Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I really don't want a feline race, or a lizard race, or anything else "furry" (in the broadest sense). That evokes a different set of tropes. If nothing else, it would sit ill with a bunch of "human" races whose behavior is different: There's an effect of alienness with that that you don't quite get from having cat people who don't act like humans.

I've thought about having no race called "men"—see my discussion of centaurs/gandharva—and it's possible I might go that way. It will somewhat depend on how "different" the grasslanders are.

There are a couple of things to say about that:

* To some degree, the halflings are likely to head that way, at least as the world's great traders—between towns being mainly on the rivers, and rivers themselves making transport cheaper.

* To a lesser degree, the ghouls are going to fit into that niche, as scavengers and barterers.

* I'd really rather not undermine the basic theme by having a race that has no natural terrain. Though it might be interesting to have a small population of hybrids, born through magic, and not quite welcome anywhere. I'd rather go that way that have a banestorm; I don't like plurality of timelines, except in a campaign that's actively about plurality of timelines. I'd rather not have men arrive in a spaceship, either.

The questions are welcome, though. Don't hesitate to ask more!

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

A thought on Dwarven food supplies. Doves and bats, both eat insects and produce guano. Dovecotes produced enough guano to be important sources of fertiliser in the middle ages. Dwarves could raise/protect both doves and bats, give them excellent sheltered nesting places, the guano would feed their fungi farms. As with human dovecotes, dwarven dovecotes and batcotes would also produce protein, squab and whatever they'd call a young bat.

Since Dwarves live under mountains, goats would be the most logical milk/dairy animals.

Any of that useful?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Here's a recipe for Acorn Beer. I hope this inspires someone. The moss requierment is interesting.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Is "American two-row pale" a form of barley? That is, is this not so much fermented acorns as conventional beer supplemented with acorn meal?

I wonder how bitter it is? Diminishing the bitterness is supposedly the big challenge to eating acorns.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

There is nothing organic that someone hasn't tried to make into booze. Well, I haven't heard of a booze made from human blood yet. But theoretically you could probably.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I believe the answer is: human blood doesn't contain enough sugar. We've used cows blood and whatnot as part of a refining step for certain alcohols as the blood grabs on to some of the bits we don't want, causing them to precipitate out ... but thats' a different thing that fermenting the blood itself.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

A fully packed liver probably contains enough glycogen to ferment, though.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Tried, that may be true. Succeeded, lots of things -- lots of things either don't ferment, or ferment to produce something undrinkable.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Okay, I see what you mean about how the felines wouldn't fit. I think the notion of hybrids filling that "facilitator/enabler/merchant/mercenary/buffer-culture" niche is a good one, too.

I thought the notion of a "rootless" people would act as a nice contrast to help throw the "rooted" cultures into sharp relief. They also provide that base of "clients" that do the jobs nobody else wants to do, so as to allow the people in the base cultures to focus more on the things they prefer.

The idea of a collection of hybrid folk, who don't fit in anywhere, holds a lot of appeal for me, as a player, and offers a lot of story ideas to use as a GM. Honestly, were I to play in this campaign, I'd choose a hybrid character of some sort.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Or you could have the unwelcome race having had their natural terrain eradicated or nearly so. Drama can be had from who they blame for the loss of their habitats, which may not be the truth (especially if it was their own fault).

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Just a thought on neuter dwarves:
As dwarves are engaged in mining, extracting, smelting, and refining, all in enclosed spaces, using low technology, it is entirely possible that quite a few of them are reproductively dubious due to chemical exposure. Some arbitrarily connected ideas related to this:

Dwarves have litters, and a single female can produce enough children to maintain a sizable community. Labor, however, is perennially (ahem) short, so most communities maintain only a few fertile adults and a few more kids who have never worked in any of the industries that are taboo for breeders. Everyone elses' sex drive is suppressed, deliberately or accidentally, by chemicals. If workers did manage to have children, they would be very sickly, at best.

Since the workers have numbers and a monopoly on the vital industries, it is entirely possible that the ruling class is infertile. They might very well be paranoid about the reproductive activities of their fertile relatives, making their marriage and reproductive customs rather strict.

Alternately, maybe a monopoly in children makes you powerful. (Historical evidence says no, but it's not outrageous.) This leads to a fertile ruling class that uses the vast majority of their own children for labour.

Both of the above, and more, could be true in different dwarven communities. There could be great schism between the fertile rulers and the rulers who treat fertiles as assets, with little hope for resolution since dwarves don't travel much, are not great warriors, but inhabit areas that are natural fortresses. There might instead be all sorts of crazy (literal AND figurative) underground warfare, if the issue is felt strongly enough. I can imagine poisoning someone's sister with infertility chemicals and then forcing them to import one of your own via various cruel shenanigans.

If the damage is permanent, you become a laborer forever, and fertiles are kept far from certain areas. If it is something that heals over time, laborers can aspire to fertility, and fertiles don't have to be so zealously preserved. If it is somewhere in between, there are interesting grey areas.

It is quite possible that the degree of damage depends strongly on ore body and technology.

I'm sure there's room for more.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I can see, actually, at least two ways to get hybrids:

* The heroic myth approach: Beren alone of mortal men married an elf-woman, the sons of God desired the daughters of men, and so on.

* The urban realism approach: When people start coming to the emerging halfling city-states to trade, some of them stay, and perhaps intermarry, and whether through chance, drugs, or magic, some of them have children.

I'm not sure if they'd both work in the same storyline, though. Thoughts?

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

This is an idea I definitely want to have true: I prefer to have multiple cultures for each race, with different customs. Back when I was playing with Tolkien's dwarves, who are two-thirds male, I worked out an alternate scheme where two brothers share a wife. In the long run, that custom has the sharing of genes between "brothers" converging to 1/3, which is less than for full brothers; so there might be a slow oscillation between monogamy and fraternal polyandry. Or you could get a radical religion where two poor brotherless dwarves adopt each other.

"Cold is brotherless bed" might be a dwarven proverb. Though probably not in the world I'm playing with.

Bill Stoddard

Selkies
 

I have been wondering what the difference is between the selkies and the halflings. Rivers and their banks, swamps, and lakes aren't hugely different from tidal waterways, dunes, marshes, and lagoons. What's the crucial difference? Tides? Salt water? Ground firm enough to burrow? Where is the boundary between selkie habitatat and halfling habitat in environments like the Mississippi, Nile, and Tigris-Euphrates deltas? Did the two races actually speciate by sympatric/parapatric specialisation at all, or did they speciate allopatrically and only specialise after they came back into contact? It's difficult. I wonder whether you are sure that you want two races here. Perhaps you would prefer a single race of water-edge specialists and boatmen that has branched into seafaring and agriculture as chiefly cultural adaptations?


If not, how about this:

The selkies (or stranden) originally differed from the halfings (or brocmen) originally in having some sort of adaptation for going into the surf and lagoons. Perhaps they had a large, heat-conserving build, or a tendency to deposit insulating subcutaneous fat, or deposits of brown fat for improved metabolic thermal homeostasis, or a mechanism for dealing with salt ingestion, or enlarged spleens that stored oxygen (as oxyhaemoglobin, not as gas) for extended diving, or resistance to the bends or something like that. Perhaps several of those things in modest parts. Anyway, whatever it is it is developmentally and metabolically expensive, so selkies can out-compete brocmen only where diving (deep? in salt water?) provides a lot of food. They are simply too hungry to survive in direct competition with the brocmen.

Now, infants and small children are not good at diving: apart from anything else, their small bulk means rapid hypothermia except in tropical waters, and safe swimming in surf needs strength. So women with infants and toddlers, perhaps in the late stages of pregnancy too, stay on the shore or don't venture far. They gather clams from the sand and oysters from tidal rocks, build fish-traps, set traps for mud crab, net tidal waterways, and fish with lines and hooks from the beaches and headlands, hunt shorebirds, raid seabird-rookeries for eggs, and gather the scant vegetable food of the dunes. Deep-sea fishing and diving for abalone etc. on reefs is necessarily the province of men and of young women without children: in many cultures it becomes the province of men exclusively.

Absent skin-changing magic (a late development, or a rare accomplishment) stranden cannot swim long distances like seals, or hike across the seafloor. Therefore, and because carrying a catch of fish or whatever while you are swimming is difficult anyway, they developed first sea-going boats and then ocean-going ships. The latter opened up bountiful fisheries of herring, cod, and game-fish like marlin, also sealing and whaling. These have turned out to provide a much more commodious niche than the original coastal fishing, and now support the majority of that much-increased stranden population that they made possible. Further, they led in to long-distance commerce and transoceanic migration. On the other hand, they made the stranden dependent on trade with elves, brocmen, and perhaps trolls for oak and teak for hulls, pine and fir for spars, cordage, canvas, pitch, and tar.

So the archetype of stranden society has communities in harbors and on the beach, where women live permanently and where men come and go. The women probably govern the beaches and harbors, and perhaps they own the land. Women probably collaborate with their sisters and orthocousins for mutual support/protection and to achieve scale where necessary. Matrilineal matriarchy looks like a good bet. The development of shipping is perhaps too recent for evolutionary rather than cultural adaptation. (It makes economic sense for women to be shipowners and silent partners in fishing and trade, but is probably counter to culture.)

Male social units are probably closely associated with individual vessels, with two or three men (perhaps kin or lovers) on small boats, ranging up to large bands of several score on the biggest ships. Men roam far, and are often away for long periods, moreover their return is uncertain. The seaman with a family in every port is an obvious trope for stranden, so is the "sea widow" with several husbands in different ships. The way of life of men among the stranden has always been more exposed to danger than that of the women, and has always paid its richest rewards to well-judged daring. The intrepid sailor is doubtless much admired, the wise and canny captain more so, and the sagacious commodore whose lead even the captains follow most of all. The crews of ships are often not closely related, and when they are the relationships that are known with greatest certainty are those of men to their [uterine half-]brothers and their sisters' sons. Ships lose men on voyages and recruit in far ports; the youngster who chafes under female government on shore and longs to join a rich ship with a dashing captain is a stock figure.

In an earlier post I suggested stranden ships with whole communities aboard, floating villages on galleons and huge junks. If these exist they are a departure from tradition, and the women on them are deprived of their traditional base of wealth and power, forced to do men's work and face men's dangers. I can see kidnap victims in the part.

Standen men in ancient times did work that required their constantly going into the water, and they doubtless spent their days nude except perhaps for a tool-belt. Clothing might have been considered effeminate until stranden men started going in ships to where the water is too cold even for them to swim in it. The stranden talent for diving probably delayed but did not prevent the development of trawling and dredging.

Ships and sea-going boats would have given the stranden an unique capacity for migrating across open water. Men would have found islands (and perhaps continents) on sealing and whaling trips, and while exploring for fishing banks. They would then have had to persuade women to come with them settling: or perhaps they told the women of empty shores and the women persuaded or hired men to take them there. On larger islands and perhaps even isolated continents stranden migrants will have found river-valleys innocent of brocmen, forests without elves, grasslands without mearasmen, and (not that they'd be much interested, I think) deserts without ghuls and tundra without trolls. I would expect behavioural adaptation. The project of importing herdbeasts, horses, elvish croptrees, and brocman crops would require an entrepreneur strikingly free from cultural preconceptions.

Stranden dread storms at sea, and particularly the onshore gale. Sharks and orcas probably haunt their nightmares. Tsunamis perhaps loom large in legend.

Re: Selkies
 

I think that the river race is going to spend a larger percentage of time on the riverbanks than the coastal race is on the seashores. They'll be better walkers but not such good swimmers, and they'll lack adaptations for deep diving. They'll also have burrows, which the coastal race won't be likely to have. And on the other hand, they'll lack adaptations for prolonged immersion in salt water. Those are the main things I think of.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Selkies
 

I have a possible construction of the selkies as "stranden" (from Anglo-Saxon strand + mann) above, based on the assumption that the selkies grew large and had some adaptions for deep diving and cool water that were developmentally and metabolically costly. Let me know if the stranden are not the sort of thing you want.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Tolkien managed to alternate between heroic and folksy. Even Star Wars managed to have Noir on tatooine and martial arts elsewhere.

Re: Selkies
 

No, actually, they sound interesting, and the metabolic argument makes sense. The large size was definitely part of my picture of them. I just was focusing first on what seemed the primary question, and delaying comment on the stranden till I had time to analyze them closely.

You mustn't swim till you're six weeks old,
Or your head will be sunk by your heels;
And summer gales and killer whales
Are bad for baby seals.

I'd want to look at the earlier phases of their navigation technology. I think that early on they would not be using wood very much, because it's scarce. I'd be looking at kayaks and umiaks and coracles and other sorts of skin boats, with the rigid parts often made from bone. They might have developed floats even earlier.

For a long time, their wayfinding might be a matter of Area Knowledge more than Navigation. Like Heinlein's Mars pilot who says he knows every bit of space in Mars orbit by its freckles (which RAH probably stole from Mark Twain).

Bill Stoddard

Selkies
 

Among stranden the women are inclined to make their homes on the shore. In primitive times, among communities that have not developed a way of life for men that involves highly production offshore fishing and lucrative trade, and where the stranden by dint of migration have exclusive occupation of islands with resources that would otherwise be pre-empted by other races women produce significant food and other resources from the land. In these cases control of the foreshore and lagoons (perhaps even of other land on islands) is a significant source of wealth either to tribes of women or to communities in which the sexes might have specialised but the men have not wandered off. In these circumstances coastal communities of the stranden may enter into competition and conflict over land, either with other groups of stranden, or with encroaching brocmen and elves. The terrain involved is likely to be fairly close, which will favour ambushes and hit-and run attacks, and estuarine or marish, favouring amphibious action.

In cases where the male moiety of a stranden community is often absent on long voyages, and these produce far more income than beachcombing and whatever on the foreshore, the stranden community will participate in the character of a port or haven. Little valuing the hinterland, the women will fortify and defend their havens, the most important thing being to keep open access to the sea. They may engage in manufacturing, or process oceanic products, but very likely their most important business will be trade. Merchant-women will trade piecemeal with brocmen and other neighbours to accumulate cargoes and stores for wholesale to shipping-men, and they will buy catches and cargos wholesale for piecemeal sale. The most powerful [sororities of] stranden women will be ship's chandlers, cargo agents, importers and exporters, and wholesale merchants.

Such havens are likely to have warehouses full of rich goods, a temptation to raiders, and of course their populations are as attractive as any other to slavers and rapists. But I don't see that there will be much actual warfare over the actual source of their wealth, which is access between the sea and customers. Strandenmale pirates might raid the warehouses and rape or enslave the women. But most will be culturally averse to holding the port. Other races won't be able to make much of the port if they sieze it, because the strandenmales won't trade there if the women are driven away. I can see women with a poor port trying to sieze a better one—just. I can see a powerful port wanting to destroy a trading rival, but that would be hard without naval support which I doubt the men would give. And I can see an empire or tyrant of some other race conquering a city for the purpose of taxing its commerce.

As for stranden men, I definitely see the coastal ones fighting over oyster-beds and good places to put lobster-pots. Perhaps even skirmishing over land for their women, as discussed above. The seagoing men, however, are going to see ships and cargoes as sources of wealth. They may seize a ship or two, especially if it is well-laden and they are poor, and they may raid a coastal settlement to fill their holds, but I don't see them very interested in conquering anything.

In some geographical circumstances you might get stranden arriving by sea in places like Wallacea, Polynesia, New Zealand, and Australia. They will settle the shores and small islands well enough, with women owning the land and branching out into horticulture while men own the seas and fisheries. But empty niches and population pressure will eventually draw them up rivers and into the interior forests and grasslands. I can see stranden women building inland ports like those along the Mississippi-Missouri and the Murray-Darling, and perhaps engaging in brocman-like agriculture, while the men adapt fishing and whaling customs to hunting, herding, and timbergetting. However, access is going to be more limited — perhaps even, as along the Darling, seasonal — which will mean a permanent association between the women of some town and the men of its hinterland, the itinerant male lifestyle becoming circumscribed, the moieties re-integrating into geographically distinct communities with a less distinct separation of the sexes into different communities.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

It's by swatting fish out of the rivers, for the Kodiaks. Plus eating berries.

A kodiak will eat 20-30 salmon's skins per day. Generally, they don't bother with the actual meat, just the fatty skin. Less efficient fishing bears will clean up the leftovers, as will ravens. They will also hijack wolf and lynx kills, if they can. If they happen to have an easy swat at a squirrel, I've seen Alaskan brown and black bears do so and gulp them down.

Oh, and raiding trash cans is another favorite food source for them.

Polars are solitary hunters... but HIGHLY effective.

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

Re: Selkies
 

Also, probably, more carnivorous, or rather piscivorous.

This is not that dissimilar to the hunter/gatherer split in men, where males go out in hunting parties and bring back the meat. Note that there is a documented pattern where the males eat the brains and the organ meats out in the field, right after the kill, and the females and children get the leaner muscle meats that they fetch home.

I was envisioning a setup where males are large because they must claim and hold territory, and the male with the better territory gets the better choice of wives and the larger number of wives. This might be somewhat like the seals that Kipling describes, and somewhat like prides. But only a minority of older, stronger, and eventually wealthier males will have this. There will be a population of ambitious young bachelors waiting their chance to come in and take over.

Will there be initiation ceremonies for the new recruits? Will some selkie communities perhaps have pederasty, comparable to the model of Athens?

Or, perhaps, the crews of ships will be mostly young, and the old ship's captain will be seen as something of a failure—why didn't he come ashore?

Certainly net trawling would be an early development; the net may have been the original technology for this species. They might even have been the pioneers of weaving. On the other hand, wearing woven fabric might have disturbing symbolism for them—caught in a net? The wearing of skins, or of string skirts, might appeal to them more. I was somewhat thinking of them as furred, like some seals, though I suppose they could go either way; in any case I envision them as having plentiful fat for insulation.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

There are types of acorns that are less bitter than others. Some oak trees have naturally low tanin acorns. But these are rare multi-recesive trait trees. Since squirrels like oaks trees as they are, and it takes ten years for an oak tree to bear acorns, domestication of oak trees hasn't happened yet. In a world with magic, it might be easy to domesticate Oak trees, or at least no harder than it was for pecans.

Re: Selkies
 

Edible seaweeds have several uses in the real world.

It could be the selkies know medicinal plants and fish in the areas.

As the ocean shore folk, selkies would be the logical shore trade shipers, fishermen, and salvage crews.

Re: Selkies
 

Well, sea otter fur, in regions where there are sea otters. Whale oil, whalebone, and ambergris. Royal purple dye. Whatever can be harvested from salt water swamps.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

That doesn't answer my question about "American two-row pale."

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Yes, it's barley. "Two-Row" refers to the shape of the kernel.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

So then this is a recipe for using acorns to supplement barley, not a recipe for acorn beer as made by elves who lack grain.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Selkies
 

I see problems with that.

In the primitive situation men can't make a living on shore, because brocmen will out-compete them securing any resource that doesn't require adaptation for semi-aquatic life. And their offshore exploits produce few resources that are storable: there's no practical way for men to save up for a retirement. Men keep going back to sea until they are crippled or killed. A man can't even contribute generously to the support of his children if he must stay on the beach to "protect" his harem from mating with men playing "sneaky ****er" strategies.

Things change when the stranden develop ocean-going ships and then long-distance commerce. They acquire durable forms of wealth, and it becomes possible for a successful middle-aged man to accumulate wealth at sea, invest in something income-producing, and settle down on the shore with the money to support a wife or harem and a posse of strandlets. But by that time it is going to be a huge social change for that to seem like a desirable or admirable thing to do.

Seals do it episodically, and their savings are in the form of body size and stored fat. But that is only feasible because the cows have a short, synchronised mating season during which they must congregate because of the shortage of suitable rookeries. It's hard to get that working for a species that has proper arms and legs (so it can build and climb), takes ten years rather than six weeks to get its neonates able to feed themselves, and has to flourish in a wide range of environments with different seasonality.

I'm finding it very difficult to get synchronised and congregated ovulation to turn out to be an evolutionarily stable strategy for humans. Women keep ending up with an evolutionary incentive to sneak off. I can only do it if at least one sex is migratory and the two sexes spend most of the year apart. And even then I don't get men competing like bulls or bull seals for matings, I get them competing like stags, songbirds, or birds-of-paradise. That is, they compete for female choice, not to control mating access by driving off rival men.

I think it extremely likely. Perhaps even comparable to the model of the so-called Sambia (actually the Foré, I think).

As I said above, for retirement before being crippled to be seen as a sign of success, the society must first develop a durable form of wealth and a way to invest it for an income. Before that happens daring and sagacity at sea are going to be the outstanding status symbols among stranden men, which will make is a radical transformation in attitudes for "staying on the beach with the women" to become the mark of a successful man. That might be an interesting social change to have going on during your campaign, but it doesn't seem likely to be early enough or universal enough to affect physiology (e.g. in promoting sexual dimorphism).

Netting tidal waterways will certainly be big, also the thrown net and maybe the seine. But their fondness for diving will make the shallow trawl less of a compelling opportunity. They'll still have to trawl deep waters, but they won't have such an obvious path of development from shallow to ever deeper trawling as faces men in boats who are averse to getting wet and cold.

Clothes will spoil their streamlining in the water and remain soggy and uncomfortable, even softening and damaging the skin, when they come out. They aren't going to have form-fitting lycra and spandex nor quick-drying nylon and microfibre.

Swimming costumes are a very late development, and are intensely silly.

All seals are furred. It is whales, walrus, manatees, and dugongs that are sparsely hairs and appear bald.

Note that if you have a large ratio of women to sexually-successful men the men will have outsized testicles, or if there is a distinct mating season they might enlarge during the season and atrophy out-of-season. Internal testes are possible, probably very near the surface in the pelvis. Or testes might be internal and non-functional between mating seasons and drop during the season.

But do note that I don't find the mating season evolutionarily plausible.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

True. Consider starting with a sugary sap such as maple sap, or sugary juices of fruit and berries such as apples and elderberries, rather than making booze out of the food crop.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

It seems to me that the early development of selkies [stranden] as a species has a problem if the females stay on shore with the young and the males go out to sea: What sort of male-female cooperation is there going to be? Indeed, is there going to be any? Men go out to hunt, but they only stay away for a short time, and then come back, bringing high-value nutrients and useful industrial materials to women. I can't readily see a stable cooperative relationship existing if the men go away for long journeys and only show up occasionally. There needs to be a form of durable and portable wealth to make that functional, I think—that is, trade needs to have emerged first.

Before then, there may be a considerable separation between males and females, but the males are still going to want to come on shore to rest, and to provide the females with their catch.

I'd also note that if the males take, later, to going on long voyages to trade or whale, the females will be left alone. To keep up their protein and calorie intake, they may need to develop their own fishing customs. And if their fishing grounds are valuable, they may have to fight for them, against men or halflings or even trolls who want to muscle in.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

For the dwarves, I had this idea of making most of them hibernate. In desperate times, maybe they can eat the manifest bodies of the earth spirits, who are able to survive a certain amount of depopulation without blighting the land. This would also contribute to the scarcity of mined goods, and establish a reserve of living dwarves in case of war or other disaster.

What about hyperglycemic blood? 600 mg/dl levels are not uncommon in diabetics, I understand, and I found one story of a person who briefly had 5600 mg/dl and survived (thanks to treatment, of course).

Also, I suspect we've just invented a new Batman villain together, and a particularly goofy one too. The rest of y'all can thank/curse us later.

Re: Selkies
 

In the primitive stage of stranden society the men are only undertaking day trips anyway, and are at hand to exploit resources near the shore. But whether the men are near or far, a girl with no children yet is not confined to the shore at all, and a woman whose youngest child is old enough not to need close supervision only needs to return to shore a few times per day. Even a woman who needs to be within a shout and a short sprint of a child than might at any time toddle into trouble fish with a handline or net a tidal waterway. Then too, such women as whose babes are no longer at the breast can form crèches, freeing up some for hours-long fishing and shellfish-diving. That gives women's shore communities both onshore and offshore food resources that might need to be defended. I briefly mentioned their military circumstances in post #179.

Men fetch nutrients from further afield, in general at least as rich or richer, and perhaps crucially diverse. The biological problem for men is to convert those riches into reproductive success. The two most obvious and ethologically most common strategies are (1) to invest those nutrients in getting more matings (make more related infants) and (2) to feed them to related children and their mothers (increase the survival-to-adulthood rate among related infants).

1(a) The men could invest their catches in the bulk and strength to out-fight other men, and the fat reserves to closely supervise women in a compact harem during a restricted mating season, but only if the women had a limited mating season and were forced to cluster during it. But the women haven't and aren't.

1(b) They could give food etc. to women who mated with them, without longer-term commitment. In this case the reproductive interest of the man is to detect when a woman is are fertile and to monopolise her affections through her fertile period. The reproductive interest of a woman is to mate during her actual fertile period with a man whose inheritable characteristics suggest that other women will want to mate with his sons (the "sexy son" strategy), while at other times convincing rich men that she is fertile and will conceive children with them if amply bribed (the "gold-digger" strategy). This sort of behaviour is not unknown to ethology — I can think of spiders that do this — but it is probably not adequate to the high degree of dependency of a woman raising a voracious and slow-maturing human child.

2(a) Men could give food to their mothers while their mothers were still fertile, or to their sisters. In these circumstances it is in their evolutionary interests that their mothers be faithful to their fathers, but whether their sisters are faithful to anyone doesn't matter to them. This leads to the avuncular pattern of society, in which the supervision of women's sexual behaviour is lax.

2(b) Men could create a lasting arrangement with one or more women, in which the woman undertakes sexually faithful, and the man provides nutrients to her and her children. In such circumstances the woman has an evolutionary interest in making the man concentrate his resources on her children and not dilute them among multiple baby-mothers, unless the provision is so ample that her children are glutted and the other women in question are close relatives. She also has an evolutionary interest is accepting his support while sneaking matings with the likely fathers of sexy sons. And an interest in convincing him that she is not doing this: costly displays of fidelity and attachment may be involved. The man has an evolutionary interest in spreading his resources among as many children as they will support (which might involve multiple mothers) and in perhaps sneaking some matings with women whose children other men will support, also, in preventing his women from bearing children to other men. In this situation his father and brothers are potential rivals: they want to promote him only into reproductive opportunities that they can't have themselves. His allies are his mother and grandmothers, his sisters, and his children. This produces the patrilineal pattern of society in which women are supervised (in the absence of their husbands) by their mothers-in-law.

3. Men have other strategies such as the "sneaky ****er" that do not involve providing resources, and therefore do not answer the question "how does a man convert surplus resources into increased reproductive success". I'll mention them here anyway as a prolepsis. And they do complicate the strategies above.


In short, it looks a lot like any hunter-gather society in which the men undertaking overnight or multiple-day hunting trips. And it may develop into something like the fishing and whaling communities of New England etc.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I was thinking more of diabetics' urine.

Re: Selkies
 

I have the impression that gorillas are polygynous and have pronounced sexual dimorphism. Do they have a limited mating season, and if so, is there a compelling reason that the stranden can't? It's not jumping out at me, but that may just be because I'm not ingenious enough to work it out. Or do they have polygyny without restricted mating seasons?

Not for this species, anyway. It's what I was considering for the troll analogs, with the females being originally stronger than the males and later equally strong and smarter.

That general pattern is one I'm familiar with and might like to explore in more detail. And it's going to lead to matrilineages and political alliances based on them, which will be more stable when, later on, the men are far away at sea.

* Does it imply anything about relative male and female body size?

* It seems as if males don't gain meaningful power over their mothers until they're old enough to participate in hunting and bringing home food. But by then most of their brothers (and sisters) will already be born, won't they? So male social control of older women's sexuality is going to have less of a payoff. I suppose if a man knows who his father is, he might be unhappy if his mother took up with another man, perhaps unhappy enough to go a-viking. . . .

The most common pattern among men, and therefore less interesting because less exotic. Though I wouldn't flatly rule it out, if 2a has problems.

One thing that occurs to me is that men are probably going to do more diving than women. Deep diving is high-risk, and men can be spared; and it gives access to more resources, and enables men to provide more usefully. Perhaps displays of good lung capacity, via singing, may be a useful form of sexual advertising. "Have my kids and your sons will be good providers!" I'd like to have musical ability be a common trait; it's so often attributed to merfolk and sirens and the like. A bit of sexual selection for vocalization riding on top of natural selection for breath control might fit.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Selkies
 

I don't think they have restricted mating seasons, but what they do have is males in constant propinquity with their harems: male and female gorillas gather the same food in the same places and almost the same way. Stranden can't do that because the women can't take their babies along on the activity that gives them a niche in which to survive competition with the brocmen.

Now, if stranden women had a relatively short breeding season in which they hung together in groups, then men could contest for reproductive access to those groups, in something like the way that bull seals and bulls and stallions contest for reproductive control of herds. But they would have to supervise those groups constantly, which means no going off for fishing and diving trips. They could manage by stacking on the weight during the off season and running on reserves through the mating season. But they can't keep that up for very long, hence the need for a short season.

The problem is that stranden women don't face any of the incentives that keep mares, cows, and seal-cows together, nor (at least globally) the incentives that give them a co-ordinated breeding season. And it doesn't seem to be in the the women's reproductive interest to be controlled that way. The closest I can come in men displaying like larks or birds-of-paradise, and the women choosing among them. Now, if women only bonked one man per breeding season, or the men could tell which children were theirs that might be followed up with resource provision….

It implies a great freedom of women to choose they fathers of their children, with the "sexy son" strategy producing arbitrary selective pressures on men. I think elephant cows prefer large bulls, but the result at the moment is not dimorphism by both sexes getting larger in African national parks where the counter-pressures have been relieved.

"I'll tell Daddy!"

Humans having adopted both patterns under different circumstances, the difference might be cultural rather than biological.

"Any note you can hold I can hold longer! I can hold any note longer than you!"

Size itself might be a useful indicator of diving ability. Big men are less susceptible to chill.

The problem, as with the elephants, is not to get both sexes enlarging.

Re: Selkies
 

I don't necessarily object to both sexes being comparatively large humanoids! But I can see sexual dimorphism in the males, who do more diving, having more need for high lung capacity and good thermal insulation—neither of which need lead to their being taller, of course.

At a certain point they're going to be up against the limits of feeding those large bodies, though.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Well, as I thought about the recent arrival of human beings, I figured one of the attractive possibilities was that the most powerful spirits from each habitat brought the humans, because they realized the world needed a facilitator race that didn't really fit in, anywhere.

It wouldn't necessarily have been a deliberate decision by a particular set of "gods," either. It could have come as a manifestation of the collective subconscious recognition of the need, by the specialized races.

The hybrid notion could work the same way. The subconscious recognition that, perhaps, the people had become too specialized "charges" the spirits to make healthy hybrids more frequent. The could make the Brett's stranden trading cities havens of fertility -- which has some interesting possibilities for the discussion of dwarven reproduction issues and stranden family strategy, too.

Perhaps large stranden trading cities are seen as licentious pits of social upheaval, filled with half-breeds of all sorts, who have the disturbing tendency to be really good at stuff the more traditional folk need doing?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

One of the things I've been thinking about is the ways in which the various races might "sin"—that is, go down a destructive path. I'm looking for ways in which all of them might refuse cultural, ecological, and economic exchange with the others. Like my other thoughts, these are speculative and somewhat inspired by Tolkienian symbolism. However, I don't want to have any purely "evil" races like his orcs; even Tolkien was thinking better of that later in life.

* Dwarves tend to worry about hoarding and trying to have a lot of inflow and no outflow.

* Elves develop very stable societies preoccupied with rank and formal roles. and want the rest of the world to be equally stable; ideally they'd like to have massive afforestation so that as much of the world as possible can be a pleasance.

* Ghouls fall into short-term thinking, seeking maximal returns without repeat business, through stealth, theft, fraud, and occasional mobbing.

* Halflings have the characteristic problems of market economies: If you don't have formally defined property rights in something they treat it as a free good and overuse it. They also have some rent-seeking tendencies, though not as bad as elves.

* Men's failings are the state, conquest, and war; they're attracted by power.

* Selkies embody the lawlessness of the open sea, being likely to turn to viking raids.

* Trolls seek power at an individual level: Males through superior strength, females through superior magic. Trollwives are the closest the world has to the classic "wicked witch" stereotype.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Perhaps. Or perhaps you have more of that in the halfling river towns, which do more of the continental trading.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I am revolted but not surprised. Also, I note that the process described there doesn't involve fermenting urine. The sugar is extracted and added to barley-malt mash.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Are you sure that you want men for the herdsmen and hobbits for the planters? Are you sure that the herdsmen aren't small jockey types, and the ploughmen a bit larger and stronger? We used to put small soldiers in the cavalry and large ones in the foot guards.

Ownership of land begins with agriculture (and probably also with silviculture), and annual crops lead to easy taxation. Where fortune depends on "global" events such as drought and flood, priests replace private magic. Cue the temple-granary and the sacred king. Farmers invent taxation, invasion, and the divinely-descended monarchy. (viz Parkinson, p.28–38)

Ownership of flocks, especially with the need to move around following rain and pasture, gives people a need for leadership. Unlike a priest-king, whose job is to squat in a palace in isolation and at most give judgement, a nomad leader makes decisions about where people are going to go, and these can turn out to be patently good or bad. The leader needs a track record of achievement (perhaps demonstrated by the possession of large flocks), and probably persuasive skills. He can lose his place by making bad decisions. And he has to move with his people, live in a demountable home like theirs, mingle with them daily with his human frailties apparent to all: he cannot so-easily as the palace-bound priest-king present himself as a divine being. The nomad monarch is a plutocrat and an active leader, an entrepreneur of new enterprises, who must persuade his followers to follow. Herdsmen's first experience of war is with cattle-raids, not invasions. When they get serious about it they tend to conquer agricultural people and settle as aristocrats, not so much invade and take over the cultivation. (Viz. Parkinson pp.39–44)

Grazing an area out and moving on is classic nomad behaviour. Overstocking common grazing is a failing to which pastoralists are vulnerable (though anthropologically we find that they very often have rules and customs to prevent it by limiting grazing rights—the tragedy of the commons is more of a danger recognised and forestalled than a phenomenon). Individual or transferrable ownership of land is alien to them.

A classic farmer sin is to "settle" on someone else's grazing or hunting grounds, having at most first ascertained that it is not anybody's property. Another is to clear land that really needs trees to prevent desertification.

The stranden got all the way to piracy against ships.

I think the question "Are you here to trade or raid?" goes all the way back to Homer. The answer is "We'll see how things turn out."

And trollmen to the classic "ogre in the castle"?

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I'll have to think about this; you make a plausible argument for much of it. Though I'm looking at the halflings as farming the relatively small areas of highly fertile soil, more than manufacturing larger such areas. The movement from the former to the latter is characteristic of the shift from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age and the secondary products revolution (the secondary product being traction, in this case); it amounts to the deliberate manufacture of high-fertility soil and thus the more even spread of crop growing over an entire landscape rather than its concentration in highly favorable locations (see Sherratt's work in archaeology). It's possible that the development of plowing (a) is done more by men who have learned a trick or two from halflings, (b) is inhibited to some degree by the resistance of other races who have other uses for the land that would have to be cleared, and (c) is thus one of the sources of conflict in the setting.

But that's independent of the argument about putting the small blokes in the cavalry.

On the other hand, in your model, I got the impression that the ships they were pirating were operated by other stranden, so it's not so much a hostile mode of interaction with other races.

Yes, you've made a plausible case for this. Insofar as this isn't hampered by the trollmen being less bright than most races.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

While we're in the area, elvish silviculture is vulnerable to taxation and congenial to kings' building palaces, like agriculture. However, since it does not involves constant tilling, and since the foresters engaging in hunting and are more often exposed to chance while far from help than farmers are, individual luck and personal magic remain prominent. Forests are vulnerable to fire and drought — wildfire in particular being an appalling danger to elvish communities — so there is some call for public magic a.k.a. religion, but it's not as strong as among farmers. Silviculturalists have no call for leaders in the way that nomadic pastoralists do. Elves dont' modify land by clearing, draining, tilling, and fencing/hedging to keep animals out of the crops as thoroughly as farmers, so their idea of private property in land is not as strong. Perhaps they imagine owning trees but not land. Where elves do establish plantations, or replace forest trees with more productive or palatable strains, the project is capital-intense with often a 15–70 year delay before pay-offs start. I can see community efforts there, resulting in significant communal property. Also, I can see undertakings by wealthy capitalist planters.

Elves' need for labour in gathering acorns, pecan, beechnuts and hazels, chestnuts, macadamias, and Brazils is limited and strictly seasonal. There is probably a big "pitch in an harvest-time" custom. Otherwise most elves probably spend a lot of time in towns and cities, employed in professions and crafts. This concentration of commoners in the towns and cities speaks to me of city-states and democracy. Thence, naturally, of chaos, tyranny, and Bonapartism. I am minded of the supposed political contrast between sugar colonies and coffee colonies, in which sugar colones with annual crops can recover from, and therefore afford, war and revolution better than coffee colonies dependent on plantation trees that take a decade to replace if burned.

My thoughts above are based on elves living in temperate seasonal forests and monsoon seasonal forests. Taiga and tropical rainforest would be rather different, and I haven't thought about them much yet.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I was envisioning elves as more chiefdoms than states, with gift economies like potlatch systems. Of course those will tend to get disrupted once there are trade goods coming in from halflings or dwarves, though not as badly as in the Pacific Northwest under the impact of an industrial economy. Large nut harvests might conceivably sustain a prosperous economy somewhat similarly to huge salmon catches.

Those capital-intensive projects would work better if elves had long time horizons, which might be possible in a comparatively stable ecological community such as a climax forest. This wouldn't necessarily require that elves be immortal or even longer-lived; just that their attitudes seem somewhat "timeless" to many of the other species. Though I wouldn't mind having them have prolonged lifespans; that would work well with comparatively low fertility, which I think would go with inhabiting stable forests. Perhaps elven fertility and even elven sexuality are linked to the landscape around them in some way: An elven couple might gain fertility from occupying a new grove or stand of trees, perhaps—which would give them a payoff for planting more trees! They would be doing the reverse of human-style forest clearing.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Yes, but whether they are steppe-men who domesticated horses and learned farming from halfings, or river-men who domesticated grain and learned horses from halflings need not yet be decided.

It might be worth looking at Guns, Germs, and Steel p.167, and thinking about which race domesticated which animal. Dogs might have been domesticated by trolls, or might have been domesticated several times independently (evidence seems to be that in the real world dogs were either domesticated several times or a frighteningly long time ago). Pigs, water buffalo, ducks, and perhaps donkeys were domesticated by river-dwellers. Domestic fowl (what you call "chickens" and I call "chooks") were domesticated in forests. For that matter the table on pp.126–127 is worth considering too, and the comments in that chapter about agriculture absent traction animals in the Americas.

Very much so. As an Australian I am acutely aware of it.

I ought to be clear that I used "we" in the very most general sense in making that argument. Australia's famous mounted troops were mounted infantry, not cavalry, and the Light Horse were not not chosen for aptitude of build, but because they could ride and provide their own horses. Australia has never had a foot guards unit.

That's right. I'm not inclined to think that all or necessarily the most important conflict will be between races. A bird competes with a mole for worms, but it competes with other birds of the same species and sex for everything.

Yah. I think that that is going to have to be axiomatic, perhaps like polygyny and dimorphism among the selkies.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I was not taking the latter as axiomatic, though; you had made a convincing case for its being implausible. That's why I was discussing the implications of different ways for males to invest in reproductive success.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

How arboreal do you see the elves being? Are they just the humanoids who live in the forests? Or are they adapted to a more arboreal lifestyle?

That would suggest light weight, good agility, and if they have some jumping or brachiating capability, good judgement of distance. At first glance* there seem to be three adaptational styles. One is something like squirrels with claws to dig in and hold, which I suspect does not scale up to human size. The second is a climbing or 'four-hand' style with both hands and feet (and maybe tails) being prehensile and capable of grasping and holding. And the last is brachiation like gibbons.

Both of the last two suggest that they have rather poor mobility on the ground. Light weight and good balance suggests that they would adjust easily and well to riding though.

Also you have a physiological explanation for the fabled elven archery. If 'four-handed' they can hold a bow with a foot and use two hands to draw it. If brachiators they are likely to have proportionally long and powerful arms to draw a bow with.


*I expect Brett to jump in with names for these three styles, and a few others.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I'm not sure you could get yeasts to live in pure urine. The pH probably is too extreme.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Urine goes from acid to alkaline as bacteria eat the urea and the ketones evaporate out, so it's conceivable that pH needn't be an issue. The question is how well the yeast coexist with and/or outcompete the bacteria.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

It doesn't stay at the slightly acidic pH that yeasts prefer. You could probably make a buffer solution, though.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Urine shouldn't have any bacteria in it unless you add them. Absent a UTI it is sterile. Which is why it is sometimes recommended for cleaning wounds in field care.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Yeah if you were going to harvest urine for fermentation you'd want to keep it sterile and only introduce the microbes that you choose.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

In any case, this is a fantasy campaign. I'm not thinking that alcoholic beverages made from fermented urine are a thing I want to introduce into this particular fantasy.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I gave this some thought last week, but got distracted by the stranden.

Leaf-eating monkeys are notoriously stupid, and not terribly active. Fruit-eating monkeys and parrots seem to be intelligent for roughly the same reason: they depend on scattered and episodic sources of food, and if they can remember what a crop of fruit was like and when, and estimate when it will be ripe they can save a lot of travel time. Fruit-eating monkeys have ended up bright and active and with comparatively good colour vision, think of something like a gibbon.

Orang-utans are something like what you (jmurrell) describe. They are too big to climb to the tips and tops of branches and trees, but their bigger brains allow for more efficient foraging and their size and strength allowes them to monopolise trees that are fruiting heavily. They are good climbers, fairly smart, and as you say not very mobile on the ground. The problem is that they have no co-operative behaviours and are pretty much solitary, which means little pressure to evolve the complex social behaviours and appreciation of others that constitute sapience. I don't see anything like oran-utans as promising material for a race of sapient social animals. We could soup them up by adding co-operative hunting behaviour to their repertoire, making them more like chimps ecologically, but still arboreal. But even if we do: (1) I think a lot of the audience are going to balk at bandy-legged elves that walk clumsily and drag their knuckles, and (2) I don't see anything that is that bad on the ground exploiting the bounty of fallen nuts as elves must do if they are going to come out of the tropics and into the seasonal forests.

I've looked at orang-utans, gorillas, and chimps as possible models for a human race tied to forests. Chimps seem the best of those, but really not as good as the humans who live in forests.

Some elves are really likely to turn out a lot like hunters and swiddeners in the Amazon, or like silviculturalists in the New Guinea Highlands. They tend not to be very big: they are better at wriggling quietly through tangled brush than at running on the level plains: but that might be an observation artifact of the fact that the surviving examples are tropical (animals in warm climates tend small). I've been told that they tend to be smart. Otherwise they are just these guys, you know.

The interesting thing about the elves is going to be that they learned or developed a way of supporting large population densities in deciduous forests without clearing the trees for grain-fields. They will dominate the tropical forests, perhaps to the loss of chimps and gorillas, and perhaps they will tend to replace a lot of the forest trees with food-producing macadamias and Brazil nuts. But I don't think its a foregone conclusion that that enterprise will succeed: tropical elves might end up al lot like real-world rainforest humans. The really interesting and otherworldly development is going to be when they build towns and cities in the middles of oak and beech and hickory forests, cities that have apparently no farmland.

I don't think that our arboreal hunter-gatherers, our intelligent omnivorous orang-utans, are going to be able to establish themselves outside the tropics. In deciduous forest the deer and boar are on the ground, and the squirrels you probably can't get until you can trap or shoot them. We need a terrestrial hunter-gather that comes into the deciduous forest to hunt deer and gather mushrooms and berries and whatever you guys have in your forests up there, and which experiences a breakout by learning to make acorns edible.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I recall a ritual intoxicant consisting of the urine of people (shamans? medicine-women?) who had ingested hallucinogenic toadstools. A troll thing, perhaps.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Amanita muscaria's active ingredient comes out in the urine. Some Siberian shamans would sell theirs to poor people; others would give it to their reindeer. When I first read about it I thought, "So that's why Santa's reindeer can fly!"

But it's not alcoholic. . . .

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

You are a hard taskmaster. An alcoholic drink fermented from urine might be beyond my powers.

I think I need a bacterium that metabolises urea, but that will probably produce nitrate….

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I don't actually particularly want to include urine as an intoxicant, no matter what the active ingredient is. I can't imagine my players would respond well to being served a wooden mug of troll's urine, even in imagination. I'd rather see what you come up with in other domains.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

I'd just as soon not go for primarily arboreal elves, anyway; I don't see them as being as likely to come down to the ground and engage in horticulture. On the other hand, I'd be fine with elves who are a bit better at climbing, perhaps have more dextrous big toes, and maybe a keener sense of balance, to help them take refuge in the trees when endangered.

Years ago I read a short discussion of the tribal peoples of northern California. It mentioned that they had a great abundance of food from acorns and the like, and a fair amount of leisure, but had somewhat underdeveloped social structure, which they compensated for by elaborate anxiety-displacing rituals. I have to say it sounded oddly like northern California now. It really made me think there was something to this "spirit of the land" thing.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Woo! I've found a bacterium in the sacciform forestomach of kangaroos that ferments urea with cellulose and produces amino acids. This allows the animals to excrete urea into the stomach rather than through their kidneys, and thus conserve water!

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Well, if you're willing to be sufficiently indirect, you can use the urine as part of fertilizer and grow something more suitable for creation of alcohol ;) Or if you have a bunch of excess energy, you can just convert urea to ethanol, nitrogen, and water.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Those would be the "Dodge Cities" of your world -- places where goods shifted from one mode of transporation to another. In Dodge, the commodity, "beef" shifted modes of transportation from "cattle drive" to "railroad." I figured your river cities would be like that -- goods shift from road (or trail) transportation to river transport.

The difference is, the Stranden cities with their intercontinental trade act as hubs by which transportation modes shift from "ocean vessels" to "river barges," for entire networks of smaller trade cities, in one or more river drainage basins.

It's the difference between a Dodge City, and a Boston or a New York or a London or a Venice.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Yes, but only once blue water trade is solidly established, which I figure is centuries in the future. And it's not a foregone conclusion which species will do it first.

At lower tech levels, you are looking more at the analog of the Polynesian expansion. They did amazing things with their outrigger canoes and proa sails. But they didn't become hubs of economic growth and wealth production.

Bill Stoddard

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

It's a matter of organization rather then technology(concrete technology anyway; organization is an abstract form of technology). Any tough Viking Intrepid Merchant with a few likely lads that fear nothing but capital one no hassle cards can guarantee his goods by the strength of his right arm. But only so long as those goods are within his reach. Above a certain point a commercial organization requires a network of polities* interested enough in the needs of merchants to uphold contracts by law. Without that no large amount of goods and services can be traded, and no abstract commercial organizations can be formed. Protecting the trade routes is important but in the end there will always be merchants who are hardy enough to get through provided the price is right. It is a means of protecting the integrity of the market that is critical to commerce above a certain level. A saga heroes idea of commerce can be so simple it is like another form of hunter-gathering.* It is romantic but without an infrastructure it is limited.

I remember a story of an Emir who received a complaint that the market-cadi had ordered an important noble to be flogged. His response was to uphold the cadi and send the noble to be flogged; because without a reliable law there would be no merchants, and without merchants no revenue.

*Yes, Norsemen were capable of building well-governed cities. I was referring to the archetype.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

OK then, traditionally elves are portrayed as tall and slender. Slender to wriggle through tangled brush and long-limbed to help in climbing might explain that.

It occurs to me that if this is true then the elves are ectomorphs, the ogretrolls are mesomorphs, and the strannen are endomorphs.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Good point. The coastal settlements of the strannen women have an interest in developing such states. Do you think that they have a strong enough position to make their interests stick?

Strannen commerce probably develops most easily and first either somewhere like the Mediterranean-Euxine where it can extend itself coast-wise in comparatively sheltered waters, or somewhere like the Malay Archipelago where it can extend itself island-to-island in waters that lack mid-latitude and polar storms.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

This is what I was actually thinking. I used Dodge City and New York/Boston not in the sense of the sort of trade possible in a TL5 industrializing society, but to illustrate the difference between the sort of small trading/service community one would see on a river-bank, and a port with wide mercantile interests -- even if it isn't quite trans-oceanic.

Dodge City had a reputation as a wild place to be, and the hard-working farm-folk around it considered it licentious. But compared to, say, Boston or New York or (especially) San Francisco (or even Denver), it was no big deal. Most of the problems came from semi-skilled, semi-literate agricultural workers (cowboys) letting off steam after they'd gotten paid, and Wyatt Earp never even had to shoot anybody, during his years in Dodge.

I'd think a TL1-2 era would have the same sort of dichotomies, since trade can take place given the geographical realities mentioned by Brett. I'd think that small trading towns on fords, or at the point where rivers became navigable in Europe, were considered "centers of civilization" for the farming villages for dozens of miles in every direction. And, I'd imagine their equivalents in your campaign would have a few wild nights, now and again, during the spring fertility festivals or just after harvest.

But, even in TL1, towns such as Tyre, Tartessos, Alexandria, Corinth and Troy existed, and I'd think the strannen could very easily have similarly busy ports with widespread interests, should you so choose. When I visited the museum in Seville, last year, I saw a fair amount of information about Tartessos (for instance). As of 800 BC, that city existed, and its merchants brought in silver, tin and copper from northern Europe (maybe even Britain), made it into bronze finished goods, and traded it all over the Mediterranean. That area, along the Guadalquivir River, has acted as a trading port, ever since.

Those are the kinds of places I envisioned as the true "centers of licentiousness and social upheaval," with lots of half-bloods wandering around, looking for opportunities.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Certainly. The men wouldn't object to the women arranging such things; it's their money too, and if the women want to do the work, that is reasonable enough considering that it is their jurisdiction. All that is required is enough force available to take care of constabulary and defense needs; that would need either Strannen amazons or some of the men to remain behind as warriors during a trade season. Or both.

Once these basics are taken care of, Strannen women can develop an elaborate code of admiralty law and contractural custom which will allow a mature trade network.

Re: theme for a fantasy campaign
 

Checking Eugene Odum's Fundamentals of Ecology, I find the following:

Jungle and Woodland ecosystems: Mean net primary productivity ranges from 700 to 2200 grams of carbon per square meter per year
Grasslands: 600 to 900
Tundra and alpine: 140
Desert and semidesert shrub: 90
Lake and stream: 250/Swamp and marsh: 2000/Cultivated land: 650
Estuaries: 1500/Algal beds and reefs: 2500

Of course, two other factors enter into population size: relative ease of exploitation of productivity, and body size (metabolic rate tends to be proportional to body surface area, not to body mass; in GURPS terms I suppose this would mean metabolic rate was proportional to the square of ST)

Bill Stoddard