Let's talk about things that eat people.
In most fantasy and horror settings, there is no shortage of things that enjoy the taste of human. You have vampires, werewolves, trolls, ogres, giants, giant spiders, carnivorous plants.. You even have wendigos, a whole subset of supernatural monster emerging from cannibalism. They might rip and chew, or swallow you whole. They might overpower you or tempt you into their lair. But all in all, they want to eat people.
There are many of them, often multiple existing in the same world, and more often than not having superhuman abilities. The question then is this: how are there still humans in these worlds? How have humans not been hunted to the verge of extinction? More importantly, how do you do that without verging into the brainless dickwaving of HFY?
>>44312372
Because humanity fuck ye---
>without verging into the brainless dickwaving of HFY?
Because bad writing
>>44312372
Because the worst of human eating stuff is rare, while the more common things can be dispatched by numbers, clever planning, or just overpowering it.
They are still few, and there are still inviduals - and groups of inviduals who are capable of caving their skulls in.
Plus, predators still require prey. They might choose to keep healthy population, or starve.
Or subsist on something else.
>>44312372
See the first half of Daybreakers for why you don't over-eat humanity. After that it kind of but not really gets into hfy waving.
>>44312372
Many of the man-eaters are intelligent and manage human society from the shadows in the same way humans manage farms.
>>44312479
But they're not rare. Oh, you might encounter ONE man-eating spider in your adventure, sure, but you will encounter no shortage of things with the prefix of "man-eating". So, yeah, the spiders might have a small population but the set of "things that each humans" is not at all small. The only reason you encounter one or two of them in an adventure is more of a meta-reason, GMs trying to avoid having the same encounter over and over.
Consider that if a creature eats humans enough that its species has evolved to favour them as prey, that means that human-eating is a prime strategy for that species and has been for a long time. It's not opportunistic, mind you, such as when bears eat people; these are creatures that have effects and eating habits so specific that they might only be able to eat humans (certain types vampires, for instance). Saying "we can fight them off" is like saying gazelles can fight off lions. In the individual instance, yes, the gazelle might get away this time, but on the whole the lion wins plenty of times, enough for lions to still be around.
Fuck, I'm hungry now
>>44312372
I fucking love TV Hannibal, why does it ends so early
>>44312599
Going with your metaphor, there /are/ still gazelles. Despite lions adapting to eat the fast things, gazelles, zebras, etc, they still manage to survive as a whole.
Also, humans are sentient, and therefore can outsmart most man-eating things, usually things like spiders and plants, beasts that act on instinct alone.
>>44312599
way to misread what I was saying, pal.
And why the fuck are you comparing adventurers to the common cityfolk?
>>44312515
>>44312515
Are they solitary? Zombies are horde creatures. Vampires have covens. No, the man-eater is a most successful when he is a pack hunter; not necessarily a puppetmaster periodically chowing down on prole tartare, but certainly a social animal.
>>44312716
While many of them do act on instinct - your mindless zombie, for instance - plenty of man-eaters show intelligence, cunning and deception. They might masquerade as humans during the day and hunt at night, or create beautiful songs to bait men into their trap. These traps will be honed by fierce evolution, with only the ones creating the most cunning lie being the one who feasts.
>>44312372
Predators need, and in most cases are heavily, heavily outnumbered by, prey.
Consider the african savannah - you have lions, cheetahs, leopards, hyenas, jackals and crocodiles in rivers, all of which prey on things like antelope, yet the populations of the antelope and such are never at risk
If you just put humans in the position of prey animal, with very small numbers of predators that won't overconsume (at least not without starving themselves) then humanity is fine, except for the guys that get eaten
>>44312819
True, but what we're presented with isn't a savannah with plenty of prey and a smaller number of predatory species.
We're presented with very few prey species with high populations, and then a staggering array of predators all competing for that same food supply. And somehow not starving each other out.
>>44312599
>Why isn't humanity eaten yet
>Guy gives you an answer
>You tell him he's 'wrong'
Why did you even ask?
>>44312803
>These traps will be honed by fierce evolution
Things like sirens or vampires are rare, humans are plentiful. They're not really in competition with one another since they're rare and there's no shortage of prey. They only need to be able to trick a dumber than average human being, which isn't that hard.
>>44312716
True, but a gazelle is often better at running than a lion, whose main advantage is his teeth.
In fantasy, we are presented with predators with wide arrays of super-human abilities, often overtly magical. Mesmerism, transformation, superhuman speed and strength. And quite often the ability to convert those it does not eat entirely into more of its kind; a vampire might make more vampires, a zombie makes more zombies. Meaning the more successful these predators are, the more the problem they present to the prey population.
>>44312599
>But they're not rare
>the set of "things that each humans" is not at all small
Very few of those prey exclusively on humans.
>>44312599
Of all the creatures that were listed in the OP, only vampires and wendigos exclusively prey on people.
>>44312372
>More importantly, how do you do that without verging into the brainless dickwaving of HFY?
It's easy. Don't verge into brainless dickwaving, you mongoloid.
>>44312944
>the predators are not realistic representations of predators in the wild.
>Why isn't the predator/prey balance more like real life?
Herp derp derp
>>44312900
Because he (or, more likely you) was (were) wrong. The question was "given there are so many different types of things that eat people in settings, why are there still people?" and the answer was "because predators are rare", which is patently not the case (and against the premise of the question). And it doesn't address the problem that, yes, predators do have small population numbers compared to prey by necessity, but in these settings there are so many of these small predator populations that, when taken together as a set, they amount to an unsustainable number.
Are the man-eating monsters man-eating because they eat ONLY humans, or because they CAN eat humans if in a position to do so?
Take the giant man-eating spider for instance. I always assumed they'll eat whatever large prey they happen to catch, and this sometimes includes wayward humans, but the spider doesn't specifically seek out and consume humans.
>>44312944
Well, infectious zombies in particular are usually presented as the apocalyptic event you expect. From what I understand fantasy zombies are more often the direct result of dark magic of some kind rather than that.
>>44313037
Because they also eat things that aren't humans you tit.
>>44312925
Some species are rare, but others reproduce quite rapidly - think how quickly it takes for a zombie outbreak to happen. Hell, we're not even taking into account all those monsters that turn humans into themselves and "predate" humans as reproductive methods rather than food.
Perhaps a more secure answer might be how long one needs to go between meals. Meat is energy dense and while herbivores need to eat constantly, carnivores eat relatively rarely - cold-blooded carnivores especially. A human-eater might only need to eat once a month, and thereby might get away with the local human population not being too adversely affected.
>>44313071
Fantasy zombies are distinct from sci fi zombies.
Sci fi zombies are like a virus, mindlessly chewing its way through the population until there's no more population to chew.
Fantasy zombies are more like servants under the control of a higher dark power, some sort of necromancer or evil cleric or whatever, and they exist not to consume but to used as mindless fodder.
>>44312868
>with high populations
That seems somewhat unlikely - even given our near-total mastery of prey species, relative to everything we eat we're massively outnumbered, and there's no situation I can think of where that isn't the case
And then you get the issue of competing predators, which will help balance the number of both the other predatory species (most savannah predators fight each other), and location - based predators who dominate in their home range but can't leave there effectively (like a crocodile)
And of course predator species tend to have long maturation periods where their young need to be cared for which allows for brain development - consider how incompetent a baby is compared to any calf, that pattern is seen throughout the animal kingdom
Does OP not understand the simple fact that a lot of humans together with weapons will fend off bad predators but those predators can make shorter work of a smaller number of humans alone or unarmed?
This is really not a difficult concept.
>>44313037
>in these settings there are so many of these small predator populations that, when taken together as a set, they amount to an unsustainable number.
Says who? Can you give a single example of a setting that has such an unsustainable number with proof?
>>44313182
Read Charles Stross' "The Rhesus Index", which is about vampires in the banking industry. It breaks down quite clearly the impact a single vampire would have on the human population of Earth today.
Most of the predators IRL don't need to eat more than once every 3 days or something like that, a man is serveral pounds of meat so unless you have one of those "kill for the sake of killing" predators in your settings there should be enough men to go around before they eat them all
>>44313136
>zombies
I'm sure this may change in some snowflake settings, but AFAIK zombies don't eat to sustain themselves. They're undead and they eat people just because.
If you're talking about a modern zombie apocalypse then there's not much in the way of natural selection vis a vis human prey, because in this cases the zombies win and humanity is destroyed, or the spontaneous zombie outbreak is contained and then eradicated by nuclear weapons or an vaccine or whatever.
>>44313180
As >>44313010 points out, OP's being more than a little dumb
>Humans are comparatively r-selected
>Other shit is almost extinct because the Gods said fuck you to them a long time ago
>Humans are actually competent and have numbers + organization on their side, ie. the same reason humans still exist but sabretooths and giant man eating birds of prey do not
>World is fuckhueg so you never run into them unless you decide to go exploring magic castles
>Elves or some other benevolent protector like humans more than rapeorkmagicvampireregeneratingtrolls being on their border, so they help out
>Things that eat people are the one-off result of magic and not selective evolution
>Everything is terrible and humans die a lot, but our life spans are in 50 years range instead of 5000 so we still outbreed the giant evil lizards that need one meal per year
etc
>>44313136
That works with creatures that eat human meat, though it fails on the vampire (without having to resort to magic) as blood is actually extremely shitty for digesting to get energy. There's a reason you don't get large haemovores and the ones that do are pretty much nothing but mouths with just enough senses and smarts to seek out warm things, bite down and hold on. .
Because things that eat people fight against each other. Much like human tribes of the earlier times competed over their hunting grounds and herds of cattle, supernaturals of today compete over towns and villages. Most of that struggle remains unseen by the little people.
Oh and there's also the part that given the opportunity, humans like to breed. A lot.
Don't humans in settings with man eating monsters tend to have magic and stuff? Vampires aren't so bad when you can have a cleric blast it into dust. Carnivorous plant? Meet my friend pyromancer. Etc.
>>44312716
Gazelles have a different rate of growth then humans. Gazelles live 10-12 years in the wild. Even assuming poor living conditions humans tend to live past their 20s.
>>44312599
Humans are not a species well suited to be primary prey. We take way too long to develop and invest too much into our young.
Also predators have much lower chances at a successful hunt then you'd realize and there are examples of starvation due to inability to hunt on their own.
So I'm in the bad writing camp. Large predators that are capable of ripping humans in twain are rare and require populace food sources. IRL this often means large hunting zones per predator.
My take is that Vampires make the most sense of the possible man-eating species. At least from the perspective of being lethargic/asleep for years with intermittent hunting mixed in. That style of vampire with large hunting zones can fit in very well to a campaign.
Beyond that the main reason animals attack humans is because they are literally starving. Humans are bad smelling, loud, weird, lanky creatures. It takes a lot to get over that and think we are worth hunting.
>>44313277
>Only encounter the predator if you decide to go exploring magic castles
Why would a predatory creature isolate itself so completely that the only way for prey to encounter it was essentially self-selection? Even ambush/opportunity predators like spiders are smart enough to set up lairs and webs in places likely to have passers-by to pounce on.
Something like that would have to be a near-total omnivore and even then it would put itself somewhere within a good hunting distance of fucking something to kill.
A species that solely eats humans/sentient beings would be stupid.
They'd more likely eat any kind of meat and see humans as a delicacy. Predators who don't do that are way too reliant on their prey.
Also, why pick off humans when there's easier prey around?
Or look at it this way: Would you eat the same food every day?
>>44313279
>the vampire (without having to resort to magic)
>an undead creature that's hurt by holy symbols and the sun
>not inherently magical
Nigga, be serious.
>>44313219
Okay, I'll go read an entire shitty fantasy novel that's at best only tangentially related to the point at hand. Make sure to keep the thread alive until I get back.
>>44313322
Ain't a lot of these fucks created by magic or curses?
>>44312372
An awful lot of those things will eat more than just humans, and may just eat humans opportunistically.
>>44313322
Because it lives 50,000 years and eats once every 5 and stupid humans like shiny shit so they eventually show up. It's stuck there because all the other ones were killed by well organized hunting parties.
>>44313318
The better model for vampires is parasite rather than predator; they would be most successful merged with human society and feeding non-lethally, perhaps with some numbing effect (common to haemovores) to cloud their victims mind to prevent being identified as an attacker. They siphon off human strength rather than killing people entirely.
>>44313355
>realizes he's been backed into a corner
>"Y-yeah, I don't have t-time for this. S-seeya, nerd."
Nice damage control tbph relative.
>>44313355
It's super-relevant to the discussion. Literally the entire premise is "the impact of a single vampire on the human population is so drastic that the single greatest threat to one vampire's continued well-being is the mere existence of a second vampire, so vampires hate each other and are constantly waging these paranoid shadow-wars."
Wolves eat rabbits, and there are still rabbits. Wolves are much faster, stronger, bigger, and have sharper teeth than rabbits. A single wolf could easily kill several rabbits at a time, in the same way that _SupernaturalMan-eater_ could do to humans.
Replace this example with any predator/prey relationship.
There are just a small amount of predators compared to the population of humanity, that's how.
>>44313455
That must be some kind of crazy fucking hungry vampire.
>>44313494
Most prey species reproduce at a far faster rate then humans though.
>>44313375
Parasite vampires work too. Though the assertion that blood is enough is often steeped in some form of magic or another to make it work.
Honestly most dungeon monsters should be automated constructs if it really comes down to it. If it's beyond a sealed door that nobody can get through then no large predators should exist within it anyway.
>>44313543
>Most prey species reproduce at a far faster rate then humans though.
Most humans reproduce at a far faster rate than Wendigos, trolls, giants, etc.
>>44313334
Alright, for the sake of "being serious", let's say a vampire has to only drink enough blood to fill their stomach to get "a meal". Fair? A human stomach can be distended to contain up to one gallon, so for the sake of example (since the vampire drinks only blood and doesn't need room for food) let's say a vampire has to drink one gallon from a person and that's it.
Except "that's it" is about 8 pints. A human body contains about 1.2 to 1.5 gallons. So the vampire either has to kill when it eats, or engage in the far riskier strategy of hunting multiple prey per meal and then leaving them alive for future retribution. Doesn't seem sustainable.
>>44313571
The only settings where Vampires need that much blood are settings where they are seen as a horrible predator that the story revolves around hunting down and killing.
Or not, like in Salem's lot where the entire town dies.
Any setting which involves sustainable vampire populations has them eating much, much less than that, and many vampires are given powers of persuasion or mind control to easily gain covens that allow them to feed without impacting the population severely.
>>44313565
That brings up a whole other set of problems. Why are species that big able to stay alive? Though I suppose if you have bipeds that big they'd always be somewhat hungry and willing to attack humans.
Also your missing OPs original argument (I'm in the bad writing camp) which is that there are so many various species that consume humans that it starts stretching suspension of disbelief.
>>44313400
Thanks for bumping the thread, still hard at work reading "The Rhesus Monkey."
>>44313455
>the impact of a single vampire on the human population is so drastic
How so?
>>44313279
I liked how Stross Handled it in the Rhesus Chart, part of his Laundry Files series.
A Vampire is a combination of a human and an exonome (spirit, demon, squiggly thing from the dungeon dimensions, call it what you will)
When created, the Vampire is granted great powers, able to regenerate damage, they appear remarkably attractive and persuasive, they're strong, fast, tough, and ageless.
Unfortunately, the demon needs to be fed, otherwise it devours the mind of its host. To get around this, they create a sympathetic link to a victim by drinking their blood. The demon is thus able to feed off the mind of their victim instead.
>>44313653
That is the problem - these species all need to stay big enough in order to maintain a viable breeding pool, right? You can say they have a small population, but when you have all these different creatures in the same setting, their populations have to shrink to accommodate each other and eventually you're getting into levels where you have like three of a species.
I would call it "bad worldbuilding" rather than just "bad writing". It's a sign that the creator was too keen on kitchen-sinking it and didn't think things through in the planning and prep stages of the story.
>>44313750
>these species all need to stay big enough in order to maintain a viable breeding pool, right?
Wrong, they're supernatural.
>>44313696
Right, but it still does so in a way that becomes staggeringly unsustainable quite quickly unless you take that one approach the Secret Hidden Vampire used. A Stross vampire runs the risk of people going "gee, sure are a lot of people with fucking holes in their brains for no good god-damn reason" and then the many occult agencies in that setting going "holes in their brains, you say?" and grabbing torches and pitchforks.
>>44313653
Assuming "because magic" isn't the answer, long periods between eating, or perhaps hibernation; huge territory ranges; being omnivores, and having sustainable hunting patterns are all options, especially if you combine them
Compare how much longer a lion is a cub than a gazelle is a calf.
Then compare a human's period of being a baby, and the step up in lethality
Then you give the man-eater a comparable step up
>>44313750
To be fair writing a biome that feels scientifically feasible is freaking hard. It's no surprise that people give up, short change, and cobble together just enough explanation for suspension of disblief.
It's one of the things Dune did that I found impressive.
>>44313809
That's "Magic ain't got to explain shit" handwavium of the highest quality.
A lot of human eaters *are* supernatural but that line of discussion included Trolls and Giants.
Granted supernatural Trolls that are basically a type of elemental that can't even eat humans (like Discworld Trolls) is pretty cool.
>>44312622
Ooooh. He made... Mystery meat la france.
>>44313809
Supernatural species still compete and reproduce, and the better ones still are more likely to reproduce. Being able to shoot a fireball doesn't exclude you from natural selection, it just changes what criteria you're being selected on.
Soooooo, "The Rhesus Factor" is actually an example of a setting where vampires cower in fear of being discovered because they'd get fucked up if humanity as a whole noticed them, making it the complete opposite of what the first anon was using it as an example of?
>>44312372
I figure most of those are attacks of opportunity, with their standard diet being rather less human filled.
Ogres, for instance, tend to be omnivorous browsers. They eat leaves, birds, bark, grubs, dirt, squirrels, etc. They're not picky.
It's just that when a human comes near, they're not going to turn it down. That's a lot of protein right there. And they can use their mail shirts to armour their limbs.
Werewolves, well, you don't shit where you eat. Other humans could be potential werewolves too. Instead you can eat sheep, goats, and other herd animals. That's why you've got to look after your shepherds. Don't forget the story of "the boy who cried wolf", he kept claiming there was a wolf out there, and it turned out, in the end, he was the wolf and eating the sheep.
>>44312372
Well OP, with that concept you also have to ask: What else is there that those things eat? Surely vampires DON'T just eat human flesh. I bet you a giant spider wouldn't be picky if it could catch a troll or ogre.
You may have to look a bit more into how much they really give a shit what type of meat they eat as long as it's meat.
>>44313854
Vampires and Werewolves don't even reproduce sexually. Having a super small population would have no deleterious effects due to inbreeding since they literally can't inbreed. Trolls and Giants don't actually exclusively eat people, so their population size has fuckall to do with how many people are around. Fuck, I don't think them eating people is even a particularly ubiquitous trait.
>>44313810
Oh yeah certainly.
I also love how they fit so perfectly into the rules the rpg has for demon bound people, like agent Random in the Jennifer Morgue.
>>44313917
>they'd get fucked if humans noticed them
Confirmed for not having read The Rhesus Factor.
It goes like this: to become a vampire in that set-up, you need to be a spell-caster first and foremost. Ideally one good enough to know what's happening and prevent it from getting TOO bad. Then you need to be enough of a sociopath to not immediately kill yourself when you realise what you've become.
A vampire that lives past two weeks is a wizard of high calibre and total ruthlessness. It does not conceal itself from humans; it conceals itself from OTHER VAMPIRES.
The conclusion of The Rhesus Factor involves a single vampire walking into the occult centre of the UK military industrial complex and absolutely wrecking its shit, effortlessly annihilating some of the most senior and powerful spellcasters in the world before being "I'm taking you with me!"-d by something that was essentially a Lovecraftian horror.
This vampire only did so because it was driven to that end by an older, smarter vampire who had out-maneuvered it in a shadow war centuries long. Neither of them particularly saw humans as humans any more.
>>44313992
Yeah, Giants actually have specific dietary problems with humans, they don't eat the flesh, just the bones. And even then it's got to be ground into meal.
Presumably they discard the rest of the carcass for other scavengers of their homelands.
And of course, they can only digest Christians.
>>44314245
Honestly, it seems like you could get multiple species co-operating to get the different parts of the humans they want. Like, vampires just want the blood and the giants just want the bones, right? There's no competition there and if both are intelligent enough there's no reason why there couldn't be industrial human farming.
>>44314296
And now I'm imagining vampires as cockroaches for giants.
Always scattering when you shine a light on them.
>>44314081
How is that particularly relevant to OPs question in any way?
IT
DEPENDS
ON
THE
SETTING
>>44314383
Because it was in response to someone saying that vampires in The Rhesus Factor were scared of humans.
Read, kiddo. It's fundamental.
>>44314383
It's in response to someone else, you may have noticed that the link in his post is not followed by (OP) indicating he is responding to a post which isn't the original post, and is therefore unlikely to be the original question.
>>44312372
>How have humans not been hunted to the verge of extinction?
I don't even understand the question, apparently.
Have you seen the planet you currently live on? It's filled to the brim with things that are fully capable of killing us, but we're still around. Been that way since the dawn of our species.
The only thing added by including vampires megaplants and the like, is variety. There's just a larger variety of shit to kill us. Has no baring at all on whether or not our species should go extinct.
I guess what I'm getting at is, the question you've asked doesn't even require an answer because we can substitute the example of the world we really live in for an answer. We survive, and there was never a reason to believe otherwise.
>>44314347
I was seeing it as more like an industry where the ogres are in the human-fields taking in the harvest while the vampires are in the shady barn draining out the blood, flensing off the flesh and then putting the bones through the grinders.
It's a co-op, after all. Everyone's gotta do their part!
>>44314525
>"there's a whole bunch of stuff that can kill us"
is not the same as
>"there is a whole bunch of stuff out there which actively hunts us"
>>44314552
But is the humanbone flour they sell organic?
>>44314552
>Human Eaters Co-Op
So, we've got:
>Blood: Vampires
>Bones: Giants
>Brains: Illithids
What other monsters eat specific human parts? Does anything go for the eyes especially?
>>44315110
>Does anything go for the eyes especially?
Pygmy dire gerbils
Homeostasis. Think about it like wolves and deer rather than monsters and people.
When too many predators, the prey is all eaten and predators starve. When too much prey, predators flourish and eat more prey. The system will work itself out to some degree, unless something really drastically changes things. In this case, logically if there are dozens of different man-eating baddies out there, then they either eat other things too, there are a lot more people than monsters, or they don't need a lot of people. Some can keep larders of "not dead yet" people or people with cut off limbs whose torsos are left to squirm in cages.
I think monsters generally make more sense if you don't think of them as a species, but more like a mutant
There's really no reason a minotaur or giant spider or whatever has to be one of many. I think stuff like the dnd monster manual gets it in people's heads that there's supposed to be some sort of wacky ecology to all that stuff, but I really just don't think it can work without most of that stuff being "that one guy cursed by zeus" or "that one lady who was so hungry she made a deal with the devil" if you really think about it.
Or alternatively being able to easily eat one dude doesn't stop 40 of them with torches when you blow your cover, so one way or another that shit just contains itself
OP, fact is almost any predator on Earth has the prefix "man-eating". Wolves eat people, bears eat people, sharks eat people. Yet they do not usually get to eat people because people are really scary. They make weapons, they have technology, they're organised. I venture to say that humans are the #1 cause of death among predators, on this Earth and on any fantasy setting.
Vampires? Humans are the biggest growers of garlic and carvers of stakes and seem to always have a silvered weapon hidden somewhere on their person. Plus they're annoyingly religious: so many clerics and holy symbols.
Lycanthropes? Meet silvered bear traps.
Giant Spiders? Fire and swords make short work of those webs and weedy little legs.
Trolls? Humans have discovered fire long ago.
Ogres? Giants? Large targets.
Carnivorous plants? Just walk a bit further away from them.
Plus, those man-eating things also have a tendency to eat each other. Vampires and werewolves are famous for this, but it is universal. Meanwhile, the humans have an odd tendency to cooperate especially when faced with a monster.
>>44312372
Humans breed year round
Humans cluster together for safety
Humans tend to fortify their dens
Most importantly, humans hunt their hunters
>>44313136
In reality, zombie plague would actually be pretty terrible at spreading. Spreading through bites is not a particularly effective method, and a single zombies is hardly a big threat (they're slow and mindless). They're onyl a threat when you have lots of them, but because of aformentioned reasons it would be very hard to get a huge amount of zombies in one place before the authorities notice and contain the infection.
>>44313279
Vampires are nearly always explicitly magical. They don't drink blood because of its nutritional value, but because of its metaphysical value. Vampires are undead beings that sustain their existence by preying on the living, and blood symbolizes life.
>>44313571
Depends on how common vampires are and how often they need to eat.
I'd imagine vampires are very rare, and probably quite territorial because they usually prefer to stay hidden, which is harder to do if you got multiple of them running around the same area.
A vampire that needs to feed once a week could quite easily live in a decently sized city undetected. Such places tend to have large amounts of people who aren't missed much if they're gone (beggars, homeless, etc.). So in all likelyhood the authorities probably wouldn't even notice one extra homeless person disappearring eveyr week, at least if the vampire is smart enough to hide its tracks and not leave exsanguinated bodies lying in the middle of the street. Even if his disappearance was noticed, it'd be likely they'd just assume he got into a fight, or got drunk and fell into the river or something.
>>44319685
Not all zombies are slow, not all zombies spread through bites.
I'm reminded of the Dawn of the Dead remake, where the cause of the (fast) zombies is never explained - there are just suddenly murderous corpses popping up worldwide, and no-one knows why. Society collapses overnight, as the "infection" is impossible to contain.
There's also Left For Dead, where in its relatively meagre lore, the zombie virus is extremely capable of surviving outside humans hosts, and is mutating constantly, allowing it to be transmitted in all kinds of ways (but especially by air) making containment impossible. That, and the zombies seem to have some kind of hive mind, that allows them to coordinate and destroy heavily-armed military outposts while suffering relatively few losses.
>>44319892
And the original Nigth of the Living Dead had some mysterious force causing any recently dead body to rise as a zombie.
But the standard zombie you usually see in fiction is a shambling mindless corpse that infects people with the zombie plague by biting them.
Although fantasy zombies aren't usually the same as the zombie film zombies. Fantasy zombies are usually created by necromancers raising corpses to act as their minions. Sometimes you have plagues that cause the victims to rise as zombies (like the Scourge in WC3), but they're usually more of a Black Death analoque (now with added zombies!) rather than a zombie movie style zombie plague.
>>44312372
Anything that has been eating humans for a long time has to be significantly smarter. We haven't eaten to extinction the species we could just domesticate. In fact, they are in much better condition than species we don't eat, like lions and elephants.
By extension : let your man-eating predators be so much smarter than your men that homo sapiens are like cattle before them. [Vampires] could go around doing their own shit and just grabbing a snack when they get hungry. The kennels for humans could be called "towns" where humans think themselves free, oblivious to their own place in the food chain. They hunt deer and plant seeds and mourn deaths, they praise gods and wage wars and play music. And there are a few places they have learned not to go, such as _that_ forest or _this_ mountain.
Sure, people go missing from time to time, but that's just life. Even if they know about vampires, there is nothing they can do (in a well written setting).
>>44313361
I agree with that man.
The vampire goes "fuck it, I'm tired of pitchforks, I'm gonna be a shepherd and drink lamb's blood, with the occasional human snack of old time's sake/chrismas"
Even if a baby's or a young maiden's blood is a delicacy, I'm not sure that the usual bum/peasant/hardened warrior taste better than cattle.
>>44312372
Maybe those things eat each other too.
One problem I often have is balancing the idea of eating people giving you superpowers and reasons why the majority of society doesn't do it.
Take the film Ravenous for example. I can't really find any reason why there isn't a large successful society of suporpowered immortal cannibals that farm regular people.
>>44313318
>Humans are bad smelling, loud, weird, lanky creatures. It takes a lot to get over that and think we are worth hunting.
Also Humans don't have much meat on them. We're too bony and not fatty enough for sharks to regularly go after.
>>44312372
Pic related is a person who eats people. He's only a "monster" in the figurative sense.
Given that IRL lore runs from Dahmer, thru aboriginal head-hunters all the way to shit like Peruvian plane crashes and the Donner Party, I doubt a few actual supernaturals would disrupt things that much.
>>44312944
And men are more numerous and have the boon of ADVENTURERS and HEROES to defend then.
>>44312372
For the same reason that the animals we eat in the real world still exist: we like eating them and want to continue eating them. Either there are less vicious predators in total than there are humans (a "for every one of them we kill, they killed twenty of us" sort of deal) or they're intelligent enough to realize that if they keep gorging on us, there will come a day when there will be no more to eat.
So then they set up human farms or human habitat protection zones to prevent us from going extinct. Not out of any love for us, but because they want to keep eating us forever.
>>44327009
So, in other words, class levels?
Not a great counterpoint given monstrous races can take class levels as well.
>>44322638
Depends on the causal link, I suppose. Are you superhuman because you eat people or do you eat people because you're superhuman? In the former model, you're right, cannibalism would be way more common. In the latter model, it would only be as common and whatever it is that causes superhumanity.
I'm not a biologist, so I may have fudged the numbers here, but I remember reading something about predator:prey ratios being something like 1:100 almost universally. 1 lion/100 gazelle, for instance. Humans are only apex predators because we're smart as fuck, relatively--biologically, we're more like pigs or goats than wolves or lions. You're probably going to see two kinds of man-eating creatures; the kind that predate mainly on humans, and the kind that predate on lots of things, sometimes including humans. I'm betting the latter are way more common. Whatever eats mainly human are probably going to be solitary and territorial, and competition is going to guarantee they never overpopulate. That, or they're even more K selected than humans. There's just no way we would have evolved together, otherwise.
>>44312622
>had pork roast for dinner
>this makes me want to go have more
>>44335669
Sure, that's pork.
>>44335835
Longpork.It actually is pork. Studio isn't allowed to cook actual human remains.
>>44335835
That's Hannibal. I'm well aware of what he's cooking.
Didn't stop me from getting another chunk of pork roast though.
>>44335880
>It actually is pork. Studio isn't allowed to cook actual human remains.
show fucking dropped
next thing you're gonna tell me is that lucas wasn't a war reporter during the clone wars before being co-opted and blackmailed to work for the rebellion
>>44312372
Many of these creatures are supernatural and reproduce/feed through non-natural means. Vampires, for example, need not necessarily feed constantly, and aren't exactly crawling out of the walls. Most settings make the curse something that isn't necessarily spread every feeding.
Man coexisted for quite a long time (thousands of years) with creatures that could eat it and did so. Giant eagles, smilodon, dire wolves - even in the modern day, lions and bears.
>>44336259
He wasn't blackmailed, he joined of his own accord.
>>44322509
>species we don't eat
>elephants
>what is sub-saharan Africa
>>44312372
Presumably, they can eat other things, too. Other things which may be less of a hassle to catch.
This doesn't apply to specialized monsters like vampires, of course. Things like that would have be few and far between, with lower food requirements than normal.
>>44312372
Why aren't real life prey species all on the verge of being extinct? If there are too few things to eat, competition becomes more fierce and the predators being dying off as well.
>>44312599
There are thousands of predators, from mammals to birds to fish, that eat squirrel. Squirrels still exist. /thread
>>44312536
Then causing human extinction would be against their interest.
>>44312599
Having human as main prey is pretty much a horrible evolutionary choice, considering we are the only one specie that builds cities, weapons and stick togheter in groups of thousands (if you exclude insects). Bears would be a better choice of prey than humans.
>>44312803
Assuming a population of, say, vampires could grow steadily regulated only by the availability of resources and not factors like competition with other supernatural predators or being hunted by their own prey ... if their number grew enough to influence heavily the local prey (human) population, they would soon have to compete much more for survival, since they would be making themselves scarcer their susteanance. Successful predators don't predate their natural prey to extinction, usually.
>>44313037
Then they will deplete their own sustainance source and consequently suffer overpopulation.
>>44313068
We are used to address animals as 'man-eating' as in 'given the possibility this animal could and would predate on humans'. Predating exclusively on humans for anything but a very specific restriction of supernatural nature (like vampires' curse) would be quite asinine.
>>44313182
OP is talking about their own bizarre setting and making up stuff as it goes.
>>44313322
If you, as a setting writer, are doing things right, you will either make these creatures bound to the place for some reasons (supernatural or not), or turn such places into self-sustaining micro-ecosystems, or make those places just a 'safe place' from which the beasts hunt the surrounding territory.
>>44313543
Humans reproduce far more successfully than rabbits. Seriously, comparisons to the actual animal kingdom won't bring the argument towards your point, since in case you haven't noticed humans are by far the most successful predator/herder among all animals. There must be some severe case of powerplaying behind our race design.
