Goonhub
06-01-2025, 12:04 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-01-2025, 10:16 PM by Egregorious. Edited 8 times in total.)
I've never liked how vampire thralls worked. Raising the dead as your permanent minions is such a necromancer theme that it's a shame the design space is tied to vampires. They don't even make great use of them a lot of the time, especially on RP where people have to kind of tiptoe around a thrall's very existance just to avoid escalating. Certainly going back to Bram Stoker, vampires were far more about hypnosis than necromancy.
What I would do is remove thralls as they are now, and give vampires a ~10-minute mindhack ability on a ~5-minute cooldown. Give them a gameplay that involves either having a loyal subject that they consistently re-hypnotise to do their bidding, or run around in the dark hypnotising random people into doing dirty deeds while trying to keep their identity a secret so the thralls can't tattle on them once they come out of the trance.
The mindhack ability would need a long windup time, but Vampires are already well suited for that kind of thing. And mindhacking pre-mindhacked servants would probably subvert the windup.
And then make a lich antagonist who actually wants to raise the dead as a personal army.
What I would do is remove thralls as they are now, and give vampires a ~10-minute mindhack ability on a ~5-minute cooldown. Give them a gameplay that involves either having a loyal subject that they consistently re-hypnotise to do their bidding, or run around in the dark hypnotising random people into doing dirty deeds while trying to keep their identity a secret so the thralls can't tattle on them once they come out of the trance.
The mindhack ability would need a long windup time, but Vampires are already well suited for that kind of thing. And mindhacking pre-mindhacked servants would probably subvert the windup.
And then make a lich antagonist who actually wants to raise the dead as a personal army.