alright, I have some ideas I would like to share. as we all know, vampires in fortress mode leave behind bloodless corpses. What if these corpses turned into vampires after some time? Like, the poor dwarf was placed in a coffin, and after some time(a week, a season, a couple of years... random stretches of time to give it a ticking-timebomb feel) they punch their way out of the coffin, and either run off to change their name and join another fort, go berserker on your fort, or seek out the vampire that vamped them for some retribution (if he/she's still around). having to destroy the body out of fear of it coming back as a night creature would make things much more fun, right?
Now, for adventure mode vamps... Most of the time I turned into a vamp by toppling a statue at a temple. But I just got a message saying that I had been cursed, and then after a day I would go next to a sleeping person and suck their blood, and then and only then the ñ would appear.
what if the moment you become a vamp (drinking/toppling) you also become a follower of a god with evil spheres? and that god talks to you.
I always found it weird that vamps made crafts out of the things they killed by drinking their blood just for the sake of a trophy... but what if the reason they do that is to appease the evil god? Like, if you get cursed, that night the evil god speaks with you and tells you that he/she owns your sorry butt. That now you're a vampire, that sunlight will spell your doom, and the only way to avoid becoming a pile of ash is to drink the blood of the living. Regularly. But that not all is lost (your soul most certainly is), that if you follow his/her commands, he/she can grant you boons of power, abilities beyond just being sun proof.
You could refuse to believe what the god is telling you, and find out just how much the sun can hurt you, or you can go find someone sleeping and drink their blood. and then the god would speak with you again. The god tells you to drink the person dry, killing them. You could refuse, saying that you feel strong enough already to withstand the sun and that you're cutting off all ties with the god, becoming a vampire with none of the benefits (super strength/agility/NOPAIN tag) and all the drawbacks (having to drink blood, going into some kind of cave adaptation thingy if you dont drink enough...)
... Or you could gladly comply. and the god tells you that since people that have been sucked dry WILL become vampires, the corpse infront of you is very valuable. That the vampire curse is twisting the corpse as you speak, filling the empty veins with evil and dark magic... (I wanna say negative energy, but that's too D&D), but that the soul has not been trapped into this evil shell yet. And the god teaches you how to make crafts out of these turning corpses, these "unborn vampires", and by making and wearing more and more of these items, you can become stronger. That's how you would gain doubled speed and strength, the no pain tag, maybe even the ability to turn into mist if you're deadly wounded, to retreat from the fight...
The god could even give you "quests", telling you to make a craft out of a specific creature (could you get the ability to turn into a beast vampire thing that could fly by wearing a necklace made from the bones of a dragon?), or kill the priest of another god, or make more vampires, or defile another god's temple... or break into a vault to steal the tablet and then find the demon and bind him not to yourself, but to the evil god.
Maybe a similar "evil quest" system could be used to give abilities to werebeasts and necromancers. Wanna learn how to supress your transformations? do me a little favor. wanna learn how to turn at will? do me a bigger favor. Wanna learn how to raise more than 10 undeads at a time? wanna learn how to come back from among the dead yourself?
There's soo much potential for night creatures...