Ordo Velum Mundi · Historical Archives Division
The Codex
The world has rules. The supernatural operates according to documented principles: belief-based power systems, Progenitor lineages, the seven societies, and the mechanisms the Velum Institute has spent seven hundred years mapping.
Selected records have been cleared for external distribution. Additional documentation remains classified pending mandatory review cycles.
Bestiary: Vampire (25)
Adze
The Adze's true nature is invisible in its primary form: it appears as a firefly. This is not a disguise or a shapeshifted human form but the creature's fundamental resting state. As a firefly, it passes through walls and windows, is effectively undetectable in any normal sense, and can enter any occupied space. When captured or physically trapped by a...
Alukah / Estrie
The Estrie presents as a beautiful, sometimes disorienting beauty, a woman who appears in the night with her hair loose (considered in the relevant tradition to be deeply immodest and a signal of supernatural or transgressive identity). The hair is specifically the Estrie's identifier in tradition: it flies loose and wild even in still air, and the creature...
Asanbosam / Sasabonsam
The Asanbosam is the most immediately inhuman of the African vampire variants: tall, with a wingspan of approximately twenty feet, primarily humanoid in body structure but with legs that end in iron hooks rather than feet (or in some accounts, iron teeth), and large bloodshot eyes that glow in low light. The creature's skin is described as hairy, and the...
Aswang
The Aswang is unique among vampire-lineage classifications in being genuinely an umbrella category for multiple distinct subtypes that are classified together by Filipino folk tradition. OVM analysis has identified at minimum five distinct supernatural entities operating under the Aswang label, of which three (the blood-drinking witch, the Manananggal, and...
Bruxa
The Bruxa is unique among vampire-lineage creatures in that its transformation point is not the usual siring process but an extended period of deliberate engagement with vampiric power. A Bruxa begins as a human woman (historically almost always female, though the OVM has documented male equivalents) who actively seeks vampiric ability through ritual...
Chupacabra
The Chupacabra presents in two primary forms reported by witnesses, which the OVM has determined are actually two distinct creatures incorrectly grouped under the same name. The first (reptilian, bipedal, with spines along its back and red eyes) is the Puerto Rican original manifestation and is the Vampire Progenitor variant. The second (mange-afflicted...
Churel
The Churel's most distinctive physical tell is in the feet: the feet are reversed, pointing backward. All movement must therefore be considered carefully, as a Churel walking toward you has its feet pointing away, and vice versa. Beyond this, the Churel presents as the woman she was in life, sometimes beautiful and sometimes deliberately beautiful in a way...
Cihuateteo
The Cihuateteo manifests at crossroads on the five specific calendar days associated with their activity, appearing either in their true supernatural form or, when hunting, in the form of animals: coyotes, screech owls, or poisonous serpents. In their supernatural form, they are strikingly described: chalk-white skin, skeletal faces, wearing white garments,...
Impundulu
The Impundulu in its natural form is a large bird of dramatically contrasting colouration: black and white, with a wingspan that can exceed twelve feet. It can generate lightning from its wings in flight, and its association with storms means it is most active and powerful during thunderstorms. In its secondary form, adopted for specific purposes, it...
Jiangshi
The Jiangshi is immediately distinctive in a way that most vampire variants are not: it does not move naturally. The body is in a state of advanced rigor mortis, which means the creature cannot bend at the joints. Movement is accomplished entirely by hopping, with arms extended forward for balance and spatial awareness. The skin is greenish-white, carrying...
Krasue
Identical in core concept to the Penanggalan: a severed glowing head with organs trailing beneath, floating through darkness. The Krasue tradition adds specific detail about the creature's origin in Thai noble or royal courts: a high-status woman subjected to a curse, or who performed prohibited magical rituals, whose head and organs are separated from her...
Lidérc
The Lidérc's most striking characteristic is its extraordinary physical beauty. Where the Strigoi carries an uncanny, almost threatening quality of perfection, the Lidérc is simply beautiful in the most immediately human sense of the term: warm skin, expressive eyes, a manner of movement that reads as entirely natural and deeply appealing. The creature...
Lugat / Kukudh
The Lugat is a relatively unmarked creature in appearance, presenting as a healthy-looking human being of unremarkable appearance who might pass entirely unnoticed in any setting. Albanian folk tradition described the Lugat as identifiable not by appearance but by its shoes wearing out from the inside out, as it walks barefoot inside its skin. In the world,...
Moroi
The Moroi presents as a more translucent, less fully-embodied version of the Strigoi. Where the Strigoi is solid, immediate, and physically commanding, the Moroi carries an unsettling quality of partial-presence: skin that seems to show faint shadows of bone, eyes that are pale and milky rather than burning, movements that register in peripheral vision but...
Nachzehrer
The Nachzehrer is the vampire variant most associated with the aesthetics of plague. They manifest as beings of excess: too present, too substantial, with a bloated quality that suggests consumption rather than deprivation. Unlike the wasted pallor of cinematic vampires, a well-fed Nachzehrer appears over-nourished, the skin flushed with other people's...
Obayifo
By day, the Obayifo is completely human, one of the most convincing human-form presentations of any vampire variant. There is no tell available to normal human perception. At night, when the creature feeds or moves through the supernatural space between bodies, it emits a faint phosphorescent light from specific body points, which is the only reliable...
Penanggalan
The Penanggalan manifests as a normal woman by day, maintaining a perfectly conventional human appearance. By night, the head separates from the body, trailing a glowing mass of internal organs (stomach, intestines, lymph nodes) soaking in vinegar to prevent them from decaying or expanding. This separated head-and-organs floats, guided by intelligence and...
Pontianak
The Pontianak presents as a beautiful young woman in a white dress, with long black hair, who is first detected by the sweet floral scent she emits (which is supernatural and not tied to perfume or any physical source). The scent shifts to a distinctive rotting smell when the Pontianak is actively feeding or agitated. Her back, if visible, shows a hole at...
Soucouyant / Loogaroo
By day, the Soucouyant presents as an unremarkable elderly woman, often reclusive, living alone at the edge of a community. This presentation is not entirely a disguise: the Soucouyant genuinely ages in her human form between skin-sheddings, and over long periods of existence manifests the physical markers of extreme age. By night, after removing her human...
Strigoi
The Strigoi manifests as a being anchored at their physical state at the moment of transformation, aging so imperceptibly slowly as to appear unchanging on a human timescale. Skin takes on an almost porcelain quality with a faint luminosity, as though moonlight lives just beneath the surface. Eyes carry an unnatural depth, and under conditions of extreme...
Strix / Striges
The Strix represents the oldest documented form of vampiric entity in the European record, predating the Progenitor and functioning as one of the proto-supernatural phenomena that contributed to shaping the cultural template that eventually channelled the vampire lineage into Vlad's transformation. Whether ancient Striges were vampiric entities of a...
Strzyga
The Strzyga in Polish tradition was often identified during life, not after death: individuals born with certain features (teeth at birth, a caul, an extra row of upper teeth) were considered pre-Strzyga and handled accordingly. In the world, this folk-identification process proved surprisingly accurate. Individuals born with these characteristics carry a...
Upyr
The Upyr presents with an unnerving specificity that differs from most vampire-lineage creatures: they look almost completely human, but wrong in ways that take a moment to identify. The skin holds colour but not quite the right colour, a slightly yellowish cast that suggests stored life-force rather than natural pigmentation. The eyes are frequently...
Vampir / Vampyr
The term "vampire" in English derives ultimately from these South Slavic traditions, and the creatures of this lineage represent in some sense the most "archetypal" modern conception: pale, physically attractive, formally dressed in the fashion of their era of transformation, nocturnal, and feeding on blood. But the specifics carry distinct South Slavic...
Vrykolakas
The Vrykolakas presents as a corpse that refuses to decay: solid, preserved, with a peculiar drum-like tautness to the flesh that gives the creature's body an unusual resonant quality when struck, as though the skin is stretched over something that fills it completely. The complexion holds a brownish-ruddy tinge from the blood pooled in the preserved...