Anyone familiar with old school Vampire: The Masquerade?
I was thinking that it might be great fun to drop the party's voidship in a sector populated by V:tM style vampires.
Any thoughts on the mechanics of such vampires?
Vampires on the Voidship!
Yes indeed. I suggest against directly converting rules for disciplines unless you want PCs to get access to those powers. Fortitude can be represented by levels of Unnatural Toughness and decreased vampiric vulnerabilities.
Rogue Trader doesn't distinguish between bashing, lethal, and aggravated damage. Maybe vampires just have more wounds, or take half-damage from impact weapons.
As for what they are, I suggest a warp-tainted population of abhumans. A stable strain or strains of mutant. They look human...until you examine them.
On a side note, 40k does have vampires. A breed of warp-xenos.
On a side note, 40k does have vampires. A breed of warp-xenos.
And the Blood Angels, sort of.
But yeah, I'd just look at existing examples of similar traits and cobble together an appropriate representation of what you want to go for. Increased physical resilience could easily be portrayed by giving them Space Marine Unnatural Toughness, whereas "anti-vamp" weapons would get the Felling trait. I'm not actually a fan of either, but unless you're changing the entire injury mechanic it's easiest to just roll with existing rules for sake of consistency and ease of implementation.
I see what you're saying there. Potence and Celerity would be represented by unnatural strength and agility.
And Presence/Majesty and Dominate are just sub-powers of Telepathy. If you want vampires of that sort in 40k you might consider drawing up your own within the RT rules. Check out Chaos Sorcery (Edge of the Abyss, I think). Even other FFG games (DH, DW, OW, etc.) don't crossover well. Other systems will crossover even less well.
And Presence/Majesty and Dominate are just sub-powers of Telepathy.
This actually fits nicely with Decessor's suggestion of Warp taint, too. Shame that Khorne doesn't like psykers, but Slaanesh would fit just as well for dabbling in this sort of stuff, if you look at it from a "gourmet perspective" where those exposed to this particular mutation develop an intense craving for human blood. In fact, wasn't this even one of the potential Corruption effects somewhere?
Even other FFG games (DH, DW, OW, etc.) don't crossover well.
Sad but true. Although you can of course always take some inspiration from there!
I'm liking the ideas here.
Now what about Protean and, my personal favorite, Obtenebration?
'Vampires as aliens' appeared in 1st Ed. 40K. I took a stab at adapting them to WH40KRP a while back- check the NEW XENOS link in my signature below.
The biomancy powers from Dark Heresy 1st ed involved flesh-shaping.
Obtenebration has no direct equivalent in 40k, but some combination of "see me not" type powers and telekinesis should emulate some effects.
Obtenebration actually has similarities with some Navigator powers. But then, you're crossing over into some really fuzzy distinctions between active and passive uses of psy, or the difference between summoning the warp and merely acting as a conduit for the warp.
As an academic exercise, I always find such topics interesting, but I can't begin to imagine how you'd bring such a thing into play. Any character career designed will not be play-balanced at all. Other players will be annoyed at the player using such powers in the game. I know my current group would show any such the player the nearest airlock.
Someone recently asked me about using a Fallen Librarian concept for their Astropath. I said "No" so fast it shocked him. No Space Marines. No crossovers. No aliens. No.
And putting that much work into an NPC seems counterproductive. I can write up anything into a "monster" encounter, and I don't need to justify it. I just need to play-balance it and the players will accept it. I can spend all that time fleshing out personalities, adding conspiracies, and leaving out important details to heighten the mysteries. More fun.
And then it matters if you want "vampires", or 13 different varieties of vampires, some of which with meh powers, others with "blood/clan-specific" abilities (Tzmitce Vicissitude, Gangrel Protean, Malkie Dementation, etc.). It might work better if your vampires just had a "uniform" suite of "typical" powers, while maybe a few could have special ones. Depending on one's take, vampirism could be a disease of Nurgle, and those who are the best receive warp-based gifts, akin to sorcery. It all depends, I suppose, on the source. I've often whined at how much more, lately, Fantasy has weaseled into 40K, and made that game worse. I've never cared for Fantasy, and getting random psychic powers, and random Warlord traits, in a dedicated strategy game, will never sit well with me, while I'm still a bit on the fence about Tomb Kings in Space variant of Necrons, but Vampire Counts, as far as I can tell, is one Fantasy Army that didn't seem to carry over, at least not as obviously as Elves --> Eldar, Chaos, yep, Orks, yep, Tomb Kings --> Newcrons. Unless the Vampire Counts got demoted, and "heroized", into the Blood Angels, an admittedly separate Chapter from the Codex: Space Marines, but still, they got skipped, and these could be servants of Chaos, though between blood and procreation, I'd vote for Nurgle, over Khorne.