Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I'm thinking about how dwarves lived at TL0, and what drove or drew them underground. What was the original asymmetry that got them to specialise in a way of life that seems to want for a deep past?

Are they basically handy men who made first better tools and then specialised in tool-making, and delved first for flint?

Or are they basically short men who could spelunk better than others, and were drawn into crafts because they went into caves?

Which came first, which is the more fundamental: the subterranean habits or the mastery of craft?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I guess that your trolls/ogres/orcs are a bit like Neanderthals: large, very robust, extremely strong, and probably co-operative ambush hunters of large game such as buffalo, elk, and reindeer. Their stength is startling, but their endurance is probably poor. They're not quite obligate carnivores, but they are probably prone to diabetes etc. on a high-carbohydrate diet, and they probably prefer to get their ascorbates from raw fresh meat than from fruit. Living in the cloudy north they are most likely pale-skinned, blond or red-haired, and blue or grey eyed. And as an adaptation to the cold they have large noses and frontal and maxillary sinuses, which gives them midfacial prognathism and an illusion of a low brown and weak chin.

They don't walk long distances well, and they are too heavy to ride, so their only niche as nomads is on sleighs drawn by reindeer and perhaps dogs: they are most mobile in the winter. You probably have them hunting seals and walrus on the sea-ice: a highly specialised way of life. And in temperate mountain climes they might be transhumantic herders of cows, goats, yaks etc. Otherwise they are mostly confined to rugged or close terrain, where there is enough cover for them to get close to, or set ambushes for, large game.

They make poor farmers, and there aren't a lot of occupations in which individual strength makes up for poor endurance and large appetite. A prominent exception is as ultra-heavy infantry. I see ogre aristocracies in castles and heavy armour, except where human light cavalry have freedom of strategic and tactical manoeuvre.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

You have halflings living on rivers and lakes, and in marshes and swamps. That suggests that unlike Tolkien's hobbits they are probably very fond of boats. You might name them by starting with the Mercian for "boat people" or "boat makers" and "wearing it down" like "hobbit" beside "holbyltan".

They are rivals of elves where the rivers flow through forests as in Northern Europe, and of humans where the rivers flow through grasslands. Probably originally fisherfolk, they are naturally in the correct position to develop wet rice and taro agriculture. And I'm not clear whether you want them or the humans to have developed wheat and barley in the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates. The halflings look good for the Nile, because it doesn't exactly flow through grasslands. Perhaps they are the original pioneers and perhaps chief exponents of agriculture. And of the things that go with it, such as temple-states and divine kings. I direct your attention to the chapters in Parkinson's The Evolution of Political Thought about the differences between early government among agricultural and pastoral peoples.

There was some sort of semi-aquatic farming practiced by Aztecs in lakes such as Lake Texcoco, with significant water-works. But I can't remember the term.

Halflings might build dams as beavers do, or artificial swamps for rice and taro. I can see them living on rafts, in houses on pilings in lakes, and in houses built of reeds and sedges like those that were traditional in the ****-al-Arab. As well as burrowing into riverbanks in the Tolkien style. I have an image of burrows and "beaver-lodges" with underwater entrances in areas of high threat, but I guess that you won't care for it.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Well, that can be answered as several levels.

If we're envisioning an evolutionary partial equilibrium, the sequence is irrelevant. Both traits are there, they function together, and it doesn't matter which came first, or if they were evolved or created or what. A state of equilibrium has no history.

However, if you want history, as a notional evolutionary reconstruction—my guess is that when acquiring good quality stone for specialized tools became important enough to justify the labor of Paleolithic mining, the race that was already a bit smaller, and perhaps had burrowing habits, had major advantages as proto-miners. So they specialized, and became better adapted for digging, and probably came under selective pressure in favor of being small, for reasons discussed in George Orwell's essay about the brutally hard labor of traditional British coal mining. And being able to trade obsidian or other stone, and later metal, for food and fuel, initially perhaps through silent barter, let them increase their numbers in proportion to their skill at mining.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I don't have one, I just remember reading it in a book of science essays. The fungi are rare and the mineral exotic that's all I know. On the other hand, their are bacteria that are eating the Iron of the Titanic as we speak. Or rather they are useing the chemical reactions of iron and salt to feed themselves somehow.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

The Dwarves could be the bat-shepheards and their beast forms could be bats. The Dwarves could be skilled users of the powers of darkness and decay because those are necessary to the fungi farms. Necromancy lets the dwarves animate corpses so they can come and rot in their fungi farms. The Ghouls hate this! And proper godly churchmen hate it too!

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Yes, I know about chemoautotrophy. But it doesn't occur in eucaryotes, as far as I know.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Okay, if dwarves are in God's first thought burrowers then we can suppose that they are adapted to be gatherers rather than hunters, specialising in buried food such as roots and perhaps animals in burrows. Plants with large storage roots suggests a climate with seasonal rainfall for their home, and without a closed canopy. I'm thinking about potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, cassava. They are physiologically adapted for a diet high in starch. They don't grow large, and they are avid for fat and protein. They don't get type II diabetes, but a high-fat or high-protein diet might give them problems. Not hunting they don't run well, nor stalk well, and such games as football and hockey probably don't appeal to them. They might be dangerous when cornered, but their fighting instincts are defensive, and they are not howling horrors in close combat like the aurochs-slaying orcneas. Dwarves are strong and have stamina for long hours of burrowing, but their small stature and short limbs make them inept at running or long marches, and at throwing and using bows.

Specialisation into mining, then adding metallurgy, then manufacturing has allowed the dwarves population growth way beyond any expansion in their food supply. What food production we do expect to see is fields of potatoes, sweet potatoes, manioc and the like, perhaps augmented by the growing of fungi on agricultural trash, in disused tunnels.

As metallurgists, dwarves need a lot of fuel. They probably use coal, perhaps even coke, where coal is available. Otherwise they need charcoal, which means either felling forests, or cultivating woods, or trading (probably with elves). They probably need pit-props too.

As masons dwarves produce a product that is not transportable. Some dwarvish masons are doubtless itinerant, others perhaps find a fairly steady stream of work in larger cities. Some dwarvish smiths doubtless ship finished weapons, tools, and armour from dwarvish homelands. Others perhaps set up enclaves in rich and large cities where customers are plentiful. Living among larger and more aggressive neighbours whose hunting antecedents make them more apt with weapons, dwarves probably cluster for mutual defence and build defensible homes. Escape tunnels and underground refuges would be in keeping with their psychological predispositions.

Dwarvish livelihood is dependent on the possession of a body of ore, and for those who have one keeping it is a matter of individual, family, clan, perhaps even tribal prosperity or death. Dwarves fight over disputed claims, and there is most likely conflict in dwarvish settlements between the owners of the mines and unrelated employees. Exhausting their body of ore is a national or family disaster: the tragedy of the dwarves is that it comes to all, sooner or later.

For all that a dwarvish king and community with a good mine might be extremely defensive and conservative, all communities and dynasties now extant have been founded by daring or desperate and lucky prospectors.

Dwarves who own no mineral resources must work for wages in others' mines, or as craftsmen. The better craftsmen face the same incentives to form guilds, conceal trade secrets, and restrict the practice of crafts that mediaeval craftsmen did.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

No, actually, that's very much along the lines I was envisioning, though more elaborated. Though I think it would take sturdier material than I envision being used for beaver lodges to stand off a military threat from men or trolls. But halflings might very well develop brickmaking early on.

I definitely would like the halflings to be the pioneers of grain agriculture. On the other hand, the deliberate manufacture of fertile soil by plowing, irrigating, and fertilizing, in areas further away from river valleys, may be a pursuit that attracts both some men and some halflings; the need for draft animals will tend to favor men. Elves might cultivate root crops but I don't see them as having the right kind of habitat for grains.

I thought of borrowing your idea about raising fungus cultures underground as something for halflings to do in their burrows, to supplement their aboveground farming. It seems less obviously workable for dwarves, who are going to tunnel mainly through stone, though I could imagine dwarves learning the technique of fungiculture from halflings.

While the hobbits of the Shire may have abandoned most boating, their kindred among whom Smeagol was born seem to have been comfortable with it, and Deagol was a good swimmer when he found the One Ring and was murdered for it.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

This may be too earth-sciencey, but you can't do smelting with straight coal: too many of the wrong gasses come off it when it burns. Until coke was invented, smelting and forge-work were all done with charcoal. Having coke be a dwarven secret is a very reasonable idea.

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.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Does anyone eat rabbits? How about guinea pigs?

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Well, they are grass-eaters: they don't flourish in forests, swamps, or marshes. Which makes them game for humans. Maybe ghuls.

Halflings or dwarves, I guess. They are the kind of domesticate you can breed and fatten in a burrow.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I forgot bananas and plantains, which are crops of the tropical elves, and sugarcane, which is a crop of tropical halflings. Also, vetches and pulses.

Ogretrolls and selkies, lacking starchy and sugary foods, are probably physiologically unaccustomed to and very susceptible to alcohol. Whereas halflings would probably die of dysentery if they didn't ferment every drop they drank into beer. Elves I think make wine, cider, and perry where they can, fermenting other fruit juices where they don't have grapes and pomes. Could they make beer out of some low-fat nut such as a chestnut, and what on Earth would it be like?

Amongst humans the farmers probably drink beer; the pastoralists have kumis at best and are probably susceptible to alcohol.

The race and peoples who don't drink alcohol most likely have other intoxicants: hallucinogenic mushrooms for the trolls; cannabis, poppy-juice, kava, kif, poisonous toads, etc. etc.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Tropical elves very likely drink palm wine. Perhaps they could come up with a technique for producing it that doesn't kill the palm, or perhaps they don't worry about it as long as they can make room for a new one. Tolkien makes much of "treeherds," but shepherds don't necessarily grieve at killing a single sheep.

Incidentally, I want to note that I've now stored a large share of your posts (and a couple by other people) in a file on my own computer, so that if my players buy this campaign I don't have to search old threads. The discussion will be invaluable.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

What if they have horses, but there are no large mobile animals that can usefully be hunted on horseback? Or is this massively unlikely?

Certainly the elves are the most logical to cultivate olives; in a Mediterranean area it's a common tree. I'll have to review Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece to see what other crops are available. Vines are possible for elves, certainly, but I could also see them as something halflings might grow. The grape seemingly was first domesticated in the Near East, probably along rivers, as it requires 700 mm of water from rain or irrigation. And the Bible has "under your own vine and your own fig tree."

As to ghouls, another option for them might be "firestick farming." Set fire to trees on the edge of your desert and you have a lot of dead animals to eat, and a period of high primary productivity while herbs recolonize the emptied land.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

In Bali they (Balinese people, not elves) tap sap from a coconut-palm by nocking the stem of a bunch of flowers—which doesn't kill the tree. This they ferment to make a drink called "tuak", which in turn they distil to make a spirit called "arrack".

This is related to the process for making coconut sugar.

Just so. Tolkien is sentimental about trees. Shepherds are seldom sentimental about sheep.

I would expect elves to clear trees of species that they didn't value ,to replace them with food-producing trees; manage forests for timber and woodlands for wood; and practice coppicing, pollarding, pruning, grafting, air-grafting, girdling and so forth. If they don't maximise production their children starve. If their children are in no danger of starving, then their population will grow until food is short.

A managed forest or woodland can be beautiful and wonderful, just like the intensely-managed rural landscape that Tolkien loved and (I think) similarly mistook for Nature.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Then I guess you herd horses for food.

I can't think why it should be. The distribution of domesticable medium-sized herbivores indicated by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel seems to have no pattern to it, any more than does the distribution of large-seeded grasses.

Yes, but on the other hand a lot of that area was originally forested and would not have been deforested if the elves got into it before the goats. And I think that in connection with your theme here both grafting and the planting of plantations look like Elvish Art, while tilling and cultivation of annual crops are emerging as the halfing schtick.

I don't suppose that you have read The Future Eaters, by Tim Flannery? Flannery suggests that the Ur-Aborigines who colonise Australia about 56,000 years ago accidentally converted 90% of Australia from dry woodland to desert and semi-desert. It wasn't because of their firestick farming; lightning, for example, starts enough fires in Australia to keep the fuel load near equilibrium. What they did was to kill and eat the herbivores (supporting a human population explosion), which allowed the fuel load to rise from 1–2 tonnes per hectare (which won't support fire hot enough to kill trees and buried seeds) to 10–20 tonnes per hectare (which will support sterilising wildfire). The reason that nearly all of the vegetation in mainland Australia is fire-tolerant is that the fire-tolerant stuff radiated and spread into vacant niches after the entire continent burned down ca. 54,000 years ago. Flannery speculates that the human population may have fallen from about half a million to about 80 thousand in the aftermath of than event.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Or maybe you just hunt the wild horses.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Checking an online Anglo-Saxon lexicon, I find that the most straightforward word for "boat" seems to be bát. Combining that with bytla, "builder," and wearing it down phonologically seems likely to give "babbit." Sinclair Lewis, call your office.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

On another track:

Selkie males are substantially larger than females, and tend toward polygynous relationships from which the younger bachelors are excluded.

Man males are modestly larger than females, and have imperfectly monogamous relationships. Halfling males and females are similar.

Elf males and females are much the same size. They lead long lives and have comparatively low fertility; much of their sexual activity is a social bonding mechanism.

Troll males and females are much the same size, but females have bigger brains and higher intelligence.

Ghoul females are modestly larger than males and tend to become leaders of ghoul bands through greater aggression.

Dwarf females are definitely larger than males, and one female will bear multiple children, most of whom are sterile workers; they are of both sexes but hard to tell apart. Fertile dwarf males are comparatively small.

This is all just a preliminary guess and subject to change if anyone comes up with a better fancy.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

They could easily have hunted them to extinction.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

This suggests to me that circumstances are such that a modest amount of beating-up-other-males gets you a lot of extra matings. Which suggests in its turn that women are a concentrated asset whom it is easy to control access to, like cows in a herd or seals on a restricted beach. At least during the mating season.

I guess you're not terribly bothered by the evolutionary biology. We're like this 'cause we're seal-people, not because its an evolutionarily stable strategy for our genes.

I'm going to have to think carefully about the anthropology and social economics.

Why? Is there are biological reason? Are elves supposed to be like something the way selkies seem to be? Is it some sort of thematic reason having to do with the slow maturation of forest trees?

Hyaena-people, right?

Naked mole-rats? Ants? Why? Is it the burrows?

Do these people swarm? Do they send out princesses and princes on nuptial prospecting journeys?

I guess we're not worrying about the biology here. The psychology is going to be very strange, though. Do you want dwarves to be playable?

I'd like an idea what you are shooting for. This is going to make these people weird, and give some of them deeply un-humanlike motivations. How is it connected to your theme? Do you have players who are going to enjoy getting into some deeply alien mindsets? And what sort of intellectual tools are they going to attempt that with?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

That is an awesome image. I think I need to steal that for something, somehow, somewhen.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I can see a dwarvish prince (fertile male) bachelor showing up at an unrelated hive with ore samples and an affidavit, and negotiating with the queen about what guarantees of good faith he gets before he tells her surveyors where his claim is, and which princess he gets if his find is confirmed to be as described. With half an hour to concentrate I could probably come up with a convincing account of what happens in a dwarvish gold rush. But I'm having a bit of trouble putting myself in the shoes of a dwarvish sterile worker.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Asexuality isn't unknown in human psychology. I'm not sure it's that problematical here. In this case I'd expect Greed and Workaholic in the template.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

It isn't, true. But I suspect that human asexuality is a poor model for the motivations of a sterile worker in a eusocial species. The sterile worker doesn't abstain from reproduction, she does it by proxy. The relationship between a worker bee and a queen bee is halfway towards the relationship between a stomach and a sex organ.

Asexual humans are not (that I know of) particularly motivated to get their sisters laid. A worker bee is all about keeping her sister pregnant and getting her nieces and nephews married. She's not uninterested in sex except for herself.

Coming at this from a standpoint in evolutionary biology or the ethology of eusocial animals such as ants and bees, I think Selfless and Sense of Duty might be more expected than Greed.

I don't know much about naked mole rats. And I can't help sharing Richard Dawkins' view that we are missing something very important in our description of them. He suggests that they might have an unrecognised furry form that travels on the surface to mate with non-relatives and found new nests.

I seem to recall that naked mole rats live on tubers that are so large as to be uneatable by a single pair of rats, which they discover rarely, sporadically, and with much labour. That's a reasonable analogue for dwarves finding ore bodies, I suppose. I might look the rats up when I find out what whswhs' purpose is for the funky sociobiology.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

The sterile workers are of both sexes? Are they permanently sterile, or is their fertility suppressed by the proximity of the breeders? How are senescent breeders replaced? What happens if the queen dies? How are new colonies established?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Have you thought of useing the Czech folklore name for small fay that live in rivers and swamps, Vodniks or Vodyanoy? Given that these hobbits/halflings are more beaver/otter than rabbit-like (there's a good deal of evidence, especally in the earlier editions of the Hobbit, that Tolkien originally saw the Hobbits as rabbit-like enough to be seen as and mistaken for rabbits), the frog-like aspects of Vodniks might not be to anoying. And besides, you can always make frog-like qualities a human myth to justify bigotry.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I think it's good. Traditionally seasonal labor needed for plowing and harvesting was seen as unrulely, violent, and a potenial threat. Many of the things a community might say of trolls. You could propably raid real world folklore for the various customs used to keep the hired hands in line/content. And the scary troll could be named Captain Swing.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Besides, we all know you like the Riders of Rohan. A human horse culture will need to be part of this setting, even if it isn't Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon cavalry/vikings.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Guinea pigs are actually a good match for the cramped quaters of the Dwarves. The Andean peoples who feast on them tend to already have thicker trunks and shorter limbs (though not so dramatically). Rabbits would be logical for Halflings, Elves, and Dwarves. Manatees might be good milk animals for the Nix/silkies.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I actually would prefer to have an evolutionarily stable strategy for each species; that's part of what I'm getting at with the "partial equilibrium" thing. But at this point, what I'm doing is looking for possible analogies in nonhuman mammals, with a subtext of "let's give them differing degrees of sexual dimorphism." I'm perfectly willing either to see suggestions as to what sort of evolutionary history might give rise to the proposed trait, or analyses of why a different sexual dimorphism might make sense as a stable strategy. That's one of the points of discussing all this here—to profit from exchange of ideas with people who are more knowledgeable or better at certain sorts of analysis than I am. If it changes my design, that's not necessarily a bad thing. As Tolkien says, "Their plans were improved with the best advice."

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Brewing from a nut base is difficult as many have too high an oil content. It interferes with the generation of proper head. However, there are workarounds with roasting. I know of two different beers in the southern US that are based on roasted pecans, but still need some grains to supplement the process.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Doing some research on eusociality, I find that there are actually two models of it: life insurers and fortress defenders. Dwarves seem like a natural to be fortress defenders. Their mines provide both close quarters and a valuable resource that needs to be defended. There is a shrimp species, Synalpheus regalis, that exhibits the behavior pattern.

I believe that many eusocial species have a mechanism for promotion of a sterile caste member of fertility if the fertile female dies.

As to what motivates a sterile dwarf: concern for the welfare of siblings? devotion to the mother that they all serve? a sense of the sacredness of the mine? eagerness to carry on the trade whose profits put food in the storehouses? ancestor worship? stoicism?

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

With selkies, I would note that their favored habitats are island/beach and lagoon settings; that constrains the amount of space available to them. So there should definitely be competition for space between males. This is especially important for reproductive space, as, like seals, they can't give birth out at sea.

I envision selkies as having developed song competition as a displacement of physical competition and a focus of sexual selection. Having a loud, sustained, and resonant voice naturally correlates with size and health, which is a possible starting point for the evolutionary process. There could also be something like Inuit song duels. Of course, in a world with magic, song could also be a vehicle for magically effective attack, like the duelling magical songs in The Silmarillion.

Once they develop net weaving, female selkies are likely to have work songs that involve elaborate counterpoint. And perhaps both sexes will have fishing gang songs.

I wonder if there might be a tendency to chieftainships with potlatch-like redistributive economies? Or to recruitment of whaling parties through sung advertisements of how generously past hunts paid off?

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Having a larger head to body ratio than humans could be a problem with pregnancies. Or is just that male trolls have relatively small heads?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Trolls are bigger than humans in the first place. A typical human weighs 150 pounds, which comes to roughly 70,000 cubic centimeters; a typical human brain is a bit less than 1400 cubic centimeters. But if you doubled the body mass to get 140,000 cubic centimeters, the equivalent brain volume would not be 2800 cubic centimeters but only 2250, because brain volume is proportional to body surface area, not to body volume.

In the second place, it's possible to fit a bigger brain into a human frame. Neanderthal brains actually averaged 1500 cubic centimeters.

So if you start out with male trolls at 140,000 cubic centimeters and brain volume 2250 cubic centimeters, and female trolls at 200,000 cubic centimeters and brain volume 2800 cubic centimeters, and then cut the female body down to 140,000 cubic centimeters, you've only restore the mannish head proportions.

In the third place, male troll brains might well be a bit smaller in volume than this would predict; the females might have the full 2250, for example, and the males might have less.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

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Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

So if you don't have grain, you can't make beer, basically?

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I think beer is defined as being made from grains. But you can make alcohol from anything with starch or glucose.

Edit: No, you don't need barley to turn starch into glucose. Saliva will do - it has a lot of amylase in it.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

In the fourth place, trolls aren't distance runners. Which means that there is not such a strong selective pressure to keep their pelvises narrow for an efficient running gait as there is with H. sap. sapiens. Which means that large foetal craniums are not necessarily so much of a problem. Neanderthals had larger heads, and probably easier labour despite them because of wider pelvises; but it looks as though they couldn't run down an antelope. Frighten heck out of a buffalo in hand-to-horn fighting, yes. Run the buffalo to exhaustion, no.


It has long puzzled me how birds are able to get comparatively sophisticated behaviour and visual processing out of a comparatively small brain, comparisons being made to other vertebrates. Crows and some parrots seem to rival dogs in at least some behaviours (visual recognition and spatial perception, mostly — I suspect that canines have a lot more emotional depth and probably better ability to model others' behaviour). Flight has of course put them under intense pressure to lower the weight of the brain and skull — look what happened to their teeth! Very likely they have made some trade-off to expand the weight-performance envelope of their brains, but if so, what is it? And since H. sap. sapiens are also manifestly pushing on the size-performance ratio of our brains hard enough to alter pelvic anatomy I wonder why we haven't evolved notably more compact brain tissue, which birds seem to have done. Perhaps we have started, and just hadn't got very far when we invented obstetrical forcepses, the Caesarian section, and induced labour.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Okay, got it.

Have you given any thought to how this relates to your theme? Your theme is biome competition, with each hominid species or subspecies moulded by, and its survival chained to the persistance and success of, a biome. That makes extrapolation of form and way-of-life from environment integral to your theme? Where does this fit in? Are you confident that it won't end up as another Chekov's Gun? Are you confident that it won't obscure your theme?

I don't know that passage. Where is it from?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I don't know much about the structure of bird brains. Mammals have the laminar cortex, six cell layers thick, and massively folded up to squeeze it into the skull (in humans, anyway). Do birds have that many layers? How much of their information processing even uses the cortex?

It looks as if the song control centers are in a structure called the nidopallium that handles higher cognitive and executive functions in birds—but mammals don't have it; it corresponds most closely to part of the brainstem. There's something that looks like cortex, but it's a smaller part of the brain and doesn't seem to monopolize higher cognition. Weird.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Okay. I think that the only available models of vertebrate eusociality (naked mole-rats and Damaraland mole-rats) are life-insurers, but that's okay. I can do things with non-vertebrate models, and I have been known to extrapolate in my time.

Another distinction among eusocial species is between the diploid and the haplodiploid. It is the haplodiploid ones (particularly ants and bees) that were so fruitfully analysed by Hamilton (W.D. [1964], "The genetical evolution of social behaviour" (I and II), Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, 1–16 and 17–56), but those are also the ones that produce the grossly-biased sex ratios and diploid sex that is more closely related to its same-sex siblings than to its own offspring). If you have an equal sex ratio and workers of both sexes then we are probably in the diploid range, where termites and mole-rats are better models. I'll have to look carefully to see whether analogues of slave-making ants and regicidal ants make sense, but on the other hand I think it won't be quite so challenging to fathom individuals' motives.

Two or three different ones, I think. Among bees the workers feed royal jelly to a larva to grow a new sister-queen (or niece-queen). Among naked mole-rats sterile workers of the appropriate sex (brothers or sisters) fight over which of them will complete adolescence and regain his or her suppressed fertility. Among Damaraland mole-rats I think the colony tends to break up, with multiple workers seceding.

Also, eusocial animals have at least three different ways of founding a new colony. The social bees (not solitary bees, of course) send out swarms, each with one fertile member and a power of workers. Ants tend to send out fertile offspring (of both sexes) to seek mates and start small. In those examples members of the fertile castes are specially prepared for the process, so that the colony is an analogy to an organism reproducing by fission (swarming) or broadcasting gametes (nuptial flights). But among Damaraland mole-rats an individual can leave the colony, whereupon it recovers its fertility (or completes adolescence) and can seek a mate and establish a new nest. Colonies still look like families and one is not tempted to analyse them as discontiguous organisms.

I reckon that this will depend crucially on how the colonies produce new colonies, on whether the sterile worker is potentially fertile, on whether he or she is more like a somatic cell or a non-rebellious teenager.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

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Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

It's an attempt at getting started toward the primary goal by using an intuition pump. I'm not proposing to make it a separate goal; I'm trying to use it as a tool. I'm not enough of a mathematical population biologist to actually derived optimal strategies from equations, but I'm perfectly willing to pay attention to suggestions from people who know more than I do. That's why I raised the subject here—I was hoping to lure people like you in.

It's in the chapter of The Hobbit where Thorin & Co. stay at Rivendell.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Haplodiploid genetics seems unlikely in mammals. I'm not sure if it's possible. I need to think about that.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

There is a SF short story about haploid people. Your Haploid Heart by James Tiptree, Jr. .

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Vertebrate sex determination is capable of getting screwed around. Mammal males are XY and females are XX; but bird males, I believe, are ZZ and females are ZW. But I would just as soon go with diploid eusociality.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Certainly but I'm not sure it's very likely in mammals. I need to review some stuff about chromosomal structure and meiosis in mammal gamete formation.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Indeed it does.

I have given thought before to sapient, motile species with alternation of generations between haploid and diploid forms* (such as many plants exhibit), but haplodiploid sex determination is a different challenge. The species keep coming out with radically reduced need for social cognition, and I can't convince myself that they will be sapient.


* One time I ended up with a biosphere in which diploid plants alternated generations with haploid animals. That was fun.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

What you've said already has been a huge help.

There's a reason I'm getting started thinking about this more than a year before the campaign would start! I need lots of time to play with the ideas and look for possible patterns.

On the other hand, I also have to recognize that I'm working at this level primarily to make myself happy. I'm confident that few if any of my players will perceive the nuances that we're finding so challenging to get right, let alone analyzing the evolutionary strategies. (I have one player whose degree was in biology—but he's complained to me that Theoretical Population Biology, which I used to edit, was a math journal rather than a bio journal. And I think he's more likely to end up in the superheroic campaign anyway.)

But that doesn't mean I don't want to do it! If I have a world that holds together as a natural place, with the magic growing out of the naturalism, it will be more satisfying to me, and it will make it easier for me to think of challenges.

You seem a bit bothered by the assumption of differences in the relations of the sexes in different races. I grant that it makes it more challenging! But it's a dimension on which the extant Hominidae actually vary, so it's likely that different "human" races will vary on it. My particular assignments are purely speculative at this point; any of the various races could be moved to a different degree of dimorphism and pattern of sexual behavior if it makes better sense that way. I didn't originally intend the selkies to be at the high end of male dominance and harem sexuality, for example!

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Well, I'm not planning to make the dwarves haplodiploid anyway.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I am, and not just because it presents challenges at a really fundamental level to building societies, economies, and government. I'm bothered because these dimorphisms and reproductive strategies evolve as consequences of environments and ways of life. Haplodiploidy disposes hymenopterans to eusociality, but there are merely social, and even solitary, wasps and bees. You seem to be assuming them on to your different races rather than deducing them out, and I'm afraid of getting contradictions.

Also, I'm afraid that you might be trying to ride two bicycles at once instead of having only one theme.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

If you get a contradiction, point it out. The assumption can be changed.

I seem not to have communicated to you what my approach is, perhaps because I tend to take it for granted. It seems as if you may be able to start from the assumption of a hominid race adapted biologically and magically to a particular environment, and work out its characteristics from the equations and theorems of population genetics. My mind doesn't work quite so abstractly. What I'm doing is taking that assumption, and looking for mammal species or human cultures that inhabit that kind of environment, and taking traits from them, to see how they fit, by telling stories about them. But none of those stories is permanently laid down yet. If the stories that result imply that they couldn't survive, or they couldn't stay that way, then I can look for different stories. And that remains true until I start the campaign and hand out descriptions of the species to the players.

I do assume that varying degrees of sexual dimorphism are likely; such variation can be seen among the extant Hominidae. And I'd be interested to have it occur, because it would be a source of misunderstandings and conflicts. But all my proposals of specific configurations are in the spirit of "What if?" or "Let's see how this one works."

So by all means point out things that won't work, or things that will only work if specific assumptions are made. I'd much rather have them found out in this discussion than get into the campaign if I run it! And if it looks as if it would work better if things were otherwise than I imagined them, by all means suggest it; discovering unexpected implications is one of the payoffs of this sort of thinking.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

That's exactly what makes it valuable to me. If you thought the same way I do your contribution would not be so complementary to my efforts.

Things seem to have been fairly civil so far. I hope they remain so. Perhaps it will help that we're discussing a world of fantasy.

In any case I'm delighted that you find this kind of speculation worth pursuing.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Ironically, I'm portraying a fantasy world where, for all I know, the races might have been created rather than evolved—but created to fit their environments. And, on the other hand, it will be a TL1-2 world where social attitudes can only be, in our current terms, regressive—even if the diversity of races creates more interstitial spaces with some modest freedom of choice.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Betamax brains...

That's just awesome, dude.


:)

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Yes, sorry, I should have elaborated more. I meant raw, untreated nuts. The oil content will be the biggest issue. Once removed, the nuts should work well in the process.

You could replace the grains with a mashed tuber, like a sweet-potato. Sweet-potatoes contain Alpha and Beta-amylase, as well as the obvious starch.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Potatoes can be very useful in making booze, but will it be beer?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I don't really care all that much what it's called. Sake is called "rice wine," but it's made from a grain and a case could be made for calling it "beer." What I'm interested in is what can be fermented—or, in places with a cold season, concentrated by freezing.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

People have attempted to make alcohol out of just about everything. You have the traditional cereals for beers and fruit juices for wines, but there are countless other options available. Most of the fermented beverages would probably fall under the wine category. Relatively speaking, wine making is a less demanding process regarding preparation. Beer will require more pretreatment, to get the starches in the grains to a fermentable state.

Here is one of my bookmarked recipe lists. I use it when I am looking for ideas or starting points for unusual batches I want to try making. It has a selection of unusual wines, including some herbs, vegetables, tubers and even tree saps that might help you determine what fermented beverages would be produced in your different regions.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Those seem to sophisticated of motives to be purely biological. They would assuredly have those motives but they don't sound quite like an equiv to sex.

They can be a sublimination; after all it may not be an accident that St Francis, who was a Monk, liked nativity scenes. But it would be a sublimination of something. A Eunech might subliminate sex, as might a sworn celibate. What would someone who was born completely sterile subliminate? Unless the whole sterile strain was a late comer in a races biological sterile and thus does not eliminate sex instinct.

What is the backstory of Dwarven sterility? Is it natural? Is it a curse from some being they offended?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

It's definitely not a curse. Rather, it's a mode of survival. In a sense their mode of survival is under a curse, in that minerals are exhaustible, and one day there will be nothing left to mine (short of technological advance). But their traits should be those needed for them to survive.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Than like I said, if you have a motivation for sterile Dwarves that replaces sex it should be, well not crude(which has unnecessary negative connotations) but not sophisticated. Mundane? Animalistic? You get the idea. Something that can be recognizable as an alternative.

Motives you gave sound rather ideological. In a sense such motives are biological in their own right(which sense depends on the metaphysics of the analyst). What they are not is a counterpart. The problem is they sound to much like what humans would replace sterility with. Except that among humans sterility is either a misfortune or a sacrifice. If dwarven sterility is purely natural then it has to come with a drive that is mundanely and obviously biological as well as one that is biological in a cryptic or baroque fashion. To have an idea what that would be, one must know what survival need dwarven sterility serves, which presumably you know and I don't.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I don't think "survival" in the sense of individual survival is the point. Sex does not meaningfully serve individual survival, and yet many humans are obsessed with pursuing it, sometimes at the expense of individual survival. Nursing a child similarly does not serve individual survival, but my understanding is that many women find it rewarding.

The desire to protect one's siblings seems to exist in humans at a level more basic than ideology. And in dwarves it might well be more intense still. The "fortress eusociality" model seems to suggest that dwarves might become intensely attached to the physical boundaries of their particular mine or tunnel, and eager to watch them and defend them. This can be a powerful motive; witness seals or deer fighting over territory. Of course, having the territory is going to enable them to mate, but as nonconceptual beings they probably aren't planning ahead like that; more likely the defense of territory makes them feel good in itself.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Scientizing fantasy is problematic and I suspect poses a problem for materialist authors using speculative genres analogical to what Christian authors have dealt from Tolkien on. Fantasy is a genre that is naturally pagan-friendly, just as Sci-fi is naturally materialist friendly. The favorite tropes of each can't be used without giving an uneasy feeling of being on another tribe's territory. That does not forbid it, it just forces the author to squeeze his mind a bit. As Germanic lore is a familiar part of Western Civilization it did not require to much squeezing in Tolkien.

The point I am trying to make is that if you are not careful with your scientizing you endanger the sense of eerieness, wonder, or numinousness that is desirable for fantasy. You can create the same effect in space opera with pseudoscience of course; the B5 idea of two godlike races fighting a war through the ages was a very powerful one. As was the barren desert of Dune filled with hydrocannibalistic barbarians. And so on. But somehow it doesn't work quite the same in fantasy.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

That's kind of what I meant; to distill it to something more atavistic sounding like a primitive drive to protect kin. Naturally it would be bolstered by tradition, religion, what not. As primitive drives are among humans. And naturally other dwarves would share that drive. But presumably sterile dwarves would specialize.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I come to this thread late, and perhaps you've already moved too far down a path to find my thoughts useful, but I'll toss 'em in, here, anyway.

Thought the First:

If you want to have a truly fantastic setting where you can focus on your themes of biome competition, why don't you just leave out a "Jack-of-all-Trades" race, such as human beings?

Instead of having humans in the grasslands, have a feline race with a culture and biology based on lions. A solitary male forms the center of an extended family consisting of several females and their children. You can pull ideas from Masai or Zulu culture, and make them nomadic herders, and not just hunters. Mature males tend to be territorial and focused on care and protection of the herd, so the females do all the trading and interaction amongst the different prides, and with other races. Young males are required to remain in isolated enclaves until they've proven themselves and "earned" the right to take wives.

When the race must fight, all the younger males without prides gather up into impi, run a hundred miles in a day to reach their foes, and fight until they drop. Alternatively, you could have them mounted, as I don't see why a sufficiently domesticated horse couldn't handle bearing a sapient predator. It also gives them an interest in expanding the grasslands -- more plains means more land for pasture, which means more territory for the younger males to colonize.

Thought the Second:

What if everything exists as it does in the first thought, but then humans arrive late? They got banestormed in, or fell through a gate, or got sucked through the Bermuda Triangle, or something?

That means, of all the creatures in the world, human beings are the only ones who have no place of their own. They exist as clients of the other races, or in the interstices between them.

That makes human beings the ultimate facilitators. They provide the generalized labor, goods and services that distract the patron races from their preferred lifestyles.

So, dwarves don't grow their own food -- their human clients in the mountain valleys do that. Trolls don't make their own beer, their human slaves do that. Swamp-running hobbits or arboreal elves don't travel to large towns or dwarf-holds to trade for metal goods, human merchants do that.

In essence, every human being is a Jew or Gypsy -- tolerated by all, liked by few, and critical for the continued specialization of the lives of all other races. Humans trade, provide labor not preferred by the host race, act as mercenaries and generally do all the scut-work.

What happens, then, if the humans realize how critical they are, and decide to assert themselves?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

That sounds like Slezkine's The Jewish century or Chu's World on Fire.