What's the ideal Vampire/Human population distribution for a Vampire nobility to be sustainable?

If Vampires really do need to kill 50 a year, they would be regarded as a perpetual enemy to be destroyed or fled from by humanity. The vampires themselves would have human slave pens but this would never sate their domestic demands and they would be less aristocracy and simply slave owners.

What's the breeding rate of medieval/grimdark-fantasy humans, assuming 70 year lifespans and 50% infant mortality?

One single vampire for all population in the world. Vampires compete for the food sources and are immortal. The most logical thing for a vampire to do is to kill all other vampires and pretend that he doesn't exist.

Caine pls go.

If we use 52 kills a year, we need at least 52 human families per vampire, where each family has 3 children, 2 to sustain the population and 1 for the tithe. So I think it ends up being a 1:260 ratio.
Granted this is sloppy math and assuming that vampires only drain one of the children and they don't just drain the parents after they have 2 children.

Assume they do. They are nobility, they will have the best and that's is the entire thing. Moderation is after all, not for one such as refined them. For truly decadent, assume even worse, 20 young, beautiful virgin women per year.

This is the highest number that could be considered without overcomsumption per vampire.
But it takes, say 16 years for a woman to grow old enough to be beautiful enough to be considered. And they need 20 per year, each.
That means the human population needs to have a surplus of 320 women per generation.
So that means that for a population that has 640 kids per generation every 4 children that reaches adulthood only 1 female will be likely to have kids of their own.

Assuming that a normal family has 8 kids. That gives us 80 famiilies that can sustain a vampire population of a single vampire.
Minimum.
With no diseases, In-fighting, general wars, other monsters, accidents and so on and so fourth.

Not to mention, this is even considering that all women are even up-to-par, beauty wise.
I would consider anything less than 200 families be pushing it, and that's basically them paying taxes in women instead of money or food.
For a vampire to go unnoticed, a single vampire per city of maybe a thousand families.

For a vampire nobility... As in, at least a family, probably an entire social caste? A thousand families(tens of thousands of people), in several cities. And then it's basically a well known fact.

Could be lower with war effort, raiding, lower demands of the vampires, or as said, basically, they only need some.

This thread is gold, was thinking a lot about a setting in which vampires as rulers and nobles are accepted by humans most of the time and how this would work, but I'm bad at math. Keep it up.

Lets look at it from a different angle

The average human body has between 1.2 and 1.5 gallons of blood in it (lets average it out to 1.35).
The average wine glass has a volume of between 1.2 and 1.4 ounces (lets average it out to 1.3).

Doing some simple math, one sees that the average human body, drained dry, can produce 133 average wine glasses of blood.

Assuming that a vampire has 3 glasses of blood per day (one for each "meal"), a vampire therefore needs to kill one human every 44.3 days, or 8.25 humans per year.
Lets round that down to 8 because of traditional noble decadence.

Now all we need to know is the human reproduction rate (per year) of a fantasy serf population, divide this by 8, and we have the vampire population.

Ushoran in WHFB fixed this by banning his children from harming the people.

They fed on criminals and more primitive people from outside the borders.

That's fine when you're a traveling knight, questing for enlightenment through violence. It's not that good for a sedentary noble population.

Well it worked until his sister got butthurt that he had a kingdom and influenced a bunch of tribes to invade.

You could easily sustain dozens of vampires that way. Especially since they don't need to feed every day.

Completely dependes on how much they need to drink.
If vampires have some blood magic you can introduce blood tithe in form of donating blood for lower taxes or other benefits.
And conceptually nothing stopping you from going full edge/magic realm with human farms.

Found something.
medievaltimes.info/medieval-life-and-society/children-in-the-middle-ages/

With an average of 6 children per woman over the course of their lives, with an average infant mortality rate of 20+%, we are left with 4-5 children per woman over their lifetime (let's call it 4, to rule out other unexpected circumstances).

Women experience Menopause by the time they're 50 years old, so we'll give each generation a length of 50 years.

50 years means 400 humans per vampire per generation, which means 100 women, which means 200 humans, just to keep the population stable. To keep the population healthy, you'd probably need to double or triple that. if we say 500 humans per vampire, this leaves us with a healthy and growing population, and 40% mortality for adolescants.

Therefore, if vampire nobles...
>drink 3 wineglasses of blood each day
>drain their victims dry
>rule over their human population
>only consume virgins/untainted adolescents
>are decadent
it can be calculated that a population of 500 Humans is needed for every 1 vampire, making vampire 0.2% of the population.

nice job

You're overthinking it. Err on the side of caution and rarity, and simply decide 1 in 10 thousand. Done.

>1 in 10 thousand
lame

>Completely dependes on how much they need to drink.
This.
If it's a 5 gallons a day, not very many.
If it's a pint every two weeks, potentially a lot.

Runescape actually had an interesting take on vampire nobility where lower-ranking vampires collected "tithes" of blood from human subjects as opposed to taxing them, and it was distributed appropriately to vampires depending on rank.

What made it interesting was that top-tier vampires had their own personal human slaves that they could sip blood from whenever they felt like it, while low-tier vampires were essentially dirt poorfags whose social standing was barely better than their human counterparts.

It's sad that I am too ugly to become a Vampire.

You forgot to mention that he and his kin were also feeding on the willing.

And the willing probably got discounts and special rights in his city.

Nossies are a thing, you know.

Pretty boys please leave t. Rat person.

Yeah it helps that vampires do not have to kill people to satiate themselves normally.

How much blood do they need if the vampire has family over and it's Thanksgiving/Christmas?

Also how much blood do they take with them before they go on vacation somewhere?

That depends on a number of factors which you did not care to specify as part of your question.

Yeah, but if they're not drained dry, then the math becomes easy and boring.

Caveats have been talked about in other posts. Just think up your own conditions/factors, then justify your math.

>Thanksgiving
>In game run by anyone, but Clappistani
>In current year

>Implying Clappistanis aren't bloodthirsty glutenous vampiric nightkin

Depending on the magic level of the setting, healing magic and magical refrigeration could greatly reduce the pressures on human cattle.

You could even created some sort of horrific flesh golem you keep chained up all day and pump with healing potions whose only purpose is to generate blood

Every vampire castle could literally have a giant beating heart at its center kept alive by profane magic whose purpose is to produce litres of blood.

I human needs 1.5-2 kg of food per day, lets assume a Vampire needs the same in blood. An adult human has around 6 liters ( ≈ 6 kg) of blood in their body.

So a vampire needs 1/3 human per day to survive.

One vampire per 5,000 people

More than enough to cycle through

I know this is a horrific thought, but when you said:
>only consume virgins/untainted adolescents
the thought that the pedophile priest could be part of the anti vampire resitance movement or protecting children by tainting them, as they would no longer be acceptable food.

Hee Hee

get help, my dude.

1-100000 humans.
OTHER VAMPIRES GET OUT OF MY LAWN.
HIIIIISSSSSSSS.

You aren't considering:
1: Vampires may need to eat a whole person in many settings as often as once per week
2: a mortality rate that high is unsustainable for practical, recovery and ceonomic reasons.
3: humans currently have close to a 100% growth rate in total population every 150 years, ever point less than that makes humanity weaker and poorer. This also mean humans have about a 1.5% population growth a year given normal circumstances.

Assuming 52 humans a year, and using the rest of your stats you'd need a minimum amount that makes 52 people a year LESS THAN the total 100% of the 1.5% of total population growth.

7800 is the bare bones minimum amount of humans it would take to sustain both the vampire and the people, and that is assuming no wars/natural disasters/plague.

In my opinion, and to be safe you would say minimum 8000-10,000ish as a rule of thumb

Well yeah, obviously the number is larger when you make the vampires hungrier. I don't think that'd make an interesting setting, though, because this is supposed to be a vampire nobility, not a vampire monarch. There needs to be more of a presence than one in ten thousand, because fantasy populations are tiny compared to modern populations.

Plus, it doesn't make logical sense. No predator is so hungry that it gets one kill every week.

That does sound pretty metal.

Although I could see vampires forgoing it for a "blood tax" to remind the humans what their place is.

>>No predator is so hungry that it gets one kill every week

Nigger, most Predatory animals kill at least that often.
The ONLY ones that don’t are reptiles.

My setting has a Vampire ruled nation. Vamprism is limited to the upper nobility (Baron and up). Anyone duke level or higher was sired directly by the queen.

The number of vampires is largely artificially controlled, not relative to population size.

The human population is almost fantatically loyal to the queen, do to her thousand year long, mostly peaceful reign and centuries of indoctrination. There also might be a countries sized enchantment in place to ensure their loyalty.

That assumes that it's the same nutrition level as human food. Which is hardly a given.

Firstly, that's not true. As the other user said, wolves only kill 20 deer a year on average, and larger predators like lions only need to eat their weight in meat every 2 weeks or so.

Secondly, vampires would have predatory habits more similar to reptiles than to mammals, since vampires are cold blooded.

There's no reason for humans to need magic or indoctrination to be loyal to the vampires. Vampires make smart rulers, and their taxes of life are not always so bad as conventional taxes.

About the same as sustainability of regular nobility.
>robespierre.jpg

>upper nobility (Baron and up)
A baron is as low as you can go while still being noble - certainly a titled one (Count being 2 steps higher incidentally)

>That assumes that it's the same nutrition level as human food. Which is hardly a given.
Yeah, this whole thread lies upon assumptions because Vampires don't exist, thanks for your insight.

Anyway, to recover 1 liter of blood you'll need around 1 month (if they you can't donate blood again till 1 month rule is actually true).

Vampires = 0

youtube.com/watch?v=Bi4Gq9KDHIw

I'd say one dead human every week of the year at least for every vampire noble.

Bummier vampires could survive killing less or drinking less, but only down to about 30 people a year.

I fucked up. I meant count.
Basically even "low level" vampires have holdings big enough where blood isn't an issue.

Have you ever read the Laundry books by Charles Stross? There's one with vampires that has 2 who have been trying to get rid of each other for hundreds of years. Their games have got so advanced they hang out sometimes while organising other people to kill each other for them, with only them knowing what's going on.

Shit's cash as fuck.

I always played it as "life's blood" ie there's a mystical attachment to killing them by drinking.

Otherwise you could just drink a little or preserve the blood, and you don't have killer monsters, just blood happy elves with spiffy powers.

>thanks for your insight.
What I mean to say is that you're free to make up a number, depending on what you want your setting to have.

Just looked up vampire bats. They consume about half their body weight in 30min feeding sessions, and start pissing to make room shortly into that feeding session.

I think i'm going to have to use that for Vampires in my setting. lol

Most animals eat waaaay more than humans because several reasons:
1. They have to hunt for their prey and it's usually exhausting
2. They don't eat every day so when they do they take into account they might not eat for several days
3. Their ways of hunting and moving aren't very efficient so it takes a lot of energy

Bypedal walking is actually very effective and doesn't consume much energy. It also depends how strong and fast are your vampires, if you literally waste no energy on hunting humans that means less need for food.

If the humans give up their blood as a feudal tithe, then vampires don't waste any energy regardless of how strong or fast they are.

>Grimdark-fantasy
>70 year lifespan

I had an idea like that too once.

A post-apoc where supernatural creatures proliferated once humans lost the advantage of organized civilization and the tech and industrial base they needed to fight back.

A lot of vampires offer blood-for-protection deals, since they're much stronger than humans. They're also closer to humans than other supernaturals in mentality, and have needs and desires that only humans can fulfill. Many human communities have a vampire monster-killer on call, or in residence if there are enough humans to share the cost in blood over time.

(vamps in this setting can drink from a human without harming them.)

>and magical refrigeration could greatly reduce the pressures on human cattle.

I mean, the thing about blood is the same deal with blood AND milk in our own livestock:

If you keep the blood and milk inside of an animal and take it out when you need it and or actually going to use it then you don't need to refrigerate it. Blood especially has this privileged even more so than milk because if an animal isn't milked it can get sick, it's tits will bleed/get extremely painful, can even potentially die if it's been specifically bred to be milked (a modern milking now needs to be milked like twice a day or she'll fucking straight up die in 5 days).

Blood on the other hand doesn't need to be constantly taken out of the animal, so as long as you've got humans or whatever hanging around you'll be good.

The REAL question here is: Can Vampires eat and obtain nourishement from blood sausages?

Natural lifespan. As in, if you don't die of diseases in your first year of life like half the population, and you get a bit more lucky later in life, you could maybe live to 70. This was how it was in the Middle Ages, so it makes sense for it to be that way anywhere else there are unwashed peasants.

>The guy who invented slaadi and githyank writes cool shit.
This does not surprise me

Wolves killing an average of 20 per year does not mean that wolves only are killing once every two and a half weeks.

It means a pack of ten wolves is killing a deer every other day.

This assumes draining the humans in a 1 at a time linear fashion. It also assumes no blood recovery.

I think a more likely interpretation of this is that, with 5-10 human cattle per vampire, and using a different human each meal, the populations are more than sustainable.

No, but it is a good indication of the calorie intake of wolves, which is what matters.

Where's the fun in calculating that, though?

I know everybody is talking about the whole "how many humans" and so forth and I know that's the point, but I think we're missing out on one other topic of potential discussion:

Quality Control.

I don't think these lavish vampire nobles would be satisfied with blood from just ANY humans. I feel as though there'd be some warrant or motivation for a higher quality of living amongst their peasants n' human population if only so they could produce not only LARGER quantities of blood, but BETTER quality blood.

I always see in these situations writers creating, like, factory farm blood farming things, but really unless they're trying to desperately feed a massive population of vampires... I'd imagine the 1% vampire nobles would probably want their blood as delicious and as decadent as possible?? Not from some scrawny, undernourished, piece of crap with basically yucky blood?

I mean, sure, you'd get Vampires who want "sexy virgin blood" so you can go the full nine miles, but I'd imagine every other normal day you'd probably want your "bread and butter" to be blood from fat, happy, healthy, peasants.
Not unhappy, skinny, dysentry, lice bitten peasants.

It allows for lots of vampires.

The average peasants wouldn't even need to feed them. The vampires servants could be a privileged class in exchange for feeding them.

People might kill for the opportunity to be vamp did.

>Vampire nobility kidnap peasants
>feed them feasts
>then chain them down and drink from them

Tell that to /pol/ and within a few months Trump will make some vague reference to it in one of his rambling twitter sprees.

Vamp chow as privileged class

>Middle ages
>70 year lifespan

>The REAL question here is: Can Vampires eat and obtain nourishement from blood sausages?

Depends. The Anne Rice vampires couldn't take in stale blood. It's poison to them. It's how Lestat almost got assassinated.

There must be a reason why vampires need to drink blood from a fresh victim, else they could just visit funeral homes and be done.

The average adult human can donate one pint every 2 moons.

If a vampire drinks one pint a night, there needs to be at last 56 healthy adult humans for every vampire.

>More blood per day = more humans

Vampires in nosgoth are burned by all water like it's acid.

Lots of interesting vampire setting potential.

For food though, you might want to consider why they don't/can't just drink animal blood.

The lifespan of that time was skewed due to high infant mortality rates

Furthermore, assuming that healthy adults make up 50% of the population, and the other 50% are children, elders, and Invalides, the population ratio of humans to vampires should be roughly 112 to 1. For a group of 10 vampires to feed comfortably year round, you need a stable population of at least 1200.

If anything made the population decline rapidly, like war, plague, famine, etc. I imagine the vampires might fight over blood. Some might grow weak, some might die.

The average lifespan in the middle ages was 35, but this was because of exceptionally high infant and adolescent mortality rates. Most people who lived to 21 in the middle ages would be able to live to 70.

Depends on how often the Vampires need to feed. Ill do a few different Vampire for the lulz.

If a Vampire could go a day comfortably without Blood and a week saftely, and the Vampire needed to fill his stomach, which would keep him for the week. 25-33 ounces of Blood would be needed to fill it. The averag eadult body has anywhere from 1.2-1.5 gallons of total blood. Which is easily more than enough to sate a Vampire for weeks until it runs dry. A clever Vampire could very easily survive of less than a dozen human cattle for years before they naturally expire.

Although I doubt most Vampires would be smart enough to not kill their prey unless food was REALLY tight.

Are these bitchass vampires that need to be invited inside before they can feed?

For the Lulz...

In the Movie Blade 2, the new Vampire strain known as the Reapers needed to consume 3-5 humans dry of blood every fucking night or risk starvation. In addition to their lack of almost any intelligence, they turn their prey the fastest. One Vampire infected by a Reaper was turned in supposbly in a few days to several hours.

By the time Blade fought them in the sewers, there were hundreds of these fuckers.

So how about this.

The local Vampires get together and decide to run a prison or sorts. They import prisoners from nearby nations and have a whole city/country devoted to this task. The people who actually work the prison are only require to pay a tithe in blood as part of their taxes. For prisoners this is not only a required thing from them but they can also be used to make meat sasuages if and when the time comes. Those who were already schedule for death row are at the top of the list, serious infractions can get you bumped hire into the queue.

Very Lawful Evil take on bloodsuckers.

They obviously need active hemoglobin and unrancid plasma, hence why I suggested refrigeration.

bump

0:1

>8.25 humans per year.
>Lets round that down to 8 because of traditional noble decadence.

Don't you mean round up?

8.25 is also if not a single (averaged) drop goes to waste, which would be hard to do.

"I dodged ten years taxes. Fuck my life"

>vampire noble houses have a feasting hall just like normal noble houses
>except there is a peasant manacled to every seat
>servants bring fresh meat and drink to the table constantly
>vampires of the house stop by for a drink whenever they are thirsty
>servants cycle out the dead and clean the filth out every dawn and dusk

Imagine a party raiding one of the houses and walking in on that.

Of course there are other things that could affect the taste of the blood but the above would still be leagues above the fast food that is drinking a beggar in an alleyway or a half dead farmer.