On 1/12/06, Steve Simmons <scs at di.org> wrote: > > The Necromancer is noted as being "undead", a word which most Dragaerans > seems to use interchangably with "vampire." I think we've only seen Vlad refer to Sethra Lavode as being undead, and also as being a vampire. Anything else is you generalizing from one example. > > The common man (ie, Vlad, etc) knows that the undead are vampires who > are returned by the Gods for their own purposes. The common man does not necessarily know anything of the sort. Vlad just learned about undead being returned by the Gods from Sethra in /Issola/. And the whole vampire thing is a confusion that the terms are synonymous - something that might very well be because Vlad was confused. While a vampire might well be undead, an undead is not necessarily a vampire. > Thus everyone who is > undead (a vampire) must have been returned by the Gods. Again, not necessarily. Even granted that *some* undead are returned by the Gods, we cannot conclude that that is the *only* way to become an undead. > If Loraan was working in the same area, it might well explain how he > came back as a 'vampire' without requiring the Gods to send him back. And Loraan was not necessarily a vampire. Indeed, checking "search inside", I see that Vlad explicitly asks Savn about "blood drained" deaths, and when hearing that there are not, muses "So perhaps he is not a vampire." > (Note for the nit-picky: no, there's no textev that the Gods were or > weren't involved in returning him as a vampire. It just seems odd that > they'd do it.) Loraan was a necromancer; he was working on exploring life-states. He may well have figured out how to change the life-state of his own soul such that he became an undead. To the left, it may have been the Jenoine and/or a rogue god who sent him back. > Another thing unexplained by the text is why vampires are treated as > fearsome creatures. We've never seen any instance of a vampire acting > other than he did in normal life. Generalizing from one example again. > And Loraan was an asshole on both before and after. We didn't see much of him before he died. Perhaps he was more of an asshole afterwards? And thinking about it, he wasn't really much more of an asshole than Vlad himself, at least back in the days when Vlad ran a Jhereg territory. > We've seen Sethra eat; we've never seen her nor any other > vampire drink blood. We don't even know if she does drink blood, or how much. Vlad asserts that Sethra "requires very little blood."