#it's just. so fascinatingly gross and cruel and evil

[invinciblerodent]

I'm sure someone smarter than me has said all this before, but 7000 vampire spawn, over roughly 200 years (let's just use that number y'know, why not), is just like. 35 per year. On average, give or take. With the Faerunian calendar of 36*10 days to a year, that's just about one person per tenday.

And going by the rules on "Handling Undead Hunger" outlined in Libris Mortis (yes it's 3.5E but the most complete guide on the undead in DnD that I know of), a vampire would need to feed roughly every 3 days in order to be comfortable.

30-some missing persons going unaccounted for over the course of a year in a city with as much crime as Baldur's Gate, is... probably reasonable, but there's likely at least some indication of an upper limit to how many mysterious disappearences the Flaming Fist will just not bother investigating. I don't recall there being mention of anything like willing blood donors or anything (if there were some and I just missed it this whole thing falls apart btw), but to go out and nab a new person each time ~~Master~~ is feeling peckish, that's just. That's just unsustainable. That'd be 120 people per year, or 2.5 per tenday. At that pace, not only would they have all gotten caught, they'd have completed the ritual in like under 60 years (which, from Sebastian just being alive, we know they got started at least 170 years ago).

So if we assume that the number of those brought in remained at least kinda consistent regardless of how many spawn were out actively hunting (20-50 per year sounds... kinda realistic), it could be reasonable to also assume that each victim was, on average, the "meal" for roughly ten days before ultimately being drained fully and turned. (Yes, I thought about draining them first and keeping bloodbanks, but... leaving them alive to keep them fresher for longer is more cruel, so lbr, it's more likely.)

It's... probably halfway reasonable then to assume then that Cazador fed off the average victim like 2-4 times, over the course of a number of days, no?

There's some room for variation in that number of course, like there were probably leaner years at the start, and later with 7 spawn all hunting consistently, the time between each was probably somewhat shorter, plus there were likely cases (like Astarion) when there was only one bite total. Maybe sometimes more were brought in at once for those parties that were mentioned, only to be..... stored, and uh..... enjoyed over the course of the next... however long time, during which the "favored" spawn maybe even got to "enjoy" some downtime.

so. that's a series of fun (not relly) thoughts.

I swear, every time I think about Cazador for whatever reason, that whole shitshow just gets worse.

[btw if we take Astarion's "I've bedded thousands" comment literally and assume he personally brought in around 2000 over ~170 years of being a spawn (there could be fewer and he could be rounding up like he consistently rounds 170 up to 200, but if it's significantly more, his siblings all must seriously suck at hunting), that's roughly an average of like... 12 people a year. Which is bad, of course, don't get me wrong, but I honestly halfway expected it to be a much less realistic-sounding number, I guess.]