Dragons are welcome here!

Let me explain, vampires can take on many forms, mist cloud, vampire bat, even been known to include a wolf to name a few. We tend to feed in our original form but can shift when necessary for escape, for battle etc. The dragon is just one form and really it is just the form of a dragon, not actually being a real dragon, still really a vampire. The imagery of a dragon has also been co-opted by more than one vampire myth also so it is not that strange for a dragon form to have been included into those shapes a vampire may change into. Besides...this is fantasy...anything can happen!!!
Save your skepticism for the Real World... Sorry you are feeling down though seems to be a bit of that going around atm.

Thank you! Both for the explanation and the sympathy. I'm feeling better now...

As I was reading your post, I suddenly recalled the fellow who started the whole vampire legend, Vlad The Impaler, or Vlad Drakul. That name actually means "Dragon".
So I am completely wrong from the beginning. I'm sure it won't be the last time.

However, I will take mild exception to the attitude that "this is fantasy, anything can happen". In Second Life, ALL fantasies can mingle, and so in that sense you are right. A dragon can command a faster than light starship that battles Captain Nemo's submarine. However, I think that a fantasy world is much better if it operates within defined limits. In this particular case, we can agree that vampires may take dragon form. Can we also agree that a dragon is not subject to becoming a vampire...or if he does, that he would quickly starve?

Hmmmm....very interesting. I've been toying with creating a backstory for a certain set of avatars that seem otherwise utterly random (which is actually why they were born: to be random.) Perhaps I subscribe to your opinion of fantasy worlds needing to make at least a little sense. Hmmm.....

<--- is a druggie hippie dragon

Well if we are discussing it (rather than supposed to be letting it drop) Let me qualify that statement about anything happening in fantasy. I would say that in My SL and My fantasies anything that I find believable can happen - your mileage may very on that philosophy.

As for the dragon becoming a vampire hmmm that is actually an interesting thought. Wait a minute if non-vampire dragons were real they would starve too wouldn't they? But wait again, they eat livestock and people don't they? So run it past me why that would be different when being a turned dragon? They would just take the blood instead of eating the whole. May need a few more bison, woolly mammoth (hell why not - you got dragons haven't you?) and people. Besides a vampire never dies through lack of feeding - so starvation in this case would just lead to the vampire ending up in a period of dormancy until the next unwitting victim trips and spills their blood conveniently over the coffin lid

So I just don't accept fantasy limits the way you do - most fantasy rules/limits are arbitrarily made without thought to any kind of realism and are more to with power balance than anything. If you examine most fantasy creatures they don't hold up at all against realism. Like my example above - isn't it just as improbable that a dragon actually existed in the first place? That it breathes fire no less too - how ludicrous - no wait someone came up with a plausible explanation for that - her name was Anne McCaffrey. That is the key - if someone can adequately explain away the improbability then it becomes believable (note - not necessary probable) and believability is all thats needed in fantasy. In my opinion at least.

Of course if this was meant to be dropped rather than discussed then you may skip all of that

Vampires are very social creatures and often use social constraints to maintain a feeding herd. I don't see how a vampire dragon would behave differently.

Literature is full of proper undead dragons however. They're magical creatures, so the reliance on food or blood isn't an absolute.

I would recommend reading Robert Heinlein - I think Time Enough for Love - but maybe To Sail Beyond the Sunset - damn- I better look it up - anyway, a bunch of characters sit around in terminus and discuss how they were created by the assorted authors. It may be inspirational.

People eat animals too, and traditionally people vampires get the most benefit from people blood. Hence dragon vampires would want to feed on dragons.

It's also worth mentioning that dragons can assume the form of people, at least in certain mythologies. Perhaps a dragon vampire, being a magical creature doesn't feed on your blood, but feeds on something else inside you instead?

All very good and plausible points I feel

I said this was for dragons.. go away with your vampire shenanigans.

I don't feel as welcome in this thread as much as I did in the other one

The only place I agree with banning Dragons from.. is ice-cream parlours.

And even then, I realise there's a good reason, but it still seems rude.

(Poor Prickle).

Got to stop them blowing out candles on birthday cakes too - unless you really don't want to eat it that is

Is a furry allowed to be a dragon?

oohhh...pretty....

nice discussion, Gabriele.

I don't think a vampire dragon would be able to get by with sucking the blood of its normal food animals. After all, humans don't normally eat people...but human vampires require human blood. As I said before, there are cases in the literature of vampires existing on animal blood, but they do not thrive on it. A vampire requires the terror of its victim as much as the actual blood for sustenance. This requires the victim be sentient and self aware.

For that reason, the proper prey of a vampire dragon would be either people, or dragons. Because of their small size, I think people would be a poor choice. A vampire dragon would have to suck a whole town full of people dry in a night. And dragons themselves tend to be loners. They are wary and dangerous, and I think they would also be very difficult targets.

Now, you could say that your vamp dragon takes human form and then preys on human victims...but don't most vampires assume their normal form when feeding? And even if not, it is the root form that must be fed...so we still have a dead town on our hands.

Now, about fantasy rules in general. I agree with you that "anything goes"...but once you've set the rules for your fantasy, it's very bad form to go changing them in mid stream. For example, one tradition of magic holds that all magic comes from the magician's pacts with, and control of, demons. Fine. But if that is your premise, you cannot then introduce a situation where your magician gets out of a tight scrape by tapping the power of a ley line (another school of magical thought). And I think that the fantasists who treat magic like some form of sci-fi raygun ("Mandrake hurled a blast of power against the evil wizard's shields" are the most unbelievable of all. Magic should be arcane, and be bound about with symbols, spells, books, gestures, and all sorts of limitations to be believeable.

Fantasy creatures are the same way. They should have a history, a backstory, strengths and weaknesses, and a culture of their own. Just planting elves and dwarves about a landscape does not make it Middle Earth. For example, where do dragons come from? According to McCaffrey, they were genetically altered from fire lizard stock. According to Hambly, they came from a distant star (or perhaps another dimension). According to Tolkien, they were products of the malice of Morgoth. In each case, they came from somewhere, and have a plausible reason for existing.

Hmm Pixel or Prim Vampires?
in best vampire heavy foreign accent voice one hears "I want to suck your prims."

Thanks, you too

There as many examples of popular stories and fiction where vampires get by just fine on non-human blood its just not the first choice of most vampires and the terror thing is really a consquence of them being undead which is abhorrent to the living and/or evil not because they will drop down truly dead if the terror is not forthcoming.

In my view blood is blood, where you get it from is unimportant, a dragon vampire may prefer his own kind to drink from but ultimately there is no "proper" anything...there is so much variety in the type of vampires in popular fiction and folklore that there is no authority to say that human vampires "natural food" must be human. The only thing you can authoritatively say is that they feed from their victim in some way that is not necessarily immediately fatal. There have been myths about psychic vampires that feed from emotions or thought emissions.

Again you are picking a very narrow slice of the available material in the genre. Your slice may not correspond with another persons slice for example. The classical vampire of Bram Stoker is considered laughably out of date in most modern intepretations of vampire lore. For instances not all vampires are afraid of Churches, crosses, garlic - see Anne Rice books for examples of that.

I will agree if you create a fantasy with the purpose of including others - such as roleplay then boundaries can help avoid situations of unbelievability or cheating. However it should be noted that most SL roleplaying games that include vampires are very freeform and they don't really have any rules about what a vampire should be - precisely because the variety is so wide (think of the gulf between Dracula, Interview with a Vampire and Underworld). Granted a game based on a particular mythos or type of vampire story may have some very narrow definitions of what vampires are/can do/can be etc. Somehow it all seems to work together just fine.

Exactly each one has an interpretation of the fanstical creature and gave them histories and attributes for the purposes of their stories just as others have differed from these and provided alternatives for the same type of creature. There is no reason to necessarily narrow yourself to one interpretation though when creating yourself a character. You take something from here and a little from there - that is often what new authors do anyway. It is one of the ways we find of being creative.

Anyway we were discussing plausibility of a vampire dragon, and in my opinion many fantastical creatures are impausible if critically examined. Just because you think that humans would be the food of a vampire dragon and therefore there would be not enough food for them to exists does not mean that your view point is the only correct one. Blood could be thousands of times more nourishing to one type of creature than another instance. Vampires Dragons might have an incredible ability to metabolise blood which gives them far more energy than at first seems plausible.

It is your choice and right to limit your belief of what attributes fantastical creatures can have or even if they are possible. However you do seem to be forcing your belief of fantasy on us all by telling us what is possible/plausible etc...

I reject that completely. Even if my dragon was a "real" dragon who had been turned and survived by drinking the blood of chickens - you have no grounds to tell me that it is not possible. By its very nature it would be a fantastical creature and not meant to be compared with reality or it would not be fantasy.

Is the fantasy of Santa Claus any less valid just because there is no way he can fit down an average households chimney these days or possibly deliver presents to every person who parents claim he brought presents? Or because he rides flying reindeer whom nobody ever sees?

Heh.. tell me about it.. especially if the candles are explosive!

http://www.iconia.org/images/CakeIncident.jpg

I m=knew one here - sucked my soul right out - bastard-

I don't recall, but did't even Dracula feed off of small animals at one time?



Heeeey now, I know Santa is no fantasy. I've seen 'em!

Mari

/me deftly avoids the "you can't be that type of Dragon" discussion, being a Dragon who lives in the Void between and amongst the stars and galaxies.

My latest anthro form shot:

http://www.iconia.org/images/Talarus1.jpg

Beautiful