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I know that Pathfinder is a game. I know Pathfinder is a fantasy game. And I also know we can get into endless circular discussions when we apply real world science to this magical fantastical sandbox we all love to play in.
As an example lets take corn and potatoes. Archeology tells us that they were fist domesticated in the Western Hemisphere. Since 1492, when Columbus made his voyage, these crops have been successfully cultivated all over the world. Before that date there was no corn, nor potatoes in Europe Africa or Asia. And yet, in The Lord of the Rings, hobbits, grew potatoes. We see stalks of corn in the movies. My little cheat to get around this is that we are not trying to be entirely historically accurate. Middle Earth and Golaron are different worlds from Earth.
I do however have a little harder time with muskets and plate mail. The former brought about a decline in the latter. I would prefer to have a knight with a lance in my game more then a musketeer. Besides there are all the armor class issues to consider without heavy magical armor. But I can appreciate that in Golaron in the Manna Wastes, they have guns. So if somebody else likes them, they can use them. Ill just keep them out of my Korvosan game.
Was there a point a question here? Yes I may as well get to it. I have a predator prey question. We know that for example, in Alaska, the population of owls is dependent on the population of voles. The more voles there are, the more owls there are. As the population of voles increases, so does the population of owls. Then the owls eat too many voles, and the population of voles crashes. The owls then starve, and their population crashes. With fewer owls, the remaining voles begin breeding again, and their population increases in number again. So the cycle continues. Perhaps it is a mistake to apply such population concepts to an imaginary world.
If we take Dragons, I think we can safely say that they are the apex predator. How much territory does a dragon need to sustain itself? If we take a region of Golaran, say Varisia, How may dragons could the wildlife and the civilized populations of the region support?
Lets ask the same question about that other predator the parasitic Vampire. Given their need to feed, How many vampires could a city like Korvosa with a population of roughly 18,500 support?
So in summary my two questions are this: How many dragons could the region of Varisia support? And How many Vampires cold a city like Korvosa support?
What are your thoughts? thanks
The simple and somewhat trite answer would be..as many as you want there to be..but I do see where you are coming from you like a little rationality in your fantasy and I feel the same way.
So what size of dragon are we talking about a Great Wyrm is goiung to need a lot more room than ,say, a pair of olds and their brood
Was there a point a question here? Yes I may as well get to it. I have a predator prey question. We know that for example, in Alaska, the population of owls is dependent on the population of voles. The more voles there are, the more owls there are. As the population of voles increases, so does the population of owls. Then the owls eat too many voles, and the population of voles crashes. The owls then starve, and their population crashes. With fewer owls, the remaining voles begin breeding again, and their population increases in number again. So the cycle continues. Perhaps it is a mistake to apply such population concepts to an imaginary world.
If we take Dragons, I think we can safely say that they are the apex predator. How much territory does a dragon need to sustain...
As a rough guess, We could say that a Dragon can subsist for a long time on internal reserves during the periods in which a Dragon goes dormant and enters the next 'phase' of it's life.
If we are to assume that Dragons have fat, then we can guess, based on their body size, that a Dragon would need to consume at least three creatures of it's size or smaller per month to not only fuel it's physical and super-natural abilities but also to set some aside for this dormancy period.
Let's use a Young Red Dragon for example. Depending upon the ease of access to food, shelter, water, we can assume that the Dragon in question has a range somewhere within one hundred to two hundred miles diameter from it's lair, also assuming there isn't another Dragon or sizeable number of creatures that could contest that dominion, say, a Clan of Dwarves or suchlike.
The Red would likely need to take at least three cattle or six sheep/goats(or given the nature of the beast, People) a month to sustain itself. Anything smaller, and the Red is using up too much energy for too little gain. Anything bigger, and the Red cannot guarantee it will be able to take the carcass away to a safe location without it being discovered by other predators and scavangers, or worse yet, a bigger dragon.
The Red is surviving, probably getting a bit hungry towards the end of the month but nothing it can't live with, and it's burning a fair bit of energy dealing with the outraged Dwarves who are missing sheep, cattle and kin to it's depredations.
But let's also not forget a Dragon's true claim to fame: It's hoard. A dragon might subsist on food in the wilds, undisturbed for hundreds of years, but it will never be able to attract a mate with a pile of highly polished pebbles! The Dragon will have no other choice but to lair near enough to a Humanoid city or village to gather treasure, eitehr as tribute, battle-loot or wages, but far enough away, or have methods of making the lair inaccessible to any but itself, to assure the Dragon that thieves cannot simply steal it's treasure.
Let's go with a Brass Dragon Next, an Adult, same size as the Red as before so the variables are roughly similar, at least. The Brass lairs near a medium-sized town, enough people to outnumber the Dragon two-hundred to one at least. Being a friendly, outgoing type, the Brass is well known to the locals and no doubt takes a handy bit of coin and treasure as tribute for protecting the village and bringing people to the town as both an attraction and a source of knowledge.
No doubt the Brass would have worked out a bargain with the townsfolk for a large number of sheep or similarly sized portions of food (probably cooked to Human standards but if that's what the Dragon must suffer to gain willing conversation partners, it's a small sacrifice)over a month. Comparing the two, the Red is far worse off, having to spend short times out hunting to continually check on it's lair for other predators, thieves and would-be heroes while at the same point risking itself to gather treasure from the Dwarves for it's Hoard. The Brass, by comparisson, is much better off, having a whole town fairly dedicated to keeping the Dragon around as a friendly ally and getting not only food and treasure for merely letting mortals bask in it's glory, but also can hire said mortals to uncover other treasures or rare magical tidbits to bring back and fortify the Dragon's lair.
But I'm drifting off topic.
Lets assume that the above formula, Dragon must eat at least three times it's 'size' in food every month to continue to be in good physical health and store enough energy aside for it's dormancy period.
Depending upon the Dragon's 'elemental type, this could change. Silvers and Whites, having slower metabolisms due to their 'cold' subtype could make do with half this amount of food, while 'fire' subtype Dragons might have to double their food intake by 1/2, or even double for soon-to-be mothers, whom might need to take in large amounts of calcium for their eggs in addition to certain ores and checmical ingredients.
Furthermore, Dragons also have the problem of being the biggest target in the room. Everything, from the Kobold with the sticky fingers to the self-righteous Paladin with an epic-enchanted sentient Bastardsword is looking for a Dragon, either for the Hoard, for the Dragon's natural strength in a fight, for the Dragon's hide, teeth, blood and claws for potent magical items or even just to prove that the Dragon in question can be humbled by a 'mortal worm'.
If the dragon can cast the spells that provides food/sustenance, then they can have whatever size territory if they so choose. Probably, a ring of sustenance might be valuable for a dragon trying to stay off the radar screen.
A dragon could not even use a ring of sustenance, it would have to be a hula-hoop of sustenance instead. ;)
And size of a dragon's territory would depend on food supply. Does it have to go out and hunt deer and buffalo and other wild animals or are there convenient human farms in the area for the grabbing of livestock? And how many dragons could Varisia support also comes down to what types of dragons they are and how old they are. Some dragon breeds want more territory than others and older dragons want more territory than younger ones. I don't have the book handy, but maybe the Chronicles book Dragons Revisited has some of the answers for you.
As for vampires, even though it is a totally different system, check out the White Wolf book for playing vampires in the Middle Ages. I have always felt the limits they put for number of vampires in a given city or area were decent.
Creative Director
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One thing to keep in mind for conversations like these... once something's no longer an animal or humanoid, things start to grow increasingly magical. If a dragon were a "real world" creature, it'd need to eat lots, sure, but if a dragon were a "real world" creature, it probably wouldn't be able to fly once it gets really big. So therefore, dragons and their biology are to a certain degree magical. This might mean that they need to eat only as much as a human, or that they can eat inanimate objects for nutrition (don't some legends have dragons eating gems and metal?). They could even gain sustenance from being in proximity to large amounts of treasure. Exactly how dragons work in this regard is up to the individual GM.
For Golarion, we tend to skew things more toward a "real world" solution when we can, though, so I would probably say that a dragon would have to eat a fair amount of food to keep going. It'd probably not eat humans once it gets too big, though, and would instead hunt things like giants and bigger monsters. The big dragons are supposed to be pretty rare, though, so unless you wanted to have dozens of dragons in your campaign, I wouldn't worry too much about what they're eating.
AND: As far as rings, I've always used the house rule that rings resize to fit whatever creature wears them. This helps to explain why they're harder to make than wondrous items, and indeed, helps to explain why they're NOT in the wondrous item category.
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AND: As far as rings, I've always used the house rule that rings resize to fit whatever creature wears them. This helps to explain why they're harder to make than wondrous items, and indeed, helps to explain why they're NOT in the wondrous item category.
That's what we've always done in my group. It would be a pain to argue about ring sizes (and shoe sizes for that matter) for characters that it was better to handwave it and say magic and resizing for these items.
On the matter of corn and potatoes, note that the continents of Arcadia and Avistan have been in regular-ish contact for five thousand years, so there's been plenty of time for New World foods to be disseminated all around the globe.
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Crocodiles can go without food for about 3 months, their existence expends very little energy, and much of the energy they do gain is taken from the sun.
Using Crocodiles as a sort of blue print, the Dragon could exist in a very similar manner. Gaining a lot of heat energy from underground magma spigots. Like Crocodiles, Dragons make excellent ambush predators, using cloudcover they drop from the sky and snatch a tasty cow/sheep/virginal princess. Very little energy needs to be expended (assuming their ability to fly is somewhat supernatural in orgin).
On top of this a dragon keeps a horde of fabulous treasures. How do crocodiles get their easiest meals? They simply wait for food to come to them and drink in their watering hole. *SNAP* The horde of fabulous treasures is an excellent lure for tasty white meat-in-a-can. The dragon expends very little energy, while the prey must fight its way through a gamut of traps and the dragon's kobold servants. When the prey finally does arrive, the dragon yawns (letting loose a blast of it's energy type) and then chows down.
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Vampires are another tricky story. According to the rules their blood-drain ability heals them HP (or gives them temporary HP). Being undead they don't have a constitution and are not actually affected by rules for starvation.
One can surmise then that so long as a Vampire remains uninjured he need never feed. Another possibility is that a Vampire who knows trouble is coming might go on a feeding frenzy to boost his HP, and increase his chances of surviving a Slayer attack.
Add to this a vampire need not kill its victim, only draining a portion of its blood and allowing it to live. It has a dominate ability and could conceivably just force its victim to forget the entire event ever happened.
With that in mind a Vampire is like any other human predator, and vampire statistics would be better measured as a crime statistic, rather than a predator/prey relationship. Blood to a Pathfinder Vampire is a boost, a rush of steroids, and a med-pack. It isn't strictly speaking, food.
Crocodiles can go without food for about 3 months, their existence expends very little energy, and much of the energy they do gain is taken from the sun.
Using Crocodiles as a sort of blue print, the Dragon could exist in a very similar manner. Gaining a lot of heat energy from underground magma spigots. Like Crocodiles, Dragons make excellent ambush predators , using cloudcover they drop from the sky and snatch a tasty cow/sheep/virginal princess. Very little energy needs to be expended (assuming their ability to fly is somewhat supernatural in orgin).
OK this has to be said.
They make good 'everything' predators. flight, speed, magic, breath, intelligence, whopping huge size.
If the crocodile had half of this then we'd be extinct.
Batts
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In a given campaign, I'm unlikely to ever need many dragons, so I'm free to cut the assumed numbers down as I see fit. In my version of the game world, there is only one known dragon of each color (and no known metallic dragons at all, except for the one on Hermea, who is regarded as a myth by most non-Hermeans). The single red dragon has his own kingdom of fire giants, kobolds and hobgoblin mameluke slave-soldiers. The single adult green dragon isn't known to exist at all, since she's spent the last 1000 years as the queen of the elves of the singing woods (and has sumptuous and exotic meals brought to her by her devoted and decadent court of sybaritic sycophants). There may be other dragons on other continents, but that's nothing I need to worry about, and the dragons I'm using have plenty of sustenance, since there are only between five to seven of them, and most have a system in place to bring them food (the white is an exception, too undisciplined to have a bunch of followers bringing it food, and suffering from constant hunger as the result of a curse, flies out over the arctic oceans and hunts whales, when he isn't eating seals, walrus, caribou, humans, wolves, polar bears and the occasional unlucky frost giant. The blue and black are also exceptions, in that one doesn't live on the continent itself, and her food supply is unknown, and the other is well on her way to becoming undead, if she isn't already, and only eats for pleasure, or ritual purposes, and rarely even then).
As for vampires, most vampires seem pretty clever, so I'd assume that some would feed without killing, perhaps even in ways that aren't identifiable as vampire attacks. Others would kill, but not nightly, perhaps weekly, and live in areas (big cities, for instance) where disappearances at that rate would not be missed (perhaps even adopting a 'don't crap where you live' policy, and feeding off of visitors to town). A sizable number of vampires would, naturally, care not at all for consequences-schmonsequences, and play with their food and kill more than they need and end up attracting the attention of Paladins and good-aligned vampire hunters and the like. The more experienced vampires might even plant some clues for the hapless vampire hunters, to help weed out the idiot child who is drawing attention to the presence of vampires in the city and spoiling it for everyone.
One assumption I make regarding undead in my game settings is that they don't Create Spawn with anything like RAW assumptions in place. Someone killed by a vampire only has a very small chance of becoming a vampire, for example (the exact number being 100% if the DM wants it for plot reasons, and 0% if he doesn't, but I'm fine with allowing it to be more or less reliable if the spawn-creator goes through special steps to ensure (or prevent) spawn-age). Similarly, Ghoul Fever generally just kills you, or, at worst, turns you into a ravenous template zombie, while becoming an actual Ghoul takes a little something more. No Wightocalypse (or Shadowpocalypse, or Wraith/Spectre/Son of Kyuss-pocalypse) need apply.
It becomes much less of a question as to how many people are needed to supply the local vampire population when vampires are kind of rare, being as likely to be created by a high level spellcaster or divine curse (or through more prosaic means such as being buried in unhallowed ground after being hanged for consuming human flesh), and a single vampire can't turn a village of 30 into a vampire posse over the course of a single bloody evening.
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Thank you all for your thoughts and ideas. So many of you have taken the time to respond. I wont be able to answer everyone but thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Evil midnight lurker, thank you for addressing my potato issue. It is good to know those little spuds have had time to travel the world
James thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I appreciate the idea that the more magical or fantastical a creature is the less in needs to conform to “scientific” norms. I like the idea of Dragons eating rocks and minerals. It gives them another food source, and gives them a ready means to excavate elaborate lairs without leaving piles of excavated dirt around the mouth of their lairs. For that matter I also like that some things are left undefined. It lets us players DMs fill in the details as we see fit.
Rez Dave, thanks for the ratio 1:1000 that sounds very reasonable for determining the size of a vampire population. I was just curious. In the future if I plan to set up a community under control of a “shadow” vampire community this gives me an idea of how many vampires there could be, weather there is one cabal or two competing cabals etc.
Halforcheavymetal, I enjoyed reading your post about the red dragon going out and eating the dwarve's sheep and thus antagonizing them. The 200-mile radius seems like a good range for an adult dragon.
I really like the idea of a gregarious brass dragon, setting up a relationship with a nearby human town or village, with protection in return for food, and sharing his wisdom in return for a little respect.
Thank you DM Willard, it all boils down to my liking a little rationality to my fantasy world. Not too much, just a little bit, a few rules of thumb shall we say.
Thank you Set for your thoughts as well. I like the idea of there being one “named “dragon” per color. Thanks for the idea of the vampires “policing “ themselves, where the older more experienced vampires plant clues to the ones that don’t care about a fig and devour as much as possible.
In my own home brew world, I had several “ages”. First there was a reptile age and after a cataclysm we now have a “mammal” age. The Dragons, lizardmen, kobalts, troglodytes, Yuan It, and dinosaurs all came from the earlier “reptile “ age. The dragon’s primary food sources were dinosaurs. In the current age, those few that survived the cataclysm, and after a bottleneck have repopulated the world, but in much fewer numbers, spend much time hibernating, and dining on the large fauna when awake.
Vampires.
Vampires can exist by shallow feeding. This means that a host of intelligent vampires can freely feed on a decently large population as long as they are, indeed, intelligent and act that way.
This is further enhanced by the prospect of them dominating/charming people to feed on regularly. They do not necessarily have to go nibbing new people every night- they can just do the same few people over and over. (assuming a few such dominated people).
If they aren't intelligent.. well, any population of good size will quickly figure out they are being eaten by a stupid vampire and take measures to stake it out.
Dragons.
For dragons you really just need to pick a metabolism for them and stick with it. Maybe they are ravenously hungry and always go looking to chow entire herds of goats and sheep, cows and elephants.
Maybe they are largely magical beings eating mostly for the pleasure of doing so rather than out of any real necessity.
Maybe its a middle ground where they need to eat but not as much as ole Mr Ravenous- gaining a good deal of sustenance from magic but still needing real nibbles from time to time.
The two most important things to remember are:
1- keep it consistent. Pick something and stick with it.
2- The PC's don't need to know what you chose. Even Good dragons may be unlikely to sit and chat about their life cycle and eating habits given how that information can so easily be used against them and their kind. A good knowledge roll can still lead the character astray- afterall if the knowledge just isn't available it isn't available. (note we're talking about a fluff thing here, not something that would screw the PC over).
As magical as most dragons are though, especially the larger ones, even them being "ravenous" isn't that big of an issue. With Teleport and its proginy under their belts the territory one can cover could be very, very expansive. I have a mental image of an ancient or wyrm dragon using some small part of its vast wealth to setup farms around the world from which it can snitch prime choices of meat at its leisure.
As for "dragons flying around".. who says you can see them? Invisibility is a relatively low level spells and dragons can afford to spend spells known on stuff like that. A Colossal dragon gliding invisibly across its territory fits thematically and is a fit thought to scare the crap out of any would-be dragon hunter :)
(can just imagine an invisible dragon with a good perception check flying over, watching the dragon hunters stalk up to its own lair.. )
-S
One thing that is kind of interesting and touches on this topic is that many vampire stories touch on the idea that the "old guard" vampires are really careful about who they feed on and how much control they exert, and its the young hot heads that screw up and kill too many people that will be missed and want to push the limits of what they can do with their powers.
Meaning in a lot of cities, there may indeed be a fairly respectable number of vampires, but the "adventure" doesn't really start until one of the young, arrogant vampires decides to take over a guild or kill off a paladin or whatever and leaves a trail.
I can even begin to list every vampire story that uses this, "let's feed carefully and maintain the status quo" versus "let's be gods among men" tensions, but its definitely a theme in the Blade movies, for example.