Protean

Protean

Protean
Clans	Annunaku, Aswang, Gangrel, Gangrel Antitribu, Rakshasa
Bloodlines	Anubi, Bohagande, Coyotes, Mariners, Matasuntha, Noiades, Sta-Au, Taifa, Zoidones
Sects	Cradle of Civilization, Independents, Jati, Laibon, Quiet Nations, Sabbat, Shining Kingdoms
Rituals	None
Combination Disciplines	Protean Combination Disciplines
Rarity	Uncommon

The powers of Protean all have to do with shifting and changing, becoming one with beasts or the very earth they walk; many a vampire with the Protean Discipline has been mistaken for some other kind of creature, or contributed to legends of strange shapeshifting beasts that stalk the night. Protean is natively practiced primarily by the Gangrel, to whom such changing, especially since it brings them closer to the natural world that they prefer, is second nature; a few members of other clans have learned it, but none could ever be said to have truly perfected it.

Basic Powers

Dolphin's Unsight

You may emit a high-pitched, almost inaudible noise that allows you to find you way even without sound, much like a bat or a whale. You are able to use this power to orient yourself in pitch darkness or underwater.

Eyes of the Beast

You may cause your eyes to glow blood-red and bright in the darkness, giving you the ability to see normally no matter how little light is present. You cannot see in the dark without your eyes glowing this way, making this power a poor choice for stealth or avoiding terrifying mortals who might cross your path.

Weight of the Feather

You may temporarily reduce your mass and density, becoming so light you barely touch the ground. This power allows you to avoid damage from falling or collisions, as well as avoiding triggering any weight-related sensors or traps; however, your strength is also proportionally reduced, so in this state you deal little physical damage and are not able to run or jump especially far.

Feral Claws

Your hands transform into dangerous, bestial claws, capable of inflicting immense damage on anyone you attack with them. In addition to going through poor humans like a hot knife through butter, they injure other vampires as badly as fire or sunlight would, and are especially effective against other types of supernatural creatures.

Phocidaean Webbing

You may grow webbing between your fingers and toes as well as thin fins along your arms and legs, giving you the ability to swim as quickly and effortlessly as a water creature. Your webbing lasts for one scene, after which you return to normal.

Intermediate Powers

Earth Meld

You may sink into the ground itself, becoming one with the earth and completely disappearing from sight (often used to rest during the day without risk of being exposed to sunlight). You must be touching raw earth to use this power (not stone, concrete, glass, or anything humanmade), and you may only take your clothing and items small enough for you to hold in your hands with you as you become one with the ground. Once buried, you cannot be found by normal detection, although the Auspex Discipline will still be able to recognize your location, you have no awareness of what's going on aboveground, and if the ground is seriously disturbed, you immediately rise back up out of it.

Metamorphosis

You may have an additional animal form to transform into with Shape of the Beast; although you can still turn into your default form, you can choose another completely different animal as a separate option. You can choose this power multiple times if you wish to have other options for transformation, but this is rare even among the Gangrel.

Shape of the Beast

You may transform into an animal, gaining all of its particular skills and shape, becoming indistinguishable from the real thing. You retain your consciousness and personality, although long periods of time spent in animal form may cause vampires to start becoming more bestial than they otherwise would be. Most vampires can transform into only a single kind of animal; the vast majority of Protean-using vampires use this power to become wolves, although a few might have a different particularly appropriate animal based on their background.

Advanced Powers

Malignant Smog

You may transform into a cloud of virulently toxic gas, inflicting those who touch or breathe you with illness, blindness, and even chemical burns and blisters. You may choose what kind of gas you turn into, deciding whether to be a miasma that inflicts poison, illness, burning, psychedelic effects, and so on. This power is extremely taxing and requires more blood than most, so most can only use it once in a while or in moments of great crisis.

Mist Form

You may dissolve your body completely into mist, becoming intangible as the air itself. You may travel at the same speed as the air around you (and be blown off-course by heavy winds), and reform as soon as you wish to; while mist, no one can touch or affect you with powers, and likewise you can't do anything to affect them, either. You suffer less damage from sunlight than usual, thanks to it going right through you, and can use this power to sneak through keyholes or under doors.

The Unfettered Heart

Your internal organs, used to changing and transforming according to your will, are malleable enough to allow you to move them around; you may move your heart to elsewhere in your chest, making it much harder for anyone to successfully injure or stake it. Your heart moves only slowly, so you must move it ahead of time rather than being able to do so on the fly when attacked, but you may use this power to encourage your heart to wiggle free if you are staked, a process that takes an entire night to complete. Your heart must remain within your torso somewhere in order to perform its core function of pumping blood to animate you.

War Form

You may turn into a semi-humanoid, monstrous version of an animal (usually a wolf), much like the Crinos form of a shapeshifter; while in this form, you have terrifying claws and teeth that deal aggravated damage to others, as well as being larger, faster, and stronger than you would normally be. This form remains active for a scene and is hugely dangerous to the Masquerade, as you do not have the shapeshifter ability to inflict the Delirium on onlookers, who see you exactly as you are in all your hideous glory.

Elder Powers

Adaptability

You may adapt instinctively to your environment, allowing you to survive harsh conditions as easily as a comfortable summer evening. You might grow additional hair or fur to deal with extreme cold or thin skin to deal with extreme heat; gills or fins to operate in water; sensitive organs to perceive in heavy storms or pitch darkness; or anything else that might protect you from danger from the environment itself. This power remains active as long as you remain in the dangerous environment, after which you automatically return to normal.

Blissful Slumber

You may use this power to transform into mist and remain that way through your daytime slumber, becoming extremely difficult even to locate, let alone hurt. You are immune to all sources of potential danger or harm except for sunlight until the next night (or, if you awaken during the day, you choose to return to your usual form).

Earth Control

You may travel through the earth as easily as swimming through water. You must avoid manmade obstacles, thick or large deposits of stones, and anything that is not dirt along the way; you can only swim through actual earth, not any other buried items.

Flesh of Marble

Your skin becomes a hard, smooth shell, as if you were literally made from polished stone. You take only half the damage you otherwise would from any injury or attack.

Loki's Gift

You have the fluidity to transform into many different creatures. Simply by tasting an animal's blood, you may shapeshift into a creature of that species for the rest of the evening, drawing on the blood within you and its essence of that animal. This transformation works exactly like Shape of the Beast, except that once the night is over, you cannot transform into this animal again unless you taste its blood once more.

Shape Mastery

Your control over shapeshifting is so powerful that it can even extend to others. You may use this power to inmmediately cause any shapeshifters - literal ones or vampires or fairies who are currently shapeshifted - to revert to their original form. This may be dangerous if you force them to transform in an environment that is hostile to their usual form; for example, turning a vampire shapeshifted into a bird back into a humanoid form while in flight may cause them to fall. (Keep in mind that not every shapeshifter's original form is human.)

Smoke and Mirrors

Although it normally takes you a few moments to transform into mist with Mist Form, you may now use this power to do so instantly when you are attacked, causing the offensive to pass harmlessly through where your physical form was only a split second ago.

Animal Swarm

Instead of transforming into a single creature, you may become a swarm of tiny animals, turning into a cloud of insects, a carpet of mice, or another swarm of animals the size of a human palm or smaller. You may behave just as you would when turning into a larger animal with Shape of the Beast; the swarm is connected by you as its hive mind, and you can direct it as a whole or break pieces of it off to go in different directions (although all creatures in the storm must remain in the same scene together). As long as at least one of the swarm survives, you may turn back into yourself at the end of the night.

Death's Hidden Crawl

Although most vampires are completely helpless and unable to move while in torpor, you have such control over your form with this power that you can move (albeit at an agonizingly slow crawl) even in that final state of unconsciousness. You can move approximately one foot per night, which may allow you over time to move to a safer resting place or even drag yourself to someone who may be able to help or awaken you. This power does not give you any ability to consciously sense anything around you while you are in torpor, so moving may make you vulnerable to other dangers if your body is not resting in a safe area.

Homunculus

You may use this power to split a little bit of your body away, molding it into a tiny replica of yourself about a foot tall. The homunculus can act independently but has no personality of its own, instead seeming to think similarly (if much less clearly) to the way you do; it follows all your orders to the best of its ability, although it is not very creative and does not understand anything especially complex. It has all your physical disciplines (Celerity, Fortitude, and Potence) if you have them, but no other supernatural powers. The homunculus is permanent but can be damaged until it is incapable of doing much, or destroyed by significant enough trauma; if it is, you feel the pain of its destruction.

Restore the Mortal Visage

No matter how animalistic, monstrous, or just plain weird you look normally, this power allows you to appear the way you did when you were a mortal. All signs of your undead state, as well as any other supernatural features you may have gained, vanish completely for the rest of the night; even those with Auspex may not be able to see through your perfect shift back to your original form. Many Gangrel use this power to temporarily rid themselves of the animal features brought on by Frenzy, but it is also a handy tool to slip past supernatural beings as an innocuous "human."

Spectral Body

You may completely transform yourself into an incorporeal form; while you are still visible as usual and may use all your disciplines as long as they do not require touch, you are completely intangible, impossible to touch or affect physically in any way. In addition, you are not affected by temperature, weather, or any other physical concerns. You may remain incorporeal for the rest of the night if you wish, although you may also return to your solid form early.

Turnabout

You may perform dizzying maneuvers by swiftly dipping into and out of the earth, which you move through at lightning speed as if it were air. This power is usually used in combat to allow you to disappear and reappear a split second later behind your opponent, but it can also be used for any form of quick maneuvering.

Mythic Form

Your shapeshifting prowess is such that you can transform even into beasts of legend; unicorns, gryphons, dragons, and other Bygones are all within your grasp. Obviously, such a transformation constitutes a major breach of the Masquerade (although many elders solve this problem by simply making sure that there are no surviving witnesses to their marauding).

Purify the Impaled Breast

You may violently expel any foreign object in your body, ejecting tracking bugs, weapons, debris, and even stakes that have managed to penetrate your skin.

Draught of Phoenix Blood

It is nearly impossible to kill a vampire with this power, who is simply able to reconstitute themself with their shapeshifting powers, even from the ash of Final Death. When you die, you resurrect yourself days later, slightl less powerful and with only vague memories of your previous self, but fully capable of continuing on as if nothing happened. You also go up one generation from the stress of death, resulting in the loss of any powers that you no longer qualify for.

Dual Form

You may literally split yourself into two identical bodies, each the same as your original; both of you are linked mentally and able to act independently or in concert as you wish, and the two bodies can split up and go to different areas if you wish without any impact to their abilities or your control. These two versions of you are slightly weaker, each behaving as if they are a generation higher than you are, but at the end of the scene, they recombine and you regain your full strength. If one of your two bodies is destroyed, you return to your normal power, but you suffer half your total health in damage

Inward Focus

You may isolate your physical strengths, subtly shapeshifting to emphasize them to ever greater heights. You may juice your muscles and bones to drastically improve your strength, speed, and endurance, becoming a terrifying physical dynamo even when compared to other vampires. This power can be used along with Celerity, Fortitude, or Potence to bring your abilities to even more impressive levels.

Body of the Sun

You may use this power to transform into the deadliest and most terrible form possible: fire itself. You become a blazing pillar of semi-humanoid fire, triggering terror and Frenzy in vampires, setting anything flammable ablaze, and burning anyone you touch with instant, terrible heat. You are indestructible while in this form, which lasts for the rest of the scene or until you choose to end it, and unlike real flame you cannot be doused with water or smothered with coverings.

Important Things to Keep in Mind

Protean use is usually a massive breach of the Masquerade if witnessed by any mortal, so be careful about using it when your privacy might not be complete. While some Gangrel have more than one animal form, or turn into something more exotic than a wolf, you should probably assume that you are not one of these rare exceptions unless approved by Admin.