Bloodsucking and brain eating [Archive] - Wizards Community

Bloodsucking and brain eating [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
The Vorpal Tribble
09-26-04, 04:56 PM This will probably go under 'its a fantasy game dimwit!' but I really must ask a couple questions.

#1. How much blood can a vampire hold? I've read stories from other players with vampires sucking out entire villages in only a night etc. Even if the vampire were an empty container, the dude would overflow! Does his gullet lead to the negative energy plane or what? I thought at first 'Hey, maybe his metabolism is just sky high and he burns it off...' but they have no constitution, which means no metabolism.

#2. How does a mindflayer drill through the skull? Every picture I've seen the mouth is just empty, not even any teeth, though who knows with these artists. However, what if the skull is extremely thick, they are wearing helmets, or (and this is a stretch I know, but...) say you are playing modern d20 and its a cyborg with a metal skull and a live brain within. Can a mindflayer sheer through iron? Steel? Adamantium?!

Also, it says they can get the brains of even creatures larger than they. I suppose they could be snakelike with unhinged jaws, and eventually get that big ole tasty pink thing down their gullets, but how many can they hold? At least they are alive I suppose to have a metabolism that can burn up a dozen brains or so in one sitting, but that'd mean these guys are bouncing off the walls and have to eat every hour or so elsewise.

:behold:
headlessfriar
09-26-04, 05:32 PM Don't know about a vampire's stomach capacity, but illithid get at that salty buttery cuisine by their tentacles. The tentacles of an illithid secrete enzymes which dissolve most bodily tissues, except are inactive on nervous tissue. The tentacles dissolve holes into the skull, then lift out the brain through the opening made. Of course, a gourmet performing an act of performance eating is different altogether. In that case, the thrall begins ritually shaving it's own scalp and settling itself into a stocks while the gourmet introduces the performance, and links it's sense of taste with that of the audiance. When the linking is complete and the thrall shaved and restrained, then entire scull-cap is removed by those enzyme-producing tentacles. Then the brain is consummed in a very deliberate, precise fasion, based on the nuances in texture and flavour that the different regions of the brain possess. It is a work of art, theatre as a very practical as well as artistic event.
JabberWocky
09-26-04, 05:40 PM God, I love illithids.

Theoretically, a vampire can drain an infinite number of victims per night. How this is done is up to you. Perhaps a vampire's body absorbs the blood into its system and begins to reconstruct semblances from the creature's life. In common mythology, a vampire is pale and emaciated, but after feeding they can appear so close to human so as to pass through a crowd and not be noticed. Perhaps you can rule that a vampire gains a bonus on Disguise checks to make itself appear as a living creature of its race.

I don't think about it too much. Trying to bend the intangible rulesets of D&D to "real" things is what ruins it. I find that far too many people attempt to justify some cool anime they saw, or some zombie horror flick, within the rulesets of D&D and fail. The system itself doesn't "fail" to portray the thing in question simply because it is not the thing in question.
FriendoftheDork
09-26-04, 05:47 PM top the vampiric question the answer would be "whatever you want."

In my game, a single vampire cannot drink all the blood in a village in a single night. In Vampire the Masquerade there were rules concerning this, and a young vampire could not drain more than one man before becoming full. an older vampire could perhaps drain as many as 5 before becoming full, but these were legend. In addition they could "burn" blood to heal or boost their physical abilities temporarily, and many other supernatural abilities required blood to work.

In any case, a limit of 1-2 isn't too bad, the vampire can always kill without feeding if necessary.
The Vorpal Tribble
09-27-04, 08:44 AM That was hillarious Headless, but is any of that actually official? ;P
Feathercircle
09-27-04, 09:46 AM As per the 2nd Edition Illithiad, yes.

And on the issue of mind flayers eating the brain of something several size classes larger than they are.... well, a larger body doesn't neccessarily always imply a larger brain, for one thing. Many of the large herbivorous dinosaurs had tiny little brains supplemented by nodules along their spinal cords.... If an illithid for some reason wanted to extract a sauropod's walnut-sized brain, I wouldn't have any issue with that, provided that it could reach. For large things which do have a decent amount of neural mass... I'd rule that it doesn't actually eat the entire brain, but rather, just enough to be lethal. It doesn't take all that much brain damage to kill a person, if it's in the right areas... and who better than a cephalophagous species to know where those areas are?

Eating through a metallic skull is probably off-limits, though it might be able to get in by jabbing its tentacles through your eyesockets.
kenichi
09-27-04, 01:10 PM If you don't like the disolving tentacles way of them getting your brain, I always thought of them like octopi. Opctopi have many numerous very tiny teeth that basically grind and drill through hard calcium shells of mollusks. A mindflayer with all its tentacles wrapped around the head of its victim could drill through the skull in such a way.
Or maybe they have a beak like a sqid or a mouth like a xenomorph from Alien, these mouth pieces could be hidden deeper in the head only to emerge when they feed. I guess the official explanation was given above per the Ilithiad, but either of these alternative explanations could be used.
The Vorpal Tribble
09-27-04, 03:09 PM Aye, I think we're getting somewhere! ;)

This is an additional thing someone sent me:

From what I recall of the mindflayer description, they have a ring of tentacles surrounding their mouth, which is a beak just like an octopus. The octopus eats mainly crabs and bivalve mollusks, like oysters. The octopus will either pry open the shells with its tentacles or crack the shell with a powerful bite. Many Octopi have toxic saliva which they use to paralyze their prey (the toxin from a blue ringed octopus is strong enough to kill a full grown man). I don't know if a mindflayer's tentacles are strong enough to tear open someone's skull, or its beak powerful enough to crack through bone...but in the description I believe it states that it inserts its tentacles into the victim's skull and draws out the brain. I guess they could do it the same way they removed the brains from mummies - through the nasal cavity. I'm not sure how many tentacles it could get up a person's nose at once though. The average human brain is about 390 cubic inches (weighing around 6 lbs.). Going by the above measurement of a 1 quart size for the average stomach, then it could hold 67.201 cubic inches of brain. If you take into account the remainder of the digestive system (intestines and such) I'm sure it could fit more - or if it had a stomach larger than the average human.

Take what you want from the above info.

However, everyone on the other D&D forums I visit also agree that they should not be able to get through a metallic helmet or skull. So that should be simple enough. Wear a really tight helmet and why worry? :D
Thomar_of_Uointer
09-27-04, 10:31 PM According to the original Dracula book, vampires needed one good suck per night to keep from going hungry. They would feast on a target multiple times over a few weeks if they were trying to make a thrall. Starving was almost never a problem. They could gorge themselves if they were planning on going without feeding for a while, and one of the characters who found Dracula's coffin during the day described him as, "a gorged leech." His face was even streaked with blood that had dripped from his full mouth when he went into stupor.

I believe someone brought up the idea of a Flayer trying to eat the big brain pool they have. It was compared to trying to eat an elephant.
The WarOverlord
09-28-04, 05:32 AM This will probably go under 'its a fantasy game dimwit!' but I really must ask a couple questions.

#1. How much blood can a vampire hold? I've read stories from other players with vampires sucking out entire villages in only a night etc. Even if the vampire were an empty container, the dude would overflow! Does his gullet lead to the negative energy plane or what? I thought at first 'Hey, maybe his metabolism is just sky high and he burns it off...' but they have no constitution, which means no metabolism.

#2. How does a mindflayer drill through the skull? Every picture I've seen the mouth is just empty, not even any teeth, though who knows with these artists. However, what if the skull is extremely thick, they are wearing helmets, or (and this is a stretch I know, but...) say you are playing modern d20 and its a cyborg with a metal skull and a live brain within. Can a mindflayer sheer through iron? Steel? Adamantium?!

Also, it says they can get the brains of even creatures larger than they. I suppose they could be snakelike with unhinged jaws, and eventually get that big ole tasty pink thing down their gullets, but how many can they hold? At least they are alive I suppose to have a metabolism that can burn up a dozen brains or so in one sitting, but that'd mean these guys are bouncing off the walls and have to eat every hour or so elsewise.

:behold:

1) Actually depending on the type of vampire (Like 22 types ) it can be 1 to 2 victims a night to 1 victim every 1000 years.

The ones in D&D are of the the "undead" necromancer types and they need at least 1 pint every few weeks or so to maintain the magic that sustains their "undead" state and to have contact with the soil of their grave at least once a week though they could fill their vains to max which would be about 1 or 2 victims maximum depending on the size on the victim.

2) THem tentacle things are driven up the mouth or up the Nose of the victim on a successful grapple check then pulled out like a spaghetti string that is <SLURPED> out the nose or mouth
JabberWocky
09-28-04, 10:31 AM Oh, on the topic of mind flayers once more...have you ever heard of a "cookie cutter" shark? These small creatures attach themselves to large sea-dwelling creatures and literally bite out a circular portion of flesh. Usually it's so small that the whale or shark they took it from doesn't notice.

From the picture of the mind flayer sorcerer in the MM 3.5, it looks like they have a circular ring of teeth, just like these cookie-cutter sharks. I may be mistaken, or my sources misinformed, but I do believe that even these tiny sharks can bite a hole in metal ship plating.
varder_kiften
09-28-04, 10:57 AM I know that vampire bat can drink more than it's body size in blood, and they can do that by secreteing at the same time they eat beacause most of blood is plasma and plasma has no nutrition. I do realise this would be kind of gross/ not very charming of a vampire so do whatever suits you. Perhaps they don't drink the plasma part of the blood.
Discovery channel strikes again!
Khaibit_Ema_Neteru
09-28-04, 06:03 PM Actually, the only item that I know of that makes brain eating impossible is a magically enhanced metal plate that githyanki sometimes have implanted in their scalp, which says two things to me

1) Mindflayers can bore through normal metal without much problem, or else a magical plate wouldn't be necessary

2) They do generally go in through the scalp rather than the nose or mouth, which in turn leans toward the "cookie cutter shark" or "flesh-dissolving enzyme" theory.

I personally favor the enzyme theory, simply because I thought the illithiad was a very well written book, and I hope to see much of its information revisited in the upcoming Codex Anathema
JabberWocky
09-28-04, 06:08 PM Unfortunately I never read the Illithiad, so if they explained it in there, I am sadly in the dark. I'm only going by what I guess, as the 3.x MMs leave a good deal of this sort of thinking to the DM.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
The Vorpal Tribble 09-26-04, 04:56 PM	This will probably go under 'its a fantasy game dimwit!' but I really must ask a couple questions. #1. How much blood can a vampire hold? I've read stories from other players with vampires sucking out entire villages in only a night etc. Even if the vampire were an empty container, the dude would overflow! Does his gullet lead to the negative energy plane or what? I thought at first 'Hey, maybe his metabolism is just sky high and he burns it off...' but they have no constitution, which means no metabolism. #2. How does a mindflayer drill through the skull? Every picture I've seen the mouth is just empty, not even any teeth, though who knows with these artists. However, what if the skull is extremely thick, they are wearing helmets, or (and this is a stretch I know, but...) say you are playing modern d20 and its a cyborg with a metal skull and a live brain within. Can a mindflayer sheer through iron? Steel? Adamantium?! Also, it says they can get the brains of even creatures larger than they. I suppose they could be snakelike with unhinged jaws, and eventually get that big ole tasty pink thing down their gullets, but how many can they hold? At least they are alive I suppose to have a metabolism that can burn up a dozen brains or so in one sitting, but that'd mean these guys are bouncing off the walls and have to eat every hour or so elsewise. :behold:
headlessfriar 09-26-04, 05:32 PM	Don't know about a vampire's stomach capacity, but illithid get at that salty buttery cuisine by their tentacles. The tentacles of an illithid secrete enzymes which dissolve most bodily tissues, except are inactive on nervous tissue. The tentacles dissolve holes into the skull, then lift out the brain through the opening made. Of course, a gourmet performing an act of performance eating is different altogether. In that case, the thrall begins ritually shaving it's own scalp and settling itself into a stocks while the gourmet introduces the performance, and links it's sense of taste with that of the audiance. When the linking is complete and the thrall shaved and restrained, then entire scull-cap is removed by those enzyme-producing tentacles. Then the brain is consummed in a very deliberate, precise fasion, based on the nuances in texture and flavour that the different regions of the brain possess. It is a work of art, theatre as a very practical as well as artistic event.
JabberWocky 09-26-04, 05:40 PM	God, I love illithids. Theoretically, a vampire can drain an infinite number of victims per night. How this is done is up to you. Perhaps a vampire's body absorbs the blood into its system and begins to reconstruct semblances from the creature's life. In common mythology, a vampire is pale and emaciated, but after feeding they can appear so close to human so as to pass through a crowd and not be noticed. Perhaps you can rule that a vampire gains a bonus on Disguise checks to make itself appear as a living creature of its race. I don't think about it too much. Trying to bend the intangible rulesets of D&D to "real" things is what ruins it. I find that far too many people attempt to justify some cool anime they saw, or some zombie horror flick, within the rulesets of D&D and fail. The system itself doesn't "fail" to portray the thing in question simply because it is not the thing in question.
FriendoftheDork 09-26-04, 05:47 PM	top the vampiric question the answer would be "whatever you want." In my game, a single vampire cannot drink all the blood in a village in a single night. In Vampire the Masquerade there were rules concerning this, and a young vampire could not drain more than one man before becoming full. an older vampire could perhaps drain as many as 5 before becoming full, but these were legend. In addition they could "burn" blood to heal or boost their physical abilities temporarily, and many other supernatural abilities required blood to work. In any case, a limit of 1-2 isn't too bad, the vampire can always kill without feeding if necessary.
The Vorpal Tribble 09-27-04, 08:44 AM	That was hillarious Headless, but is any of that actually official? ;P
Feathercircle 09-27-04, 09:46 AM	As per the 2nd Edition Illithiad, yes. And on the issue of mind flayers eating the brain of something several size classes larger than they are.... well, a larger body doesn't neccessarily always imply a larger brain, for one thing. Many of the large herbivorous dinosaurs had tiny little brains supplemented by nodules along their spinal cords.... If an illithid for some reason wanted to extract a sauropod's walnut-sized brain, I wouldn't have any issue with that, provided that it could reach. For large things which do have a decent amount of neural mass... I'd rule that it doesn't actually eat the entire brain, but rather, just enough to be lethal. It doesn't take all that much brain damage to kill a person, if it's in the right areas... and who better than a cephalophagous species to know where those areas are? Eating through a metallic skull is probably off-limits, though it might be able to get in by jabbing its tentacles through your eyesockets.
kenichi 09-27-04, 01:10 PM	If you don't like the disolving tentacles way of them getting your brain, I always thought of them like octopi. Opctopi have many numerous very tiny teeth that basically grind and drill through hard calcium shells of mollusks. A mindflayer with all its tentacles wrapped around the head of its victim could drill through the skull in such a way. Or maybe they have a beak like a sqid or a mouth like a xenomorph from Alien, these mouth pieces could be hidden deeper in the head only to emerge when they feed. I guess the official explanation was given above per the Ilithiad, but either of these alternative explanations could be used.
The Vorpal Tribble 09-27-04, 03:09 PM	Aye, I think we're getting somewhere! ;) This is an additional thing someone sent me: From what I recall of the mindflayer description, they have a ring of tentacles surrounding their mouth, which is a beak just like an octopus. The octopus eats mainly crabs and bivalve mollusks, like oysters. The octopus will either pry open the shells with its tentacles or crack the shell with a powerful bite. Many Octopi have toxic saliva which they use to paralyze their prey (the toxin from a blue ringed octopus is strong enough to kill a full grown man). I don't know if a mindflayer's tentacles are strong enough to tear open someone's skull, or its beak powerful enough to crack through bone...but in the description I believe it states that it inserts its tentacles into the victim's skull and draws out the brain. I guess they could do it the same way they removed the brains from mummies - through the nasal cavity. I'm not sure how many tentacles it could get up a person's nose at once though. The average human brain is about 390 cubic inches (weighing around 6 lbs.). Going by the above measurement of a 1 quart size for the average stomach, then it could hold 67.201 cubic inches of brain. If you take into account the remainder of the digestive system (intestines and such) I'm sure it could fit more - or if it had a stomach larger than the average human. Take what you want from the above info. However, everyone on the other D&D forums I visit also agree that they should not be able to get through a metallic helmet or skull. So that should be simple enough. Wear a really tight helmet and why worry? :D
Thomar_of_Uointer 09-27-04, 10:31 PM	According to the original Dracula book, vampires needed one good suck per night to keep from going hungry. They would feast on a target multiple times over a few weeks if they were trying to make a thrall. Starving was almost never a problem. They could gorge themselves if they were planning on going without feeding for a while, and one of the characters who found Dracula's coffin during the day described him as, "a gorged leech." His face was even streaked with blood that had dripped from his full mouth when he went into stupor. I believe someone brought up the idea of a Flayer trying to eat the big brain pool they have. It was compared to trying to eat an elephant.
The WarOverlord 09-28-04, 05:32 AM	This will probably go under 'its a fantasy game dimwit!' but I really must ask a couple questions. #1. How much blood can a vampire hold? I've read stories from other players with vampires sucking out entire villages in only a night etc. Even if the vampire were an empty container, the dude would overflow! Does his gullet lead to the negative energy plane or what? I thought at first 'Hey, maybe his metabolism is just sky high and he burns it off...' but they have no constitution, which means no metabolism. #2. How does a mindflayer drill through the skull? Every picture I've seen the mouth is just empty, not even any teeth, though who knows with these artists. However, what if the skull is extremely thick, they are wearing helmets, or (and this is a stretch I know, but...) say you are playing modern d20 and its a cyborg with a metal skull and a live brain within. Can a mindflayer sheer through iron? Steel? Adamantium?! Also, it says they can get the brains of even creatures larger than they. I suppose they could be snakelike with unhinged jaws, and eventually get that big ole tasty pink thing down their gullets, but how many can they hold? At least they are alive I suppose to have a metabolism that can burn up a dozen brains or so in one sitting, but that'd mean these guys are bouncing off the walls and have to eat every hour or so elsewise. :behold: 1) Actually depending on the type of vampire (Like 22 types ) it can be 1 to 2 victims a night to 1 victim every 1000 years. The ones in D&D are of the the "undead" necromancer types and they need at least 1 pint every few weeks or so to maintain the magic that sustains their "undead" state and to have contact with the soil of their grave at least once a week though they could fill their vains to max which would be about 1 or 2 victims maximum depending on the size on the victim. 2) THem tentacle things are driven up the mouth or up the Nose of the victim on a successful grapple check then pulled out like a spaghetti string that is <SLURPED> out the nose or mouth
JabberWocky 09-28-04, 10:31 AM	Oh, on the topic of mind flayers once more...have you ever heard of a "cookie cutter" shark? These small creatures attach themselves to large sea-dwelling creatures and literally bite out a circular portion of flesh. Usually it's so small that the whale or shark they took it from doesn't notice. From the picture of the mind flayer sorcerer in the MM 3.5, it looks like they have a circular ring of teeth, just like these cookie-cutter sharks. I may be mistaken, or my sources misinformed, but I do believe that even these tiny sharks can bite a hole in metal ship plating.
varder_kiften 09-28-04, 10:57 AM	I know that vampire bat can drink more than it's body size in blood, and they can do that by secreteing at the same time they eat beacause most of blood is plasma and plasma has no nutrition. I do realise this would be kind of gross/ not very charming of a vampire so do whatever suits you. Perhaps they don't drink the plasma part of the blood. Discovery channel strikes again!
Khaibit_Ema_Neteru 09-28-04, 06:03 PM	Actually, the only item that I know of that makes brain eating impossible is a magically enhanced metal plate that githyanki sometimes have implanted in their scalp, which says two things to me 1) Mindflayers can bore through normal metal without much problem, or else a magical plate wouldn't be necessary 2) They do generally go in through the scalp rather than the nose or mouth, which in turn leans toward the "cookie cutter shark" or "flesh-dissolving enzyme" theory. I personally favor the enzyme theory, simply because I thought the illithiad was a very well written book, and I hope to see much of its information revisited in the upcoming Codex Anathema
JabberWocky 09-28-04, 06:08 PM	Unfortunately I never read the Illithiad, so if they explained it in there, I am sadly in the dark. I'm only going by what I guess, as the 3.x MMs leave a good deal of this sort of thinking to the DM.