Demographics and Urban Fantasy

[Username17]

It is a simple fact that the global population is seven times what it was two hundred years ago. World populations are a bit fuzzier before then, but it seems relatively reasonable to say that the world population was 500 million five hundred years ago, and only about 10 million people ten thousand years ago. Two hundred years ago, only about 3% of the world's population lived in urban areas, while today it's about half.

History has many cities of a million or more inhabitants, such as Rome, Edo, and Teotihuacan that reached these populations at various times before 1800. However, until the modern era, large cities rarely remained intact for long. Rome went from over a million people in the Imperial era to less than twenty thousand in the middle ages. Even in the modern era, the population of Nanking was over a million in 1937 and then it wasn't anymore. Even though the overall experience of population growth has been one of exponential growth, there have been periods of really large plagues and famines that have reduced overall population of the world significantly for a century or two and there's been no place on Earth that has been spared local wars, famines, and plagues at various points in time.

What this means is that the kind of urban society that urban fantasy puts our Harry Potter wizards and Masquerade vampires into is a historical rarity for most of history, and the few places that it would have been able to flourish largely do not have meaningful continuity with the nightlife of today. Rome may have been large enough to support nocturnal political struggles of vampires or rival wizarding schools or whatever, but a thousand years later it wasn't. So if you have vampire politics going on in Rome tonight, they are not the same vampires and are not struggling over control over the same vampire society as the vampire senators of two thousand years ago. If they tell you that they are meaningfully the same vampire society as the one that prowled the nights of Republican Rome, they are lying to you.

Let's assume that the ratio of supernaturals to normal humans stays roughly constant over history. This seems like a reasonable assumption, because otherwise you end up having to think up radically different ways for creatures to interact with humanity at different times in history and that would be a whole lot more effort in world building than anyone wants to put in for time periods that only matter as prologue. The White Wolf concept of one vampire per hundred thousand people is of course laughably insufficient. It's insufficient today, when there are seven billion people in the world, and back in the 14th century that's not even room for one vampire in fucking London. But even with a more reasonable 10,000:1 ratio of supernaturals there were historically very few places with enough people that the supernatural council would be able to hold a proper meeting or have representatives of interest groups or anything. That's still just 20-40 dudes in all of 17th century London, and literally just two guys for all of London a thousand years ago.

What this all means is that the ancient conspiracies really aren't all that ancient. Any supernatural organization worthy of being called that didn't exist as more than a single city's code of conduct more than 200 years ago. The vast majority of supernatural creatures throughout history would believe themselves unique - or at least members of a small family or initiatory cult that was separate from anything else in the world. A vampire would live in a village and the villages nearby would have no vampires in them. Whatever beast or event created them would be the only one they met for a century or more.

In short, whatever secret societies exist tonight are "fake old" in precisely the same way that nation states are today.

-Username17

[ArmorClassZero]

@Frank: Having there be 70,000 vampires (1:100,000) or 700,000 vampires (1:10,000) in the world both seem like ridiculously huge numbers.

In your Anatomy of Failure: VTM you post a similar demographic section, where you outline how there are both too many vampires and simultaneously not enough as per WoD's assumptions, and you break it down into there being not enough vampires to have the night-to-night city vampire politics WW wants you to believe happen plus the internal clan politicking and hierarchy plus the super rare minority-of-a-minority status that some combinations of generation and clan and sect warranted, but also that all of that posits so many vampires that the Masquerade can't possibly be upheld.

So how many vampires do you think there should be? And is it necessary to have night-to-night conspiracy gatherings if the people doing the conspiring are immortal beings operating on an inhuman time-scale?

Where does the assumption that vampires never move around, never travel, and conspire nightly come from? Why not have the vampires of ancient Rome conspire with each other there, and them some travel to Alexandria, other's go to Antioch or Jerusalem, and others go to Carthage, or Byzantium, or early London, or wherever?

[Dean]

Those are actually very small numbers, you just have a stupid monkey brain that can't handle how big the world is. Don't worry I do to. 70,000 is nothing on the global scale. By way of example this is a list of cities on earth with a population of 70,000. Ask yourself how many people you've met from Džalal-Abad because that's how many vampires you would have run in to. Ask yourself if you even think you know anyone who knows anyone from Dzalal-Abad. Now go down that list and ask yourself if you've ever met anyone from any of the places on the entire list put together (which represent well over 20 million people all told) and you'll get a sense for how little 70,000 is. 70,000 would be a lot of apples to have but out of a sample size of 7 billion it's absolutely nothing and our brains can really only handle the first concept and not the second one.

[Username17]

Whether 70,000 vampires is too many depends on how intrusive vampires are to the modern world. Right now the United Nations estimates that there are roughly 27 million people who are slaves in the world today. Many of them are working in sweat shops or trawling for shrimp but there are definitely a significant amount of people locked in sex dungeons. If your vampires or evil wizards and such keep a stable of five Renfields apiece, seventy thousand vampires would barely be one percent of the global slave trade.

The concentration of power is also something that could easily avoid notice in the modern world. The top one thousandth of one percent of income earners have an average yearly income of over one hundred and sixty million dollars. Like, obviously vampires and wizards and shit might influence things, but at 1 per 10,000 they don't actually outnumber people in America who make a half million dollars every day.

On the other hand, there really aren't that many murders in the world. Even active warzones like Eastern Ukraine or Northern Nigeria tend to count violent deaths in the hundred, not the thousands. So if the vampires are eating people at any particular rate, they are going to rapidly outpace armies in terms of how many people they slaughter. In fact, if Vampires are killing an average of one person a week, they are killing 3.6 million people per year, and "vampire attack" is one of the top ten causes of death overall - beating out Dementia, Diabetes, and Road Traffic Injuries. Even killing one person per year is a death rate of 10 people per hundred thousand from fucking vampire attack, which is three times the death rate for Stomach Cancer.

So a lot of vampire stories that people want to tell are pretty much incompatible with the world being vaguely recognizable and there being more than a dozen vampires running around at the same time. But a lot of vampire stories could have tens or even hundreds of thousands of vampires fit easily into the night. Vampires can have really significant herds and still vanish into the background crime world of pimps, sweatshop owners, slavers, and drug dealers. But trails of bodies cut into the demographics of what's reasonable or possible at an enormous rate.

Where does the assumption that vampires never move around, never travel, and conspire nightly come from? Why not have the vampires of ancient Rome conspire with each other there, and them some travel to Alexandria, other's go to Antioch or Jerusalem, and others go to Carthage, or Byzantium, or early London, or wherever?

I assume they move around quite a lot. But when there aren't any real concentrations of urbanity, it doesn't really matter. The population of London is twenty thousand a thousand years ago. A thousand years ago England's current second city of Birmingham was a manor that had five villagers and four smallholders with two plows. You could count all the people without taking off your shoes. Five hundred years ago, the entire population of Scotland was one million people, but none of the individual settlements had more than twenty thousand people in them.

Early London doesn't have rival sorcerer clans to conspire with or against. It has one warlock and his apprentice. That's the entire supernatural community of early London. You might be able to find him, or if you go to London he might find you. But you also might not. You could go to London and just never knock on the one door that an actual witch might answer.

At one supernatural creature per ten thousand, there just won't be any in a lot of places. At the time of the Norman conquest, the top five settlements in England other than London were Winchester, York, Lincoln, Norwich, and Thetford, and none of those places had more than six thousand people in them. If you go to Lincoln, fifty fifty there's no vampires or witches there at all. The vast majority of people lived in villages of fifty or less people, meaning that you'd have to visit like two hundred places before you found one other supernatural creature to talk to - assuming they wanted to be found at all.

And it's not like this was the result of a surprising zombie apocalypse or something. Three hundred years later, the population of York was still just over seven thousand. England didn't have a second city with a population high enough to support a second vampire until the 16th century.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

I would like to posit that there's no reason that vampire population should have grown at the same rate as the human population.

I don't know what the murder rate was 1000 years ago, but I agree that there were a lot of small settlements and a lot less travel. If there had been 1 vampire per 100 people, that might have worked. If 100 years ago there was 1 vampire per 10,000 people, that might have worked.

It's only in the post-WWII world where we have virtually instantaneous communication, visual representations of far-distant worlds, constant security monitoring of money/people that things really start to break down.

Even now, there are approximately 100 groups of people that are not part of the modern world (Uncontacted Peoples.

I do think that for vampire society to work, you have to be able to feed without killing everybody, but some people could have a substantial kill count. Vlad the Impaler could have been directly responsible for the direct deaths of 100,000 people. Not every vampire could do that today - probably not any vampire could do that today, but the very newness of modernity implies that different rules could have applied to other periods of the [relatively] recent past.

[ArmorClassZero]

IDK how you conceive of vampirism, but I think 70,000 vampires is way too fucking many.

[Omegonthesane]

The fact that vampirism has a 0% occurrence rate in real world humans is in no way indicative that it should even be fewer than ten times the number of syphilis cases in a fictional world that posits vampires actively concealing themselves from human attention. Bringing up other diseases is just a total non-sequitur.

[Trill]

IDK how you conceive of vampirism, but I think 70,000 vampires is way too fucking many.

In that case you have to choose:
[*]Complex Vampire society
or
[*]Global Vampire conspiracy

Because either those vampires are close enough that you will interact with each other, and where being a Giovanni instead of a Brujah, or being a member of the Sabbat instead of the Camarilla actually makes a fucking difference.

Or you have them in enough countries that each of them (or at least each of the major ones) are controlled by a secret society of vampires.

[kzt]

So a lot of vampire stories that people want to tell are pretty much incompatible with the world being vaguely recognizable and there being more than a dozen vampires running around at the same time. But a lot of vampire stories could have tens or even hundreds of thousands of vampires fit easily into the night. Vampires can have really significant herds and still vanish into the background crime world of pimps, sweatshop owners, slavers, and drug dealers. But trails of bodies cut into the demographics of what's reasonable or possible at an enormous rate.

Which does open up the role of homicide detective for the masquerade.

I don't know what the murder rate was 1000 years ago, but I agree that there were a lot of small settlements and a lot less travel. If there had been 1 vampire per 100 people, that might have worked. If 100 years ago there was 1 vampire per 10,000 people, that might have worked.

It was vastly higher than today, a least outside of a few nations like Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras. And I'm not sure about that they have a higher rate as the London murder rate in the 1600s was like that of Venezuela today. The world has become a much more peaceful place over he last few centuries outside of things like WWII.

[angelfromanotherpin]

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

[DrPraetor]

Let's assume that we're trying to reverse-engineer Interview with the Vampire (this is both a demographics question and a follow-up on the sister thread on vampire religious beliefs). VtM failed to do this, and I'm sure IwtV doesn't really hold together or make sense, which you can get away with in a novel much more easily than in a shared RPG which the players will stress-test.

I never read the book, but in the movie Interview with the Vampire, Lestat takes Brad Pitt and introduces him to the local vampires in Paris. I think he has to?

In 1800, Paris had a population of about 600,000 and give-or-take 30 vampires, I think? So 1:20,000 seems right.

Hellmouths are a bit of a problem as a conceit, but you can certainly have supernaturals congregate in urban areas or in the developed world, so you might have 35,000 supernaturals world-wide but half of them could live in Europe and North America, because they like their civilization and creature comforts? Or you could do the reverse, and there could be a masquerade-breaking fuckton of supernaturals in reserve, hiding in the wild places of the earth: either way, Lestat introduces his childer to the few-dozen supernaturals who would live in Indianapolis.

At that point, you have to decide why he does that. In the absence of some incentive forcing Lestat to introduce his progeny to the Primogen council, IwtV becomes gay porn in the very first novel instead of in the sequels.

There are lots of ways you could do this. You can have Light Others who are on the opposite team and are actively policing you - so you can make more vampires with permission but if you don't follow protocols, werejaguars actively hunt you down with their own magic powers. There are likewise other purely-supernatural conceits which might involve telepathy or the cosmic balance or whatever that would prevent the vampire non-society which Frank describes from developing. But, you would need to actively design such a conceit, if you want to have a Camarilla. You could have some opposite of the predators taint, where isolation makes supernaturals in general very uncomfortable, so that when someone made a Golem, even if the person making the golem was not hip to supernatural society, the Golem would instinctively seek out the coven of vampires and try to ingratiate itself.

[Lokathor]

If someone wrote into an RPG that not knowing any other supernaturals made you more likely to flip your shit over time, such that new supernaturals were pacified by introducing them to others as quickly as possible and trying to keep one alone in your basement meant they'd probably try to kill you after a month or two, I'd totally buy it as a setting conceit.

One thing that Frank didn't seem to mention is that "fractions of a supernatural" have to go somewhere. So if there's 10 towns of 1,000 people each, none of them get to have their own supernatural based on their own personal population, but there's 1 supernatural out there somewhere. Maybe within one of those ten towns, but maybe that's why the big cities seem over-crowded with supernaturals compared to the "strict even distribution" rate.

[Omegonthesane]

I can't remember if it was spelled out in an interpretation of After Sundown, but I thought it was just implicitly understood that the rate of supernaturals was higher in the city compared to the countryside due to the increased likelihood of finding kin.

(And, Lestat never introduces Louis to the Paris vampires in the movie, Louis and Claudia stumble on them by accident.)

[DrPraetor]

(reads the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interview ... film)#Plot )
Oh, right, I guess it was Antonio Banderas that did the meet-and-greet in Paris, not Lestat?
Having read the actual plot summary for the movie, it's rather more like Frank's original description than I had remembered, with vampires checking out of their society by decamping to the wilderness to live on rats basically at will.

[ArmorClassZero]

I imagine vampires would be able to sense one another over moderate distances. Like the Predator's Taint only not shitty. Vampires would be drawn to each other just as a matter of course.

[erik]

Well, this is directly pulled from After Sundown for stuff pertaining to population distribution FWIW.

In the whole world, there are roughly six hundred thousand of the "playable" supernaturals in it. And that is a bit less than 1 per ten thousand humans, a total that has remained roughly constant throughout history. Humanity has experienced a tremendous population boom even as birth rates have fallen in the last 200 years or so. The industrial age has done wonders for the mortality rate. At the same time, the major Syndicates have achieved an uneasy – but functional peace. And while birth/creation rates of supernaturals have not slowed (quite the opposite), mortality rates have fallen among the kindred to an amazing extent. Not a few supernatural scholars find these trends frightening, and are advocating that supernatural society will have to return to a state of war or move full-scale to colonize the other worlds. Populations are very different in the other worlds, the Dark Reflection seems to hold just two hundred million souls, and most of them are the damned and the Mirror Goblins. Populations in the Dreamlands are even lower, with Maya containing just a few tens of thousands – though no one really knows how many Giant Animals or Evil Plants lurk in that ghastly wilderness. The Gloom is a whole different thing altogether, having a population that is measurable in the tens of billions. Were it not for the fact that the vast majority of those creatures are Wisps mumbling in long forgotten languages who scarcely remember their own name, Mictlan would be an even bigger threat than it already is. Still, perhaps the most disturbing thing about Mictlan is that with the number of people who have died, the population is not several times larger than it is.

Distribution of supernaturals is substantially and predictably different from distribution of mortal humans. There appear to be two major directions of migration for supernaturals: towards the largest and wealthiest of the cities and towards the actual wilderness. Roughly 80% of supernaturals on Earth fall into one category or the other (and are roughly evenly split between those two extremes). Similarly, a fair number of supernaturals are drawn towards the most wealthy nations as well as the nations of low population density. Canada is probably the most overpopulated, and has substantially more supernaturals than you would expect given its meager population of 33 million. Thousands of lycanthropes and leviathans roam the Northern wilderness, far from the eyes of civilization. On the flip side, the most underpopulated nation (in terms of supernaturals relative to humans) is India. Just as brain drain sends doctors and computer programmers out of Chennai and into Western and Middle Eastern countries, fish people and witches who can use their powers to go to the UK (or wherever) frequently do.

What this means is that if you’re considering a moderate and normally populated country like Czech Republic with 10 million humans, that it probably has about a thousand supernaturals. And the split of those is that roughly 400 would be in Prague, roughly 400 would be in the actual wilderness and countryside, and only about 200 supernaturals would be in all other cities in the country. So your chance of meeting a vampire in Plzen or Brno is pretty darn low. And as it happens, that is what you get in Czech Republic specifically, with the Bishop of Prague having a flock of 250 (with another 150 foreigners and independents) while Ostrava and Liberec having so few Covenant members in them that the head of the organization in each of those cities is just a Priest.

I like the idea of it being a fairly common ability to smell out if another supernatural is around somewhere. Best might be being able to detect the lingering residue, aura, echo, whatever of when a sorcery is used. Gives an insight that someone with a connection to the other worlds is around, but doesn't give everything away.

[kzt]

There was also the vampire interactions in Stross's Laundry books, where they immediately set out to kill them if they learn of another's existence. Perhaps not ideal for RPG play, as the neonate getting hunted by the 300+ year old vampire and his friends almost universally ends poorly for the neonate.

[Username17]

The idea that some supernatural creatures would actively seek the companionship of their peers and some would actively avoid others and stick to the wild lands or tiny rural communities seems reasonably obvious. That's where the rough 40/40/20 split of After Sundown came in, and it gives you numbers that are pretty good for the modern nights. It means that the United States has 12,800 supernatural creatures to divide up between various urban areas, which is enough that you can have a primogen council in San Diego or Tampa and still have various wilderness encounters and the occasional Hills Have Eyes / Wrong Turn style adventures with rural communities of evil mutants. But it means that the supernatural population of Harlingen, Texas is below expectation and there's probably only a single adventure to be had there on your Scooby Doo or Supernatural style road trip.

But no, 32,000 supernatural creatures is not by itself over the top for the United States. There are six hundred thousand private plane pilots in the US. There are 1.1 million people living with HIV. There are 900,000 people who used Heroin this year. There are 1 million prostitutes. There are 1.4 million gang members. There are 3 million homeless people. 32,000 is a number of witches and vampires and werewolves and shit that can simply fold into the background of crime and fabulously rich people that the United States actually has. But it can only do that as long as they kill people at a similar rate to what pimps, drug dealers, gang members, and private plane owners do in the real world. If private plane owners killed and ate people every day or even every month we'd run out of homeless people in less than half a year. Major causes of death like firearms and traffic collisions kill about 30,000 people a year - meaning that your typical Werewolf or Vampire has to be actually murdering people at a rate of less than one per decade.

Complex vampire society is simply incompatible with individual vampires murdering people at any significant rate individually. But that doesn't mean that populations of vampires large enough to have complex society are unworkable. It just means that they have to mostly prey upon people non-fatally to make the numbers work out.

Anyway, none of those numbers make there be any room for complex vampire society in most of the ancient past. Five hundred years ago, Scotland had room for less than 100 supernatural creatures. The fact that any of them at all were various werewolves running around in the highlands means that there was no room for there being a primogen council in Glasgow.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

Major causes of death like firearms and traffic collisions kill about 30,000 people a year - meaning that your typical Werewolf or Vampire has to be actually murdering people at a rate of less than one per decade.

About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year–that's 1 in every 4 deaths

Is there any reason that causes of death can't be folded into something like The Masquerade? I'm not saying all/most/whatever causes of death would have to be supernaturally related, but it seems there's some wiggle room rather than the one-per-decade idea.

[Username17]

Major causes of death like firearms and traffic collisions kill about 30,000 people a year - meaning that your typical Werewolf or Vampire has to be actually murdering people at a rate of less than one per decade.

About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year–that's 1 in every 4 deaths

Is there any reason that causes of death can't be folded into something like The Masquerade? I'm not saying all/most/whatever causes of death would have to be supernaturally related, but it seems there's some wiggle room rather than the one-per-decade idea.

The vast majority of heart disease deaths are for the frail and elderly -not really the demographic that people want vampires preying upon. Yes, there's room for more than a few Bubba Hotep's running around, but that's a fringe story. People want vampires feeding on college students. And those attacks have to be almost entirely non-fatal because people in their twenties don't die very often.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

Just doing some quick napkin-work:

610000 is listed as 1 in every 4 deaths in the US. So total deaths per year in the US is ~2.4million (just checked, latest data from 2014 is ~2.6million). Divided by the 32k supernaturals mentioned above gives something like a possible ~100 deaths supernatural/year to play with in terms of how over-arching the masquerade is seen to be (obviously not all deaths are supernaturally related)
- Number of deaths underreported?
- Cause of death wrongly reported?
- Deceased information wrongly reported (age/ethnicity/name)

[Blade]

You could probably factor in "missing persons" statistics as well. They're estimated around 800 000 every year in the US.

[Omegonthesane]

You sure that helps? I thought the vast majority of missing people stopped being missing due to being found, dead or alive. Even if we assume a world of horror movies with higher missing persons rates, it'd probably look different.

[deaddmwalking]

Assuming that vampirism is a human condition, it didn't exist among hominids. Consequently, at some point there was one vampire for all the people that existed in the world (or a relatively small number if the 'first vampire' was really a cadre). Vampires had to be a small number of people in the world, but it doesn't follow that they could not exist in larger concentrations.

In The Lost Boys, the fictional town of Santa Carla is a small California Beachside town. There's a real place, Capitola, with 10,000 people today and the real-life film location of Santa Cruz has 64,000 people; the similar sounding real Santa Clara has 164,000 people now. Presumably it had less in the 80s. If you assume that your fictional world can support this story, the number of vampires on a per person basis can be between 1:1000 and 1:10,000.

If you assume that vampires 'feed' the way people do, and need approximately 2000 calories per day, it would appear they need 3-4 pints of blood. When donating blood, you're permitted to donate 1 pint every 8 weeks. To feed on 4 different people every day for 1 pint each requires a minimum of 224 people to avoid 'overfeeding'. There's no reason that vampires have to be 'careful'. It's possible to lose 3-4 pints of blood and survive (but there would be a longer recovery period to 'full health').

If your medieval vampire lived in a town with ~200 residents, that's not necessarily immersion breaking. Individual vampires could live just about anywhere. That doesn't mean that EVERY village has a vampire, but it could mean that ANY village could have a vampire.

If vampires feed less (and as supernatural beings there is no reason they have to be subject to human caloric needs) you could consequently have more vampires.

In 'modern nights', it usually is a grimmer version of 'today'. In the real world United States, there are around 2,000 deaths each year caused by gang violence. In a world where that number doubled and half were caused by vampires, we'd still plausibly live in the world we do today - people would just be more frightened than they are today, but generally the world world would remain recognizable. If a murder were only required when creating a new vampire (or were just much EASIER) I think you could account for that number of embraced each year with some number also dying.

From a real-world US demographic standpoint, I think Jewish people make an interesting comparison. First off, there are more than 5 million Jewish people in the United States, well over 1% of the population. If you look at a map of distribution, you'll find counties in North Dakota, Iowa, and even California that don't have ANY - or any significant number. There are other places that significant concentrations - and unsurprisingly they tend to be urban areas. New York, Miami, and Los Angeles all have significant numbers of self-identified Jews. And I hope it's clear that I'm not saying 'make everyone who is Jewish a vampire' - that's odious for a host of reasons - but there's no reason that for your vampire conspiracy Seattle, Chicago and Washington DC can't be your 'epicenters'.

Half of your vampires could live in urban areas with a relatively high concentration of vampires; half could live in rural areas with very few 'vampire neighbors'. Even if the ratio of vampires could be 1:100, there's no guarantee that it would be. As the human population has increased, Vampire population could have lagged behind. You end up with places that have a high concentration (like Transylvania) and places that maybe have none (like Bakersfield California). Insisting that both maintain the same ratio ends up looking dumb.

For the demographics to work, you have to set an upper bound, and you have to accept that there are places that could have vampires, but don't. If people in Chicago have a lot of vampires but people in Houston don't, there are going to be a lot of people that don't see the connection. If I told you that people in Chicago are more likely to be killed, they tend to be more lethargic and have high rates of anemia, most people would assume it has something to do with the politics/weather than believe it is due to vampirism.

There has to be room for a lot of vampires in a very small space. The existing ratio of vampires to humans may be low (and probably should be) but that shouldn't be what sets the cap. To get there you need vampires that don't have to kill to feed; a relatively small number of vampire related deaths each year (whether that be vampire versus vampire or vampire versus normal person).

For maximum fun, assume there are 1 million vampires in the United States (1:325). Assume that the highest concentration you can have in an area is 1:100. Los Angeles may not have 40,000 vampires in it, but Pasadena is 'at capacity' with more than 1,000. Houston is a veritable desert - they could have a population of 23k vampires, but they only have 50-100. You can set the game where the players are 'part of the crowd' if you set it in Pasadena, or one of the very few if you set it in Houston. Wherever you actually live is a good place for an 'unusual concentration' of vampires. And it happens in real life - Postville IA had 100 Jewish families in a town of ~2,000 (estimating about 25% of the population). It was unusual - especially compared to surrounding towns - enough to get a book written about it - but that kind of unusual demographic detail is how the real world works. Pick any ethnic group you want - they're not going to be evenly distributed over the United States.

[Thaluikhain]

Does the vampire population need to be sustainable? I mean, yeah, it needs to have been sustained up until now, but if there are too many vampires nowdays and the masquerade is about to break, that can be either a plot point, or something that happens after the campaign ends.