This idea came to me in the shower this morning. What do you think of it?

Andrew

* * * * *

Vampires on Celandra are not like the vampires of Earth's fiction. They 
have reflections, they can survive exposure to sunlight(although they 
don't enjoy it), many of them quite like garlic, they don't change their 
shapes, they don't have fangs, they don't have to sleep in coffins, and 
they aren't always undead. However, they do drink blood in small 
quantities, they are repelled by certain holy symbols, and they are 
*very* difficult to kill.

Celandran vampires are people who have made a bargain with Maracor or a 
similar Being. In exchange for agreeing to serve the aims of the God, 
the bargainer receives perpetual youth and becomes a vampire. There is, 
of course, a catch to the arrangement.

If the vampire simply goes about his or her ordinary business, he or she 
will cease to outwardly age, appearing at the age at which the bargain 
was made. However, the spell works by draining life force from other 
parts of the body in order to maintain cosmetic youth. At about the age 
of sixty-five, if the vampire does nothing to prevent it, everything 
fails at once, and he or she dies, rising as a zombie under Maracor's 
control.

Most vampires take steps to prevent that final collapse.  When 
Celandran vampires drink blood from a victim, they are establishing a 
link with the unfortunate victim's life-force. The vampire can choose to 
drain the victim's life in one fell swoop, or he or she can maintain the 
link, even at a distance, and drain the life from the victim slowly and 
gradually. Dumb or greedy vampires take the first option; smart vampires 
take the second. A victim being slowly drained will appear to be 
suffering from a slow wasting disease.

Celandran vampires can maintain many such links, and the more links a 
vampire has, the less likely it is that he or she will be detected. The 
vampire may also break links before a victim has been totally drained, 
in which case the victim will gradually recover in health.

Ordinarily, a vampire who has linked to many victims draws just enough 
energy from them to maintain the spell that maintains his or her 
unnatural youth. However, when injured, a vampire can increase the rate 
of drain in order to heal nearly instantly. This allows the vampire to 
survive otherwise fatal injuries, as long as he or she still has linked 
victims to draw life from. Healing a fatal wound requires drawing all 
the remaining life from a victim at once, and in such cases the 
unfortunate person suddenly collapses for no apparent reason. The only 
sure way of killing a vampire instantly and permanently is to smash its 
skull to paste.

At about the age of 100 or so, the Celandran vampire awakes one day to 
find that he is no longer breathing and his heart has stopped. Maracor's 
bargain grants youth, not life. The rate at which the vampire siphons 
the energy of others increases, and it as at this point that the vampire 
becomes a true undead; sunlight becomes unpleasant, and he or she must 
begin to hunt. He or she no longer requires blood to establish a link 
with a victim, prolonged physical contact will suffice. While the links 
to slowly draining victims keep the vampire's soul in his body and allow 
him to animate his own body, he now needs to completely drain a victim 
of life every other night in order to maintain his normal human 
appearance. Failing to do so causes the vampire's body to age and decay 
until his or her appearance matches chronological age, and eventually 
leads to the vampire falling into a coma-like state. Vampires can exist 
in this state for centuries, until someone gets close enough to grab and 
drain.

Human vampires are rare on Celandra: the ceremony for making the 
necessary bargain with Maracor is hard to find and requires certain rare 
items. Also, the Order of Coron is relentless in hunting down and 
destroying any and all necromancers, vampires, and other undead.

Goblin vampires are much more common than human vampires, but there are 
still relatively few of them. In the Ice Demon hordes, their greatest 
champions enact Maracor's Bargain and then form links with several 
hundred of the normal goblins. In battle, the initial wave of attacking 
Ice Demons is made up of these nearly unkillable champions: there may be 
only a thousand goblins in that first wave, but each one has to be 
killed a hundred times or more.
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