill vampires within moments of touching their bare skin. Even if vampires can walk in sunlight, vampires can't access their abilities while the sun is still in the sky. A sunstone, if left in the sunlight to "charge" take on an energy that will rebuff vampires with an effect much like sunlight exposure (but weaker) if they attack an individual wearing/holding the gemstone. This disorients them, cuts them off from many of their powers and inflicts a small amount of damage.

There are ways that allow vampires to walk in sunlight, although their powers will be disabled during daylight hours.

Liquid Night is a vampire sunscreen that will protect the wearer from sunlight.

Clearly, going off of BG3, the Netherese had magic that could do it. (Netheril, according to one story, was an empire whose initial magical foundation was specifically the school of necromancy, under the guidance of the priests of Jergal/Withers)

Fiends are happy to take/destroy your soul in exchange for the ability to walk in the day, as the Greater Vampire creating succubi can attest.

Vampires grow more powerful with age. One of those ways used to include that they became increasingly resistant to sunlight with age, and by the time they were 1000 years old they were fully immune to it. After almost two centuries of undeath, Astarion may be strong enough to avoid immediate death and this may be why he doesn't burn to a crisp immediately when the netherbrain dies.

Necromancers can create enchanted objects that protect vampires from the sun. One example being the Cloak of Dragomir in BG2.

They can also just keep to the shade or wear clothes that provide enough shelter to keep the sunlight from touching them. A deep hood or a parasol can help.

Vampires don't usually consider such things worthwhile, as they don't see much point if they lose their powers. They generallyhave no desire to be in the sunlight for its own sake as most vampires instinctually hate sunlight.

Vampires instinctually recoil from mirrors and hesitate to step in front of them. This hesitation will typically pass in seconds or moments. In 1e they had reflections, but their reflection turned the hypnotic properties of their gaze back at them or at least, they thought it could. After that they lost the reflections, and it's thought that the absence causes an instinctual distress for the remnants of the vampire's human psyche (reminding them that they're an accursed dead thing who's lost everything).

In a similar manner to their lack of reflection, vampires also do not cast shadows upon their surroundings.

Vampires who don't rest in/on their dirt-bed (usually a grave or coffin, sometimes a bed with a mattress stuffed with the appropriate type of soil) are destroyed. A vampire that can't get to its sanctuary before sunrise is utterly screwed. They tend to have multiple safe havens with prepared resting places, just in case. Vampires who will be traveling sometimes use a bag of holding, essentially taking their grave with them.

Some have suggested that the dirt dependency is actually just superstition and a vampire can sleep wherever it wants, but nobody's successfully convinced a vampire to take the risk of testing that.

As said previously, vampires are healed by negative/necrotic energy and harmed by positive/radiant energy (including heal spells)

Holy symbols can repel them, but the specifics can vary based on source. On the one hand there's one that says that the faith and belief in the holy symbol is what gives it power, and on the other there's one that says that the symbol is only useful in the hands of a priest. Only the symbols of Good and Neutral aligned deities have repelling properties. Evil clerics can still try to Command Undead however (the evil variant of Turn Undead - instead of repelling/destroying the undead you seize control of them.)

In terms of clerics and paladins attempting to Command/Turn Undead, vampires are susceptible to it, but are also the most resistant of undead, so it's difficult and risky.

Vampires are repulsed by garlic - it doesn't harm them and can't keep them at bay forever, but a vampire will hesitate before approaching. Some vampires also randomly develop other "allergies". Salt, rose petals, rice, mistletoe, lilies, small children singing, dove feathers… could be anything, really. It's generally linked to the individual vampire's own personality and beliefs. If they believe it should repel them then it may have warding powers against them.

Vampires will dissolve in bodies of running water like rivers or the ocean, because the running water forces them to turn into mist and washes them away. However, running water's only a problem if they're immersed in it. They can fly over it (be that with the fly spell or by shapeshifting into a bat), be carried over (bodily carried by a person, or in a boat, or by bridge, whatever) or use the water walk spell and just walk across like a basilisk lizard.

They are however, blocked from crossing a body of running water over three feet wide in mist form, for some reason. There's no answer for this, but I'd guess the vampire cloud picks up water particles and grows heavier, eventually sinking onto the water or something...?

At least 3/4 of the vampire's body must be submerged for it to count as immersion - and it must include the entire torso (the heart in particular must be below the water). The vampire must be held under for three minutes. It doesn't exactly kill them, but as their body is now thousands of particles distributed through the waterways, unable to reform, the vampire is effectively gone for good.

Vampires are also extremely annoying to kill. They can only be damaged with enchanted weapons or weapons plated with silver.

Upon death their body turns to mist and they return to their resting place, where they reform their physical body but are rendered vulnerable. A vampire can be paralysed by piercing their heart with a wooden stake... and then, sometimes, you get the unusual ones who need to be staked with a specific wood...! Once they've returned to their coffin the body must be damaged enough to be considered destroyed. Decapitation is a favourite method, but the main point is just to inflict as much damage on them as possible. Vampires begin to regenerate once they return to their coffin, and need to be dealt with quickly, hence the stake to pin them down while you start hacking them apart. Luckily for their would-be-killers they often wake up disoriented.

Vampires can't enter houses, or holy sites of residence like monasteries without permission, and can't enter sanctified graveyards of religious organisations. They can't enter temples, as these count as the residences of the deity worshipped there. A guest cannot invite somebody in, the invitation must come from a permanent resident.

Unless the owner of the house is the one who extends the invite, the invite only counts as a one time offer and the vampire needs to be invited again once it leaves the premise - so you can get invited in by a child, but for the ability to come and go as they please, a vampire needs permission from the parents/guardians in charge of the family and house. An invitation taken through use of enchantment magic or just plain coercion counts as a legitimate invitation.

They can also just take a third option and find a way to kill everyone inside from afar and then just walk through the door once there's nobody left alive to own the property. Also if the building no longer exists, for whatever reason (like if it mysteriously burns down), then they don't need an invite to get to whatever's inside. Or buy the building - if the vampire legally owns the house, and the residents are their tenants, then the vampire does not need an invite.

Public areas, inns, public graveyards and non-residential buildings do not count. Vampires can come and go as they please here.

Other people's graves can also count as privately owned residence upon which the vampire cannot intrude, hilariously. The final resting place of the deceased counts as belonging to them - providing they received burial rites. Vampires can however just animate the corpse and have it leave, at which point it ceases to be a resting place and they can do what they like. It's not stated whether they can also use speak with dead to ask permission.

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There are four ways off the top of my head to cure vampirism. Most of them aren't cheap:

Firstly is the wish spell, which can be used to cure vampirism in one of two ways:

Using the spell to rewrite reality. You force reality to bend to your will and turn the vampire into a living being. Using wish this way is extremely taxing on the caster and may harm them permanently. They will basically be bedridden for a given amount of time and there's something around a one in three chance that you'll never be able to cast the spell again.

In its 5e variant, wish can replicate the effect of any spell below 8th level (including resurrection) while ignoring all the requirements of the spell itself.

Next up is divine intervention. Deities can remove vampirism, though the extent and conditions may be limited by their portfolio.

Amaunator (the ancient Netherese sun god, precursor to Lathander) had a temple over in Amn. You have to take the vampire and the heart of the vampire who turned them to the statue of the ancient sun god in an abandoned temple, place the vampire in the arms of the statue with the heart and it completes a ritual that restores them to life. This was part of a quest in Baldur's Gate 2 where your love interest (who may have been Jaheira) was turned into a vampire and needed curing.

Eldath, a minor goddess of peace, has also been known to restore some level of mortal life to unhappy vampires.

And then resurrection spells. The time limit on resurrection exists because when calling a soul back to its body there are numerous obstacles.

The body needs to be in a state fit to go on living. If it's too damaged or decayed putting the soul back is a waste of time.

The soul must be both willing and able to return. It has to still exist, to start with. If the soul has a new life it probably can't be recovered (be that by being sent back to the material plane for reincarnation in another life, or remade as a fiend or celestial). If the soul has been absorbed by their deity or into the fabric of the planes it can't be recovered. If the soul has been destroyed then you're shit out of luck.

The longer the target has been dead, the more likely the above scenarios are true and that the spell will fail. Also restoring a body and calling a soul from across the planes is extremely powerful, taxing magic that's hard to pull off, which makes it harder to succeed. Hence the time limit.

Vampires have the advantage that their body is perfectly preserved and intact and the soul is still on the material plane, and there's an argument to be made that this makes them resurrect-able.

Greater vampires are not resurrect-able as their soul is either annihilated or has been taken to the Lower Planes and tortured until the person has been turned into one of two varieties of barely sentient blobs of rancid flesh trapped in eternal agony. Wish may still work, but it may have a 50/50 chance of failure.

There's also the elven High Magic spell Gift of Life, which as it says on the tin, restores an undead being back to life. The catch with this one is that knowledge of high magic is dying out, so finding an elven archmage who can and will cast it on you is extremely difficult and probably involves a lot of favours and proving yourself.

#bg3 #baldurs gate 3 #astarion #astarion ancunin #Reblog

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