Torpor

The word torpor refers to the state of deep slumber that vampires enter into for prolonged periods of time. Torpor may be entered into voluntarily, such as when one seeks to escape the monotony of eternal life and awaken in a different age, or, more commonly, involuntarily when a vampire starves, is staked, or suffers damage sufficient to kill a mortal. The amount of time one spends in torpor depends on the reason for hibernating and the vampire's strength against the Beast.

Torpor is often a disturbing experience where the vampire's mind wanders through memories of one's Requiem and her mortal existence. These events are relived over and over, each time seeing different outcomes, different participants, different precedents. This can cloud a vampire's memory to such an extent that they cannot clearly remember events that occurred before their last stint of torpor, an effect called the Fog of Eternity.

During this time the body swiftly dries out and takes on the appearance of being mummified. The skin contracts around the bones, the eyes dry out and sink into their sockets, hair become fine and brittle. The muscles of one's mouth retreat, forming a rictus around the teeth. To all appearances, the vampire is a long dead corpse.

Wounding

Wounds sufficient to kill mortals send the Kindred into torpor, instead. If a vampire’s rightmost Health box is occupied by a lethal wound, she enters torpor instead of dying. (Recall that sufficient bashing damage can convert to lethal damage, so a good beating with, say, baseball bats can send a Kindred into torpor.)

The duration of this torpor depends on the character’s Humanity and her Blood Potency. A high Blood Potency extends the torpor’s duration; so does having a low Humanity. High-Humanity vampires spend much less time in torpor than Kindred who have given most of themselves to the Beast.

To calculate the length of time a wounded Kindred spends in torpor, consult the above table. The character’s Humanity score determines a base time spent in torpor. Multiply that span by the character’s Blood Potency to find the total duration of the slumber.

Zero-Humanity vampires form an important exception to this system. When they enter torpor from wounding, they sleep for an even millennium, regardless of their Blood Potency.

While in torpor, a wounded vampire can expend Vitae but can take no other action. His undead body still expends one Vitae per night as it tries to restore itself to its post-Embrace condition. The character can also expend Vitae to heal himself — a good idea, since otherwise the Vitae just trickles away without doing anything useful. Any damage that the vampire cannot heal remains on the character’s withered body until he can rise and feed again.

If the vampire lacks sufficient reserves of Vitae to heal at least three points of the damage (whether lethal or aggravated) that sent her to torpor, that torpor lasts longer than usual. Calculate the torpor’s duration as if the character’s Blood Potency were one higher than it actually is.

If the character succumbs to torpor with no Vitae left and has lost all of her Health points to lethal or aggravated damage, she awakens having recovered one Health point as a result of the torpor, which she doesn’t have to pay for with Vitae. In effect, the character recovers this Health point for free, as a result of the stabilizing sleep of torpor.

Starvation

A Kindred who sleeps during the day and who has no Vitae — but who is not truly in torpor — fails to rise. All Vitae in him has been exhausted, so he has none to spend to rise the next night. For every night that passes under these circumstances, the character suffers a point of lethal damage in lieu of spending Vitae. In this state, the character is incapable of functioning at all, yet is not in torpor. This is important because this vampire does not need exceptionally potent Vitae to be roused yet — see p. 178. At this point, any Vitae given to him allows him to rise as normal (fed only a few Vitae, the character probably rises in a hunger frenzy). Denied any Vitae from an outside source, a starving character continues to suffer one lethal wound a night until he slips into torpor.

The character sleeps in torpor for a duration determined by the preceding chart: the base duration set by the character’s Humanity, multiplied by a number one higher than the character’s Blood Potency. At the torpor’s end, the character awakens with only one Health point restored, as discussed previously.

Voluntary Torpor

Kindred can also enter torpor deliberately. Sometimes unlife just gets to be too much and a Kindred decides to sleep in hopes that some of her problems will be solved by the time she wakes again. Elder vampires also sometimes use torpor to reduce their Blood Potency when feeding becomes too inconvenient.

Vampires seldom enter voluntary torpor lightly. An extended torpor usually requires abandoning all responsibilities in the Kindred world and all the influence so painstakingly built in the mortal world. A Kindred might hope that his childer remain reasonably loyal and greet him with respect when he rises again. He might also hope that his centuries of experience bring him honor among other Kindred and win him at least a minor title in his covenant and city’s undead community, but he cannot realistically hope to resume his old offices as if he’d never left.

Voluntary torpor lasts at least as long as the base duration set by the character’s Humanity. At the end of that time, the character wakes if his player makes a successful Resolve + Composure roll. If the roll fails, the character remains in torpor for another increment of time, and so on, until the number of increments equals the Blood Potency the character had when the torpor began. At that point, he rises automatically

Staking

Finally, a vampire enters torpor when a wooden stake penetrates his heart. Only wood has this effect. Rods of metal, plastic or other substances can damage the vampire by piercing the heart, but only wood induces torpor. Kindred mystics offer a number of religious and occult theories for why wood has this power. Most Kindred simply accept it as a fact of unlife.

Driving a stake through a vampire’s heart is extraordinarily difficult. The feat requires a melee or ranged attack with the stake. In combat, the attacker suffers a -4 dice penalty to strike so precisely. Then the attacker must inflict at least three points of lethal damage for the stake to actually thrust through the vampire’s body and into the heart. The staked vampire immediately collapses into torpor, appearing stone dead for all that a mortal could tell.

A staked vampire remains in torpor indefinitely. The Kindred awakens only when someone or something removes the stake from his heart. An unwary mortal might remove the stake from what looks like a mummified corpse. A rat might gnaw at the stake enough to dislodge it, or termites might eat the stake away completely. Until something like this occurs, however, the vampire sleeps. Grim tales among the Kindred tell of vampires who work around Princely edicts forbidding murder and Humanity erosion by trapping their enemies with stakes through the heart and burying them in secure and secret crypts, there to sleep until the Day of Judgment.

Glossary

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