wordwalker
Auror
It's one of the most commonly fudged parts of a world: how much does a monster have to eat?
In a real-world ecology there's only so much "biomass," living matter, out there to eat. It's fun to work with a proper setting where wolves hunt people as part of the food chain, but a world might need a bit more:
If the land is just supposed to be more dangerous, it might help to play up how unusually fertile the setting is, or maybe even make it tropical. More plants= more small animals= more predators, and also more forests for them to lurk in.
(One variation: maybe the big monsters are still herbivores. They're happy to eat grass, but they're fiercely territorial or hate the smell of humans or whatever it is; nobody laughs at killer rhinos. Or they've been domesticated by small but vicious creatures that see humans as a threat.)
Or, the ecology has been Seriously Altered --or pre-planned by the gods-- so that monsters are there because there are enough people to eat, 'nough said. Or they're a recent addition and threatening to devour everything...
Still, at some point you might need magic in the mix. Ghosts don't have bodies and demons might not live quite in our world either, but a dragon probably needs to draw in a lot of magic to stay alive (let alone fly and everything else it does-- no wonder they sleep for days or years). Or it could be something like the "demons" in Peter Brett's Warded Man books, that sometimes appear out of the earth; maybe they feed on the elements but prefer people. (I really need to read the rest of those books to see how else he explains them.)
And for something like a Dungeon of Guardians... well, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's obvious one of the Ark's powers was to sustain all those thousands of snakes without food (or maybe compel every snake in Egypt to crawl in there for a few days and then leave peaceably when it needed to hunt). I guess creatures that guard any kind of ancient protected site would be kept the same way; even intelligent ones could be magically trapped there (or paying off a bargain) and sustained by the spell. But it does seem easier to hide the Forbidden Sword deep in the Deathwasps' natural nesting grounds, or raise a horde of good old skeletons that won't need food to stay on guard.
But none of these mean people can't be the preferred meal for monsters, of course. Remember what the dragon said when the adventurers missed their stealth roll:
In a real-world ecology there's only so much "biomass," living matter, out there to eat. It's fun to work with a proper setting where wolves hunt people as part of the food chain, but a world might need a bit more:
If the land is just supposed to be more dangerous, it might help to play up how unusually fertile the setting is, or maybe even make it tropical. More plants= more small animals= more predators, and also more forests for them to lurk in.
(One variation: maybe the big monsters are still herbivores. They're happy to eat grass, but they're fiercely territorial or hate the smell of humans or whatever it is; nobody laughs at killer rhinos. Or they've been domesticated by small but vicious creatures that see humans as a threat.)
Or, the ecology has been Seriously Altered --or pre-planned by the gods-- so that monsters are there because there are enough people to eat, 'nough said. Or they're a recent addition and threatening to devour everything...
Still, at some point you might need magic in the mix. Ghosts don't have bodies and demons might not live quite in our world either, but a dragon probably needs to draw in a lot of magic to stay alive (let alone fly and everything else it does-- no wonder they sleep for days or years). Or it could be something like the "demons" in Peter Brett's Warded Man books, that sometimes appear out of the earth; maybe they feed on the elements but prefer people. (I really need to read the rest of those books to see how else he explains them.)
And for something like a Dungeon of Guardians... well, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's obvious one of the Ark's powers was to sustain all those thousands of snakes without food (or maybe compel every snake in Egypt to crawl in there for a few days and then leave peaceably when it needed to hunt). I guess creatures that guard any kind of ancient protected site would be kept the same way; even intelligent ones could be magically trapped there (or paying off a bargain) and sustained by the spell. But it does seem easier to hide the Forbidden Sword deep in the Deathwasps' natural nesting grounds, or raise a horde of good old skeletons that won't need food to stay on guard.
But none of these mean people can't be the preferred meal for monsters, of course. Remember what the dragon said when the adventurers missed their stealth roll:
Fighter... cleric... wizard... rogue. The four basic food groups!