If, in the Sharess' Caress, you choose "No, Halsin! Tame yourself!" (another rude!Tav delivery where you treat him like an animal) and do not let him join Astarion and Tav with the Twins, Astarion (and Halsin... AND Shadowheart???) will disapprove.
Feeding and Diet
It's actually more complicated than just "they bite you and eat your blood." Plus what they're able to eat; how often they need to eat; what happens to you if they bite you and what happens to them if they don't feed- spoiler: it's unpleasant.
Incidentally, you should reload and kill Cazador again.
(I was comparing stuff across editions and compiling it into something more coherent and then figured I'd info dump about it in case my fixations are useful to somebody out there.)
DISCLAIMER: There are two things to note about the lore presented here:
First, while the standard stat block in the monster manual is the default, in terms of lore vampires have this annoying tendency to be incredibly, stupidly varied. They are magical monstrosities ruled by the power of symbolism and superstition above anything else.
The next is that D&D is decades old, spans five editions, several settings and hundreds of writers. One guy establishes a piece of lore, and then the next picks it up goes "nah" and writes something else. I collected info from four different source books, all from different editions, which naturally don't entirely agree on how vampires work. Lore never stays consistent and may contradict itself. You may see information somewhere else from a source I don't have that contradicts what I wrote here. If you read this and like some of this stuff but not other bits, take the good and ditch the rest.
Basically, in D&D, canon is what you decide it is.
They only need to feed once in a 24 hour period.
Vampires can survive between 3-9 months of starvation, but it's a terrible idea.
There are three different categories of "Undead Hunger."
Vampires have two of them and actually need to consume more than one thing to stay "healthy": Blood and life force.
The blood is obvious. This is categorised as a "diet dependency." It's required to preserve their bodies and powers, and without it their powers are suppressed as their bodies begin to shut down.
Ultimately, if they don't get any blood then they revert into a corpse like state where they're trapped in their own body as it begins to wither and mummify. They're trapped in a coma, vaguely aware of the passing of time in flashes of awareness until somehow they are fed blood. If they ever wake up again, they will probably wake up feral and absolutely ravenous.
Vampires rely on the victim's blood pressure to expel blood from the wound they create, lapping and mouthing at the wound rather than actually sucking on it.
Being bitten is a highly pleasurable experience that victims can't help but desire, even when they know they shouldn't.
While the damage done remains, the wounds from a Vampire bite closes itself quickly after the feeding (assuming you're still alive). It does however leave a mark. The bite mark itself is often "less than half an inch in length", and leaves behind a significant bruise that causes no pain or sensitivity to touch.
Other side effects include fatigue and a weakened immune system.
Vampires typically target sleeping victims (less likely to fight back) and favour the blood of their own race above others. So theoretically, Astarion finds elf blood tastes best.
Drinking animal blood tastes bland and is health-wise akin to drinking tainted water: yes it might keep you alive in desperate times, but it's ultimately bad for you and will probably make you ill.
A vampire's secondary feeding requirement is called an "inescapable craving", which means that if a vampire doesn't get that fix then their hunger begins to devour them instead. The pain is described as a spike boring into the vampire's brain, obscuring their awareness. They begin to obsess over feeding to the exclusion of everything else, they become willing to take ridiculous levels of risk to stop the hunger as they become more and more desperate. As they are consumed they become progressively more feral until they're just a rampaging mindless horror driven only by horrific hunger.
For vampires, their inescapable craving is life force, which a vampire leeches from their prey through touch leaving the victim weak. Direct skin contact isn't required, if you're wearing full plate and/or the vampire is wearing gloves and they lay a hand on you they can still drain you. Mechanically these were combat abilities, energy/level draining occurred when a vampire struck a target with their own body (usually their hands). Before 5e hit them with a nerf bat, vampires could permanently weaken you this way (you could lose character levels from this).
5e also seems to have rolled life drain into the biting, so a vampire can consume your blood and energy at the same time.
Post feeding, a vampire starts to look alive. Their skin is flushed and warm and they feel elated and energetic.
In contrast, a vampire that hasn't been feeding properly becomes more corpse like and feels "sluggish" (I'm interpreting that as flu-like symptoms). It's purely emotional however, the vampire is no less capable and dangerous and suffers no mechanical penalties.
Vampires can feed on other vampires, which is actually more filling than living humanoid blood and gives them the ability to communicate telepathically for a few hours. They don't like it though. If a vampire drinks from another vampire then they can be controlled by that vampire and the link forces them to feel affection for each other against their will until it wears off. The results of both vampires in question feeding on each other is described as "debilitating" since they both paradoxically become enslaved to the other's will and forced to "love" each other creating an absolute dysfunctional mess of control, obsession and resentment.
The good news is that it only lasts a few hours.
Some vampires can eat regular food (no nutritional value in it for them) while others would regurgitate it if they tried. As they retain their tongues, vampires can also taste food.
That said, it's a bad idea for them to eat garlic, even if they can eat solid food.
Some kinds of vampires don't drink blood. There's all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff a vampire might be required to consume instead. Spinal fluid stands out. Or the bit about ones who drain the ocular fluid from your eyes. Gale might find interesting things to talk about with the magic eating ones who prey on mages. They're much less common, probably something to do with most people not finding that very sexy. I don't think any of them exist on Toril.
During Astarion's Origin run we get more information regarding his rest cycle. While during a non-Astarion PC run we see him resting in the position for reverie:
When playing as him we get two important segments:
1. During his solo rest he may try to remember his scars with enough detail to understand that they are not simply a poem carved into his back, but actually written in Infernal Runes.
He begins this scene deep in trance (literally stated by narrator), reliving his memories.
If choosing the second dialogue option "[INTELLIGENCE] Push the pain away, try to banish the memory." the narrator tells us he may try to push his memories away until he feels nothing
and that he may finally rest, dreaming of brilliant futures.
This could simply be a generic use of the verb to rest as a synonym for any other kind of resting (since resting has been associated with trancing at the start of the scene) and not necessarily sleeping. Considering reverie is reliving one's past memories and the narrator states he dreams of the future, this can either mean that after his initial reverie he falls asleep and dreams or that he stops trancing and imagines the possibilities of the future while simply resting.
Here is the full dialogue branch (CAMP_Astarion_SCO_CazadorNightmare_SecondDream there's a possibility of Astarion succumbing to a nightmare in other branches):
2. If Astarion has not bitten an enemy in front of his companions, he will need to feed, triggering his nightmare scene during the night. In this scene he walks through a forest in the dark. He calls out and hears the voice of his master.
Astarion can choose how to interact with this scene, cowering before Cazador, demanding the owner of the voice he hears to show themselves or try to sneak away. This is not a previous memory but a nightmare. In this, Cazador recites his four rules at Astarion. Astarion wakes up startled and wonders if, since he can walk in the sunlight, he can also go against Cazador's rules.
Considering resting in a state of reverie/trance is reliving one's memories at this stage of his life/undeath, and that Astarion doesn't have many years of good memories (and those memories are likely very old, having been created before his turning) there's a chance he might prefer to simply sleep rather than endure whatever horrors Cazador has put him through night after night. This view considers his nightly trance pose as a simplified in-game mechanic. But there's also the possibility that instead of choosing to relive bad memories, Astarion instead uses his trance to review his lockpicking, sneaking and fighting, as a way to continuously improve himself, or otherwise avoids the most visceral of his horrors, skirting away from them nightly.
Reference for Solo rest scene videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rShNX_AKbrY&ab_channel=Kinestezja
Reference for Nightmare Scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJod2Ii-Eso&ab_channel=SharnaVanhyatt
Reference for DnDE5 Elf Trance https://5e.tools/book.html#mtf,1,living%20in%20reverie
and
Reverie, or trance, was the elven state of meditation, which had certain sleep-like effects. During this state of meditation, elves conducte
Thanks to Zigraves, Cal, Anjael and Oak for the help locating/gathering the references.
Lamentable is the autumn picker content with plums
(Plums are to be picked from July to September. They are ripe in August, and soon after fall to the ground. After that either the bird-eaten ones remain or the fruits rot)
Lamentable is the person content with a less than ideal situation (settling for less)
Or
Lamentable is the person who has to content themselves with having missed something in its prime (have to content themselves with leftovers)
Astarion has had his background changed from Noble to Courtesan during Early access. For the Full release Courtesan was changed to Charlatan, but the Character Sheet sent out with the game still has his background as Courtesan.
Noble background (February 2021) discussed by Neleothesze on Reddit:
Direct link to archived topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/s/H4SjW46w1c
Reddit - Dive into anything
Screenshot from the Character Sheet from the Full Release (August 2023)
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