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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 1803652" data-attributes="member: 8158">The "vampire's plaything" arguement is a little overplayed in this thread. It certainly doesn't seem to have a lot of thought put into it. Obviously, the aspiring vampire is not going to petition someone on the order of Strahd Von Zarovich to turn him.Because an individual vampire isn't necessarily a particularly powerful entity (they can be as low as 5 HD), it's really not that hard to create a controlled situation where the vampire creator is essentially at the wizard's mercy--whether or not its aware of that--with pre-arrangments for its destruction as soon as its served its purpose. For instance, the wizard can awaken in 1d4 days to a bucket of ashes at its feet, courtesy of negotiations made a week earlier through a planar ally spell. Even easier to arrange, however, is simply to ensure that you're so far out of your creator's league that it simply can't control you. As per the Monster Manual: "At any given time a vampire may have enslaved spawn totaling no more than twice its own Hit Dice; any spawn it creates that would exceed this limit are created as free-willed vampires or vampire spawn". If it's 5 HD, and you're even as low as 11th level, you're in good shape.Now as to addressing some of the more obvious (and snarky) rebuttals I can likely expect: while wizards don't have their own copies of the Monster Manual to look this up in, they certainly are capable of doing considerable research on the subject of vampirism. And while vampires don't have their hit die stamped on their forehand, it is nonetheless easy enough to go hunting low-rent mausoleums for two-bit vamps, perform a few tests and gauge its strengths (in fact, as long as the wizard doesn't destroy the subject's coffin, he can obliterate the poor creature to his heart's content, jotting down little notes on his pad until he's fully satisfied).  There is precedence for this. I recall reading in the FRCS supplement "Lords of Darkness" that one of the archmage Manshoon's clones had been drained by a vampire name of Orlak, and "his first act upon rising was to hunt down and destroy its creator". Now, aside from the fact that the rules just don't seem to apply to FR characters, I suspect that this was accomplished by the archmage being of too many HD to be bossed around.</blockquote>

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