Wight

A Wight is a vampire whose Humanity or Path of Enlightenment has fallen to the rating of 0. They are, for all intents and purposes, the Beast within themselves. A character who has fallen to Wassail can never be saved or again played.

Overview

While most people assume that such creatures are ravenous monsters in constant frenzy, such is not always the case. Each Cainite's Beast is different. While some are indeed raging fiends, others evince a low cunning or practiced survival urge. That being said, it should be noted that older wights don't differ in behavior much as compared to younger ones.

It has been observed that a vampire's Nature can influence its behavior as a wight. In general, if a wight does not perceive its unlife to be in direct danger and if it is not hungry (its blood pool more than 3/4 full) it will persue interests related to its former Nature. Only a wight whose Nature was that of a Monster will kill and kill again, no matter how full its blood pool is.

Despite being simple minded creatures, it is possible for a wight to retain some memories of his previous state of existence, but this would depend on its Willpower rating. A wight with a Willpower of 3 or less is incapable of strategy and reasoning, hunting chiefly by animal instinct, but a wight with higher willpower rating can even retain some Abilities - for every point above Willpower 3, a wight can retain one dot of a given Ability.

Obviously abilities such as Alertness, Athletics, Brawl, Dodge, Intimidation and Stealth are not affected by this restriction, but other abilities like Academics or Computer are inappropriate for wights regardless of their Willpower score. Likewise, retaining Linguistics rating only means that the wight can understand the languages it once knew (as opposed to actually speaking them).

Strenghts and Weaknesses

These creatures are nearly impossible to influence mentally or emotionally, and all uses of Dominate and Presence are dramatically more difficult. They only acknowledge pain from Fire or Sunlight, and are able to soak bashing or lethal wounds more easily than normal vampires. However, they are also extremely susceptible to Frenzy or Rötschreck, and most will flee Fire and Sunlight without even bother to resist the red fear - and the same applies when they are confronted with True Faith.

The inhumane character of a Wight makes it unattractive by normal standards. Its moral degeneration and lack of vanity makes them obvious monstrosities and as such, no Wight may have an Appearance score higher than 1. A wight is fundamentally incapable of allying itself with any Kindred save for other wights.

Wight Packs

A pack of two or more wights are an immediate threat to all Kindred and kine in the city where they are hunting. Even a single wight will often be subject to a blood hunt as soon as its existence is discovered, as it is inherently dangerous both to the Masquerade and to any and all other Kindred — the wight has no compunctions against diablerie, but will only perform the act if he already knew such practices before losing himself to the Beast.

In a group of wights, the strongest becomes a sort of default leader, and the pack affects crude attempts of strategy (harrying prey like wolves, attacking en masse and so forth). Weaker wights will fight to Final Death to protect their leader.

Disciplines

As Wights are purely Beasts with no Man to guide them, and as such they rarely can use a Discipline over level three, and cannot use Disciplines that require finesse, patience, or ritual behavior. Physical disciplines (Potence, Fortitude, Celerity) have no upper limits except the maximum dictated by the Wight's generation, but all forms of blood magic (both paths and rituals) are unusable by wights.

Being incapable of any form of social interaction other than that which intimidates or causes fear, Dominate is inaccessible to them, such as most powers of Presence (for instance, they can use Dread Gaze, but not Awe).  A Wight developing Obfuscate would learn only the first two levels, as the third is too involved for its mind to grasp.

Trivia

• "Wight" may be used to refer to either a supernatural horror or simply a (terrible) human being.

• The term is also applied by elders as an old form of referring to mortals in general.

• In Greece, the word vrykolakas (plural vrykolakes) is instead used for vampires with no Humanity.

• In Vampire: The Requiem, the term draugr is used for vampires who have fully succumbed to the Beast.

References

• Sins of the Blood, p. 9, 17-24