The Ravenblack Grimoire

Here’s a thing to think about. In our descriptions of feeding, most of us leave a trail of absolute carnage across Ravenblack. The messages in public halls are full or descriptions of throats ripped out, bodies left strewn in alleyways (often in great heaps), and humans torn limb from limb.

There are, depending on who you ask, anywhere from ten to thirty thousand of us in this city, if you include the hosts of minions and thralls. As a very rough count, and allowing for those vampires who sleep the night away, I make that something like 50-100,000 humans snacked on EVERY NIGHT !

And yet the fools still come out to play after dark. Why haven’t they all long since fled, or decided to lock themselves in every night and only poke their noses out just after daylight ?

Depending on what milieu the city is set in (maybe the subject of a future article), why haven’t the humans’ civic authorities acted to rid the city of this scourge (that’s us, folks !). They could have called in the military, or got the police to hose the streets down with riot control vehicles using water cannons loaded with HW. The hunters seem a very inadequate response indeed to a threat of our magnitude. Where, even, are just the simple angry citizens, complete with pitchforks and torches, hunting down our resting places as we sleep through the hours of daylight ?

So let me pose an alternative hypothesis. The average human has 8 pints of blood. We take a few, but rarely enough to kill them. Innate vampire powers mean that our victims are unaware of this theft of their lifeblood. They just wake up feeling tired and lethargic. Under this idea, the casualty rate drops to maybe a few dozen a night, or a couple of hundred at most. Pretty average for, say, a large city in the third world, where the night isn’t regularly patrolled by a disciplined, motivated police force.

Something to think about, isn’t it ? So what do you think – how do you see the ecology of the city working ?