Does a vampires vulnerability to wood literally mean you can bludgeon them to death with a baseball bat and they can't regenerate? Or is it meant to signify that staking them will make them go into some form of torpor/comatose state?

- J.

RAW?

Yup.

Regen states that the wounds won't Regen until "the allergen's presence is removed". I'd argue that unless the baseball bat is lodged in the vamp's body, it's removed. The baseball bat still gets a +4 DV for attacks (due to the Severe Allergy), but only impedes Regen when it's still in contact with the subject. (Meaning you can put a vamp into "torpor"-- as per the V:TM rule-- if you incapacitate it with wooden weapon and leave the weapon inside of them. Where you insert it is really up to you.)

I always imagined killing a vampire by setting off an explosive in a building made of wood and watching them die from the shrapnel.
Also, I just noticed Crizh plays paranoia.

This is off the subject a little but brings up another point that has always bugged me, how come every vamp in every tv show or movie owns wooden furniture? If it's the one thing that kills you, maybe it's time to make the upgrade to stainless steel.

Because they're not allergic to wood and it's the stake through the heart (outside of Shadowrun). Wooden furniture isn't a problem unless it can quickly and easily be fashioned into stakes. A relatively unreasonable proposition.

Except that nine times out of ten (according to a scientific study in which I just made those numbers) the vamp is killed by a stake fashioned out of a broken chair leg.

I would agree (no pun intended). But then, if the vamp is getting pummeled by a real (not synthetic) wooden baseball bat, I figure the clothing the vamp is wearing provides negligible(?) protection again the allergy, since the clothing itself is covering the bare skin of the vamp.
But then, that was just one of my weird thoughts.

Then hit the vamp in the face with it.

Besides, if you are fighting vampiers with anything less than a gatling stake thrower...you're doing it wrong.

You could just use the good old longbow with wooden arrows.

Just make sure your bat/arrows/furniture/wooden building isn't made out of pine. In some vampire mythologies pine didn't work because evergreen trees were unnatural (un-dying like the vampire).

{edit: if you're a particularly mean GM you can use this fun fact to ruin your vampire hunter PC's day...}

@bookwyrm: Your post cracked me up. Something about a vampire saying to himself, "Well, the wooden clothing was a bad idea."

I tend to rule that damage caused by wood can not be regenerated, but can be healed with magic. Besides wood is expensive and not all that common in most places in the Barrens. And lets face it synthwood just doesn't cut it.

Living in Seattle currently, I find it really hard to imagine the default "tree-less" future often described in cyberpunk/dystopain future settings. You would seriously have to pave over ever square foot of the greater Seattle area to eradicate the trees. And I think finding scrap wood in the Barrens would be easier than in modernized areas, because you have all kinds of pre-Awakening structures rotting and falling over. Just my take on it anyway.

Saboted shotgun slugs made of lacquered hardwood.

Interestingly, in this case a wood-chipper would be as dangerous as the wood pile it shoots out would be.

Is your Gatling stake gun called a "Wood Bee Hive Blaster"?

since I actually HAVE a vampire player character in my campaign, i've given this matter some thought. I'd rule that unless someone sticks that wooden baseball bat into the leech in question, they are able to regenerate the damage. However, they still take the extra damage from getting a beat down with their severe allergen, as someone has already pointed out.

Another thing our player has taken upon herself to note was that it can be fairly difficult to spot a vampire. with a bit of cosmetics (or nanopaste disguise) to take care of the pale complexion, she's found it relatively easy to not stand out from the crowd. She still creeps people out, but hey - she's hanging out with an ex-cop and a couple combat mages.

The only thing she hasn't done yet is address her aura. anyone getting more than one success on an assensing test is gonna know what she is and will probably freak out. But she hasn't earned anywhere NEAR enough karma to initiate yet. so....she's sorta stuck until she learns masking. But then again, not EVERYONE you meet on the streets is able to see the astral plane either.

hehehe.. what about plant spirits? *imagines a vampire being attacked by a giant angry tree*

Just to clear that up, the text of Vulnerability in Running Wild clearly states that any wound caused by a substance that the creature is Vulnerable to cannot be Regenerated or Healed with magic.

They are entities made of mana not wood. So they are no more dangerous than other spirits. Hmm I'm not so sure about ally spirits with realistic form.

But... but.... Giant angry tree!

You can see the HUGE thread on Toxins and Spirits to see what most people think about that.

Personally in the words of Judge Mill Lane "I'll allow it!"

I'll have to look that up later, but i'd disallow that in my games. Just like I changed the ghoul virus around a bit - sometimes the rules are simply wrong.

Game rules reminds me of the Flanders line to God, "But I've done everything the bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!" Confusion was written differently in every sourcebook that came out for SR2 and 3, so at some point you just had to pick one. (For my money, the PAoE Confusion worked the best.)

Edit: Was the "Vulnerability" weakness written into vampires in Running Wild, because BBB vamps have the allergy but that's it. If so, it does dramatically weaken vampires in the system. (Wooden weapons get a +4DV and cannot be regened or healed by magic, which is pretty punishing.)

Understood. However I am interested in RAI, not RAW.

- J.

Which would make the damage from all spirits fall under magic? Does the book say anything about a spirit's attacks counting as being magical or not, and thus negating vampire regeneration or not?

Came up in a mage game a friend of mine was in.

Typical "farm boy" mage wants to grow a hedge around the group's house/mana well, so he seeds out a forest spirit (or whatever) and it wants a favor, it wants to eat that spirit to gain its power. Said spirit is living in a tree in some dude's backyard. Mage looks at his companion dog, asks it to bring him a cat, shapechanges the nearly-dead cat into a bear tells it to "go eat" thinking it'll distract the guy in the house so he can beat up an oak tree.

Beats up the oak tree (and get beat up by the oak tree).

Can't find bear. Door to the house is broken in and there's blood and a shotgun.

Follows blood to the next house (sees the same). "Oh no."

Wait! Brilliant! He drops the shapechange. Rampaging bear is now a cat.

So the mage goes home, staggers in the door, his group is watching TV and says, "you have to see this," but he brushes them off and heads upstairs. On the TV: footage of a bear rampaging in the small town's "downtown" whereupon it vanishes. Its rationalized that one of the cops threw a grenade and FLRM'd it (you see, a bear has this much health *wide arms* but a cat has this much *close hands* but the damage didn't go away when it changed shapes, so it more or less explodes).

Thus was born the legend of Beartown.

(For punishment the farmboy mage was forced to live as a cat for a month. Oh, and they got their hedge. It eats people).

Staking a vamp to induce dormancy or torpor has never really been a part of the SR canon, to my knowledge. In previous editions, creatures Regened from wounds caused by their vulnerabilities at the same rate they healed from everything else. In SR4 you can stake a vamp into his overflow and he won't Regen as long as you leave the wood in, and since the heart would be a good vital that would still regenerate, you pretty much can "stake" a vamp like you would in V:TM. You pull the stake out, they heal up in a matter of seconds and are no worse for wear.

If vamps are vulnerable to wood and taking into account the update in Running Wild that crizh pointed out, you can stake a vamp in the heart, and when you pull it out they'll still be wounded for as long as a non-vamp who was stabbed into their overflow.

So, to answer your original question:

SR1-3: No.
SR4: Yes.
SR4+Running Wild: No.

For my money, I like the SR4 BBB interpretation.

This was actually a major point in Terry Pratchett's excellent Carpe Jugulum. The main antagonists were a family of vampires with some progressive ideas - they found that they could overcome lots of the traditional weaknesses by acclimating themselves to them, or by training themselves not to react to them. The new vampires set themselves up less as monsters in a foreboding castle, and more as farmers ruling over a herd of mind-controlled humans, effortlessly taking over their lives and imposing a dull, cud-chewing kind of order and peace. They were nearly unstoppable, since their mind-control actually worked better on the strong willed, making the traditional heroes and traditional weapons almost entirely ineffective.

Pro-tip: If you're 'nearly' unstoppable, you're bound to get your ass handed to you sooner or later.

They were often compared to the old Master - a traditionalist who not only respected holy symbols, running water, and the rest, but treated the whole thing as a hilarious game. Of course you must have curtains that can be pulled dramatically open, and furniture that can easily break into stakes, and lots of knick-knacks that can be turned quickly into holy symbols! Otherwise, where's the fun? He honestly seemed to look forward to getting taken out every few decades. He also made a habit of only kidnapping moody young ladies with well-armed paramours, ensuring optimum fun for everyone. He was a very *sporting* monster, and by the end of the book you can't help but admire his worldview a little.

From a strategic standpoint, he had an apparent weakness that wasn't actually permanently harmful - the 'Heroes' would occasionally gank him, and celebrate, and go home, get old, die off, and then their grandkids would have to deal with the vampire all over again. Everybody knows how to stop him, which means nobody ever figured out how to actually destroy him. He wasn't particularly cruel or bloodthirsty (except in the strict literal sense) and so he never attracted the sort of organized retribution that could seriously threaten his existence. He was playing a game, and having a blast.

Which is the goal of all of we GMs, at the end of the day.

I'm just reminiscing, here - not sure if there's a lesson in there applicable to Shadowrun or not. Could be something about how gritty, grim evil is sometimes less lovable then campy, over the top villiany. Could be something about having a fallback plan that nobody sees coming. Could be something about how even the very powerful need to find ways to amuse themselves.

...or it could just be that Pratchett rocks.

I always preferred Ultraviolet's, the British television show not the awful film, solution of carbon bullets. Granted its armour penetration might be a bit reduced but considering how useless regular ammunition can be against vampires I'd still call it an improvement.



Bit overkill isn't it? Why not just use grenades with a wooden casing and/or filled with hardened wood for shrapnel.

That's actually incorrect.

- J.

bah, wood.

fire i say, fire!

It's been a couple of years since I looked at the previous editions, so I glanced through my three BBB's. I might have missed something but I didn't see anything in the vampire write-ups that included going dormant from a stake through the heart, or any other sort of wood-related trauma. Which is not to say that it didn't exist in another book, only I haven't dug deep enough to rediscover it.

So, what were the rules for staking vamps to torpor?

But... but... What about a possession based plant spirit bound to an actual tree? Would the big angry tree theory work then? Please?

sure

Huzzah! I must now make a possession based tree-hugging hippie summoner*. I will make vampires everywhere tremble in fear! I shall be their bane!!

*totally going to wear Birkenstock sandals everywhere. Even on shadowruns. Might even bind them as a sustaining focus.

STHF...

STHF?

STMF = shoot the mage first...

STHF = shoot the hippy first (a much more important rule).

haha... Oh God... So that means if I'm a hippie mage.... /facepalm

Not in my opinion. an Unarmed attack is a normal attack even if it comes from a magical creature. Same goes for indirect combat spells and elemental attacks and energy auras.

@MikeKozar: Yes, Terry Pratchett rocks.

I don't have them handy but the short of the long was that they were in induced torpor/coma/whatever until the stake was removed.

- J.

I don't remember that being the case either. Induced Dormancy, to my knowledge, was always based on a lack of air. Maybe you're misremembering how overpowered Regeneration used to be, and how wood could stop it from occuring? I dunno.

I could be wrong though. I often am.

Jake, is it possible you're remembering something from V:TM? That's how it worked in that system.

I have a lot of overlap between SR and V:TM in my head because I ran several HMHVV-themed games, and I ended up houseruling and homebrewing the vamps using a lot of ideas I nicked from V:TM. (Vamps in my game spent Essence for their powers, similar to the way blood points worked in V:TM. Also, I had a lot of different strains of HMHVV that had different powers, which was similar to the way clans worked. There were also a group of crazy vamps in my game that thought the V:TM books were coded references from ancient vampires-- when the PC's were hunting down a vamp who had The Book of Nod, the book turned out to be a White Wolf game book.)

All I have to say....

That is epic.

That's kinda how I figured it worked, but wasn't sure.

Edit: Go hippymancer!

Indeed.


Incidently, the Traditions from the Mage: The Ascension book all work pretty well as alternate traditions per Street Magic. The extra fluff and backstory can be a handy shortcut. For the uninitiated (no pun intended) the game had Hermetics, Shaman, Technomancers, and Physical Adept archtypes, as well as Wiccans, Mad Scientists (in the pulp hero gadgeteer/magic makes it possible mold), Death Cultists (less crazy then it sounds) , Christian Theurges, pornomancers/hippymancers, and a whole host of sinister corporate mages.

For instance, someone playing a Hermetic tradition could pick up the splatbook for the Order of Hermes, and get lots of ideas about how a hermetic society might organize, how its rituals might be performed, what is considered proper behavior, and a few tricks on spell combinations. Much love for Catalyst, but an extra 60~100 pages on Hermetic style would be nice, and if someone's already written one, why not?

(Does some quick searching) Well, it's out of print and big money on eBay, but ask around.

Hehe... pornomancers... Orgy power + gease of must have sex at least once a day.

ROFL!!!! Good one, Mercer!

Ok, now I know my mind is permanently in the gutter. I looked at that sentence and saw "pornomancer... orgy power + grease"