Skyrim’s Vampires: A Guide to the Children of Coldharbour

Skyrim’s vampires operate on a four-stage hunger system: feed regularly and you’re a slightly buffed normal character; starve yourself and you gain devastating powers but townspeople attack on sight. Standard vampirism is honestly mediocre—sunlight stops all regeneration and fire wrecks you—but the Dawnguard DLC changes everything with the Vampire Lord form: a transformable beast mode with its own skill tree, summoned gargoyles, and no sun penalty while transformed.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this article:

• How to become a vampire and cure it
• The four-stage progression and feeding mechanics
• Powers, abilities, and crippling weaknesses
• Vampire Lord transformation from Dawnguard DLC
• Whether being a vampire is worth it
• The mythological origins and major clans

How to Become a Vampire (and Cure It)

Contracting Sanguinare Vampiris

You catch vampirism through damage from vampire attacks. Any time a vampire hits you in combat, there’s a chance you’ll contract the Sanguinare Vampiris disease.

For the first three in-game days, this works like any other disease. You can cure it with:

• Potions of Cure Disease
• Praying at any shrine
• Talking to a Vigilant of Stendarr

After three days pass, the disease progresses to full vampirism and standard cures stop working.

Important: You can’t become a vampire if you’re already a werewolf. Lycanthropy provides complete immunity to vampirism, and the two conditions are mutually exclusive.

Curing Vampirism

During the first three days: Use any standard disease cure mentioned above.

After full transformation: Seek out Falion in Morthal for the “Rising at Dawn” quest. Ask innkeepers about rumors to learn about him.

What you need:

1. A filled Black Soul Gem (cast Soul Trap on a humanoid at the moment of death)
2. To be below Stage 4 vampirism (feed if necessary—Falion attacks blood-starved vampires)

Falion leads you to a summoning circle outside Morthal at dawn and performs the curing ritual. This works on any vampire, including pure-bloods and Daughters of Coldharbour.

Alternative cure: Join the Companions and become a werewolf through their questline. This automatically removes vampirism but locks you into lycanthropy instead.

The Four Stages of Vampirism

Vampirism works on a four-stage system based on feeding. Feeding once immediately resets you to Stage 1, regardless of what stage you were at before.

Stage 1: Well-Fed (0-24 Hours)

You have minor stat bonuses and minimal penalties. NPCs interact with you normally.

You get basic vampire abilities and a small boost to stealth and illusion magic. This is the easiest stage to manage if you want to play normally.

Stage 2: Hungry (24-48 Hours)

Your powers and weaknesses increase. Fire weakness intensifies, frost resistance improves.

You unlock Vampire’s Seduction, which lets you calm a humanoid once per day. This makes feeding much easier.

Stage 3: Starving (48-72 Hours)

Your powers get stronger, but sunlight and fire penalties worsen considerably.

Most players avoid this stage unless they need the power boost for specific encounters.

Stage 4: Blood-Starved (72+ Hours)

You gain maximum vampire powers, including Embrace of Shadows (180 seconds of invisibility plus night vision, once per day).

Warning: All NPCs become hostile on sight. You cannot enter cities, complete most quests, or hire followers. You effectively lock yourself out of normal gameplay until you feed.

How to Feed

Sneak up behind a sleeping NPC and activate them. This counts as a crime if witnessed, so do it in private locations.

At Stage 2 and beyond, use Vampire’s Seduction to calm an awake target, then feed on them without combat.

The Vampire Lord form (from Dawnguard) can feed during combat on dying enemies.

Smart feeding strategy: Feed every night before sleeping to stay at Stage 1. This keeps you socially acceptable while maintaining basic vampire benefits.

Vampire Powers and Abilities

Passive Bonuses

All vampires gain several permanent bonuses regardless of stage:

Complete immunity to disease and poison damage. This eliminates an entire category of threats.

Nightstalker’s Footsteps: 25% bonus to sneaking. This makes stealth builds much more effective.

Champion of the Night: Your Illusion spells are 25% more powerful. Calm and Frenzy become great crowd control tools.

Frost resistance scales with your stage, reaching 100% immunity at Stage 4.

These bonuses stack with existing perks and equipment.

Combat Abilities

Vampiric Drain: A spell that damages enemies while healing you for the same amount. It gets stronger as you go longer without feeding.

This makes vampires well-suited to battle-mage playstyles with built-in healing.

Vampire’s Servant: Reanimate a corpse for 60 seconds. The strength of what you can raise scales with your stage—Stage 4 vampires can raise powerful undead allies.

Stealth and Manipulation Powers

Vampire’s Sight: 60 seconds of night vision. Since you’ll be operating mostly at night (to avoid sunlight), this becomes useful.

Vampire’s Seduction (Stage 2+): Calms a humanoid target once per day. Makes feeding easier and provides emergency crowd control.

Embrace of Shadows (Stage 4 only): 180 seconds of invisibility plus night vision, once per day. This three-minute window lets you infiltrate almost anywhere, feed, and escape undetected.

The Necromage Exploit

Here’s a powerful interaction: the Necromage perk in the Restoration tree increases all spells and effects on undead by 25%.

Because you’re undead, Necromage buffs all magical effects on you by 25%. This includes beneficial enchantments on your equipment, your vampire powers, and any spells you cast on yourself.

The exploit: apply self-enchantments while Necromage is active, then remove the perk. The boosted enchantments remain at their enhanced strength.

Vampire Weaknesses

The Tyranny of the Sun

During daylight hours outdoors, vampires suffer severe penalties:

• Zero regeneration for health, magicka, and stamina
• Stat pool reductions that scale with stage
• Stage 4 vampires become crippled in sunlight

This forces you to plan around the day-night cycle. Either travel at night, or accept penalties during daytime excursions.

Indoor locations don’t count as sunlight exposure—you’re safe in dungeons, houses, and caves regardless of the time of day.

Many vampire players simply sleep during the day and conduct all business at night, using the wait function to skip daylight hours.

Vulnerability to Fire

Fire damage increases by 25% per vampire stage:

• Stage 1: 25% more fire damage
• Stage 2: 50% more fire damage
• Stage 3: 75% more fire damage
• Stage 4: 100% more fire damage (double damage)

Fire mages and dragons become dangerous threats. You’ll want to prioritize fire resistance enchantments to offset this weakness.

The frost resistance you gain provides some balance—you eventually become immune to frost damage, making ice-based enemies trivial.

Stage 4: Social Outcast

The most gameplay-limiting weakness hits at Stage 4: every non-vampire NPC attacks you on sight. This includes quest-givers, merchants, followers, guards, and random townsfolk.

You cannot enter cities without triggering combat. You cannot complete most quests.

This makes Stage 4 impractical for anything except deliberate power-gaming or roleplay scenarios. Most players stay at Stage 1 through regular feeding.

The Vampire Lord Transformation

Getting the Pureblood Form

The Dawnguard DLC introduces the Vampire Lord—a transformable beast form that makes vampirism worth using.

You receive this gift during the Dawnguard questline from either:

• Harkon (if you side with vampires)
• Serana (if you side with Dawnguard)

Accepting makes you a pure-blood vampire with access to the transformation power. You can activate and deactivate it at will, like the werewolf transformation.

The Vampire Lord Perk Tree

Vampire Lord has its own skill tree with 15 perks. You unlock them by killing enemies while transformed—each kill grants progress toward the next perk.

The tree splits between magic-focused and melee-focused paths.

Blood Magic Perks

Power of the Grave: +50 to health, magicka, and stamina while transformed

Corpse Curse: Paralyze a target with Vampire Lord-specific mechanics

Summon Gargoyle: Call a powerful stone gargoyle to fight alongside you

Blood Healing: Killing with a power attack restores all your health

Night Powers Perks

Detect All Creatures: Highlights living beings through walls

Mist Form: Turn into invulnerable mist for 20 seconds

Supernatural Reflexes: Slow time while transformed

Night Cloak: Enemies near you take damage over time

Vampire Lord Combat

Vampiric Grip: Telekinetically grab and throw enemies, dealing impact damage and healing you.

Blood Magic: Alternative spell system that draws from both magicka and stamina, letting you sustain offense longer.

Your wings grant faster sprint speed and let you hover over water and rough terrain. This mobility advantage opens shortcuts across Skyrim’s landscape.

You get increased health, magicka, and stamina pools while transformed, plus enhanced magicka regeneration. Melee attacks deal serious damage with good range thanks to your clawed limbs.

Vampire Lord Drawbacks

The transformation has limitations:

All NPCs recognize you as a monster and attack on sight, even if you’re at Stage 1 of normal vampirism and well-fed.

Daylight penalties still apply while transformed—you lose 90% stamina regeneration and take stat pool reductions during the day.

You cannot use normal equipment while transformed—no weapons, armor, or equipped items. Everything comes from the transformation itself.

You cannot activate objects like doors, levers, or containers while transformed. You must revert to human form to interact with the world normally.

These restrictions mean you’ll be switching in and out of the form frequently rather than staying transformed permanently.

Is Being a Vampire Worth It?

Without Dawnguard DLC

Not really. Standard vampirism is mediocre at best.

The sunlight penalties are crippling, fire weakness makes dragons dangerous, and you have to feed constantly to avoid Stage 4 hostility. The powers you gain don’t justify these drawbacks for most playstyles.

The only exception: stealth builds can make good use of the sneaking and Illusion bonuses, especially with the Necromage exploit.

With Dawnguard DLC

Absolutely. The Vampire Lord transformation changes everything.

It’s a powerful combat form with its own skill tree, unique abilities, and no sunlight penalty while transformed. You get summoned gargoyles, telekinetic powers, and crowd control abilities that work in any situation.

The beast form alone makes vampirism worth considering, especially for mage or hybrid builds.

Vampire Lord vs. Werewolf

Vampire Lord advantages:

• Stronger magic-based abilities
• Can transform at will with no cooldown
• Perk tree focuses on crowd control and utility
• Better for mage and stealth builds

Werewolf advantages:

• Higher melee damage output
• Simpler, more straightforward combat
• No sunlight or fire weaknesses in human form
• Better for pure warrior builds

The two curses are mutually exclusive—you can only have one active at a time.

What Are Vampires in The Elder Scrolls?

A Daedric Curse

Vampirism isn’t a natural disease—it’s a supernatural curse created by Molag Bal, the Daedric Prince of domination.

He designed it as a perversion of the natural cycle of life and death, creating beings that exist between living and dead.

The curse manifests through several disease strains: Sanguinare Vampiris (the Skyrim variant), Porphyric Hemophilia, and Noxiphilic Sanguivoria. Each strain has different characteristics, but all lead to the same destination: transformation into an undead creature that feeds on the blood of the living.

Creatures of the Night

Becoming a vampire changes your appearance. You’ll get pale skin, visible fangs, and glowing red eyes when you’re hungry.

A well-fed vampire can still pass for human. But the longer you go without blood, the more monstrous you look.

Their undead physiology grants them functional immortality—they don’t age and are immune to normal diseases. They also gain strength beyond mortal limits, enhanced speed, and natural talent for magic (particularly illusion spells).

But this power comes with harsh restrictions. Sunlight burns them, fire causes excessive damage, and they must regularly consume blood to maintain their sanity and control.

The Unending Thirst

The defining characteristic of vampirism is the constant hunger for blood.

This isn’t just a preference—it’s a biological necessity that drives vampire behavior and shapes their entire existence.

Without regular feeding, vampires become increasingly feral and monstrous. Their appearance degrades, their powers strengthen, but their connection to humanity weakens. At the final stage, the hunger becomes so overwhelming that all attempts at civilized behavior fail.

Feeding resets this progression, allowing vampires to maintain their appearance and move through society without immediate detection.

The Mythological Origins of Vampirism

The Cruelty of Molag Bal

Molag Bal created vampirism during the First Era as an expression of his dominion over mortality itself.

He didn’t craft it as an abstract concept—he imposed it through direct action on a specific person, making her the source from which all vampires descend.

His method was brutal and personal. Rather than simply killing his victim, he violated and brutalized her in the most degrading way possible, leaving her broken but alive. This cruelty wasn’t incidental—it was the foundation of the curse itself.

The Creation of Lamae Bal, the First Vampire

The first victim was Lamae Beolfag, a priestess of Arkay (the god of life and death cycles).

Molag Bal attacked her on the plains of Skyrim, left her near death, and marked her with a single drop of his blood.

Nomadic people found Lamae in a comatose state and tried to help. Her wounds healed unnaturally fast, and corruption spread from her body. Recognizing something terrible happening, the nomads built a funeral pyre to burn her before the transformation completed.

An Awakening in Flames

As the flames consumed her body, Lamae awakened as the first vampire—still burning but filled with new, terrible power.

She tore through the nomadic clan in a frenzy of rage and hunger, creating the first vampire spawn through her attacks.

After the initial madness passed, Lamae regained consciousness and realized what she’d become. She prayed to Arkay for salvation, but her former patron remained silent. Rejected by the god she’d served, Lamae accepted her new nature and began spreading her bloodline intentionally.

The Daughters of Coldharbour

Lamae earned the title “Daughter of Coldharbour” (named after Molag Bal’s realm) because she received vampirism directly from the Daedric Prince himself.

This designation carries special status among vampire society.

Other women have achieved this title through similar rituals of transformation. Serana, the companion from Dawnguard, is a Daughter of Coldharbour and one of the most powerful pure-blood vampires in Skyrim.

These direct descendants of Molag Bal possess abilities beyond normal vampires, making them natural leaders and figures of fear within vampire clans.

Vampire Clans and Bloodlines of Tamriel

The Volkihar Clan of Skyrim

The Volkihar are Skyrim’s oldest and most powerful vampire clan, operating from Castle Volkihar on an island in the Sea of Ghosts.

Their bloodline dates back to the Merethic Era.

Lord Harkon rules the clan as an ancient vampire lord, maintaining a court structure similar to mortal nobility. The Volkihar are pure-bloods who maintain relatively human appearance when well-fed, showing only pale skin and visible fangs.

When starved, they become monstrous and bestial.

The Cyrodiil Vampyrum Order

The Vampyrum Order controls Cyrodiil through political infiltration rather than direct force.

They’ve absorbed numerous smaller clans into a unified organization.

Many members hold positions in Cyrodiilian nobility—Count Janus Hassildor of Skingrad is both a legitimate political leader and secret vampire. Through such positions, they shape provincial policy and protect vampire interests.

This makes them the most politically influential vampire faction in Tamriel, wielding power far beyond their actual numbers.

The Warring Clans of Morrowind

Morrowind hosts three bloodlines in constant conflict with each other:

The Berne Clan: Aggressive hunters who prey on victims with fierce intensity.

The Quarra Clan: Stealthy operators who emphasize secrecy and subtlety.

The Aundae Clan: Skilled mages who use magic to capture and control prey.

All three compete for territory despite facing systematic persecution from Dunmer society and temple vampire hunters. This hostile environment forces them into hidden strongholds in abandoned ruins.

The Diverse Bloodlines of Valenwood

Valenwood’s four clans each possess unique adaptations:

Bonsamu: Appear normal except when exposed to candlelight, which reveals their vampiric nature.

Keerilth: Can transform into mist at will, allowing escape from danger.

Telboth: Consume children and assume their identity, living with the victim’s family while slowly feeding on remaining members.

Yekef: Can swallow human prey whole through unknown means.

The Iliac Bay Clans

Multiple clans emerged from Nedic bloodlines in the Iliac Bay region, each with specialized abilities:

Anthotis: Exceptional intelligence and arcane knowledge
Garylthi: Magical shielding abilities
Khulari: Can paralyze prey
Lyrezi: Invisibility and magical silence

These clans share a critical weakness—if their founder dies, all members of that bloodline lose their vampirism simultaneously, often dying as centuries of age catch up at once.

The Whet-Fang of Black Marsh

Black Marsh’s Whet-Fang clan uses unique feeding methods.

Instead of hunting, they maintain victims in magically-induced comas, extracting blood (which they call “red nectar”) through magicka-based techniques.

This provides a stable, controllable blood supply that minimizes risk to the clan while ensuring consistent feeding.

The Tyranny of the Sun Prophecy

Harkon’s Ancient Ambition

The Dawnguard questline centers on the Tyranny of the Sun prophecy—Harkon’s plan to block out the sun permanently and eliminate vampirism’s greatest weakness.

He created this prophecy out of resentment for how sunlight constrains vampire activity.

If fulfilled, it would sever Auri-El’s connection between Mundus and Aetherius, fundamentally altering reality itself.

The Power of Auriel’s Bow

Fulfilling the prophecy requires Auriel’s Bow combined with specialized Bloodcursed Elven Arrows.

These arrows imbue the bow with sun-blocking power.

When you fire a Bloodcursed Arrow at the sun from Auriel’s Bow, the sky transforms to perpetual red-orange twilight. This creates constant favorable conditions for vampires without plunging the world into complete darkness.

Bloodcursed Arrows and Eternal Twilight

The effect is cosmetic and practical—the entire province shifts to permanent dusk.

This provides ideal vampire conditions while maintaining enough light for mortal civilization to function.

This represents the ultimate vampire victory in the Dawnguard questline, reshaping Skyrim’s environment to favor undead existence permanently.