LE Vampires hiding among the populace

[Talonflight]

So, I was playing my vampire-hunter character and I realized; without joining the dawngaurd, there aren't many opportunities to hunt vampires; and none of them are particularly interesting beyond "Enter this cave" "Kill the guy at the end of it". And that was fun, for a while.

 

But I've had an idea, so here goes. What if we had vampires hiding among the populace? What if every few weeks in-game, the game spawned a random NPC inside a village that looked like a normal person but was a vampire. The longer you took to find them, the more generic NPCs would turn up dead. You'd walk through whiterun and see a dead body near the town square. And as time went on, more and more would appear. You would have to find out who the vampire was, and kill them, without raising the ire of the town guards.

[tnu]

that would be pretty cool. I have been hoping for something similar to this mainly to add more mystery, crime, and detedctive fiction aspects ot the game. maybe if you have the right skills you can do an autopsy report or osmethign that will helpf ind the killer

[pyrotx]

Well there are two problems with the idea of them hiding in the population. First each person in a town a unique name and doesn't typically respawn, except for guards. The second Is that the towns are fairly small, so how does a vampire hide in such lightly populated areas?

 

One way would be to start with vampire patrols in the wilderness that respawn, and the same for unnamed prey that might run into the cities for help. The best mystery you can for without a quest line is search for vampire patrol routes that ambush both the player and traveling guard or thalmor patrols and shut them down. You could simply make it so one of the patrol nodes is disabled once you tail the vampires back to spawn point, after that, you can enable a different group of stock vampires, or switch it up to make it gargoyles this time, then find maybe a trail of bodies start dead and are near the patrol nodes.

 

Making one of these patrols would probably take 30 minutes, but adding bodies and clues, and multiple patrols for every town would likely take most people a couple weeks, that is without using quests and just disabling patrol nodes or enemy spawns once you defeat the patrol boss.

[Talonflight]

Those are valid points, however, I can see 2 ways around it in order to have vampires actually IN the towns. The first would be to make Inconsequential NPCs a requirement, and the second would be to simply place the vampire in a location where it simply doesn't leave a home until, say, midnight, and even then it would only leave for say 1 hour of the day to hunt and then return to hiding.

 

the clues an autopsy would be interesting, and I really like the idea (You'd need a certain level in Restoration, healing, for example, to check how the cuts were made and you could identify the murder weapon, or use Alchemy to test the blood of the victim and somehow magically determine the gender of the vampire). However that would likely limit the possibilities for replaying it, unless there were a number of different situations that were randomly selected for each instance.

[Perraine]

There are already 2 "ordinary people" vampire's that I know of in Skyrim (frik and frak or something they are called) They run a Lumber Mill. You get to kill one of them during the DB quest line (IIRC?), but you can go there any time, and talk to them as though they were ordinary NPC's. Though they do have the quite obvious vampire eyes, they aren't hostile, and there are some Hold Guards even wandering around occasionally, that aren't hostile towards them..

[Hexxagone]

Sebile Stentor in Solitude is a vampire and she kills people, even puts the blame on another vampire and has you go kill them in their cave to cover her tracks.

 

Then there is Alva in Morthal. Most Vampires do not live with normal people. The ones that do are smart and their wont be any "leads" or investigation becuase they know how to cover their tracks.

[Talonflight]

Alva in morthal left quite a track behind her, especiall with the entire Morthal quest focusing on her. Sybille in Solitude, on the other hand, seems to be accepted by the royal family there; after all, she raised Torygg, and hasn't aged a day despite being old enough to be Elisif's mother (to the court's knowledge; actual age may be far older).

 

Either way, thats only a couple of people, and it removes the whole "track them down" effort from the whole equation. With inconsequential NPCs however, it adds a bunch of people to each city with simple names like "Patron. Farmer. Servent." imagine if one of those seemingly innocuous names was hiding a vampire in the town. It would add quite a bit of adventure to the game trying to track them down, figuring out which one it is. Following their daily habits, tracking them at nighttime to see where they go to feed. That sort of thing.

[pyrotx]

Well like I said before, if you want them to be able to hide, and have a "track them down" mechanic, have them travel between towns and maybe stay at various inns. Along the way you can either leave preset dead bodies and clues, or add other npcs that travel to the same places as the vampires. The only problem is that you have to make sure that the vampires don't randomly attack essential, or non respawning npcs. You can do this by making a new vampire faction and maing sure only the new victim npcs are an enemy of it. Also if anyone wants to do a vampire mod, please make sure they actually transform, and maybe have increased movement speed.

[Talonflight]

Oh, I wasn't talking about a Vampire Lord, though that would certainly be interesting. Personally I think the transformation takes too much scripting from what I've seen others say about it (Same reason having NPCS transform into werewolves is script-heavy in mods that use it). Still, it would be a nice touch.

 

I think the preset dead bodies would be nice, at least for wandering generic vampires. The dead bodies wouldn't appear until after the vampire was there, though we'd need some hint that the vampire was there in the first place; maybe a chance that if you ask for rumors, the innkeeper would say "there's been a stranger in town today." or something like that. If you got there too late, you could ask which room they stayed in and it would spawn a note in the room listing which town they were heading too next. I like the travelling mechanic, you'd actually need to hunt them down; weaker vampires would actually run from you, while high leveled vampires would face you head on.

 

Revenge of the Enemies has a nice integration with vampires; it adds an ability to turn into a cloud of bats and avoid damage, and they use it to avoid attacks while swinging with lifedrain swords. It makes fighting them much more dangerous, and the Vampiric Thirst overhaul makes them much tougher as well. If the Hunting Vampires mod would ever be made, those two could be patched with it for an even more dangerous experience.

[Hexxagone]

A sloppy vampire that leaves dead bodies around and tells people where he is headed? The people wouldn't even need to hire you, he would be dead within a week.

 

Alva didn't leave a trail behind, her idiot vampire assistant did. Smart vampires hiding among the population wouldn't leave bodies around, the people could go for years without even knowing it. They certainly wouldn't travel around Skyrim killing people, they would stay in one place and feed only when necessary.

Edited October 18, 2015 by Hexxagone