RPGaDay: Rare

I'm a day late because I spent most of yesterday having fun at UK Games Expo (more to follow).

You know what's really rare?  Me playing a vampire in an RPG.

Mostly that's because there's one obvious big-name game world where people play vampires, and as regular readers might have noticed, I'm not a big fan of the World of Darkness.  I've played one campaign of Vampire: The Requiem, which was the worst gaming experience of my life.  Given that I never particularly wanted to play any version of Vampire in the first place, you'd better believe I've stayed the hell away from Vampire, and vampires, ever since.

Until last night.

Liminal does vampires right.  Liminal vampires aren't romantic leads, and they sure as hell don't sparkle.  Liminal vampires are old-school soulless monsters, and are all the better for it.  So what you can play in Liminal isn't actually a vampire but a dhampir: someone for whom the process of becoming a vampire was not complete.  And you get a fair bit of flexibility in how you play them - various vampiric drawbacks are optional, as are vampiric powers.  You can build them according to whichever mythology you find fun rather than being tied into one specific ruleset.

So when I came to create pre-gens for the convention scenario I'm currently running, I decided to include a dhampir in the mix.  And when Bud of Bud's RPG Review asked us to make characters to playtest his scenario, for the first time ever I thought I might actually have fun playing a dhampir.

---

There was one thing Ophelia Crawford wanted, and that was do something good with her life.  It started out with doing first aid courses and ultimately becoming a paramedic in the Motorcycle Response Unit.  The salary wasn't important to her; her family was wealthy enough that she wasn't likely to find herself worrying about money.  Knowing she was helping people was what mattered.

The night it all went wrong began with what seemed like a perfectly normal emergency call.  Several patients, all rather pale, but she assumed it was a goth club.  Until she finished her work, and was about to head back to the bike, and was informed that she'd done such a good job that they wanted to keep her.

She was too heavily drugged to remember most of the transformation ritual, but was still alert enough to notice when a giant wolf burst into the room, tearing one vampire to pieces and sending the others running. And the bit after that where a group of police officers showed up and didn't seem to think there was anything weird about her story but left her a business card and assured her it would all be kept quiet.

She didn't know what to expect, having only just found out that vampires were real, but it wasn't long before she realised she'd changed.  While she could hide her eyes with sunglasses, and it wasn't like she had to eat garlic, life as she knew it was over.  She quit her job and moved out of the city into a house in the countryside, planning on being alone until she worked out if she could ever be around people again.

That lasted for about half an hour, when it became rapidly obvious that the chicken coop at the end of the garden was occupied not by chickens but by a changeling by the name of Jim Chiminy.  There was some initial friction as he appeared to have absolutely no sense of boundaries, particularly those that separated her house from anywhere else, but when he started ranting about a series of urban fantasy novels, she finally found herself listening to him.  And then sharing her own opinions of certain other urban fantasy novels that had contained very inaccurate portrayals of vampires.

And now she had a friend; one who knew what she was (at least she presumed that's what the 'wild garlic leaves in the salad' incident had been about) but who didn't seem to be afraid of her.  And if he didn't think she was a monster, maybe she didn't have to be one?

The house filled up fast after that, when the police who'd rescued her from the vampires decided they wanted her supporting one of their officers and he brought what she could only assume were some of his past arrests with her.  Her place of quiet solitude was now filled with noise and chaos, not all of it caused by Jim.  But she'd always wanted to do something good with her life, and keeping this lot alive was giving her life meaning once more.

And if that meant dealing with a weird fairy who kept changing people's Amazon orders to buy more toasters and trying on all her clothes, then so be it.

---

A rare character for me, but one I'd really like to play again.  And credit to Doc Griffiths who is the person responsible for Jim Chiminy, without who Ophelia's life would have been so much less weird.