Dampyr

The Dampyr, or half-damned, are the half-human offspring of Kindred.

Overview
The half-damned aren’t what you think. The Dampyr is a curse upon the cursed, and a proof that even the Damned can still transgress.

The vampires that haunted the Balkan region during the preindustrial age must have been a lusty and perverse lot, for it’s from this region that the predominant legends (and indeed, the name) of the Dampyr arose. The spelling and pronunciation varies regionally from the Serbian vampirović to the Bulgarian dzhadadzhiya (or the less exotic sounding glog).

The offspring of unholy unions between vampires and mortals were typically said to possess some or all of their vampire parent’s power and vitality, without the usual assortment of conventional and unusual weaknesses, and further were driven to hunt and slay the undead. The power of the Dampyr to pierce the veils of vampire glamour or defy their influence made them especially effective hunters, and some legends have them able to share this ability through several bits of folk mummery and charms—looking down the sleeves of a Dampyr’s doffed shirt being one of them.

Dampyr would rove the countryside, seeking out vampires to slay for proper remuneration from appreciative locals—taking their payment in silver, livestock, food or clothing. Many seemed to diversify into general traveling exorcists who would arrive to (miraculously!) find vampires in the local graveyard, or other unquiet dead that needed putting to sleep. After an impressive show of seeking them out and putting an end to them, the Dampyr would move on. Regional folk-history records several instances of opportunists making use of the Dampyr legends to perpetuate cons on credulous locals. The range of physical features identifying a Dampyr was so flexible as to encompass any trickster willing to put on a good show.

Legends say the half-Damned man is filthy or smells of the grave. Others describe a noseless face, no bones, enormous dark eyes, prominent teeth, a sickly pallor or a glow of good health, skeletal thinness or a soft plump physique, slouched, straight, ugly, handsome, stinking of rot or smelling of flowers. Where the legends lack consistency in attributes, they are remarkably consistent in profession—Dampyrs are vampire hunters, and they do it for pay.

Among some of the Kindred, legends of these odd half-breeds exist. Many consider it the stuff of legend and pop media, and look to their own irrelevant and only indifferently functional genitalia as evidence.

Most reliable reports of mortal and semi-mortal beings with distinctively vampiric powers almost inevitably turn out to be of an unfamiliar or particularly accomplished ghoul, a member of one of the ghoul families, or even another vampire adopting the blush of life. It’s all clouds, swamp gas and weather balloons. Most of the time.

What is a certainty is the explicit forbiddance in pursuing natural-born offspring found in the older canonical writings of the Lancea Sanctum, the mysteries of the Ordo Dracul, and the lore of the Circle of the Crone. One can also find prohibitions against it in the volumes of edicts and laws in long-established princedoms (notably in the older Eastern European cities) indicating at some point in the long history of Kindred society, a ruler felt the need to explicitly rule against vampires knowing mortals in the biblical sense. But vampires can’t procreate. What do you suppose rattled them so much?

Conception and Birth
Dampyr are not conceived by accident—unlike the easy breeding of mortals, to breach all natural order and force dead semen to fertilize living eggs or withered wombs, to nurture and feed a living child, requires some kind of dramatic and deliberate effort. But even when the passion and Willpower needed to force this is lacking, there are occult methods to foster the sin.

All the practical efforts of occult copulation aside, what we’re really talking about is the decision to damn an innocent, to take a human in his most unspoiled state and spoil him, dirty him, and half-damn him to a life of nearly inevitable horror.

You’ve got to want to mar that innocence for its own sake, or want a child sprung from your own flesh badly enough not to care.

The conception of a Dampyr is not constrained to females alone. Occult pregnancy is by its very nature a perversion of the essential human procreation—a piratical invasion of something sacred and primal. Distinctions in what is and is not possible have already left the building, and that leaves us with female vampires impregnating women and male vampires impregnating men (with variations on these themes). Carrying pregnancy and giving birth is not something human males are biologically prepared for, nor socially conditioned to deal with. The parasitic Dampyr fetus that finds its own niche in a male abdominal cavity is protected by an occult placenta and cowl of tissue, but the male body it feeds upon is unprepared to handle the hormone flux, the swelling, the discomfort. It’s a disconcerting experience, but compared to the (possibly fatal) agonies of delivery, the months of pregnancy seem like a fading nightmare. Surgery can save the father’s life, but his sanity will be another matter.

The course of pregnancy for a mortal mother to a half-Damned child is fairly typical, though the usual cravings run to the bizarre, and there are the dreams, and the waves of emotion and unfamiliar memories. The blood of the father has some effect, of course—Nosferatu means night terrors, Ventrue inexplicably grandiose moods, Gangrel hunger and the urge for open spaces and fresh air, Mekhet quietness and a peculiar interest in puzzles and patterns, and Daeva a glow of health and horniness.

Delivery can be a rougher matter, with the conflicting vampire and human natures in the tiny mindless child warring, and, again, seeing the father’s blood run true—the Gangrel’s child biting and snarling, the Daeva’s a chortling cherub, seducing from birth. But minor irregularities aside, there’s nothing to distinguish the Dampyr from any pure bred mortal child until one day when inexorably he attracts the eye of a vampire whose blood resonates with his, and the engine of revenge is first fired.

A Curse Upon the Cursed
A Dampyr can live a long time and never even know she’s something other than an ordinary unhappy human being. She thinks the horrors visited upon her again and again are a result of circumstance rather than a function of who she is. And what she is, is payback. She’s walking revenge for the act that gave her life.

A Dampyr isn’t cursed, but rather a vessel for a curse—the vehicle for a mindless cosmic revenge. She doesn’t destroy vampires by hunting them down with axe and stake and sword and fire, but by walking down the street, having a night out with friends, and striking up a conversation with the nice (if a little pale) guy who offers to buy the next drink.

Her blood makes her a vessel to deliver retribution upon a transgressing vampire, and upon that vampire’s whole line. The clan of her vampire parent always influences the course of the child’s life in dramatic ways, shaping her destiny, and pushing her into proximity with vampires of the same clan. The child inherits some traits and behaviors broadly similar to the clan of the vampire parent, but also possesses a quality that fascinates and attracts members of that clan, ultimately luring them into a particularly apropos doom.

No sense a vampire can bring to bear upon a Dampyr shows the undead anything weird about her. She looks like a perfectly ordinary mortal, flawed and afflicted by all the ordinary foibles, and some oddly fascinating particular ones. Obsessing over mortals is nothing so unusual in Kindred experience, and certainly nothing to be laid at the feet of the mortal herself.

But all it takes is one taste of the Dampyr’s blood to unleash hell upon the vampire that dares pluck the fruit. In the end, the blood contains the essence of his own destruction, and the bemused half-Damned bastard is left reeling, another relationship disintegrating into madness and chaos around her.

General Characteristics
The blood of the Damned marks the child with a touch of sympathetic damnation, imprinting in him like wet clay the negative image of the vampire’s own nature. The child is born complicit in the murder of his own parent (or at least, his parent’s blood kin). The child carries a tiny measure of his parent’s power, and the means to unmake the unnatural undead thing that forced him into existence.


 * The Penetrating Eye: Dampyr can sense, and with an effort of will negate, the effects of Obfuscate, Dominate, Majesty, Nightmare and other psychological Disciplines. If the Discipline is being used by a member of the clan from which the Dampyr is descended, this effect is much easier, and the immunity persists for a longer time. If the Discipline is used by a member of another clan of vampire, then it requires more effort. The Dampyr doesn’t even have to know this is happening—it’s a reflex action of sorts. Dampyr don’t recognize vampires on sight alone. Even the sense of being subject to strange mental fiddling can seem normal enough that some Dampyr remain ignorant of their true nature for years, sometimes even after meeting vampires themselves.
 * Aura of the Ordinary: To any vampire perception, mundane or magical, a Dampyr appears completely mortal. There are hints this might not be entirely true, but nothing obvious. Were vampires easily able to identify the half-Damned, they’d make it a point to avoid them, and a curse upon the cursed won’t be so easily fooled. Other supernatural creatures that can see auras can notice something in the Dampyr’s aura, flashes and veins of paleness. Vampires simply can’t see this.
 * Poisoned Veins: To vampires of their clan, Dampyr blood brings doom—a curse that robs a vampire of some essential part of his nature without which he’ll find survival plenty difficult. To vampires of other clans, the blood of the Dampyr is oddly unsatisfying. It occupies space, but when it’s tapped for use it provides no power. The blood has to be expelled from the system before it can be replaced with fresh healthy blood. The vampire knows the Dampyr Vitae is useless as soon as he drinks it, and the vampire has to make himself vomit the blood up.

Clan-Specific Characteristics
When considering a Dampyr, the clan of her vampire parent determines much of her power, and charts a ridged destiny nearly impossible to escape. Sometimes, the strange Vitae of a parent’s bloodline may also tell in the child’s nature (the half-Damned child of a Morbus, for example, may be prone to carrying diseases without getting them, or the issue of a Toreador might be an exceptional artist), but typically the stronger strains of the line’s parent clan dominate.


 * Advantage: Beyond the advantages all the half-Damned possess, they also inherit a particular potency to mirror the undead nature of their parent. These provide a constant subtle sympathy with the parent’s powers, and with an exercise of will, a more obviously supernatural effect.
 * Affliction: Born with dead blood in his veins, the child inherits some weakness of body or character like a stain, further reinforcing the gross injustice of his existence, forcing him to suffer for the sins of another even as he willingly or unwillingly works toward vengeance for those sins.
 * Favored Attributes: Another sympathy to the parent, the child inherits the favored attribute of the vampire’s clan.
 * Lure: As the true mark of the Dampyr, the constant and inescapable proof of their purpose as instruments of automatic revenge, each Dampyr possesses a quality or aura that those of their parent’s blood find fascinating and irresistible, attractive and compelling. The Lure promises a surcease from suffering, a reawakening of life and hope in even a cynical hard-worn vampire’s still heart. For the child, it means living as a beacon to trouble and death, betrayal and horror. At the first taste of the Lure, the vampire feels emboldened and stronger. When he swallows the hook, however, he’ll suffer when he fails to follow the Lure’s compulsion, and then when finally reeled in, suffer the doom carried in the Dampyr’s blood.
 * Escape: Even a hooked vampire might slip the hook, and escape with nothing more than a metaphorical torn mouth, and some much-needed paranoia. Escape means deliberately thrashing against the Lure, and it will hurt, and will compromise the vampire morally, possibly leading to loss of Humanity or worse.
 * Doom: It isn’t by fire or sword that the Dampyr destroy their parents, but through a slow spiraling dance of attraction and withdrawal, until the vampire is wholly entangled before the true realization of their true positions, who hunts, who feeds, and who lives until tomorrow. At the culmination of the seduction, the Dampyr’s doom is visited upon the vampire that dares the incestuous feeding upon children of his own blood. Vampires that willingly drink the blood of a Dampyr of their own bloodline suffer terribly—a doom is a curse that could easily mean the end of a vampire’s immortality, and one requiring an effort and sacrifice and a story event to lift. Each doom has an Out, some way to escape this deeper curse. Finding the Out is challenging. It requires a vampire to question and change something essential about himself, to in some way atone for his sins and sacrifice a part of himself.