Fang and Fury - Guidebook to Vampires.pdf

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Chapter Eight: Equipment
Races of Renown: Fang & Fury
In the hands of a vampire, these drops pulse with unnatural vitality
and seem to shine like pinpricks welling blood. A vampire wielder
can resist the Thirst by drawing on some of their divine power. Once
per week, the wielder can attempt a Concentration check (DC 16)
to call on this power. If the check is successful, the wielder takes
no damage from the Thirst for 1d3 days (though he still suffers the
normal effects of sunlight exposure).
If a lawful good cleric casts true resurrection on one of these drops, it
is destroyed and re-forms into an echo of the long-dead deity from
which it once fell. This entity is badly weakened and lacks true divine
power, but it is still mighty by mortal standards. Treat the echo as a 44
HD solar; it will perform one of the following tasks for its restorer.
• Grant a single wish.
• Attack any single evil creature that the wielder knows personally.
• Bestow discern lies on the wielder as a permanent supernatural
ability that can be activated as a free action.
• Grant the wielder a permanent +4 sacred bonus on turn
checks made against vampires.
Once it has granted this reward, the reconstituted deity returns to its
home on the Outer Planes.
Heart Vault
Only a handful of these artifacts are known to exist, and all are
guarded by powerful vampires of great age. In the few recorded
cases when a new example has been unearthed, or “liberated” from
its prior owner, every vampire in the region has descended on the
site to claim the prize.
A heart vault resembles a small black iron jar, rough cast from a sand
mold. It has a crude stopper of beeswax and pitch and stands upright on
three short legs. A vampire can spend one day to remove her heart and
place it in the vault, which then vanishes into the Deep Ethereal. It can
be recalled to the Material Plane only by completing a special ceremony,
which requires gallons of fresh blood and the secret name of the vault’s
owner, as well as a successful Knowledge (arcana) check (DC 18).
Following the operation, the vampire permanently loses 1d4 hp per
Hit Die (to a minimum of 1 hp), and takes a –4 penalty to Strength
and Dexterity for one month. In return, the vampire is totally
immune to staking attacks of any type—her heart simply doesn’t
reside in her chest. There is a cumulative 1% chance per month of
use that the heart vault is discovered by a random ethereal creature.
Possible consequences to the vampire include becoming a slave of
an outsider or being destroyed outright. The vault itself has hardness
10, 30 hit points, and a break DC of 28.
Major Artifacts
These creations are both mighty and terrible, carrying doom even
greater than their power.
The Cask of Brand
The entity known as Brand does not simply appear in his rare
visits. He plummets from the sky in a blaze of fire like a shooting
star, encapsulated in a great sarcophagus that explodes into
whatever is unlucky enough to catch his fall. Within minutes of
landing, he emerges from his great casket and begins another long
walk across the face of the world. In all but one case, these sarcophagi
have been consumed by their own internal energies, causing immense