08-15-2019, 04:42 PM | #11 |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
Elves in my setting reach "adulthood" shortly after one hundred, but to them adulthood means giving up childish things like pair bonding and procreation.
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
08-15-2019, 05:51 PM | #12 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
After posting this thread I've started to think more about the impact of even a small number of very old elves on a setting. If elves are ageless, even a small number of lucky elves who manage to survive thousands of years without dying of violence or accident means "living memory" in your setting is thousands of years. Unless some cataclysm wiped out most of the elves born before a certain date. Hmmm. How do people like to handle this?
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08-15-2019, 06:58 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
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In my long-running hombrew world dates were counted from the "Eldest of Days", a subsequent estimate of the date of a moment when everybody woke up with a language but no other memories. The setting of campaigns I ran ranged from 4600 After the Eldest of Days to about 5005 AED. There were quite a few gods still around from the Eldest of Days, and a few claimed to remember what had gone before. But their stories didn't match up, and all the philosohers figured that they were liars. There were no elves in that setting (nor dwarves, hobbits, orcs), but there was a group called the léshy, who were exactly like Tolkien's elves except for not being like Tolkien's elves, if you get what I mean. By chance one had survived from the Eldest of Days: Alkinous the Deathless. The PC party in the first campaign tracked him down with great difficulty to ask what had happened to the Sword with No Name at some particular historical juncture. They found him nude on a beach on a remote island, fishing for his dinner with a hand-line, and his answer to their question was "I don't know; I wasn't there. If you want to live a long life you avoid historical junctures." Alkinous turned out to be strongly oriented towards the future, and to disparage interest in the past. The PCs didn't quiz him about the Eldest of Days because they figured that the reason he made himself so hard to find was to escape prying tourists. He gave them a good dinner of fish, though, and charged very reasonably. (Players never discovered this, but Alkinous combined moderately outstanding attributes with the highest possible skill level in every skill in the book including all the magical invocation skills, and complete knowledge of all the fields of knowledge including all the magical Fundamentals. He didn't have the Talent, but he was a Namer and a Spellsinger, besides being a Favourite of Selené, and he could perform un-Talented ritual magic. He put regular effort into performing divinations, and always tried to be where things weren't going to happen.) It is a pain in the neck to have to devise the deep history of a whole world. I like to cut it off a reasonable way back, make it difficult and unrewarding to investigate the cut, and then never give players any reason to need to know about anything that happened more than a few hundred years ago.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
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08-15-2019, 08:26 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
Hm. What sort of enhancement/limitation on unaging is it that:
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08-15-2019, 09:29 PM | #15 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
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JRRT's Elven families tend to be small, and the children are spread widely apart, by Mannish standards. Even if the period of reproductive activity is relatively brief as Elves measure such things, a couple's children might well be centuries apart even so. But at one point, IIRC, Tolkien observed that Feanor had the largest number of offspring recorded in the legendarium, at seven kids. That's only a modestly large family by modern Mannish standards, and would be quite average family size in most of Mannish history. By Elven standards 7 offspring is a gigantic family. Many Elvish couples have only one child. Thingol and Melian were together for multiple Ages and produced only the one. Tolkien went back and forth on Galadriel, but she appears to have had only 1 or at most 2, depending on the writing in question. So Elven populations grow only very slowly. Granted, with immortality, eventually any growth rate will fill the world, but it's not clear that the Elves have been in the world long enough to crowd it. Men are ages younger, as a people, and we caught up and passed their population early.
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08-16-2019, 01:30 AM | #16 | |
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Alsea, OR
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
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You need 1 child per adult and no accidents to have a stable population. Basic math. Spaced out over centuries is fine, but the average needs to be about 2.1 to 2.3 per couple to have a growth rate of note... because, while they die not from age, they do die from violence, bad fortune, and occasionally melancholy. |
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08-16-2019, 02:11 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
Even if totally immortal, a ratio of less than one child per adult actually means the population will asymptotically approach a limit of (original population) / (1 - children/parent).
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08-16-2019, 07:30 AM | #18 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
Quote:
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08-16-2019, 09:30 AM | #19 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
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Their memories don't have to be impossibly perfect, just suited to their immortal existence. |
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08-16-2019, 11:29 AM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Elven maturation and population growth
Quote:
There's a scene of Peter Jackson's where Elrond says of Aragorn (quoting one of Tolkien's appendices) that he recalled "the splendor of the kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world." And that's a powerful statement, because Elrond himself SAW "the splendor of the kings of Men," many thousands of years ago, and its memory lives on in him. Of course, if you like, that's Tolkien's testimony to how he felt about his close friends who died in the Great War, which was his personal "breaking of the world." But the fact that you can explain it that way doesn't make the metaphysical conception any less potent.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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