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[O11O1]

Following that line of thought, is a mosqito a vampire?

Clearly, DF needs to uncover what happens when a mosquito contracts vamprism. And Lycanthropy. Which reminds me, Are there plans to simulate insect transmitted diseases and syndromes?

[werechicken]

I hope the graphics packs are uploaded quickly, ASCII graphics make my eyes hurt.

Also vampires originated from a combination of Vlad the impaler (a syphaltic psychopath with a penchant for horrific slaughter), the fact that the first few days after death the gums recede making the teeth look longer and finally porphyria, a hereditary blood disease which can make the sufferer very sensitive to sunlight.

P.S. I would love to see a weremosquito

Edit: I meant Vlad the impaler, stupid predictive text phone.

[Rose]

Fun fact, I have porphyria. Or am supposed to, anyway. but it's only intermittent.

[Knight Otu]

Following that line of thought, is a mosqito a vampire?

Clearly, DF needs to uncover what happens when a mosquito contracts vamprism. And Lycanthropy. Which reminds me, Are there plans to simulate insect transmitted diseases and syndromes?

This was mentioned in DF Talk 12.

Toady:   ... Leeches and mosquitoes are going to be fun.
Rainseeker:   Ah, will they spread disease?
Toady:   Well, that's the question right? When you get to the mosquito you can be satisfied in a way just making a creature that bites you that doesn't really suck an appreciable amount of blood necessarily - unless it's a giant mosquitoman, which is disgusting - but it give you this really annoying itchy thing ... If we did all that then mosquitomen would be considered a success for the swamps and so on, probably. But really you want to get to ... you know, do you add diseases and blood borne illnesses and that kind of thing? I don't know, I don't know. It's a question with all of these, really. Bees won so I spent a lot of time on them, and I just don't have time to spend a month on every animal.
Rainseeker:   Please do not.
Toady:   Yeah, that would be five years. It would be a great animal game at that point, but it'd be a long time. It's hard to say with any given animal exactly how much time I'm going to spend on that, because diseases is something we were going to put in in the big nineteen month release - I think it was one of the few items that got redded out on that list, along with formations and brain death and a few other things - so it didn't make it in and so it's fair to say that the game is ready for it and if you want to have world generation and then after that experiencing diseases and plagues and stuff, it's a really important force in world history and if the mosquitoes are the vector for that then that'll be great for them, that addition to the game. I don't know, they're coming though, at some point...

[Neonivek]

This kind of thing annoys me. Its like, saying the Hobbits in The Hobbit, aren't Hobbits. They're closer to large brownies.

Of course, the problem with that logic is that Twilight in no way invented or defined the word "Vampire".

A better analogy would be that saying that the Dwemer of Elder Scrolls lore are not dwarves despire being called dwarves. Which, incidentally, is also true - they aren't.

Look the thing isn't that Twilight Vampires arn't exactly any less vampires. The issue people have with them is that they are very much constructed as some sort of wish fulfilment turning some of the very defining traits of a vampire into screaming fangirl bait. (that and Twilight itself doesn't even know whats its own vampires are.)

To get the EXACT same effect. Take a werewolf... Now imagine that instead of transforming at a fullmoon they instead became extremely sexy and toned by the invigoration because wolves have a lot more muscles then a human. They can still turn into wolves but it has nothing to do with the moon.

[werechicken]

Er... Hate to break it to you, but there are werewolvess in twilight and that's exactly what they did 

(I had my arm twisted by a friend to watch the new moon one)

To be fair most fairy tale monsters are just extensions if some part of the human psyche, only when they originally were conceived civilisation was much darker and allot less self absorbed.

[Miuramir]

NO_PHYS_ATT_GAIN - I noticed this tag in a couple of the entries in the new interaction based nightcreatures. Does it prevent future Attribute gains for the creature?

It certainly sounds like it does that. It does seem a bit weird that necromancers and vampires would have that tag, but the presence of that tag could be randomized.

Yeah, it locks attributes in place.  For some reason, I didn't imagine vampires being able to lift weights and load themselves out.  I dunno if that'll be randomized in the future.  As a general note, you can zero out the number of random vampires and use the example vampire to make your own work how you want.  I'm not sure when we're going to have parameters for how the randomization actually works.  I think the current plan was to do that first with random dragons, but I'm not sure what the format is going to be.

In almost every interpretation of vampires in every mythology, vampires gain power over time. The older a vampire is, the more powerful it is - including being stronger and faster. The more blood a vampire drinks, the more powerful a vampire is.

Why did you decide to abandon this fundamental aspect of vampire lore? It has nothing to do with working out, granted, but vampires being stuck at particular attribute levels for all time is absolutely bizarre.

Citation needed; I don't think it's even that common, and certainly not the general case.  In particularly, it sounds like you're talking about vampire *fiction*, not vampire *mythology*.  Remember, DF is set generally pre-1400; and my impression is that the sort of tale you're talking about is generally Victorian or more recent.  I'm doubtful you can come up with references that even a majority of, let alone "almost every" example of, of pre-1400 myths about vampires work that way. 

In the most general terms, tales of vampires were originally about the horrors of *death* (and death gone wrong), with a lesser component of being about disease (particularly plagues).  Then the Victorians (in general) with their particular world view picked up an old set of tropes and rebuilt them as being about the horrors of *romance* (and romance gone wrong), with a lesser component of being about disease (particularly sexually-transmitted diseases).  Then modern writers have picked up the tropes again, and rebuilt them again as what amount to fetish fantasy, with the "disagreement" between types having at the core what (set of) fetish(es) the authors are implicitly or explicitly using their vampires to represent / explore (bondage, ageplay, bloodplay, consequence-free satyrism / nymphomania, and so on). 

From a more specifically DF standpoint, my take would be that IF (some) vampires can gain additional power from blood (as opposed to a more traditional take where it merely slows their decline), that should be a "magical" interaction, and probably handled by the same sort of framework that would be needed for an adventurer to gain strange magical powers from the blood of a powerful beast (e.g. spear-resistant skin, the ability to understand the language of birds, or other mythological standards).  Said interactions would presumably override ordinary limitations by their magical nature.  The currently implemented tags prevent a vampire assigned as, say, a miner or pump operator or other task that can buff physical stats from getting more ripped due to their job, which IMO is as it should be. 

A related question is how vampires and necromancers interact with the skill decay system; if there's not some care taken, they could end up as ageless incompetents. 

Toady, do vampires, necromancers, mummies, and other "atypically old" variant creatures have any special handling for skill decay?  It seems like that agelessness should provide at least some protection, otherwise they may end up as unusually incompetent in old worlds.

[Quatch]

Also recall that bram stoker's dracula could be active in the daytime (http://www.draculas.info/literature/bram_stoker_dracula/) just without the use of some of his powers.

The whole flambe thing came later.

That said, I believe toady indicated the vampires were a random amalgam of many many mythological aspects. Your world might end up with dracula, or twilight.

[Kogut]

Following that line of thought, is a mosqito a vampire?

Clearly, DF needs to uncover what happens when a mosquito contracts vamprism. And Lycanthropy. Which reminds me, Are there plans to simulate insect transmitted diseases and syndromes?

Done by Deon.

[Caldfir]

Um, wow.  Cannot believe people care this much about vampire qualities. 

From what I can tell, the DF vampires as they currently stand are vampires - they suck blood, and they are immortal.  Everything else is flavor.  Vampires are tricky because the mythos we have surrounding them in popular culture is extremely varied.  They are the equivalent of how old fairy tales describe "trolls" or "fairies" - which is to say completely inconsistently.  I think Toady's vision for the randomized trolls did a pretty good job of supporting this notion, and see no reason to think his treatment of vampires will not do the same. 

...

Oh my lord... will I be able to add mists to good-aligned regions that temporarily add the [FLYER] tag?  Peter-Pan RP game, here I come! (although the occasional giant flying badger might become a nuisance...)

[Mel_Vixen]

I hope at some point the Ai will recognize and use the effects of good and bad regions. Say a using a good region to heal war-crippled soldiers while enemies are driven into the more deadly places.

Oh just a thought: is it possible to generate mists over/on special map-tiles? (Sulphur)gasses and compounds on Volcanos and Swamps would be a nice touch ... hehe including self-igniting stuff.

[Footkerchief]

Oh just a thought: is it possible to generate mists over/on special map-tiles? (Sulphur)gasses and compounds on Volcanos and Swamps would be a nice touch ... hehe including self-igniting stuff.

A mist is associated with a particular region on the aboveground map.  So you could have mists that only appear in swampy regions, but not ones that only appear over volcanos.

[Mel_Vixen]

Thats rather nice for swamps but alas i think volcanos and the magma-layer should be a bit more dangerous in general.

[Putnam]

Swamp gas, fairy dust, dangerous volcanic gas welling up from the loam, it's all possible~

[Sunday]

You could conceivably have firestorms, then, right? A "mist" with a super-high homeotherm, that sets the landscape around it on fire (while also swirling around itself).

If the weather events ever get tied to wetness, etc., then that might be 1 way to hack in wildfires during droughts.

Edit: and even now, you'd be able to tie it to some of the hotter, dryer biomes (assuming it's possible) such as savannas and possibly deserts (though the latter would be more obviously supernatural).