Title is pretty self explanatory, tbh. I was wondering what people thought of RPing vampyrs and San’layns. I always thought they were very interesting, and I even had the idea to perhaps play one myself, but I was genuinely curious to see what people thought about those!
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I love RPing my San’layn. A lot of people don’t like the idea of people RPing San’layn. A lot of other people think it’s fine, or think it’s fine within certain parameters, or don’t care.
It is tricky that we know almost nothing about the San’layn – as a group or with regard to more than two individuals – post-Wrath, and not all that much from Wrath either. How many still exist, where they might be, and what they might or might not be doing are all things we have to guess about.
A surprising number of people have tried to tell me that because Blood Prince Dreven worked for Sylvanas during BfA, then killed some Horde deckhands, it is Lore that “the San’layn” as a group joined the Horde in BfA and then “the San’layn” as a group betrayed the Horde and therefore, it is impossible for any San’layn to be an accepted member of the Horde anymore. I think this is unlikely. It doesn’t seem to me like “the San’layn” as a group did anything in BfA at all so much as Blood Prince Dreven in particular did, and we can’t actually infer very much past that without more information to go on.
I think that if you want to play a San’layn, you should give it a try. I’d also say that some people are going to tell you that you shouldn’t play one or that you’re doing it wrong for one reason or another, and others are going to interpret and flesh out the sparse lore we have about San’layn in a number of different ways. But none of that means you can’t have fun doing it. It’s one of those things that comes down to finding the right people to do it with.
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What year is it? We gonna talk about protests and pandemics next?
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You may RP as a San’layn.
You may not RP as a San’layn hotter than an NPC San’layn.
That’s lore-breaking.
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I mean that goes without saying xD
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
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Thank you, that does tell me a lot. I might give it a try <3
You have mentioned Vampyrs, I am summoned!
I bent over backwards to make a lore-abiding Vampyr with this character. She’s part of the pirate crew of the Red Blade that got turned undead by the Vrykul Blood Thane in Stromheim. Vampirate! Because why be just a vampyre or just a pirate, when you can be both!
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hahaha very very true.
I am very tempted to make a vampyr myself, but I really wanna do my research first.
Personally, I never quite cared for the subject, in part given how vaporous and obscure Vampire lore seems to be in general, especially not pertaining to San’layn. Of course I don’t disparage anyone else who wants to do it. It’s technically not outside of established canon so I won’t fully ignore it. Like with most things my fellow rpers do that I don’t approve of, I just keep to myself and avoid the anathema as I please.
AFAWK, the San’layn got a body-blow in the Icecrown Citadel fight with their three Princes and their Queen getting wafflestomped by the Murderhobos Honster Mumpers Florida People Champions of the Alliance on their way up to fight the Lich King.
A large chunk of them allied with the Horde but were slain during the War of Thorns.
And there was another San’layn who showed up during the Sin’dorei Heritage questline, having found a way to tie themselves to the powers of the Shadowlands for true immortality, blending traits of their Hemomantic arts with the phylacteries of a Lich, but they were ultimately slain.
What San’layn remain today are unknown, but it is likely they possess an addiction to Blood Magic, which is, surprisingly enough, a natural response to Hemomancy as the accumulation of life force from draining blood to power your spells tends to affect the spellcaster in a narcotic-adjacent kind of way, much like the Fel and, to a limited extent, the Arcane does. Odds are they’d likely be less powerful members like the trash-mobs we chewed through on the way to the San’layn ‘Royalty’, or ‘replacements’ spawned by the surviving San’layn who might not possess the full suite of powers and abilities of a proper Scourge-raised San’layn. Regardless, San’layn seem to all possess some level of innate Hemomantic powers, being able to drain blood at a distance, discorporate into bats or mists of blood, and the ability to rapidly regenerate their forms and take on a almost-living appearance if consuming large amounts of blood.
There’s also the Blood-Blades of the Broken Isles, specifically the Vampirates and their now-dead ‘Sire’, Blood-Thane Lucard, which granted vampire-like traits to their wielders and gave them an overwhelming thirst for blood. Notably, these ‘Vampirates’ are affected both by the red mist emitted from Blood-Thane Lucard’s crypt, and possession of the Blood-Blades, turning the Red Blade Pirates into frenzied savages who are desperate to feed themselves with blood. Despite the death of Blood-Thane Lucard, the crazed state remained, although if this is due to the fact the Red Blade Pirates were still trapped in a place with nothing to slake their thirst, or if it is a permanent state of being.
Notably, the Blood-Blades did curse their wielders into a state similar to the San’layn, including turning them into Undead in the process, but the ‘Vampirate’ strain of the Blood Curse doesn’t grant any natural Hemomantic abilities. They ‘feed’ by using the Blood Blades to strike a victim, and the blades seem to absorb the blade and ‘feed’ the hunger within the Vampirates, similar to what Death Knights of the Blood School do to restore their bodies and assume a near-living state, at least in appearance, and to fuel their more offensive capabilities in turn.
Its likely that, given how the setting works, some idiot tried to either sell or capture the Blood Blades for study and they’re now out and about in the world. I know several folks who took up the blades by accident, either to study the Blood Curse of Vampirism or simply thinking they were purchasing a magical weapon, and are now stuck wandering Azeroth, feeding off of bandits, monsters and the enemies of their people and praying that they never lose possession of the weapon, as simply touching it seems to be enough to start the infection process, and without the blade, the Vampirate Strain appears to be unable to feed, leading the frenzied, maddened state we see the Vampirates reduced to in the Broken Isles.
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Is this a real thing in lore? Cause I haven’t seen it in my research of the Red Blade.
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Wow, you really have done your research, thank you! I’ll be sure to read up some more on it!
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Given that treasure hunters are recorded as prowling after adventurers to pick up what we leave off, its likely that at least a few blades we missed got handled, and given how the Blood Blades work …
That said, this is an extrapolation. Don’t take it as Word-of-God.
There’s also the whole Explorer’s League has had several members sell off recovered goods because they either A) thought it was worthless junk or B) had agendas of their own and needed cash to get it up and running.
There’s also the whole handling the blade can give you the curse. Assuming that NPCs kept at least some protocols in place, we can bet most blades were handled with great care but to study something is to get close to it, and the Member of the Explorer’s League we speak to near the Vampirates expresses surprise that a Vampire could actually die, and mentions that Vampires were both rare and had a huge swath of ways to keep them in stasis since actual true death was almost impossible to perform. Stakes through the heart seemed to symbolically turn a Vampire inert, but the Blood-Thane was unaffected due to the strain of the Blood Curse he was afflicted with.
Much of what I’ve based the theories on are the actions and attacks the Red Blade Vampirates use, and what we’ve seen Blood Mages and San’layn use, and the differences between all three groups. A lot of the lore for Vampires and Blood Mages came from the Table Top manuals, which were declared non-canon years ago as well.
I’d argue more, if you have a believable reason to have a Blood Blade, or to have been raised as a San’layn, go nuts. Just don’t have unlimited power and don’t try to be BFFs with major lore characters.
A suggestion I’d add to what Eledris said is this: For random RP - don’t necessarily advertise it. People have strong feelings about San’layn, and there’s some truth that in the lore they’ve done some bad things, so you might be better off advertising yourself IC as an “Undead Quel’dorei” or “Darkfallen”. That’ll deter some of the griefers, because Darkfallen Elves literally look exactly the same, they just lack the focus on blood magic. Still 100% be a San’layn IC, just keep it on the down-low, which makes in-universe sense, imo.
Personally I love the San’layn as a concept, and while I don’t have one, I kind of would like to make one at some point. They’ve got such a rich history - being Kael’thas’ elite forces, then working for the Illidari, dying to the Scourge, and then presumably finding their freedom once more once Arthas was slain. There’s a lot of fun backstory stuff that can be worked with, on that front. The idea bouncing around in my brain is an ex spellbreaker, but I’ve got enough alts already that I’ve never quite got around to making it happen. They’re a cool idea. But they’d likely want to hide exactly WHAT they are from all but their closest confidants, because they’ve served a fairly antagonistic role in the narrative thus far.
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Personally, I would play it the way I would any vampire, which is that it is a secret. It’s not something you go around speaking of proudly. Or at the very least, if I were to go with the idea I wanted, my character would not be proud of what they are to begin with.
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I just want to say that as someone who was on here during WOTLK when the mere mention of RPing a San’layn was enough to have you marked for death by nearly every single person on this server, it’s genuinely nice to see a rational discussion about it.
Those threads would go for hundreds of pages and basically can be summed up as “RP what you want, but you’re a terrible person and no one should ever RP with you because reasons.”
…except with a lot more vitriol and nastiness.
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San’layn RP got slapped the same issues as Dragon RP, as Orc RP, as Worgen RP, as Death Knight RP, in that there were a bunch of people being absolute chodes and trying to argue that being as powerful as they were, they would always ‘win’ at roleplay. It didn’t help that people divebombed on the opportunity to be ‘in the right’ with an argument that everybody already agreed about in the first place to pound that dead horse into a chunky puddle of pavement sealant.
Thankfully those people left, grew up or gained some much needed social interaction and power-gaming RP is basically either restricted to brand new players, which is universal across all forms of interactive media and tabletops, or sit edgily in the taverns and shriek over Tumblr, Twitter (NEVER X) and other social media that RP is dead.
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…I honestly wonder how true the “strong feelings” part is, at this point in WoW’s venerable decrepitness.
Sure, when things were thriving and we had need of common communal lore to draw from, it made sense to be a little sterner about that sort of thing. But when I walk around Orgrimmar these days, I see Blood Elves who are High Elves, Forsaken who are Blood Elves, Orcs who are secretly Ogres, Vulpera who are actually tiny Worgen and damn near everyone has some form of mechanical limb, eye or butt.
And when I weigh an Elf pretending to be a San’layn against, say, a cyborg Tauren who is half-Sethrak and channels a fire aura (because there’s always an aura), I couldn’t tell you which I find more offensive.
The community isn’t really there to agree and coalesce on a set of guidelines. Now is the age of monsters.
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I’ve been under the impression that San’layn are a subset of Darkfallen anyway, in which case this wouldn’t even be inaccurate. All the trash mobs in the Crimson Halls are called Darkfallen This and Darkfallen That, and I remember when I did the Lordaeron questline, Dark Ranger Velonara’s dialogue at the end came across to me as validating the idea that “Darkfallen” is an umbrella term for undead elves in general.
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