theme for a fantasy campaign

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

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.

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