Has anyone played in a game with (or played) a vampire that eats flesh, rather than emotions or blood? It definitely seems like the hardest of the hungers to maintain – and I’d be curious about the ways that people have come up to play them.
With blood or emotion you can imagine ways in which the feeding process itself could be addicting to the fed upon, but flesh seems a lot more difficult. As well it seems a lot harder to leave someone alive after eating their flesh than blood or emotion. Finally, I think it’d be harder for a flesh vamp to use it’s feeding as an ‘intimate moment’. Still, I think it’d be cool to explore this alternative to the usual vampires out there, so I’d love to hear folks ideas 🙂
BTW, Brion Oliver – this is one of the ideas I’m toying with for your PbP – just trying to figure out ideas on how to make it interesting 🙂
Does it have to be human flesh?
Tim Franzke has the idea I was thinking of. I was picturing the episode of Supernatural where people are just devouring tons of raw meat. Still plenty gross, difficult to manage, etc.
I /would/ say that if you are playing a vamp (a ghoul?) who is eating raw meat, it shouldn’t be as simple as just grabbing a pound of ground beef from the supermarket. Pounds upon pounds is how I’d want to do it!
I have seen it once, in a one-shot. They worked at a morgue and fed themselves that way. Was a really cool character actually. 🙂
The move Eternal Hunger explicitly says that it is HUMAN meat/blood/emotions and there is a Corruption advance for other kinds of creatures (though the implication to me is still sentient).
Meat definitely seems the hardest. For the “they don’t die” choice I’d probably interpret that usually as eating meat from corpses rather than a living person. While it doesn’t have the same risks as attacking a person directly, getting reliable access to reasonably fresh corpses has its own issues and drama.
In retrospect, it’s kind of weird that a Vamp has to become terribly corrupted before they can stop eating people. I feel like Adaptable Palate might’ve fit better as a normal advance. Ah, well.
Regardless, ghoulish mortuary Vamp is a damned cool concept!
I can kind if dig that angle, but I feel like it only works if you’re thinking of your character as inhuman, rather than as a human who’s been cursed. Also, that advance says you can feed on any creature, not just any sentient creature, so you could subsist entirely on feeder mice or something instead of going all super-cannibal.
(Note to self: find an opportunity to play a Vamp pet shop owner!)
So yeah, doesn’t instinctively feel like a corruption advance to me. Going off on a tangent, though!
In Iain Banks’ Consider Phlebas the prophet of the Eaters cult had special teeth he used to strip the flesh from fingers. I imagine these to be a little like a cigar cutter.
I think you could easily say a mouthful of flesh from a living human being is enough to sate your craving. This is very possible to survive. I can see a food source appearing normal above the clothing but having horrible bites in various stages of healing on their body and limbs where it won’t show.
I’m sure having someone take a bite out of you is someone somewhere’s fetish so I can easily see how the food source could get addicted to this.
Go gangster! Cut off fingers to send messages and punish failure! Bun debts having people off or cripple your enemies… By cutting parts of them off. Make more enemies! Be driven by needing to find new ways to feed without just ripping into some poor sucker like a bunch of baby back ribs.