theme for a fantasy campaign

[whswhs]

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

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

* 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.

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.

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

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."

* 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.

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

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

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.

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.

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, along with the answer "We'll see how things turn out."

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.

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

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

[Agemegos]

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.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

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.

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

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

It's possible that the development of plowing (a) is done more by men who have learned a trick or two from halflings,

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.

(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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

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

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