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Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.

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OK Dimension 20 fans!! I have Dropout tv and have not watched any of the Dimension 20 stuff because I have never really been drawn to any D&D series in the past BUT I keep hearing good things about this and I really like the players when I see them on other Dropout shows so basically I'm leaving it up to whoever in the fandom sees this post to decide my introduction to this series.

I put in parentheses my own inclinations based on what I know of the campaigns, when I know anything at all) ALSO PLEASE NO SPOILERS

I combined some similar ones because I ran out of options, so if you have a strong opinion on one of those please tell me! Also if you think I should watch seasons within each storyline out of order, also tell me that. I won't do it, but you could still tell me.

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So, You Want To Write Vampires...

Here's a basic list of things to do/consider when approaching this creature.

Source Material

Go back to the origins. Almost every culture around the world has a story or myth containing cannibalism / blood drinking. You may want to base your origin story for vampires on one of these. This can also give you some ideas about what traits and abilities you might want to include that have been written out of modern fiction. It could help you add a unique twist.

2. Vampire Fiction

Vampires have been popping up in fiction for a very long time. Read The Vampyre by John Polidori (thought to be one of the first books written on vampires). Check out Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (the lesbian vampire story that came out before Dracula). Speaking of, Dracula is a classic.

Look at modern fiction. Vampire Academy, Twilight, Vampire Diaries, True Blood, A Dowery of Blood, Crave. Read the good and the bad. Learn what qualities you like and which you will not use.

Make a list of things you like and things you don't.

3. Themes

Writing vampires brings a lot of themes surrounding mortality, immortality, morality, and at what point do we draw the line between what is human and what is other. These themes are integral to a vampire story whether you're writing a gothic horror, a paranormal romance, or a YA. There are a lot of links between cannibalism / blood drinking and love, vampires and LGBTQIA+ characters / coding.

4.Pick your traits

Vampires tend to be unique to the writer. The vampires in Twilight work differently to the vampires in The Vampire Diaries to the vampires in Dracula.

By this point you should have a list of possible traits and abilities you might want to give your vampires. My advice: tailor it to your genre. If you're writing a horror go with the traditional vampire abilities, give them the things that scare you. Think Nosferatu. If you're writing romance, then you might want to soften the traditional vampire traits in the way you find frequently in modern vampire media.

What you choose is up to you.

5. Origins

This is often overlooked in vampire stories but how did your vampires come into being? Who was the first vampire? Is this vampire still alive? How far back do vampires go as a species?

This could affect your vampires in terms of relationships with others of their kind, their powers, their strength.

This might not impact on your plot but, in terms of worldbuilding, if you intend to turn your book into a series then this could be very important going forward.

6. Society

Unless you're writing about the first ever vampire you're probably going to be writing about an established vampire population who will have their own laws, their own history, their own leadership, their own customs. This is an important piece of worldbuilding. It will affect your characters relationships, add conflict to the plot, create established enemies and can be used to raise the stakes.

7. Nocturnal Life

If you're following a traditional burn-in-the-sun vampire and they haven't found a way around this then you need to determine the night life of your setting. What is there for your vampires to do at night?

8. Feeding, Hunting, and Bloodlust

This will affect the level of gore in your story as a lot of the bloody parts in your story will take place through feeding and hunting. This will also determine your vampire population.

You need to decide how much your vampires need to feed, how often they need to do so, and what they can feed on. Do they drink animal blood? Is that possible? Do they drink human blood? Can they drink from blood bags? Do they need the blood fresh? If they need human blood do they need all of it?

The less a vampire feeds, the larger a population you can have in one area as it attracts less attention.

What happens when your vampires are hungry? What does their bloodlust look like? How does it affect a vampire? Is the amount of bloodlust a vampire experiences determined by how old the vampire is?

9. Threats

Unless your vampires are well and truly endless there will be ways to kill them and they will have enemies. Do these enemies take the shape of humans, of other vampires, or another species entirely? How can your vampires be killed? What other species are out there?

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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.

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Thinking of the larger context of LOTR and like, the fellowship swapping old war stories and shit and Sam just says “Yeah I killed a huge spider…Shelob, I think?”

And Gandalf just blinks and is like, “You what now?”

“Yeah, killed it. Had to save Frodo”

Gandalf elects not to tell Sam that he killed the spawn of a primordial demon.

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this may or may not be a fantasy writing exercise for me. please reblog

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No, no, you misunderstood me. The best trope isn't the villain gets the girl, the best trope is the girl gets the villain.

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when in fics they say two characters gave each other a look this is always what i envision in my head

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Me when I hit a writing slump and need to keep my motivation up

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so. bad news. we have to keep going tomorrow. good news is that I’ll keep going with you

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If it brings you joy it's not a waste of time.

If it brings you joy it's not a waste of time.

If it brings you joy it's not a waste of time.

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"Nobody ACTUALLY wants anything bad to happen to these fictional characters-" I do. I want these motherfuckers to break.

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The thing about writing is that until you publish it there is 0 cost to fucking it up. You're not using up materials. You're not doing anything that can't be undone. You can fuck around endlessly to figure out what you want and it's free.

Like, yes, ok, you might waste your time

but would you rather waste your time writing or being too scared to write?

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oh my favorite trope? two people who go through something so unique and agonizing and entirely beyond words that they have no choice but to create a bond that transcends all other types of love, thus acting as the sole point of understanding for the other person in a world that cannot fathom what they’ve been through