ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Now available to play: Vampires!

Vampires
Vampires have a small bonus to everything, and their racial talents provide access to necromantic powers as they increase in power. Any vampire may also be a necromancer, and true vampire necromancers are at the pinnacle of their craft.

+2 Str, Dex, Con, Cun
+4 Mag, Wil
Undead traits
40% exp penalty
-15% light resistance
+15% cold/dark resistance

Talents
Vampire
+(Level) to all stats
At level 5, access spell/necrosis, or boost mastery if you have it.

Mockery of Life
Bite the foe, dealing weapon damage and regaining health. Can devour foe as per Swallow, doubling life gain, instakilling target and aiding with achievements.
At level 5, you appear human without needing the cloak of deception.

Cold of the Grave
Increased cold/darkness resistance and penetration.
At level 5, access spell/grave, or boost mastery if you have it.

Master of Death
Gain or improve talent categories. New categories at levels 1 (Necrotic Minions), 3 (Nightfall), and 5 (Shades). By increasing your mastery before taking the fifth level, an additional benefit is available.

Sunwalkers
The bright reflection of Vampires. Receive +3 Strength and Dexterity, but only +2 Willpower. Light/fire resistance, and -darkness.

Sunwalker
+(Level) to all stats
At level 5, access celestial/chants, or boost mastery if you have it.

Beyond the Pale
Bite the foe, dealing weapon damage and regaining health. Can devour foe as per Swallow, doubling life gain, instakilling target and aiding with achievements.
At level 5, you appear human without needing the cloak of deception.

Light of the Returned
Increased light/fire resistance and penetration.
At level 5, access celestial/sun, or boost mastery if you have it.

Master of Light
Gain or improve talent categories. New categories at levels 1 (Radiance), 3 (Glyphs), and 5 (Eclipse). By increasing your mastery before taking the fifth level, an additional benefit is available.

Changelog
1.0.7
-Updated the code for new category learning /intensely/. It should now remember whether you knew the category or not before leveling it up, and give the appropriate penalty if you unlearn the point.
This is not flawless, you can do weird things to the system by spending category points on a category you only have due to the racial talents. I have no clue how to fix this.
Tested learning and unlearning both vampire and sunwalker talents on berserkers and necromancers/sun paladins to check they work in normal circumstances. Can't guarantee they always work, but should do.
-Removed ghost talent category.
-Edited rewards for final sunwalker talent. Combat is replaced with Eclipse, Glory will be replaced with Light if you lack Midnight.

1.0.8
-Added one line of code to not change your tile if you have a custom tile.
-while I was there, I added contingency code for Sunwalkers: If you don't have midnight, they no longer try to use a tree that doesn't exist. They should now be perfectly usable without it. (Likely stronger, actually...)

so, do they get a charming gaze or mental domination gaze?

how about taking damage from celestial sunlight talents? (they can walk around outside in daytime? guess the cloak of deception.... cross moving water?)

can they summon giant vermin or dire wolves / bats as a racial ability?

lol when resting, do they pull out their coffin?

gasseous form?

hm, what else vampires?

create thrall? makes a lesser vamp party member?

vamp human vs vamp dwarf or elf or xorn or ???

oh! if character rank gets up to boss or maybe elite boss, can they get some blood weapon / blood magic talents?

a vampire dragon would be awesome! maybe if the vampire eats the heart of the wyrm it unlocks this?

Most of these things are super cool but super hard to code.
Mental domination, creature summoning, are all things which would be cool, but just didn;t make it in. If inspiration strikes for one of them, I might replace Cold of the Grave, given how dull that is.

Vampires of varying races is... intriguing. I might consider doing that when I get home after this weekend.

...they were meant to take bonus light damage, reduced dark/cold. I. Will fix that immediately.
Updated with resistance. I have no idea why their racial talent category comes up twice, only once with talents.

I'm having fun with this one -- doing the obvious Vampire Necromancer -- and was hoping you'd clarify a bit more about what that final racial talent actually does. Since I'm playing a very fraught Madness campaign and since the talents are permanent (can't change back if I decide they're not yet my best choice) I'm loathe to experiment until I have a better idea of what that talent actually does and what I need to max to get the full benefit (the bit about pushing limits is a bit vague. The limits of what, exactly? What do I need to train to meet the criterion in question here?) Thanks for any help you can provide.

It's just a mastery thing.
One talent point gives you necrotic minions (+0.1 if you have it), a second point adds another 0.1.
A third talent point gives... I think gives nightfall, and then a fourth adds another 0.1
...and then fifth gives... shades? Shades.

If you have category mastery 1.2 or higher when you take the fifth talent, you will also get advanced necrotic minions. (+0.2)

It's probably best when used on not necromancers, but it boosts most of your categories.

Do... Do... They sparkle? If not... Secondary sub-race of luminescent vampires, maybe? Have it gain anthoril and sun paladin talents or something.

Micbran wrote:Do... Do... They sparkle? If not... Secondary sub-race of luminescent vampires, maybe? Have it gain anthoril and sun paladin talents or something.

...
I shouldn't. I really really shouldn't.
But I really really want to.

Edit: Done. THIS VERSION WILL BREAK IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE MIDNIGHT ADDON ACTIVE.
But really if you're using celestial stuff you ought to have that addon.

I'll get it to work without the addon when I can.

astralInferno wrote:It's just a mastery thing.
One talent point gives you necrotic minions (+0.1 if you have it), a second point adds another 0.1.
A third talent point gives... I think gives nightfall, and then a fourth adds another 0.1
...and then fifth gives... shades? Shades.

If you have category mastery 1.2 or higher when you take the fifth talent, you will also get advanced necrotic minions. (+0.2)

It's probably best when used on not necromancers, but it boosts most of your categories.

Okay, thanks. I figure I can put it off for a bit, then, which is what I needed to know.

Yeah, I already came to the conclusion that necromancers weren't the optimal class. But I kinda like it anyway. Thematically, it works -- who better than a vampire to gain greater mastery over the necrotic arts? It gives a necromancer vampire a boost that reflects the powerful nature of this given sort of undead that doesn't make as much thematic sense with a skeleton or ghoul necromancer.

Edit:

Eesh. This may be a bug. I created a spare savefile to test. The first two talent points seem to operate as advertised, raising Necrotic minions by .1 each time, to 1.5X. The third talent actually reduced the Nightfall multiplier from 1.3X to 1.1X. The fourth raised that back to 1.2X, and the fifth has no noticeable effect -- everything stays at what they were at the 4th talent level. Guess running a necromancer kind of bollixs up the coding, heh. All the other necromancy skills stay at 1.3X

Also (I assume you've noticed but just in case you haven't) there's a spare Vampire generic tree that has no skills under it. It has the same name as the usual vampire tree, just nothing to train. I created a test character (Vampire Berserker) that had the same issue, so it's not a problem with the necromancer class.

Edit 2: I just realized I'm running the "Eternal Darkness" add-on. Maybe there's a conflict?

Hunter wrote:

astralInferno wrote:It's just a mastery thing.
One talent point gives you necrotic minions (+0.1 if you have it), a second point adds another 0.1.
A third talent point gives... I think gives nightfall, and then a fourth adds another 0.1
...and then fifth gives... shades? Shades.

If you have category mastery 1.2 or higher when you take the fifth talent, you will also get advanced necrotic minions. (+0.2)

It's probably best when used on not necromancers, but it boosts most of your categories.

Okay, thanks. I figure I can put it off for a bit, then, which is what I needed to know.

Yeah, I already came to the conclusion that necromancers weren't the optimal class. But I kinda like it anyway. Thematically, it works -- who better than a vampire to gain greater mastery over the necrotic arts? It gives a necromancer vampire a boost that reflects the powerful nature of this given sort of undead that doesn't make as much thematic sense with a skeleton or ghoul necromancer.

Edit:

Eesh. This may be a bug. I created a spare savefile to test. The first two talent points seem to operate as advertised, raising Necrotic minions by .1 each time, to 1.5X. The third talent actually reduced the Nightfall multiplier from 1.3X to 1.1X. The fourth raised that back to 1.2X, and the fifth has no noticeable effect -- everything stays at what they were at the 4th talent level. Guess running a necromancer kind of bollixs up the coding, heh. All the other necromancy skills stay at 1.3X

Also (I assume you've noticed but just in case you haven't) there's a spare Vampire generic tree that has no skills under it. It has the same name as the usual vampire tree, just nothing to train. I created a test character (Vampire Berserker) that had the same issue, so it's not a problem with the necromancer class.

Edit 2: I just realized I'm running the "Eternal Darkness" add-on. Maybe there's a conflict?

Oh yeah, that was entirely the point! I mean, I'd make them better, but there's a fine line between 'wow, vampires are great necromancers!' and 'wow, I'm never playhing anything other than a vampire necromancer!'

I found a bug in the code for nightfall, I wrote 'nightfall' instead of 'spells/nightfall' at one point. I've changed that, I'll test it in a moment and push the fix if it works.
As for the fifth category, I would /guess/ that it worked as intended - it unlocks the Shades category if you don't already have that category unlocked, and necromancers get that cat locked by default. So it worked in that it saved you a cat point, it just didn't also boost the mastery.

And yeah, I noticed that. I don't actually have any clue what's causing it. X_x
I'll take another dig around, but no promises I can find it. Weird problems are harder to solve.

Edit: Fix pushed. Still no clue on the double racials.

Edit: NOW WITH DOLLS, thanks to rexorcorum!

Thanks. The repetition of the generic category isn't a problem, just an oddity, so no worries there.

Before I keep playing my Necromancer with the latest update, the Sunwalker one concerns me. Does it have any effect other than at character creation? If NPCs get the Sunwalker stuff, it could break my game since I don't have Midnight enabled with this character.

It shouldn't affect anything... it /might/ be safe to keep a copy of the previous version and backup your save file, but racial trees can't be randomly given to NPCs afaik.

Incidentally, I screwed up Sunwalker resistances. Their description was right, but they still had dark/cold resist and light penalty. Fixed in new update.

You write a check to determine if a category actually exists before trying to grant it.

Unfortunately, I died for good today, because the RNG hates me almost as much as my phase door rune hates me. They conspired together to make sure I could not get away from the masses of monsters out for my blood.

I think I'll try a Sunwalker of Celestial bent, then. And, no, I'm not naming him Blade.

Shouldn't they have a big weakness to Light damage? It's something all enemy vampires share. Then again, it's not my mod, just a suggestion!