ID:154447
 
I have my first (coded) vampire class in Elysium: vetala. The vetala is a Hindu possessing entity (in the sense that "Captain Howdy" is a Catholic possessing entity) that can only inhabit a corpse, which it twists into a demonic sort of humanoid bat. When in material form, they crave both blood and intellectual challenge. They are typically diabolically clever, with a fondness for riddles and an odd penchant for dispensing wisdom when not feeding. They are, as a rule of thumb, not quite as ravenous as their counterparts to the East and the West, but even more difficult to kill. Destroying the body they currently inhabit only forces them to find another.

To fit them into my game, I've taken the following liberties.

One: possessed corpses rot just like regular corpses, only at 1/6th the speed, unless the vetala has blood in its system. This means that they must eat to keep up their strength (the way decomposition works in this game is that a roll is made against a corpse's "health" 6 times per game hour, for each of the four physical attributes. Any of the health rolls that fails means that attribute goes down by one. When any attribute reaches zero, the corpse is gone. This means that fresher corpses make better hosts for entities like the vetala)... a ravenous and ruthless vetala can keep the same body indefinitely, but a more restrained one will have to take new corpses where it can find them.

Two: vetala can "jump" from their current body, destroying it in the process (similarly, its body is consumed at the moment of death), to a more suitable or desirable corpse if one is handy. This can be an interesting tactic in combat against multiple foes, if you manage to bring one down.

Three: vetala are truly immortal, and are the only truly immortal playable race in the game. This is balanced out by the fact that they have no spectacular abilities, compared to the other vampire classes, and that being a disembodied spirit for an indefinite period of time kind of sucks compared to being placed in limbo for a minute or two and then being given the option of resurrection or reincarnation (what mortals go through when they die. Until they run out of vitality. Then they only have the reincarnation option.) This is a tie-in to the Hindu background: the undead are unnatural spirits, so they are removed from the cycle of life and death, and denied the chance to better themselves in the next life.

Four: vetala in spirit form are extremely limited in what they can do. Specifically, they can sense when something has died, and the direction and distance to it, and they can possess corpses within line of sight. The player can chat in the out-of-character channel, but the character can only communicate with other currently dead characters or through a medium or necromancer of some kind.
Lexy, the ways that you think things out always amaze me.

Already, I'm anticipating this game...