#vampire worldbuilding

[thinkblotted]

Even now I'm having vampire worldbuilding thoughts

It's in poor taste to 'bite first, ask questions later', even for poachers in a territory. Vampires tend to be very interested in lineage and moreover social ties. If someone comes into territory, you need to know exactly who they are, and how everyone is related. Why they're there, and where they plan to go.

Coming into someone's territory and NOT saying anything, and likewise, seeing someone new on the turf and immediately starting violence, is not just bad manners all around, it's dangerous. The newcomers/owners could be members of a larger group, or have connections to someone much older and more powerful/influential than you and yours.

Knowing who's who is VERY important to maintaining decent relations.

All that to say: vampires gossip like no one else. If they're not being chatty with you, you're REALLY in their dog house.

[onnahu]

The way how vampires are shown to feed from humans always baffled me, bc it doesn't make sense.

Because look - a vampire bites and sucks. Pretty simple. But no! Did they retract their fangs? That could be a ways to let the blood flow. But it seems impractical, since it would not only go to their mouth but everywhere else. For me it seems like a waste. There's other way - they keep the fangs in and dring what will go out around them. But again, entarely insufficient and impractical, especialy that at some point they need to let go. They could also let go and just suck on like an algae eater but that way they have the same problem as with rectractable fangs with the bonus of propably having to make some weird gimnasicks to avoid the fangs to go into the skin in another place. Though i suppose that's a way too - you bite, then move to bite another place above and suck out of the first. But it still feels terribly insufficient.

So, i propose a true Sucking Vampire - they suck through their teeth. The fangs are like a proboscis in insects, you know?

And look, i know this way we lose the eroticism of having a mouthful of blood or whatever, but it's about efficiency! I have priorities!

Look i even made an illustration!

Because the suck tube needs to be wide so we can slurp, there's a 'fang cap' that dissolves in human blood, it's about half of the full fang (true fang + false fang), and after feeding it slowly builds up again, so when the fang looks like regular fang it means they are ready to feed again - since sharp can bite down.

Also, it brings many possibilities - in fashion departament, there may be a thing with false 'false caps', that you put on after feeding to look like a legit vampires with actual sharp fangs, and i'm sure dentristy would be a great bussiness since, you know, holes in the tooth.

Anyways, this was my ted talk, thank you

[helloitsnico-yt]

how have i not posted about my inspired-by-tma vampire concept yet?

No, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you think about it compared to human anatomy. so don’t do that!

I have a few other doodles of them but i left the sketchbook i put them in at home and im at school right now. i’ll reblog with the images

[themarginalthinker]

Woke up, got up, took a shower, and started to think about population densities of vampires in the Lost Boys universe.

Unlike many other vampire medias like Vampire: The Masquerade or Underworld, while there COULD be vampires, as Edgar says 'occupying high positions in the government', I think it's just not really a thing in this world. Vampire's feeding issues (needing to exsanguinate at least one human on order to be sated) puts a pretty big roadblock in any high-profile schmoozing any vamp may want to do. Max was likely already pushing it with owning a local business on a fairly popular seaside town.

So if vampires in this world are not creating massive networks of influence across the world, being the hand behind governments and all society, then..what is their actual population?

My take: much fewer and farther between.

Think about it: they're big pack predators. Their prey is...well, abundant, but tricky to actually get. If they wanted to stay in one place, that territory would need to be pretty damn large. Staying in centers of activity with a lot of people coming and going and creating barriers of time before someone would even know anyone was missing, like a town or city, is a no-brainer, right?

Well...yes and no. See. Just like with humans, cities attract people. The prey comes in, and predators follow. But that also means a LOT of those pack predators in close proximity to one another. Which means pretty fierce competition.

Max and the Boys seemed to have cleared out Santa Carla pretty well for themselves, but this doesn't read as nearly the norm to me.

Vampire packs are likely pretty small, getting no larger than the Boys and Michael and Star (Max wanting to add in Lucy and Sam as well was just plain unhinged overkill with no actual thought being put into territory management tbh.) As such, the easiest option for most TLB'verse vamps is likely...to just move. Become nomadic. Follow music tours as 'fans', tourist seasons in towns, hell, even hopping continents once and a while. This is often the reasons clans form, a stable central group that acts as something of a gateway to certain regions, hostels and camps for nomad singletons and packs.

The hard numbers on this are iffy? But I can check some stuff and make estimates later, just for fun. The vampire to human ratio is Definitely much much lower than you'd think though, with it being in my mind anywhere from 1000 to 3000 humans per vampire in any given area.

We head canon vampires need to eat somewhat less frequently than every night (Santa Carla would be empty by now if that were the case) so let's say...once a month for a healthy vamp with access to a steady supply of prey? That's 12 humans a year. Multiply that by pack size (4) and that's 48 humans missing from a designated space per year. That's. Still quite a bit. Again, much easier to hide if it's an active town. Much harder for rural areas.

Surviving in the vampire world ain't easy. Especially as a singleton with no pack or coven, especially if being one of those on the move.

The canny survive. The stupid do not. There are two ages of vampire's you'll usually meet out there:

The very young, and the very old. The dullbloods and rainbow teeth.

We'll let you decide which one is more dangerous.

[gaygoetia]

Vampire Worldbuilding Project - Blood (Part 1)

Help me do some vampire-based collaborative worldbuilding!

We've already discussed what our vampires look like and how they're affected by the sun.

This time we're deciding their relationship to blood drinking (there will be follow up polls on this subject based on the results of this one)

How essential is blood to vampires' survival?

They need to drink blood to live but it doesn't have to be human blood

They need to drink blood to live and it has to be human blood

They can survive without blood but they crave it like an addiction

They can survive without blood but their vampire powers won't work

They can survive without blood but will go into a comatose or deathlike state

They can survive without blood but will become severely weakened/ill

Something else (elaborate in comments/tags/replies)

Not Sure/See Results

Voting ended onDec 9, 2023

EDIT: The "they don't require human blood to live options" can also include scenarios in which they feed on something else (e.g. Life force, magic, fear, lust)

Will be making an index type post soon with links to all the polls

[vampiresdontbelonginfairytales]

Vampires

Given that 'vampires' is in the title of the webcomic, that I have thus far forgotten to explain how my vampires work here is uh. Anyway.

There are three kinds of vampire in the Otherworlds.

First I need to quickly explain magic. Magic in the Otherworlds exists everywhere in the environment, and living things have magic in them too. Different species need different levels of magic to survive. Unicorns and fairies are at the top of the scale, elves and humans near the bottom. Think of it like heat. Some animals have evolved to live near volcanic vents, others in the snow. Unicorns are the ‘volcanic vent’ end of the scale. There are magical vents all over the planet. More details here

‘True’ vampires.

These vampires are made not born. When magic is incorrectly used it damages the caster. If a spell needs more magic than is available in the surrounding environment, it pulls on the magic in the caster. If it uses it all, the caster is killed, but there is small window where they are transformed into a vampire. If they can drink enough blood before that last bit of their magic drains away, they won’t die. This also happens when a magical creature is deprived of magic.   

  Magical damage is most obviously evident as a loss of colour in the hair and eyes. True vampires have white hair and red eyes. The true vampire’s body stops aging. As long as they get enough blood, they continue to live like a regular person, just y'know, with immortality.

  True vampires are exceptionally rare. There are only 4 or 5 in the whole of the Otherworlds.

  You have to be a skilled magical practitioner to even use the amount of magic that would damage you, so true vampires are usually highly skilled magical practitioners and know a wide range of spells.

Vampires

The children of a vampire will always be vampires. But the severity of the condition weakens each generation. This varies a lot, but as a rough guide, say the original vampire needs blood every day, their children will need blood every other day. Their grandchildren will need blood every 3-4 days.  

  Although, this only really applies when they are an adult. Vampire children grow up biting their non-vampire parent and don’t need a lot of blood, but the amount they need grows as they do. What if they have two vampire parents, I hear you ask? Vampires are usually related to all the other vampires they know, so vampire couples are incredibly rare. The Stollenheims are unusually numerous, with the Le Fanu family after that. The other vampire families are much smaller.

  Vampire children learn spells from their vampire parent when they are little, usually designed to help them escape or hide from aggressors… or help them sneak into bedrooms, depending on the morality of said parent. The most commonly known spells are self-transformation and float.

  Examples:    Hettie can turn into a panther and can float.

                         Victor can turn into a bat or mist.

                        Johann can turn into a bat, wolf, a cloud of bats* and use hypnotism**

*it’s more like a cloud of bat shaped energy rather than several individual bats

**only works on people who are half asleep or otherwise somehow out of it.

If vampires need blood, they get tired and cranky, sometimes mildly confused. The longer this goes on, the more tired they get, and they’ll eventually collapse and pass out. They will wake up again, but they will be incredibly lethargic, and at this point they pretty much need someone to shove a vein at them.    

They age normally and will live as long as their species normally does. Humans are not the only kind of vampire, this can happen to any caster species - humans, elves, dwarves, fairies, etc. Vampire animals are rare, as animals don't absorb/use magic in the same way. Vampires need caster blood, animal blood is no good to them. Magical animal blood could technically work, but dragon blood is highly corrosive and a unicorn will kill you first.

Revenants

This is the most basic vampire you find in folklore. A corpse that has been reanimated by a necromancer. A spell is pinned to the body that is activated by a drop in sunlight (or whatever the necromancer sets it to do, but this is the usual). The spell needs blood to keep working, so if the revenant doesn’t bite anyone it will just fizzle out after a night or two. Can also be stopped by the usual – head chopping, burning, stake. Note that the stake is to pin the revenant to the ground. It won’t work if you just jam it through their heart. They’ll just lurch around with a stake through them.

[lierdumoa]

IWTV Vampire Mythos: What makes good blood good blood?

Now I haven't read the books, but according to ITWV lore as presented by the tv series, the quality of blood largely depends on the ...vigor of the victim. Elderly ppl taste worse than people in their prime. Sick people taste worse than healthy people. A person suffering from a terminal illness might taste no better than a rat.

If that worldbuilding rule is consistent in its application, then human blood shouldn't necessarily be the best tasting blood.

Any animal whose natural lifespan is as long or longer than a human's natural lifespan should possess sufficient "vitality" to make its blood palatable to vampires.

Several tropical birds have lifespans comparable to humans. Some whales live to 200. Some sharks live to 400.

Of course, the vast majority of animals are significantly shorter lived than humans, and should therefore taste significantly worse. I imagine most vampires wouldn't ever drink from enough animals to figure out that some do actually taste pretty good. Obviously it would be virtually impossible to drink blood from a live shark in Louisiana in the 1930s.

But you know what Louisiana has plenty of? Catfish.

Those fuckers can live to 100.

[oscarjcarlisle]

A couple of sketches for a new bat. I’ve made some bat OCs before, I really love them.

This one is going to be The Nosferatu aka The Night King, the source of most European vampire myths in Isaac’s universe (i refer to my worlds by their central character), until the rise of the Dracul and Bathory families. Vampirism is a real, supernatural occurrence in this universe, the origin of which is unknown. It’s seemingly existed as long as anthropomorphic animal peoples have (origins also supernatural and vague).

Vampirism usually passes among predatory and omnivorous anthro species, only occasionally popping up in obligate herbivores. The effect is that, without ingesting blood, they live relatively short and sickly lives. Some choose this. By feeding on animal blood, they can live long, very long, and healthy lives, highly resistant to cancers and other diseases, and are able to heal much more quickly and from much greater wounds than mortals. However without human (which I use synonymously with anthros, there are no Homo sapiens sapiens in this world) blood, vampires age and will, eventually, die. By consuming the blood of people, vampires are able to reverse the effects of aging and cure themselves of essentially any disease, poison, or wound, short of a lost limb (but even that can be done with extra magic)

Because of this, vampires have to potential to live forever, so long as they have a supply of human blood, and don’t get hurt too badly. They’re very difficult to kill. The Nosferatu specifically, this bat, was like, the all time champ of staying alive. He was born around a millennium before Christ (also a historical figure in canon) and dies sometime in the late 21st/early 22nd century I haven’t decided.