Vampire (any edition): Flight discipline

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Necrozius

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EDIT: just realized that I messed up dots 3 and 4. Fixed! Silly copy+paste goof up.

Something that has always bugged me about any World of Darkness Vampire system, new, old, revised or anniversary. There's never been any discipline that enables a power featured in vampire media all over: that of defying gravity.
  • wall crawling
  • jumping really high and/or far (leap up to ceiling, effortlessly jump from rooftop to rooftop)
  • floating
  • hovering in the air
  • full-on superman flight
Now I've heard people say that with a clever application of Discipline X and Thaumaturgy Y, or simply with great Potence and Protean, you can blah blah blah no really, I wonder why there isn't something like this.

Here's how I'd do it. I have no idea which clan would have access to this, but I'd want features of it to be universal, to be honest.

• climb up walls at the speed of a walk, or even hang from ceilings (just like Spiderman)
•• leap vertically very high and quickly (not sure about height system) or horizontally very far
••• slowly rise up into the air or float down (slow speed, but combined with the previous dots...)
•••• fly slowly (speed of a walk or jog) in any direction
••••• full on Superman flight

What do you think? Has anyone tackled this before?

Paging Doc Sammy: you must've thought of this too...
 
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I came up with something like this a long time ago, but it didn't have extra leaping.
 
Gargoyles have this in Masquerade, although it's just straight flight without the wall climbing or leaping powers.
 
I figured it might be cool to have the power come on gradually: that it's more about defying gravity in a supernatural sense while tapping into a few mythical tropes.
 
Something that has always bugged me about any World of Darkness Vampire system, new, old, revised or anniversary. There's never been any discipline that enables a power featured in vampire media all over: that of defying gravity.

You know, I never noticed this. Good point. Maybe it's just too much for the masquerade, all those pale people with almost no shirt flying past office windows or against the light of the moon.

Here's how I'd do it. I have no idea which clan would have access to this, but I'd want features of it to be universal, to be honest.

Toreador, Tremere, Ventrue, and Lasombra are the ones that make sense to me. Vampire flight is stately and masterful in my mind.
 
I've never actually thought of this before, but it is a cool idea for a Discipline.
 
EDIT: just realized that I accidentally made dots 3 and 4 exactly the same. That was a typo. I need to better proofread my stuff.

I think that a "Flight" discipline would be more interesting if it wasn't just a flat progression of "you can fly a bit, then a bit faster/higher, then a bit MORE fast/high etc..." and instead structured like some of the existing powers. I mean, look at Protean, Animalism, Dominate. They have different abilities at each dot that scale up in power but they're not all the exact same effect.

That's my reasoning for: spider crawl, supernatural leap, slow floating etc...
 
Well Necrozius you just blew my mind.

I picked up my first copy of Vampire The Masquerade back in my college years (must of been the early 1990s), and played WoD pretty solidly for almost a decade until it all kinda became bloated and ran out of steam. Listened to The Crow soundtrack to death everytime I wanted inspiration for Vampire, and Enigma everytime I played Mage. Never really got into much of the nWoD stuff that came afterwards, but I recently got back into collecting the anniversary revised versions of oWoD. So yeah, I considered myself a fan of all this WoD stuff.

And I never realised this at all. I assumed some clan had these abilities, but reading this I can't believe it was overlooked. I love the spider-wall climbing stuff, it's very eerie and an iconic vampiric ability, and vampiric flight is definately a thing for some vampires in literature.

So it's not just a Flight ability, it's more of a Supernatural Movement ability. I like the tiers you have come up with.

I think it should be an optional Discipline available to all Kindred, either that or it is something that has been lost to current Generations but earlier Generations have it as an option.

Anyway it's pretty cool, and I'm amazed that it was not officially covered somewhere.
 
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Non-shapechanged vampiric flight makes me think of the badly green-screened transition scenes from Forever Knight. I'm not quite sure myself whether this counts as a pro or con to the general idea...
 
Yeah for every cool scene in a medium we get others that are super lame. Vampire powers can look really neat or stupid.

Some scenes that stick to my mind for being cool visuals
  • Interview with the Vampire: that fellow walking up a wall and even standing upside down under a bridge
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula: titular character climbing down a wall like a lizard or spider
  • Salem's Lot: the kid vampire floating up to a window sinisterly waving
  • Underworld (1): vampire lady leaps up to ceiling and hangs there like a cat/spider
I would like to remember more in which they're full-on flying, but I can't.

Come to think of it, most of my memories are of characters climbing, leaping and hovering, not flying. Hmm
 
Come to think of it, most of my memories are of characters climbing, leaping and hovering, not flying. Hmm

"I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall." - Some old book

 
True Blood had flying vampires, always done with Eric flying away at superspeed at the end of a scene.




And one more with an added soundrack.
 
I'm going to double down on the Canadian shlock:

(Minute 7+, flying powder on vampire cloaks, IIRC; better villain than any Blade/Twilight flick)
 
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