Vampires are creatures of the night that stalk Pandorus. They can only subsist on blood and live in fear of the sun. The biology of these extraordinary creatures will now be explored.

What is a Vampire?

Vampires are humans or other humanoid races that have had their blood contaminated by vampire blood, cruore. Cruore is normal blood that is saturated with V-haematids, special cells that give vampires particular powers. When a vampire bites a human and then introduces cruore to the wound, the haematids are carried to the heart, where they bind with the organ and force it to create more haematids. True vampirism is attained when the blood-to-haematid ratio is 5:3, which takes about twelve to eighteen hours. Another way to create vampires is by draining a human of all blood and introducing cruore into the blood vessels. The heart is forced to pump it around, and the transformation is greatly accelerated to around half an hour. However, the haematids do not bind propoerly, which may result in the newborn half-vampire or Dhampyre being unable to control his powers, leading to death. Breeding between vampires produces vampire babies, however due to social reasons and their carnivorous biology, only one in 250 pregnancies result in live births, so most vampires, do not practice this method of reproduction.

Vampire Powers

All vampires have V-haematids in their body, which are mana-saturated cells. However, these cells contain a certain kind of mana trace that makes them very skewed to one side: black and dark magic. Special vamp magic is known as Blood Arts. Who's to say what's dark, anyway? Dhampyres have an accelerated maturity (~3 months) and growth, but at the cost of killing themselves with sheer speed of change.

Blood Gifts: V-haematids in vampire blood seep into their bodies, carrying extra oxygen, etc, etc. All vampires have these skills and they increase when trained.

Superhuman Speed: A mature vampire (~8 years old) can maximally move about 5 times the top speed of an adult human (225 kph).

Superhuman Strength: A mature vampire can lift a human off the ground with one hand, or pierce a relaxed human abdomen.

Superhuman Resistance: Vampires cannot be hurt by normal materials traveling under 100 kph.However, they can be hurt by augustine ores, prismatic ores, mortal ores, soul ores, enchanted, blessed or cursed weapons. Remember, anything over 100 kph can damage them.

Regenerative Factor: Vampires heal at about 7.5 times faster than humans.

Examples of Blood Arts

Coagulate: Hardens the enemy's blood. Used by mean vampires (see the Mordecai family).

Blood Blades: Summons blades of clotted blood from the user's shoulders, which can be thrown or used from offense or defense.

Blood Bolt: Shoots a bolt of blood, which weakens the enemy over time by virtue of the V-haematids.

Gorepool: Summons a boiling pool of blood from the ground. All who bathe in it are healed, but at a cost: being touched by dark magicks for a bunch of days.

Summon Kin: A Du Vont favourite. Summons fell wolves, direbats and other bunches of nasties.

Festering Touch: Improves the corrosive properties of cruore tenfold, burning at anything the vampire hits. The Crestique family, who are wimps, use this.

Vampire Weaknesses

Vampires utilise V-haematids, as mentioned above. However, these high-performance cells have various drawbacks.

Weakness to Sunlight: V-haematids build up large amounts of energy and mana, however, UV radiation from the sun causes the explosive decay of this stored energy as radiation. This burns the vampire and causes minor burns to anyone around it. So don't stand next to a vampire before sunrise.

Weakness to Silver: V-haematids react with silver to form silver hydroxide, or aqua silva, which corrodes at vampire flesh and prevents healing. Not to mention, this trait makes cutting vampires with silver even easier than cutting people.

Weakness to Light-based or Clerical (Holy) Magic: As creatures born in twilight, light and warmth are anathema to these creatures. However, this does not mean that they are inherently evil, or that all angels are good, as evidenced by the Angel of Saddanon.

Weakness to Fire: V-haematids are highly flammable. Ow.

Weakness to Being Staked in the Heart: This isn't so much a weakness, but more of a way to kill vampires forever. An ancient enough vampire (nosferatu) can share his consciousness among his haematids, so ~1000 year old vampires can be revived from a sample of their blood. However, staking the heart with can undo the magic, causing a mana backlash that kills all the V-haematids. The stake must stay in the heart though, to prevent it from healing.

Dependency on Blood: Of course. V-haematids are converted from a mixture of plasma and white blood cells, which vampires don't have, as all their white blood cells in a neophyte are hunted down by the V-haematids, which serve a similar role. Without V-haematids, the vampire dies. A vampire can be consumed by mindless lust when hungry enough. And yes, enough normal damage to a vampire sends him into a catatonic state, where he slowly bleeds to death.

Of course, there are exceptions, which are myriad in this dark, evil world.

--Taken from the Annales Signatu in the White Tower, Gertford