Vampiricism

Version 0.11: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

The vampiric brand (not to be confused with draining) adds a healing effect to your weapon's melee attacks against living monsters (natural holiness).

Normally it activates 80% of the time, healing you for 1d(Damage) HP. Against monsters that can bleed, Vampires can use these weapons more effectively: In addition to the previous effect, it heals min(2d(Damage), XL) against monsters with clean corpses, or min(1d(Damage), XL) if the target leaves a contaminated, or poisonous corpse. In both cases it also provides satiation. Ranged attacks with thrown vampiric weapons receive no benefit from this brand.

If the victim has life protection, there is a 33.3% chance that the healing effect will fail per rank (100% failure rate at rN+++).

Use of this weapon is considered to be Necromancy, so good gods forbid its use.

Hunger

The act of wielding a weapon of vampiricism has a hunger cost. Living characters are unable to wield it unless they have a Full or better satiation level, and they immediately lose a tremendous amount of nutrition upon doing so. Undead characters are not affected by this.

Alive & Full+: "As you grasp it, you feel a great hunger."
Alive & not Full: "As you grasp it, you feel a great hunger. Being not satiated, you stop."
Undead: "You feel an empty sense of dread."
Vampire: "You feel a bloodthirsty glee!"

Attack Flavour

Some monsters have innate vampiric attacks that are slightly different from the weapon brand. These attacks can heal the attacker only if the defender can bleed. This means that the following player conditions will prevent the monster's vampiric attacks from providing healing:

• Being a mummy, ghoul or a vampire below satiated
• rN+++
• Some transmutations: Spider Form, Ice Form, Statue Form, Necromutation

Tips & Tricks

• Vampiricism is one of the best brands in the game.
• Vampiricism is an excellent way for deep dwarf, and bloodless vampire characters to heal.
• This brand works equally well on any weapon, though it is much safer when found on sharp weapons. Switching weapons to butcher corpses will almost certainly cost you more nutrition than you gain. Using Animate Skeleton is a good work-around for this issue.

History

Prior to 0.6, these weapons increased the hunger cost for all actions instead of having a large set hunger cost. Vampires received a smaller hunger penalty. Also, all species received satiation with each attack.