I don't consider myself a vampire guy, but I've included a lot of runs that dealt with vampires in my games. One of the fun ones is the runners were investigating this group of vamps that were all infected when they were in high school and had formed this lost children of the underground vibe. My players had played a lot of White Wolf, so when terms started showing up from that game (The book of nod, the prince of Seattle, clans, and so on), they naturally assumed I was doing an SR WW crossover.
Which I kind of was, but only in that this group of infected had discovered a bunch of old White Wolf game material and thought it had been printed by ancient vampires as a way of educating modern vampires without breaking the Masquerade (the Masquerade being another made up thing in the game within the game). So it was actually a Live Action Vampire game staffed by actual vampires that didn't really realize it was a game.
That was the same campaign that I introduced a group of vampire hunters based on John Carpenter's Vampires; a group of runners who drove around in an RV thinking they were doing the lord's work killing vampires and ghouls and other infected. The PC's never did much with these guys, but it was a fun thing going on in the background.
Later, during the game I ran set in Africa, the runners ended up getting stranded in the ghoul nation (Asamando or something, it's been awhile), there were a lot of ghouls and vamps running around. It was basically a homeland where the infected could go without fear of persecution, so there were wendigo and dzoo-noo-qua and fomorian and banshee and so on. Fun place to get stranded.
One thing I decided to do to mix things up a but was to switch up the vampire abilities a bit. Instead of having always active powers, I changed it so that vamps could use powers by spending Essence (similar to Blood Points, something I did crib from WW). Different vamps might have different powers-- basically these bloodlines were slightly different expressions of the disease-- but the book vamp was considered "typical". Further, I changed it so that vamps didn't automatically lose Essence every month; they could maintain their current essence by drinking blood and as long as they weren't burning points for powers they could survive that way indefinitely. (I like vamps who steal blood bags. That's just me.) Instead of giving them regeneration I let them heal a would level by spending Essence, though that was in SR3, in SR4 it work a little differently. (Off the top of my head, a point of Essence for an immediate healing roll off BOD.)
