Actually, the original Unearthed Arcana, with its rules for drow PCs, came first, in 1985. Drizzt wasn’t created until The Crystal Shard was published in 1988 (well, when it was being written in 1986 or 87).
Huh. Back in the day, there was a minimum CHA requirement to be a Paladin.
Generally speaking, if a PC was turned into a vampire, I’d require that he roll up a new character.
I did make an exception once, when the PC was a fairly high level cleric of the sun god, and had done a really good job of roleplaying his piety and devotion throughout the game. I let him keep his character, with his original alignment, provided his character never fed, and houseruled some penalties for being a blood-starved vampire. Also, he could use his channel positive energy ability (this was a Pathfinder game) without exploding. Which he later did anyway, in order to destroy the powerful evil artifact that had been the source of the vampires in the campaign.
Speaking of drow and Pathfinder, in the Pathfinder campaign, drow aren’t just mean elves who live underground, they’re actually under a powerful curse - one that can strike any elf who gives himself over utterly to despair and hatred. The curse is apparently also genetic, since drow breed true. What I love about this is that it takes the drow race, who are already problematic due to the whole “you can tell their evil by their dark skin” thing, and basically adds the Blood Libel to it, making them the single most politically uncomfortable thing to appear in a D&D game since the anal rapist hillbilly treants in Something Positive.
Yeah, they got rid of minimum attribute requirements for classes a while ago. Instead, they made most class abilities dependent on your attributes in some way. For example, there’s technically no rule against playing a wizard with an INT of 4. However, to cast a wizard spell, you need to have an INT score of 10 + the level of the spell, so your developmentally delayed wizard is still going to be pretty useless.
A lot of the 3rd ed. paladin’s abilities rely on charisma, so using it as your dump stat can still hurt you pretty bad: spells, saving throws, healing, and turning undead are all derived from your charisma. But you’re not barred from the class if you’ve got the personality of a toad.
I think the theory is that when a character becomes a vampire, they lose their soul when they die. So they appear to still be the same person because they have all of the intelligence and memories they had as a living being. But they now lack their moral center.
Durkon is still part of the group because he still wants to save the world. But just because that’s his goal, doesn’t mean he’s Good - Evil beings like Tarquin or Xykon also don’t want to see the world destroyed. Durkon’s presumably now willing to do a lot of things in pursuit of saving the world that he wouldn’t have done before. (One example is the casual way we saw him kill Zz’drti and planned on killing Nale. The living Durkon may have killed people but he was not a casual murderer.)
It could be that Miko had decent Charisma but it didn’t express itself through her personality. There were several references that Miko was supposed to be a really attractive woman and physical attractiveness is a form of charisma. It drew some characters, including Roy, to Miko before they realized her Charisma was only skin deep.
Even as far as personality goes, high charisma still doesn’t necessarily mean “likable”. It mostly means that people react to you in the way that you want them to, and most people want to be liked. But Miko didn’t really care whether anyone liked her. In fact, it probably suited her more for people to not like her, because it fed into her whole “I’m special and nobody realizes it but me” complex.
That’s how it worked in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - being turned into a vampire meant you died, your human soul was released into whatever afterlife awaited it, and a minor demon inhabited your body, possessing all of your memories.
D&D vampires probably don’t work that way. There’s certainly no demon involved, and it’s unlikely that Durkon’s soul has gone on to some other plane. If it had, presumably you’d be able to recall it using True Resurrection, or at least talk to him with Speak with Dead.
I think it’s more likely that the process of being turned into a vampire corrupts the person’s soul, tainting it with evil that is then revealed through their action as an undead.
That’s a fair point.
The first Unearthed Arcana was part of first edition AD&D, and as I stated in my post, preceded the creation of Drizz’t.
Totally understandable. I would not allow a vampire PC unless I were sure the campaign setting could handle it (since vampire PCs are totally overpowered), that the other players in the party wouldn’t just switch tactics to simplistic kinds such as “have the vampire kill everything for us,” and that the player would take seriously the dark, Evil forces which now animate his character, and his character’s reaction to those forces.
It wouldn’t be easy.
Regardless of all this, Burlew made a vampire PC. So therefore the discussion goes in a possibly different direction than the stereotypical Evil behavior of vampires.
That was always my take on it. Which makes it all the more tragic in Durkon’s case.
I think Durkon will remain D&D-evil, but not a dick. In Burlew’s conception, evil and dickishness are two different things: Xykon for example is kind of a dick. Also, recall the prophesied damage to the Northern Dwarfen kingdom: Durkula might not take the extended deception particularly well. There are other ways to work the prophesy though.
Apropos nothing, one can hope that Miko was a Tsundere. She just never met the right guy.
No - the soul is bound up in the existence of the vamp. Inaccessible, perhaps, but not gone. Which is why you have to kill the vampire before a Resurrection spell can work.
Rich Burlew has proven to be a fabulous story teller—as I’m sure we can all agree, seeing as we’re hearing hanging on every new comic and arguing over all kinds of minutiae related to it—and has earned our trust that Durkon’s future unlife is likely to be a compelling story, and not merely some clichéd vampire silliness.
Burlew already has several affably evil characters, though, so I don’t predict seeing Durkin go in that direction. But that doesn’t mean he has to be a dick, either. I did enjoy his turning on Nale et al with his “But the two o’ ye’re still tha same old dicks!” comment.
Durkon will be something else.
Nancy Collins used the same idea in her vampire books.
Perhaps not so much gone on to the afterlife as separated from the character. Maybe sealed off within the character, which would explain why a vampire has to be killed to free the soul.
Malack implied in this strip that resurrecting him would restore him to the being he had been at the point of his death and his vampire existence would be eliminated. That implies that his soul is not involved in his vampiric existence.
I agree. I don’t think Durkon will be a mindless killing machine. He certainly isn’t one now.
But at the moment, in the heat of battle, his actions as a good or evil character are in close alignment so the others can ignore any changes caused by his alignment. (Look at Belkar as an example - he’s a useful member of the group when they’re in combat but becomes a liability in social encounters.)
But once they leave the battlefield and engage in more routine activities, they may see that Durkon has changed. Let’s suppose they go into a town and Durkon drinks some NPC’s blood. The others would be shocked but Evil Durkon would say “I’m working on saving everyone in the world. If killing a few innocent people to keep my strength up helps save the entire world, why are you complaining?”
Yes, but when drow became PC-able in UA, they also became capable of being other than CE. Which, as you noted, was before Drizzt, which contradicts what you posted about the non-CE drow coming after Drizzt.
To be fair, killing someone who has attempted to kill you and your companions numerous times isn’t exactly “casual murder”. Yeah, Zz’dtri may have been incapacitated at the time (although they just demonstrated their ability to kill a vampire with relatively little effort) and killing him might not have been “honorable” but it’s not like Durkon is walkin’ down the street, murdering folks.
Drow were first seen in the original 1st Monster Manual and are said to be purely evil. They were then included in some dungeon modules and, again, are solely evil. Finally, they were part of the Fiend Folio with an expanded description (as opposed to the M. Manual which just said “oh, and there’s legends of evil elves”).
When they were later presented as a player character choice (in the Unearthed Arcana although I think the rules were first in Dragon magazine), the “always chaotic evil” limitation was relaxed.
So you’re correct that they were originally always chaotic evil. Just that the shift came from allowing them to be PCs rather than stemming from the Icewind Dale trilogy.
Actually, despite Eugene’s line early in the strip, the D&D Speak with Dead spell doesn’t involve the soul at all. It’s purely working off of the information imprinted upon the corpse.
And Korf, vampire PCs are not actually horribly overpowered: Quite the opposite. Vampires have a level adjustment of +8, which means that ordinarily, a vampire that’s a fifth-level character will be hanging out in a party where everyone else is level 13. You do gain a lot of nice things by being a vampire, but not nice enough to make up for that huge deficit.
Now, obviously this can be an issue when an already-high character like Durkon suddenly becomes a vampire, but only temporarily. Yeah, Durkon has gained a great deal of power very rapidly, but that level adjustment also means that he’s going to earn negligible XP until the rest of the party catches up to him, which will probably never happen. Given that he was only one or two levels away from gaining ninth-level spells, this is a huge drawback, that’ll be kicking in pretty quickly.