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Basalt Alltrades
#5
My favorite is vampires, but certainly not the Dracula or Twilight kinds, I'm talking Vampire: The Masquerade Vampires.
While this flavor of vampire retains the dependency on blood and aversion to sunlight, which were great horror cornerstones back when humanity was more day-oriented and blood was considered more of a person's life force and less the stuff that feeds our cells, it builds further with different clans and bloodlines of having different powers and attributes. For instance, the Nosferatu are mostly ugly as sin and quite a few live in sewers and underground tunnels, but their clan powers mostly center around animalism, potence, and obfuscate, which means that they have varying degrees of power of animals (most notably rats for them), superhuman strength, and the ability to hide or create illusions. And that's just 1 major clan out of what I think are the 10 major clans, with, of course, subfactions here of there, but that's not important.
Where this flavor of vampire shines for me is it is all about the age of the vampires in relation to their power and about how they keep The Masquerade to prevent the Kine (mortals) from being aware of their existence while the different vampires all basically screw with each other to gather more power while stripping the other clans of their power. The older a vampire, the more powerful it is, obviously, but it turns into a giant interesting mess of Methuselahs (the most oldest vampires) influencing younger vampires without them really knowing about it who in turn control or influence even younger vampires or Kine minions or supplies and it just branches out into a giant web of utter shenanigans where all your actions are made up and your individual goals don't matter because you might be being influenced by an older vampire to accomplish their goals without even knowing it.
They had an interesting TCG that used 2 decks and a multitude of actions utilizing political actions and straight-up combat to bleed your opposing Methuselahs little by little to beat everyone else out a little after I was born and I've never got to actually play it... :c
Also, Twilight-brand(tm) vampires make me butthurt.