Re: Selkies
 

Good thought. Such timber as they are able to get from fixed dunes and coastal swamp probably won't even give them good planks, let alone a dugout. And dugouts, the archaeologists tell me, are the way to start on building wooden boats. Remember that the stranden are in a bit of an economic trap: until they develop ocean-going ships they will be poor, and until they get rich they have nothing with which to buy timber to build ships to get rich with. It's very possible that the building of wooden boats actually begins with the brocmen, who have good timber trees growing on their riverbanks, and want rafts, then canoes, then boats for mucking about in on rivers.

One other material I'd like to recommend to your attention is bark. The best bark for making bark canoes comes off forest trees such as birch, brush box, and red gum, which aren't available at the shore. But the dominant species in the coastal swamps near here is paperbark tea-tree, which grows up to a couple of metres in girth, and produces thick, pliable sheets of of impermeable bark consisting of multiple parallel and complete layers of tough papery material. The locals used to use paperbark canoes in the coastal swamps, the estuary, and short, daring trips into the ocean.

Anyway, you have to think about exceptions, of which the most prominent is coconut palm. Palm-trunk dugouts are still popular fishing boats in Indonesia, and often have their sides built up with planks cut from a palm-trunk and attached with pegs. Coconuts grow pretty much to the water's edge. Then there are environments (such as, I think, the Pacific Northwest) in which the coastal waters are highly productive but the adjacent land produces little food. I think that stranden might be numerous enough in Puget Sound and elves few enough among the conifer-forests that the standen could pinch a few trees. And then, of course, once the stranden have a coracle that can get them across the English Channel on a fair day they can go nuts among the oaks of Britain. Or similarly with (for instance) the teaks of Borneo.

These thoughts might give hints about where the seafaring culture of the stranden got started.

Re: Selkies
 

Before they got into long-distance trade and had, basically, everything, the stranden had the following to trade, according to location.

• Surplus seafood, this is a good dietary source of protein and certain essential fats, besides iodine and zinc, and vitamins A and D.

• Salt.

• Pearls.

• Mother-of-pearl and other decorative shells.

• Coral.

• Amber.

• Jet.

• Tortoiseshell.

• Seal fur, maybe.

• Narwhal ivory, maybe.

• Dyes (e.g. purple) and medicines.

Anything else?

Re: Selkies
 

Stranden are found in a wide range of climates, including tropical and temperate, cloudy and clear. And they probably migrated into those along with, if not at the forefront of, human migration from the place of origin. You might not find them even on the strands where the water is very cold, because where they can't make much of diving they get out-competed by the brocmen. You might even find them in continental interiors on isolated continents like Australia. That means that they have had as long to adapt to local conditions as anyone else, and we expect them to show a full range of skin colour and eye colour, in local races according to how sunny and cloudy the environment is. And of course this will have been modified by recent migrations after the invention of oceanic navigation.

It's possible that some particular texture of hair drains free of water more readily than others. Crinkly or frizzy hair, perhaps. If so it's likely to be common among the stranden.

Stranden as discussed before are probably rather large and stocky, with long arms and large hands and feet. They probably stubbornly retain an insulating layer of subcutaneous fat, though you would expect them to be sleek rather than gross, and there is no reason they should be inclined to carry more abdominal fat than anyone else. They might have large eyes with pupils capable of opening very wide to see in dim depths, and so perhaps they are bothered by bright light and glare and favour eyeshades, peaked or brimmed hats, something like Inuit snow goggles, and eventually dark glasses (invented in China in the 12th century!)


The stranden speciated parapatrically with the brocmen, under circumstances where intermediates could flourish in neither specialisation. I would expect barriers to interbreeding to have evolved, such as mutual sterility or incompatible and even aversive sexual signalling. Niven is likely wrong about rishathra.

I think that's all I have on the Deep Ones.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

This gives me an unpleasant idea about diabetes mellitus.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

You have to have alcohol before you can concentrate it, so concentration by freezing follows after fermentation in the manner of distillation.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

That is a real danger. One of the ways to be careful is to hide your working, erase all the construction lines, and present only the bizarre conclusions that you have reached without explaining how you got them. Extrapolating from an odd thought to an otherworldly conclusion, and then sticking rigorously to the position that no-one in the world knows why, say, stranden women don't go to sea and trolls prefer their meat raw, can give you a wondrous otherworld. It's explaining the joke that kills the humour.

In SF, particularly in the "hard SF" subgenre, the working is treasured by the writer and the fans: the scientific points are the main attraction, and the story is often little but a vehicle for them. This is often very bad for the story, as too much of it reads like my ramblings about the stranden upthread, as opposed to anything exciting or moving actually happening.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I'm thinking about eusocial dwarves, the scale of dwarvish colonies, and the number of children that a woman might have in her lifetime. And I don't like the results I'm getting. Did you see whole dwarvish towns and cities as single colonies with a single queen? Or dwarves not forming big settlements? Or dwarvish settlements as colonies of colonies? The last looks like the only way to get dwarvish cities without huge bloated dwarvish queens giving birth to hundreds of tiny undeveloped spawn. I don't like the monsterqueens, but the eusocial families turn out with very low inter-group co-operation to go with their high intra-group co-operation.

If dwarvish families are producing sterile workers it's because they can't hire labourers. The human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange is sinking into the sand of instinctive co-operation, and I'm getting alien-ness.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I was thinking colonies of colonies, with social cooperation initially mediated by links between mother and daughter colonies, or sister and sister colonies. This might later give rise to the kind of trade setup where you trust the other firm because they're relatives.

Dwarf communities that get bigger are going to need some sort of common defensive arrangements, I think; and those that get crowded are going to need mining law to resolve disputes over whose tunnel broke into whose, and which vein who owns. The cooperation on both points may be arranged not by the queens but by the guardians. It may be a source of political tension.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Selkies
 

Assuming there is long distance shipping, at some point you might see deliberate raids on coastal or river communities of other species, with the aim of acquiring labor more able to operate on land. In effect, this would be somewhat like viking raids. So you would have overseas communities with thralls growing crops or cutting down trees. There might be no intent to have self-sustaining populations, but likely enough some of that would happen; there could even be runaway communities of maroons, or outright thrall revolts. Some of these cultures might be quite deviant from the original patterns for their species, or from their older traditions, especially if there is a process of creole language formation going on.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Quite. I've been running campaigns with hidden understructure for a long time now.

Bill Stoddard