05-14-2022, 04:05 AM | #11 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
"I was on a train, thinking of nothing very much when I realised how the genetics of Tolkein's dwarves worked. That realisation changed my gaming life."
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
05-14-2022, 04:18 AM | #12 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Pioneer Valley
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
Got it.
My players seem to love it.
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My gaming blog: Apotheosis of the Invisible City "Call me old-fashioned, but after you're dead, I don't think you should be entitled to a Dodge any more." - my wife It's not that I don't understand what you're saying. It's that I disagree with what you're saying. |
05-14-2022, 04:32 AM | #13 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
Back when I first learned about R.A. Fisher's work on the determination of sex ratios, and its application by Trivers and Hare to investigate the sex ratios slave-taking and non-slave-taking ants, I applied the theory to the sex ratio of dwarves given in Appendix A.III of The Lord of the Rings and deduced the chromosomal arrangement of Tolkien's dwarves. Which was freaky.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
05-14-2022, 05:50 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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05-14-2022, 07:48 AM | #15 |
Join Date: Apr 2022
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
Did Tolkien really world build that much anyway? (Regarding Dwarf Procreation)
I know the Simarillion is pretty much a design document, but: I just regarded his works as fairytales that stand on their own, and everything weird or outstanding is fairtytale magic. Like how witches can turn someone into an oven and the oven can still speak. Just a beautiful adventure story with a nice ending. In little need of Authors of prodigious girth needing to go: "But wot wes his tex policy?" to poopoo it. (yeah personal beef...) Last edited by Lovewyrm; 05-14-2022 at 07:54 AM. |
05-14-2022, 08:14 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
On one hand, when I wrote about Tolkien's treatment of ecological themes, and also when I wrote "Law and Institutions in the Shire," I was impressed by how much Tolkien's fiction was grounded in reality. And on the other, just recently, the publication of The Nature of Middle-Earth has given us a lot of documents where he did things like working out the growth in the elven population from generation to generation during the First Age. So he certainly seems to have been concerned with such matters.
In one of his letters, he talks about his use of older idioms, and cites Theoden's speech to Gandalf where he tells Gandalf that he's going to ride out to meet the foe. And he says that of course, he could paraphrase most of the speech in twentieth-century English, and, I believe, illustrates the word choice. But then he concludes that Theoden's final statement that if he dies in battle he will sleep better is simply not something that a modern man could say or think, and that he has to use older idioms. So I think the worldbuilding was implicitly present in his linguistic and stylistic choices.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
05-14-2022, 09:58 AM | #17 | |
Join Date: Apr 2022
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
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05-14-2022, 04:22 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
Haven't read it yet but bought the other week because it showed up on sale on a ebook list. Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (Culture of the Land)
Matthew Dickerson, Jonathan Evans |
05-14-2022, 09:31 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Dreamland
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
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05-16-2022, 06:08 AM | #20 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: New Disadvantage: Compulsive Worldbuilding
I'm afraid that I have forgotten. It was over forty years ago, and my memory just isn't that good. I vaguely recollect there being two types of gametes with genetic content in the ratio of seven to four, but I don't remember what was going on with the ploidy.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 05-16-2022 at 06:17 AM. |
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compulsive behavior, disadvantages, worldbuilding |
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