Magic & Pathfinder: The Vampires

When I was developing the racial rules for Pathfinders of Zendikar, I had to decide what to do with vampires. They are Zendikar's major black mana race, but straight up Pathfinder vampires are way too powerful to be used by players. Fortunately, there was a possibility - the dhampir race. Dhampir are half-human half-vampires, technically living, but treated as undead for the purposes of healing magic. I had a way to make the dhampir fit - but I had to pull out an old pet theory of mine. But lets go back a few years, to when I first started playing Magic.

Illustration by Adi Granov

There's a scene in the Agents of Artifice novel, the second Magic novel I bought, where Liliana spends a significant amount of time explaining to Jace that summoning a vampire is a very bad idea, as they are incredibly powerful, and can easily break free of the summoner's control, at which point, everyone nearby is in a huge amount of trouble.

It's a scene that doesn't make a lot of sense today, as vampires are now considered to be black's characteristic race. If you use black mana, it is likely that you will be using a lot of vampires. And there are a lot of them that are not powerful in any way.

At the time Agents was written, however, it was perfectly correct - vampire was quite a rare creature type, and the ones that existed were all pretty scary. Some were even dangerous to your own health.

The change from big iconic-style threat to vampires-vampires-everywhere happened in the original Zendikar set. The Zendikar vampires, however, are nothing like the current noble glamour-style vampires that everyone seems to like these days. They are very tribal - complete with war paint, armour made from animals, and iconic poses in jungle settings.

And there was one thing that was very unusual about them - the Planeswalker's Guide said they had a lifespan of 200 years. They got old and died. This is pretty much unheard of when it comes to vampire lore, and made me suspect that these vampires were not actually what most people thought they were. What if these vampires were not undead?

A lot of other things seemed to fit in with this idea. Zendikar vampires didn't need human blood, they could quite happily subsist on animal blood. They couldn't turn other people into vampires. The Cthulu-like Eldrazi had some sort of strange hold over them. And Sorin Markov treated them with complete and utter disdain, comparing them to beasts and almost refusing to even call them vampires. (Though, to be fair, it now seems like Sorin treats everyone with complete and utter disdain.)

Vampires on Zendikar were even tolerated to a certain extent - Anowon, for example, was a well-known and respected archeologist, whilst vampires lived alongside humans in the port city of Nimana.

I suspect that this unusual set of characteristics was intended to explain the disparity in power level between the new breed of weaker vampires, and older powerhouses like Baron Sengir. These are not your parents vampires, essentially. For many years, a lot of people thought I was a bit crazy for insisting that Zendikar vampires were more like vampire bats than true undead bloodsuckers. And I can't really blame them, cause looking at the cards revealed none of this. The thing that pointed in this direction was the Planeswalkers Guide, which most people hadn't read.

However, regardless of how accurate it was, it was a pretty good excuse to take the dhampir rules from Pathfinder, and use them for playable vampires. The lore was adjusted - they're not part-human creatures or anything like that, but actual Zendikar vampires.

And then, just a few weeks ago, Plane Shift: Zendikar was released, which explicitly told us that Zendikar vampires were not undead. And it went even further, explaining that the reason vampires drink blood is because it is full of concentrated mana. They're not drinking it for the blood, they actually survive by consuming mana. Plane Shift doesn't specifically link this to the Eldrazi, but we do know they are also mana devourers, but on a much more massive scale, which may explain the strange connection between the two races.

The dhampir rules only apply to Zendikar vampires. While the exact nature of the vampires on Mirrodin was never explored, when it came to Innistrad, vampires were back to being truly undead bloodsuckers preying on humans (though, still much weaker than old-school vampires in order to have them show up in large numbers).

So, allowing players to be a vampire on Innistrad or other places is far more problematic. Making a vampire race from scratch is incredibly difficult, as merely having the 'undead' creature type is going to make them significantly more powerful than any player race should be.