Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

All of that works pretty well, yes. It occurs to me that both trolls and dwarves are going to have a physique with compact bodies and short limbs; perhaps they're comparatively close kin. Though a dwarf woman bearing a half-troll child would probably die.

I was initially envisioning trolls as sexually dimorphic, with the females larger than the males. This goes with a pattern where the young are raised mainly by the females, and the males drop in but don't stay.

But I also wanted the females to be the main magic workers. So it occurred to me that originally large female trolls might have undergone evolution for smaller body size without reduction in brain size. This would make for relatively higher intelligence and more retentive memory. And it might substitute for large size in making female trolls more capable and thus able to care for young unaided.

Males may tend to be nomadic, and thus likely to turn up in other species' territories, especially in lowlands not far from mountains; this would be somewhat consistent with the three trolls in The Hobbit, who seemingly came down from the Trollshaws, and I could imagine male trolls forming small gangs for mutual protection.

One task that is performed by creatures with high strength but limited endurance is plowing. Oxen apparently cannot be worked for a full day; five hours is their limit. Of course, you can feed oxen on hay; they don't need meat. On the other hand, trolls might be useful where a draft animal that understands spoken instructions is needed. Or perhaps they might be recruited to help clear new ground. What do you think?

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Even with their immense strength, trolls probably need to form hunting parties to take down elk, aurochs, buffalo, bison, mammoths, and other large game of the 0°C line. They aren't equipped to give it a trivial wound and then run it until it bleeds out. They have to force it into engagement and kill it before it kills them. Before they broke out as sled-riders and stalkers on the ice they were human wolves.

I think that it is hard to think of a task that requires the strength of a troll but can't be done by two or three men (or dwarves). That is especially true if the dwarves can use levers and counterweights as cunningly as Wally Wallington.

The obvious exception is heavy infantry, especially in garrisons. To Tolkien's three trolls I answer with any number of stories from Chretien de Troyes to Charles Perrault in which manors are ruled by cruel ogres who live in castles (and are defeated by brave knights etc.). Puss in Boots, for instance.

The obvious job for a troll is huscarl or lord of the manor, perhaps even earl or king.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Trolls might have a lower resting metabolic rate, as compared to their strength and/or ability to do work, than humans, which would give some benefits, though if they need a higher percentage of meat in their diets that would pretty much wipe out any savings. Also, lower demand for firewood would give them an advantage as farmers in northern areas, but I have to agree that 'thug' is one of the occupations where being big and strong is most useful.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I was thinking of human bears, perhaps Kodiak or polar. How do they keep themselves fed? I don't think it's by pack hunting.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

We have humans in the grasslands, which includes steppe and praire besides the tropical savannah. They started our as cursorial hunters, running wounded prey to death in open terrain. But that way of life persists only where there is grassland by no large or medium-sized domesticable native herbivores (like Australia, Africa in and south of the rinderpest zone, and the pampas before colonisation), and no suitable domesticates have been introduced, and where farming has not come in.

Where there are domesticable herd animals, humans have become sedentary pastoralists (like the people of Africa north of the rinderpest zone and outside the Congo forests) where the grazing is perennial, or nomadic pastoralists where it is seasonal. Where there is a domesticable riding animal but no domesticable meat animal they are probably herd-following mounted hunters (like Plains Indians after the Spanish reintroduced horses). Humans really break out where there is seasonal grazing and they have a ridable domestic animal. Then you get horse-nomads, and cavalry, the apotheosis of human awesomeness.

Some humans have borrowed grain agriculture from the hobbits and combined it with [superior] draught animals to produce a more extensible form of agriculture. These are converting grasslands to fields and attempting to encroach even on forests.

Humans from the tropics are probably black. Humans from the steppes are probably adapted for clear skies and moderate cold: perhaps they resemble the peoples of central Asia and north America. Humans were probably mostly excluded from high latitudes and cloudy climes by ogretrolls and elves, so they probably didn't evolve a depigmented morph like the Europeans.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

There might be small populations in Poland or its analogs. My understanding is that Poland was dominated by cavalrymen who made it the terror of Europe for a while. Though that might have been dependent on more advanced technology.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I buy them as human polar-bears now that (and to the extent that) they have moved out onto the ice, but the Esquimaux way of live is technologically sophisticated and was a late development. They're fine there (and herding their yaks up and down the mountains) as, as you put it, a static equilibrium. But I'm not very happy about how they got that way.

Which need not concern you, of course.

I don't know much about bears. I think that polar bears flourish through the winter mostly by stalking seals and staking out seals' breathing-holes, which is a very limited niche. Bears in general I think are a lot more omnivorous and solitary than wolves. I worry about the lack of need for human-like intelligence without co-operative behaviour and social competition.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I considered calling the humans "gandharvas" or "centaurs" (Dumeizil seemingly thinks those are cognate words), but that would have invited even worse misunderstanding.

Aren't horses a serviceable meat animal, and also a serviceable milk animal or blood animal? It might be that the mounted hunter lifestyle of the Plains Indians was a product not so much of horses being unsuited as food sources as of there being wild game in vast quantities. The payoff for riding a horse to hunt bison (or, in the Old World, having a horse draw your chariot while you hunted from it) may be much more meat than you could get by eating the horse.

Men will likely not think well of other races that consider the horse a tasty meat animal.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I suggest that you pinch a suitable obscure tribal demonym from Herodotus' account of the Scythians and Thracians.

Passable, but they're sickly and delicate and have a lousy food conversion ratio. Also, they run too fast and are buggers to herd if you don't have a riding animal — such as a horse. Cattle and sheep are healthier, tougher, and fatten with less and poorer feed. If we couldn't ride horses we'd stampede the bastards off cliffs to free up pasture for something better.

But since we can ride them they are awesome for herding better herd animals, and hunting un-herdable herbivores. They even have a narrow niche as a herd animal because you can move them farther and quicker than any other when grazing and water are patchy.

I'm sorry, I was unclear. I meant to say that a mounted-hunter way of life might persist rather than developing into herding — not because horses are unsuitable to eat, but because bison and deer are unsuitable to herd.

That is:

• if humans have neither a ridable nor a herdable animal they remain cursorial hunters;
• if they have a herdable animal but not a ridable one, they become graziers, sedentary or migratory depending on whether their pastures are perennial or seasonal;
• if they have a ridable animal but not a herdable one they become mounted hunters, because horses are more awesome to ride than to eat;
• if they have both they become super-awesome mounted nomads, woo-hoo!

They will also likely sneer as pigs, because they drove so poorly.


We have what now?

• Humans eat game such as antelope, zebra, gnu, and bison, mutton and chevre, beef, blood, milk, cheese, and yoghurt. Some have picked up wheat, barley, millet, sorghum, pork and maybe geese or ducks from the halflings.
• Halflings eat wheat, barley, rice, millet, taro, tapioca, sago, maize(?), waterlilly-root, water-chestnut, bamboo shoots, fish, crayfish, freshwater shellfish, pork, waterfowl, eggs, and maybe beef or buffalo, besides strange things called "vegetables".
• Ogretrolls eat seal, whale, reindeer, elk, aurochs, mammoth, pork, beef, yak, chevre, milk, ham, cheese, smoked beef, chicken, and under strenuous protest oats.
• Elves eat venison and pork, acorns, beechnuts, macadamias, hazels, walnuts, filberts, chestnuts, brazils, small and medium game including squirrels, fowl, and monkeys, besides probably tree fruit such as apples/pears and peaches/plums, oranges, loquats, mangoes, mangosteens, durian etc. etc. Tropical elvish diets are rich in soft fruit and small game, temperate elvish diets rich in nuts and medium game.
• Dwarves eat potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, mutton and chevre, probably pork, and anything that they can get in trade.
• Selkies eat fish, shellfish, and crustaceans, eggs, sea-birds, the larger types of whales?
• Ghuls eat carrion, lizards, the seeds and fruit of desert plants when they can get them, dates(?)

I still don't see who makes the wine and olive oil. Probably the elves, since it looks as though establishing long-lived plantation crops is their schtick.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I have a 'centaur' human culture write up....


http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...&postcount=140

It may be too narrowly drawn for your purposes, or just not what you want, of course.