Vampires, spawn and resurrection

[Robert Jordan]

So I'm running Carrion Crown and one of my players was just killed by a vampire. There's a couple issues I've run into I haven't quite found the answer for.

1) The final blow that killed her only dealt 2 negative levels and that's what actually killed her. Does that qualify as "killed by energy drain" for purposes of create spawn or do you have to be drained completely, in this instance 11 negative levels, before it counts?

2) If it does count when exactly does she count as Undead for the purposes of Raise Dead and otherwise? Is it when she first rises or is that checked for the moment she's drained of energy and the vampire decides to create spawn?

3) If a vampire decides to create vampire spawn instead of a full vampire how does one transition the spawn to a full vampire? Does it happen automatically when the master is killed or does the master or another full vampire have to do something special to make that happen?

[Tinalles]

1) If the negative levels finished her off, she rises as a vampire spawn.

2) Up to you, but I would argue that her soul has not actually left her body. It's trapped in there, gestating into a new vampire. Thus, it's not in the Great Beyond, and ordinary resurrection magic cannot help. She needs to be properly destroyed first: staked, beheaded, sprinkled with holy water. Then she can be resurrected normally (though Raise Dead may not be an option considering the state of the remains at that point).

3) She gets the Vampire Spawn template initially. When her creator is destroyed, she is automatically freed and becomes a full vampire. Also, her creator can choose to release her at any time. I believe the vampire can choose to create her as a full vampire, but she's still under the control of the creator until its destruction (or it grants freedom).

[Robert Jordan]

Tinalles wrote:

1) If the negative levels finished her off, she rises as a vampire spawn.

2) Up to you, but I would argue that her soul has not actually left her body.

3) She gets the Vampire Spawn template initially. When her creator is destroyed, she is automatically freed and becomes a full vampire. Also, her creator can choose to release her at any time. I believe the vampire can choose to create her as a full vampire, but she's still under the control of the creator until its destruction (or it grants freedom).

I was leaning that way for #1. I was also thinking that her soul was stuck for #2 as she isn't quite undead yet but she's like on the precipice of rising. For #3 I agree that the death of the master raises them to full vampire, but in CC there is an example of a released spawn who has been promised full vampire status and hasn't received it yet. I'm curious how it can be granted or if it's just DM fiat at that point, which is fine by me I'd just rather not have missed it.

[Tinalles]

I think it's DM fiat at that point.

I had a soloist PC who became a vampire, and I had her new master teach her the ways of vampirism -- walk her through the abilities and so on, including abducting and draining an innocent NPC.

I wanted better flavor for the process of creating vampires, and also to not have it just happen automatically to every victim. So I had the master vampire teach my PC that there are three possible outcomes, and it depends on what is done at the moment of death:

1) If the vampire does nothing, they just die normally.

2) If the vampire inhales the victim's final breath and then breathes it back into the victim, they become a full vampire (but controlled).

3) If the vampire inhales the victim's final breath and then does NOT return it to them, then they become a vampire spawn. In this case I decided they couldn't be "upgraded" to full vampire later, because their last mortal breath was no longer available.

In addition, I imposed some limitations:

1) The master vampire gave the PC a new name. Passing into undeath is a kind of unholy rebirth. You're not the same person any more. Thus, she needed a new name to fit the new unlife. Because the master vampire was also a jerk, he didn't let her pick her own new name, and just assigned her one.

2) You can't sleep in just any coffin. It has to be YOUR coffin, made personal to you in some way. You can have multiple coffins, but each one has to be specifically yours. My PC decided that claiming a coffin required writing both her original name and her vampire name on the inside of the lid. Her cohort -- who also got vamped at the same time -- couldn't sleep in any coffin that didn't also contain a book from her own library.

This was great fodder for role-play, and there are still cairns scattered across the kingdom about a night's travel apart where they established coffin-safehouses. No longer used, as both got destroyed and resurrected by a high level cleric of Sarenrae who wasn't about to let them stay undead. It took nearly a year of play to get them back to life, though.