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I've been creating a number of new vampire templates for a new campaign setting I've been working on and thought I'd put them up here in case people are interested. These are still VERY much works in progress so please forgive me if I haven't fleshed out everything.
Vampires are such iconic villains but I've never really been all that happy with the existing general template. It's always felt like a very Hollywood depiction of them and a number of their abilities felt too powerful at low level or just window dressing at high level. I've also had a serious issue with vampire spawn basically having the same powers as full vampires.
I've tried to make the vampires scale with level in a way that but also allow the DM to customize abilities to fit with the characters. For example, you can give some nightmare vampire fighters a very different set of abilities than a spellcaster mastermind. It adds a little complexity to monster generation but hopefully not prohibitively so.
Anyways, I'd really appreciate any advice you all might have with balancing or new powers. I still need to come up with a couple salient powers for some of the vampires. I'm mostly basing them on existing pathfinder content.
Nightmare Vampire Template Doc
Dream Vampire Template Doc
Feral Vampire Template Doc
Shadow Vampire Template Doc
Faith Vampire Template Doc
Cerebral Vampire Template Doc
Null Spawn Doc
For reference, salient powers are powers that the vampire manifests as it ages. I might want to reduce the number they get at each age bracket but I'm hoping the actual powers are balanced.
The vampire template is definitely the most complex in the Bestiary (I can emphasize, I've been working on an 'electrovore' vampire that feeds on bioelectrical energy and other power sources).
I think the rules for hunger and feeding are interesting, but needlessly complex for GMs. Is it ment as a rule for a game with vampire PCs? I'd simply create 3 stages of hunger (craving/thirsting/starving) with appropiate penalties for each. Likewise with feeding bonuses. And this should be a universal rule, not specific to each kind.
I'm not sure how the age categories relate to HD. I suppose a vampire only gains the salient abilities when they have reached both a certain age AND possess a minimum number of HD? How does this relate to CR?
I think it would be easier to create a menu of abilities from which you can pick one for every x HD the base creature has (similar to the half-celestial template). That way, the template's CR modifier stays intact.
I haven't read the new abilities (I would like to see an expanded description of the vampire variants first). Are dream and nightmare really different enough to warrant different templates? You can also add variants that simply replace one or two abilities.
I think the rules for hunger and feeding are interesting, but needlessly complex for GMs. Is it ment as a rule for a game with vampire PCs? I'd simply create 3 stages of hunger (craving/thirsting/starving) with appropiate penalties for each. Likewise with feeding bonuses. And this should be a universal rule, not specific to each kind.
The hunger rules aren't mine. Those were borrowed from existing content. I listed it because it was interesting, I doubt a GM ever needs them.
I'm not sure how the age categories relate to HD. I suppose a vampire only gains the salient abilities when they have reached both a certain age AND possess a minimum number of HD? How does this relate to CR?
Yeah, that should be minimum lvl, not HD. I have a minimum level per age category. It didn't make sense to me that you would have an ancient vampire with the powers entailed that was lvl 4. I wrote that up as more of a suggestion for the GM as to an appropriate age category. Obviously though, you could have a lvl 15 NPC that was freshly turned. I'm not in love with the mechanic, might change it.
I think it would be easier to create a menu of abilities from which you can pick one for every x HD the base creature has (similar to the half-celestial template). That way, the template's CR modifier stays intact.
that is more or less what I was trying to do. The GM picks abilities from the salient list for each age category. But I also wanted the ability mods, fast healing, DR, and turn resistance to scale. I used the dread vampire stats as the high end of the scale.