| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| evildmguy |
Posted - 14 Dec 2005 : 18:17:55
Greetings!
I have a clarification question from a cultural anthropological standpoint.
How can the ages of the precursor races, as well as their successors, be so long? Further, how can the races that "fell into barbarism" still be barbarians tens of thousands of years later?
btw, I am not attacking any writings of here or canon material. I accept it. I just read the good articles in the CC3 and CC4 about the precursors and some of the ages. That's what got me thinking about this. Perhaps I can't grasp the basics of the fantasy races and that's what is causing the problem.
In any case, to make the question more specific, how is it that dragons rule from ~-28,000 DR (or whenever, don't have the timeline in front of me) until ~-24,000 DR and don't have anything else up until this day? Why isn't there a realm ruled (openly) by dragons, metallic, gem or chromatic? How is it that the Kenku can became barbaric and stay that way for over 20,000 years? In some ways, the question is also, how can the progenitor races still be around after so long?
To somewhat answer my own questions, I will put my ideas here. However, I would love any agreement or disagreement that people have.
1) longevity of race in question. It seems a lot of the early races, although perhaps not giants but I could be wrong, have a longer life span than humans. If a typical generation is 100 years, instead of 20 for humans, then it makes sense that things might take 1000 years for something major to happen.
This is the history major in me. I understand that until humans could share knowledge among groups, through writing or language, that each culture had to discover things on their own. Further, I also better understand now why the period from about 450 CE(AD, whatever) until 1500 CE(AD) was called the Dark Ages and I agree. Even then, though, we still had some advances. We still had growth, even if it was slower and for as much as we lost, we still had some things. There is evidence of that everywhere. Yet, that doesn't seem to be the case.
(btw, I am more than willing to accept that some of this information is only now being revealed, which is why previous editions/printings don't have ruins of the dragon cities, etc. My question then becomes, where are they now? Or is that something for the DM to do as fits their story?)
2) Out of favor with the gods. Perhaps something happened with the group in question and their god. Once they lost favor with their gods, they lost "civilization" or intelligence to create a civilization and aren't able to recover it?
I don't like this as an explanation mainly because why would a god weaken themselves by losing followers by making them primitive? Why not start over or try again? Why get rid of them?
3) Magic. Of course, there can always be a magic explanation, either by helping or hindering. That just seems less . . . acceptable to me. I might be picky. It just feels like too much "hand waving" to explain something and I would prefer a bit more scientific answer to it.
Along the same lines as this, how can a (semi) mortal creature exist for thousands of years? Whether undead (okay, this makes them immortal, but are they able to handle it) or not, how can a mind exist for that long? For example, how the heck can there be Sarrukh liches that have been around for over 10,000 years? How does something that old relate to anything? How are they not all doddering idiots? Or problems with their memory? I mean, are the Chosen immune from not only aging but from the ravages of time? How do they stay sane?
Perhaps it is my own limited intellect but I can't fathom these things. Does anyone have some ideas they would be willing to share?
Thanks!
Have a good one! Take care!
edg |
| 30 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| The Sage |
Posted - 06 Mar 2012 : 00:49:44
quote:
Originally posted by TBeholder
quote:
Originally posted by The Sage
It's been proven in the Realmslore that even some Chosen don't know the full extent of Khelben's plans-within-plans. Why should non-Chosen know differently?
Because while "we don't know everyting" is a normal situation, "nevermind, it should be something we don't know" is just a meaningless cop-out: explains everything, and thus predicts nothing. Whether applied specifically to this issue or not.
You're assuming, though, that these plans-within-plans have all been fully outlined. And we know that isn't the case, because Steven Schend has made that clear on several occasions.
It would really only be a "meaningless cop out" if designers deliberately chose to leave them as not detailed. But my reading of what Sage Schend has told us, in the past, is that it's simply about providing opportunities for future designers to tinker and tweak with their own lore in order to further generate new material based on these vague references. It's not about "something we don't know," but, rather, just something we don't know... yet. |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 05 Mar 2012 : 22:01:24
I'm willing to admit that anyone can make mistakes, including Khelben. I just don't think we have enough data to say he was acting without reason in the specified examples. |
| Icelander |
Posted - 05 Mar 2012 : 20:05:11
It's theoretically possible that every seeming mistake that Khelben ever made was the result of a convuleted scheme on his behalf, the ingenious results of which would not become apparent until a millenia after his death.
It's also an unfalsifiable belief and thus not really a fruitful avenue of discussion. Any time someone points out that a seemingly rash or ill-considered action on Khelben's part actually made things worse, the proponent of 'Khelben is never wrong, just mysterious' can always add another layer of complexity to Khelben's secret scheme. That this requires omniscience on his part that is never demonstrated by any other Chosen is pretty much irrelevant, as those arguing this presumbably already believe this of him.
Nevertheless, I'll point out that the fact that Khelben may in fact believe that he's acting as part of a long-term plan does not mean that he'd fall under many definitions of 'sane'. In a legal sense, I believe that Khelben is sane, i.e. that he's responsible for his actions. From a psychological health perspective, he's so traumatised by centuries of loss and disillusionment that only an array of coping mechanisms keeps him functioning at all. That's not 'sane', that's 'barely functioning'.
If he didn't have the comfort of the recent relationship with Laeral, a fellow immortal, I believe that Khelben would have so little human perspective that his plans had a high probability of being fundamentally flawed. That his methods had become unsound. That he managed to soldier on before ending his life in a way noble enough so that it couldn't have been called a selfish act I attribute entirely to the beneficial effects of sharing immortality with someone.
I point out that Elminster has at least once maintained that certain acts that the Blackstaff believes were part of a long-term plan were actually motivated by emotional imbalance on the part of Khelben. See the Sea of Fallen Stars, on spelljammers and Khelben's obsessive crusade in ridding the Sea of Swords of remains of them. |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 05 Mar 2012 : 18:19:13
quote:
Originally posted by TBeholder
quote:
Originally posted by The Sage
It's been proven in the Realmslore that even some Chosen don't know the full extent of Khelben's plans-within-plans. Why should non-Chosen know differently?
Because while "we don't know everyting" is a normal situation, "nevermind, it should be something we don't know" is just a meaningless cop-out: explains everything, and thus predicts nothing. Whether applied specifically to this issue or not.
Moreover, two of the three Blackstaff's acts i mentioned were heat-of-the-moment decisions. And did not proceed "just as planned" unless he wanted Liriel to become Zedriniset (maybe he had a secret crush on her and wanted her to become his equal?) and the steel dragon to wreck that banquet (-maybe he didn't like the cake? -he's too sneaky, you can never tell!) or something. 
Where does it say those acts were heat of the moment decisions? |
| TBeholder |
Posted - 05 Mar 2012 : 08:40:19
quote:
Originally posted by The Sage
It's been proven in the Realmslore that even some Chosen don't know the full extent of Khelben's plans-within-plans. Why should non-Chosen know differently?
Because while "we don't know everyting" is a normal situation, "nevermind, it should be something we don't know" is just a meaningless cop-out: explains everything, and thus predicts nothing. Whether applied specifically to this issue or not.
Moreover, two of the three Blackstaff's acts i mentioned were heat-of-the-moment decisions. And did not proceed "just as planned" unless he wanted Liriel to become Zedriniset (maybe he had a secret crush on her and wanted her to become his equal?) and the steel dragon to wreck that banquet (-maybe he didn't like the cake? -he's too sneaky, you can never tell!) or something. |
| The Sage |
Posted - 05 Mar 2012 : 06:02:55
quote:
Originally posted by TBeholder
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
Khelben is a plans-within-plans kinda guy, someone who tends to stay a few steps ahead of everyone else. Just because you don't see why he did something, it does not prove he did it entirely without reason.
Do you? If anything goes, it's not a meaningful theory. That's just an universal cop-out.
Eh. It's been proven in the Realmslore that even some Chosen don't know the full extent of Khelben's plans-within-plans. Why should non-Chosen know differently? |
| TBeholder |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 21:41:39
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
Khelben is a plans-within-plans kinda guy, someone who tends to stay a few steps ahead of everyone else. Just because you don't see why he did something, it does not prove he did it entirely without reason.
Do you? If anything goes, it's not a meaningful theory. That's just an universal cop-out.
But on the other eyestalk... this reminds me of something from Van Richten's Guide to Vampires. So, proceeding on the subject of slipping sanity... quote:
Sometimes the transition from sanity to insanity is hard to spot. As a result of the creatures' immortality, they will often engage in plans that might take centuries to reach fruition. The creatures' day-to-day actions, when viewed without the long view of immortality, might make little or no sense. The transition to insanity is insidious, subtly more complicated as the vampire engages in more and more intricate plans - "wheels within wheels within wheels", to quote one vampire - and more labyrinthine plotting. Eventually the creature's day-to-day actions make no sense to the creature itself, but it follows through with them anyway.
- Dr. Rudolph Van Richten
BTW, wasn't there one kind of nice but mad surviving Aearee in one of novels? |
| Lord Karsus |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 19:08:02
quote:
Originally posted by Icelander
*It's a low-resolution model for our convenience, not how things really work there.
-This concept is key. The sourcebooks that we have are, for the most part, designed to be Dungeons & Dragons game supplements. The novels that we have are, for the most part, contemporarily-relevant stories that WotC wants to have told, that they contract authors to write. There are plenty minor details that are generally assumed, that are skipped over because they're seen as minor and inconsequential, or not relevant to the Forgotten Realms when viewed through the lens of a D&D game. Things like ancient lore and artifacts are casualties of this kind of worldview. It's not that ancient lore and artifacts get completely ignored and aren't in any way relevant to D&D games- for plenty of people, it's the opposite. But, in terms of how this info is told- Ancient Dragons did X, Y, and Z, as opposed to, in a story or sourcebooks, someone finds ruins of Ancient Dragons who did X, Y, and Z- the archeological aspect of things is kind of minimized, or not given any thought whatsoever. |
| Markustay |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 17:10:37
There are ruins EVERYWHERE.
I once made a comment on Ed's thread that "It feels like you can't walk ten feet in the Realms without stumbling over the ruins of some long forgotten kingdom", and THO responded "Thats the precisely the feel Ed was going for."
The ruins we know about are just the ones that have been found - there are many, many more. The Citadel of the Raven is unbelievably old - it may date to the Creators, and the Temple of Saigai (to the east) is over 8000 years old, and appears to been built by some sort of 'beast men'. And then there is Calimshan - a 'living fossil'.
Dwarves (as we have been told by Ed) are infuriatingly secretive when it comes to geographic information - they purposely obscure information and rarely create maps (and when they do, the maps are well hidden and done in such a way as to be near-indecipherable by others).
Elves, on the other hand, believe certain knowledge should not be "in the hands of lesser beings" (in other words, non-Elves), so they lock-away all sorts of history and science (including the 'magical sciences') in their most secret libraries hidden from prying eyes.
Halflings don't bother with written history - they are more of a verbal folklore type of culture, and probably tell very little about other races. Who knows what Gnomes think - they're nuts.
As for the other races, except for a few highly evolved species (illithids, maybe aboleth, etc), most of them don't bother with history, beyond some rather sparse and imprecise religious teachings.
So there we have it - fallen civilizations are everywhere on Toril, and humans usually don't even know where to look, or what they found. For instance, anything found in Anauroch will be blamed on the Netherease, when it could have come from Thaeraval, the Cloud Kingdom, any of the three survivor states (Asram, Anauria, and Hlondeth), Delzoun, at least two Elven nations, the beholders, the Sarrukh, the Asabi, etc, etc... Faerunians do not have the same knowldge we do - they would not realize just how many civilizations over lapped in the same regions. This makes it much harder for them to figure-out what came from where (no carbon-14 dating), and how many civilizations there really were.
We FR fans probably don't even know about 10% of what once existed in the Realms, and we know far more then the folks that live there.
And then there is the absolute, complete destruction of historical records. Considering the magnitude and severity of past disasters - The Sundering, tearfalls, Miyertar/High Moor, Fall of Netheril, Great Conflagration, Imaskari/Mulan Godwar, Orcgate Wars, etc, etc - it is a small wonder we have any records of ancient cultures in the Realms. In our RW, there is evidence of ancient civilizations well over 7000 years old in India, and yet we have almost no record of them - the British rail companies leveled all the ruins to use the stone to line their rail-beds back in the 1800's. What little evidence we have is from a couple of early explorers who took notes on the sites (when the British Gov't sent out official teams years later, the ruins were gone).
Thats what happens - progress. In ancient Egypt (and elsewhere), people have been leveling and building on top of important relics for thousands of years - every time there is an earthquake or flood stuff is being found beneath people's homes! Thats just the way of things - we are fortunate to have had things like the Chinese and Roman empires, that took such excellent civic notes about everything. Can you imagine what our Egyptian knowledge would be without the accidental discovery of the Rosetta Stone?
And here on our RW we are finding evidence of other cultures we didn't know abut all the time - beneath the sea, and elsewhere. There is even evidence of offshoots of humanity that became extinct - huge men (Gigantopithecus) and tiny ones (Homo floresiensis). We also have entire species wiped-out in recent years, just because of over-hunting - the dodo and Thylacine. The Thylacine (Tasmanian wolf/tiger) was purposely hunted to extinction because it 'bothered people'.
On a planet full of other races, you don't think some civilizations may have been purposely wiped off the planet because they 'bothered people'? It happens all the time. It even continues to happen today. History is written by the winners... the losers (and their realms) get forgotten.
So its not that their is huge gaps of history that should be there - its that we don't have complete knowledge of every little thing that has ever happened on Toril.
As it should be. |
| Icelander |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 16:51:01
quote:
Originally posted by evildmguy
And, 35k years is not a lot of geological time, if we are using real world basics here, such that it would be buried that much deeper. Yes, we can default back to magic, and if that's the conclusion, that's fine. Just looking for reasons.
Maybe the sarrukh were different enough that there have been ruins but humans didn't recognize them for what they were? Just not sure on why we don't have more giant-ish stuff about. Some in the stonelands but not much elsewhere.
Also, don't forget that to find evidence of ruins, identity them and for this knowledge to become known by more people, you need a lot of people deliberately looking.
The number and age of old ruins known to us on Earth in the 18th century was by far less than those we knew about in the 19th, which was dwarved again by what we found in the 20th century and it is only now that we are beginning to establish fairly accurate dates and plausible explanations for a lot of what we found.
There are people on Toril that look for ruins, but the vast majority of them do it to loot them for valuables, not record them for posterity. Anything remotely accessible to people will mostly have been picked over by tomb robbers and desperados known as adventurers, with any true archeological evidence destroyed. Bones trampled, art defaced in tearing out gems and valuable metals, etc.
Even if we were to propose that the wealth and population density of Toril is closer to our 19th century than our Middle Ages, this still leaves the intense specialisation necessary for good archeologists out of the hands of any but a few royals and nobles, archmages or adventurer lords. And most of these, again, are actually specialised in their trade, not a 'useless' hobby like ancient archelogy.
You can expect that the ratio of archelogists per square mile of potential discoveries on Toril is several orders of magnitude less than on Earth. And we've seen on our Earth just how much difference this makes, when we compare what is known about European pre-history with what is known about New Guinean pre-history.
Both societies appear to have started acriculture at about the same period, but compare New Guinea with an equivalent square mile area of Western Europe and see how many artifacts and ruins from 5,000 BCE there exist in the archeological community.
Fewer digs means that fewer ruins are found, no matter whether many or few ruins exist. |
| evildmguy |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 16:38:22
quote:
Originally posted by Lord Karsus
quote:
Originally posted by evildmguy
My other question has not but it was murky, so let me try it again.
How can we have had 35k years of history and no evidence of over half of it? Where are the remains/ruins/writings of the sarrukh? Dragons? Giants?
-Well, getting the obvious out of the way, the planet has kind of been blow up, smashed around, devastated, and various other maladies over the +/-35,000 years of recorded, 'civilized' history that we have. Having your ancient society blown off the map would kind of make it hard to find ruins and remnants of it and such.
Hmm. I do grant that there has been one RSE during that time. (I'm the type to ignore 4E but even that wasn't huge in terms of the land, and if anything, should have revealed more.) But I don't think there has been enough to destroy all evidence of them.
And, 35k years is not a lot of geological time, if we are using real world basics here, such that it would be buried that much deeper. Yes, we can default back to magic, and if that's the conclusion, that's fine. Just looking for reasons.
Maybe the sarrukh were different enough that there have been ruins but humans didn't recognize them for what they were? Just not sure on why we don't have more giant-ish stuff about. Some in the stonelands but not much elsewhere.
Thanks again for the replies!
edg |
| Icelander |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 16:36:44
quote:
Originally posted by evildmguy
Okay, one of my questions has been answered, in terms of how can this group be at this level of technology and that group be at that level of technology at the same time. Thanks!
More than welcome. I found the exercise of applying principles of archeosociology and history of technology to the Realms profoundly interesting.
quote:
Originally posted by evildmguy
How can we have had 35k years of history and no evidence of over half of it? Where are the remains/ruins/writings of the sarrukh? Dragons? Giants?
Let us begin with some ruins and remains.
In Serpent Kingdoms we discover the crypts of Oreme in Aunaroch, dating back to the fallen sarrukh realm of Isstosseffifil (-33,800 DR), various mysterious ruins and relics in the Western Heartlands dating back 30,000 years and more, Sar'Rukoth, the Vault of Records and other ruins of lost Okoth (-34,100 DR) in the southern deserts of Mulhorand and Unther and innumerable ancient ruins in the jungles of Chult from the continous presence there of serpentine races dating back to the sarrukh of thirty five millenia ago. Nor are these the only ruins from the sarrukh. Many, many more exist, though identifying them may prove difficult, as time and less-than-careful looters will have destroyed most visible signs.
The Hall of Mists in the High Forest dates back to a secret society of three Creator Races, the sarrukh, batrachi and aearee, which bore the name of Ba'aetith. They also left behind what became the Nether Scrolls, so not only did they leave both ruins and writings, but they profoundly influenced the rise of human civilisations.
Direct evidence that other remnants of Creator Races may have led to some of the most powerful magical civilisations of humanity is sparse, but hints of it do exist. In addition, ruins which predate all written history in a region are not unlikely to be Creator Race relics. This applies to structures such as the Bloodforges and the Mountain of Iron in the Utter East, Ironfang Keep in the Moonsea North and perhaps the Citadel of the Raven as well (both likely to be giant-built) and so on.
Most of the more impressive giant ruins are covered by miles of glaciers, of course, with the swallowing up of their heartlands by the inexorable advance of the Great Glacier. Yet even so, it is possible to find magnificent examples if adventurers were to look. In addition, I have no doubt that many underground caverns of great beauty once held stone giant halls, but have now been taken over by other underground races. Check Giantcraft for further examples of giant societies.
As for dragons, their physiology makes it much less likely that they would built houses or leave tools. After all, what need have they of knives to cut their meat, spears to hunt it or a roof to shelter them? They have claws, teeth and scales. Even when a dragon rules a realm of primitive humans, it is most likely to demand tribute in the form of portable treasure rather than any form of rooted building. And the portable treasure assuredly still exists, but it would take a pretty awesome scholar to recognise when a given gem is carved by a human living in a society ruled by a human king and when it is carved by one ruled by a dragon.
Even so, dragonic realms did build things, I expect. But the problem with these buildings is that they were built by humans in the service of dragons, but later attacked by rival dragons, giants and elves wielding titannic magics. Thus, the forces that were applied to their destruction were considerably more powerful than those which contributed to their construction. By comparison, imagine how much would remain in the way of identifiable ruins thousands of years later if a village of mud huts were attacked with modern bulldozers, napalm and bunker-busters.
Those ruins which were not completely destroyed at the time have no doubt been occupied by a succession of multiple cultures of various races in the meantime. Some of the elven realms were no doubt founded on the sites of dragonic capitals, changing the style and decoration of older buildings with magic and artistry to suit their own tastes. How would a scholar of modern Faerun know that he was looking at a fusion of two or more cultures when exploring the ruins of these early elven realms?
But aside from these considerations, let's not forget how much entropy changes things in just ten thousand years, let alone thirty thousand. Stonehenge is less than five thousand years old, but we know next to nothing about its builders. Without powerful magic, how would anyone in Faerun know the difference between the ruins of a human, elven, dwarven, sarruk, batrachi, aearee, fey, giant or dragon ruin? In most cases, they'd be buried, overgrown and mostly invisible to the naked eye. All that would be found is a couple of stones standing up from the ground that looked deliberately shaped.
The search for the oldest man-made structures has involved serious scientists using modern technology estimating the same 'megalithic structure' as being between 20,000-30,000 years old, being more than 75,000 years old or being just a collection of random stones. And that's the best we can do with ruins that are any older than 10,000 years.
Cave paintings exist that are older than this, of course, but that's because caves are naturally almost a sterile environment for conserving stuff, not because early people concentrated their art there. Do dragon paintings exist in caves in Faerun? Assuredly! But what they can tell us about the real centers of civilisations at the time might not be representative.
While I don't consider game mechanics to be an accurate representation of the reality in the setting*, I think it's reasonable to say that temporal limitations on divination and necromantic spells aren't purely a game-tech phenomenon. That is, the further back in the mists of time that a given spell must reach, the more powerful the spellcaster needs to be. In order to contact spirits or read the psychometry of artifacts dating back centuries, a user of magic or psionics needs to be exceptional. To reach millenia back, he needs to be immensely powerful. Tens of millenia is likely to be so far back that impressions are unreliable in the extreme and so cryptic that the scholar cannot be sure of anything.
So when attempting to use Legend Lore or similar spells on something that looks like a ruin of truly ancient times, without knowing anything more, it is quite possible that even dating accurate enough to know which race it belonged to is something which requires an epic level caster. In fact, given that some spells use limits like a century per level of the caster, I'd venture to say that past ca -2000 DR, most of the information known to even the best sages in Faerun is essentially based on written records of civilisations that were active then and limited by their own knowledge or lack thereof.
Anything known about a specific dragon realm of -27,000 DR might be the result of ten seperate transmissions of second-hand rumours from one ancient civilisation to the next, with some rumours being fanciful translations from primitive archeology. In this sort of 'Chinese whipers'/'telephone game', any detail at all is suspect.
*It's a low-resolution model for our convenience, not how things really work there. |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 15:58:44
quote:
Originally posted by TBeholder
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
I don't see Khelben's actions as being a reflection of mental instability... He's working to prevent a greater evil.
But of course, he is. Blackstaff is a great hero standing high on the front when Doomy Dooms of Doom are out to get everyone and knock at the door - no question here. But when there aren't any, he will find some or other target to do much the same anyway. In other words: tend to react inadequately. The smokepowder crusade? Sending a warship after Liriel (BTW, this couldn't reassure Ruathym - for example - that what Waterdeep plays is "live and let live", even with extra "or else"), really? Attacking an unknown shapeshifted dragon, in the middle of a party, for no good reason whatsoever? All perfectly sensible actions? 
Khelben is a plans-within-plans kinda guy, someone who tends to stay a few steps ahead of everyone else. Just because you don't see why he did something, it does not prove he did it entirely without reason. |
| TBeholder |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 13:34:58
quote:
Originally posted by evildmguy
Along the same lines as this, how can a (semi) mortal creature exist for thousands of years? Whether undead (okay, this makes them immortal, but are they able to handle it) or not, how can a mind exist for that long?
But liches are out of it - and eventually very, very far out of it. That was repeatedly given as the reason why liches who don't "kick puppies for giggles" for no reason are still extremely dangerous. They may be brilliant and as such make an interesting shop-talk for a few very advanced mages, but tend to fall out of touch with the living - and this goes on for centuries. Sooner or later "might makes right" or some little obsession pops up on surface and hilarity ensues.
quote:
Originally posted by George Krashos
As to how 'great' civilizations can lapse into barbarism (a very imprecise term I grant you) just look at most of the great, ancient powers and how they have ended up in the modern world. They are modern cultures but are they at the forefront and zenith of science, living standards, wealth, and other such social/cultural/political indicators? Sadly, the answer would appear to be no. So in the Realms, as an example, the fact that kenku were an early, developed race doesn't necessarily mean that they should stay or be so in today's Realms.
Moreover, we get to see the elves (as "The People") going through something resembling the ethnologically predictable sunset. Elminster in Myth Drannor depicts the place of self-absorbed decadence which a few bright folk tries to pull by the hair out of this swamp. As other novels and sourcebook show, the majority wasn't changed much, mostly just went along with the new dominant trend. After that, elves got to face the phase when the people can't even resist, let alone achieve something. Around ToT, there was enough of little incidents to say the elves tend to be peaceful and conformist not because they found a cute utopia with songs and flowers and happy with it, but because they rarely can squeeze out a good effort, except in borderline insanity. Most of the elvenkind remained living in the past or falling into obscurity some other way.
Conversely, Zakharan elves, as well as the elven split cultures like Drow or even Avariel, managed to escape this fate, since they have changed and are more viable than that.
quote:
Originally posted by khorne
I haven`t pictured Khelben as insane.
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
I don't see Khelben's actions as being a reflection of mental instability... He's working to prevent a greater evil.
But of course, he is. Blackstaff is a great hero standing high on the front when Doomy Dooms of Doom are out to get everyone and knock at the door - no question here. But when there aren't any, he will find some or other target to do much the same anyway. In other words: tend to react inadequately. The smokepowder crusade? Sending a warship after Liriel (BTW, this couldn't reassure Ruathym - for example - that what Waterdeep plays is "live and let live", even with extra "or else"), really? Attacking an unknown shapeshifted dragon, in the middle of a party, for no good reason whatsoever? All perfectly sensible actions?
quote:
Originally posted by sleyvas
Secondarily, you were asking about how did most of these races not reclaim their "thrones". Dragons ruled, but elves bred them out.
Elves didn't just "bred them out". They drove the dragons nuts with High Magic. |
| Lord Karsus |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 04:12:57
quote:
Originally posted by evildmguy
My other question has not but it was murky, so let me try it again.
How can we have had 35k years of history and no evidence of over half of it? Where are the remains/ruins/writings of the sarrukh? Dragons? Giants?
-Well, getting the obvious out of the way, the planet has kind of been blow up, smashed around, devastated, and various other maladies over the +/-35,000 years of recorded, 'civilized' history that we have. Having your ancient society blown off the map would kind of make it hard to find ruins and remnants of it and such. |
| evildmguy |
Posted - 04 Mar 2012 : 03:22:15
OP here:
Okay, one of my questions has been answered, in terms of how can this group be at this level of technology and that group be at that level of technology at the same time. Thanks!
My other question has not but it was murky, so let me try it again.
How can we have had 35k years of history and no evidence of over half of it? Where are the remains/ruins/writings of the sarrukh? Dragons? Giants?
Some of that is answered, of course, in that the giants have runes and at least Darkhold is supposed to have been theirs. But, that's it? And what about the rest of it?
Or, is it just that the designers said some things that were cool but nothing has been put into play about most of it? That's fine! I'm just wondering what the intention was. If that's the case, I think I would ignore all the history except from elven forward but that's me.
Thanks again for the replies!
edg |
| Jakk |
Posted - 02 Mar 2012 : 21:13:00
quote:
Originally posted by Markustay
I have my own theories about all of this (I blame everything on the Elves). Most of our tech directly stems from our mastery of Iron, which is anathema to fey (from whence the Elves derived).
<snip>
When man evolves, man destroys. It is therefor in the best interest of non-humans to keep mankind from becoming 'overly civilized'. Our adaptive prowess is built right into the D&D rules - we discover something, and immediately wish to control it. Mystra got burnt by Karsus - we cannot help but wish to take possession of all we survey.
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the most forgotten and locked-away Elven library-vaults lies the secrets of Atomic reaction... secrets stolen from the first humans (Creators), and kept from them ever since. Humans had highly advanced societies once - Elves, Dwarves, and many others do not wish to see that happen again. On worlds where it does occur, non-humans soon cease to exist (except in folklore and myth).
Just my take is all. On a world with hundreds of sentient species, RW logic doesn't even apply anymore. 
Your take is very similar to mine. I think that, to some extent, humankind possesses (and is possessed by) a "nihilism gene"; on Earth, we (and our ancestors) are responsible for more extinctions than any other species in the available fossil record. The elves, having seen this behaviour from humans on other worlds (and, for all we know, Earth) demonstrated their superior intelligence by staying the hell away from us... and when they found a world to their liking with non-technological humans, they stayed around to protect us (and the rest of the biosphere) from ourselves. Admittedly, the concept is not my own; I was inspired by 'Calvin and Hobbes' by Bill Watterson, in one comic of which Calvin says to Hobbes, "I sometimes think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." This is my view as well, as misanthropic as it might be... but misanthropy is a lot like pessimism... it protects you from disappointment. I much prefer pleasant surprises to unpleasant ones.
quote:
Originally posted by Markustay
Also, more OT - while looking for sources for Icelander in his Solon thread, I came-across references to 'the Red Earth', which appears to be a reference to that first proto-world that existed prior to the Godswar. Not an 'Era of Toril', but still apparently a canon D&D era.
I guess I'll have to look at the 4e cosmology a bit closer soon. 
Edit: Oops. Forgot to respond to this part. I'm thinking the same thing, Mark (re: 4e cosmology). But it does sound like we may be returning to the Great Wheel in 5e, which may (hopefully) retcon the end of the Blood War out of existence. I miss the Blood War (or, more properly, I miss having new canon lore about the Blood War once in a while, because it never ended in my D&D multiverse). I'm working on a new (old) cosmology that keeps the Great Wheel and the multiplicity of Inner Planes (para- and quasi-elemental planes in particular), and restores the "single Material Plane" cosmology of 2e and Spelljammer, including the "crystal sphere" concept, while maintaining the things I liked about the Great Tree in 3e. I don't know 4e cosmology well enough to say what I like and don't like about it without looking at the notes I made when originally reading the 4e material.  |
| Markustay |
Posted - 02 Mar 2012 : 19:17:15
I have my own theories about all of this (I blame everything on the Elves). Most of our tech directly stems from our mastery of Iron, which is anathema to fey (from whence the Elves derived).
On a magical world, phenomena like Lightening would be physical manifestations of primal elements and energies coming into contention, and Elves (being fey off-shoots) are directly linked to these primal energies, and do not wish to 'be grounded' (by iron, and other highly conductive metals). These patterns of energy exist in all things (they are the basic building-blocks of The Weave), and Elves would not want humans to master electricity - they do not want man to have that power.
"We used to control the Lightening!"
{thanks to the brilliant Larry Niven}
When man evolves, man destroys. It is therefor in the best interest of non-humans to keep mankind from becoming 'overly civilized'. Our adaptive prowess is built right into the D&D rules - we discover something, and immediately wish to control it. Mystra got burnt by Karsus - we cannot help but wish to take possession of all we survey.
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the most forgotten and locked-away Elven library-vaults lies the secrets of Atomic reaction... secrets stolen from the first humans (Creators), and kept from them ever since. Humans had highly advanced societies once - Elves, Dwarves, and many others do not wish to see that happen again. On worlds where it does occur, non-humans soon cease to exist (except in folklore and myth).
Just my take is all. On a world with hundreds of sentient species, RW logic doesn't even apply anymore.
Also, more OT - while looking for sources for Icelander in his Solon thread, I came-across references to 'the Red Earth', which appears to be a reference to that first proto-world that existed prior to the Godswar. Not an 'Era of Toril', but still apparently a canon D&D era.
I guess I'll have to look at the 4e cosmology a bit closer soon. |
| Eladrinstar |
Posted - 01 Mar 2012 : 21:10:22
Okay. I am going to read that colossal post later, but let me tell you Icelander, I admire your passion for "figuring out" the Realms. |
| Icelander |
Posted - 01 Mar 2012 : 13:55:36
I know this is truly an ancient scroll, but then, it is about making sense of ancient history.
A Disgression About the Author's Youthful Follies
The question posed by this scroll is profoundly interesting to me, because as a child, I too found it hard to comprehend how a world could go through what amounted to at least four times and maybe ten times the period of actual human history and still manage to have a significant proportion of illiterate barbarians, not to mention inventing primitive sailing vessels only as late as 600 DR!
Older and hopefully wiser by now, I understand that I was trapped by 19th century views of the evolution of culture*, i.e. in a gently ascending line toward Our Glorious Selves. Initially, minor improvements to tools just sort of happened over time, obviously rather slowly, but then, I and those Victorian proto-anthropologists who must somehow have poisoned my childhood education reasoned, these were primitive times.
Later, contemporary** with glorious and flowering civilisations to which we were obviously heirs, heroic inventors came up with miraculous advances, each of them transforming society. Oh, there were also continuing tiresome minor improvements and adaptations, but these clearly mattered far less.
Scientific and technological innovations were discovered in particular years and after that time, the world was now a world with New Invention X in it. There was a Time Before the Horse Collar and a Time After the Horse Collar. In the Time After the Horse Collar, everyone who mattered*** had the horse collar and they continued to use it until a better thing came along.
A Very Long and Very Nebbish Discussion of the History of Technology
As noted earlier, I would eventually learn a somewhat different interpretation of the historical and archeological record, not to mention the linguistic and anthropological sciences along with the vast horde of contributing fields of study and interdisciplinary research areas that inform our quest into the mists of history, better served to explain the guiding paradigms.
Item, of the ca 3-7 million years humans have existed as a seperate genus from the apes, we and our best candidates for direct line of ancestors**** have spent more than half with only marginal improvements in technology and culture over great apes and something between 97-99% of that time using technology that would deeply shame a Stone Age 'caveman'.
Item, while anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 200,000 years, there is a dearth of evidence suggesting that anything resembling human society***** has existed for more than ca 50,000 years.
For the purposes of this observation, interpret 'society' in a very wide sense, with no demands for a complex societal structure to qualify. I simply mean that we don't have convincing evidence to suggest that before this date, anatomically modern humans had anything in their society to suggest that their technology might ever advance in any way and their current level of tool-making was not dramatically better than even the ancient homo erectus, whose brain capacity is significantly less.
Item, even after some fundamental change which occured around 50,000 years ago and spurred our ancestors to previously unheard of feats of innovation and change, it took almost 40,000 years until humans 'advanced' from bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers****** to literally any other form of social organisation.
Item, these 'advances' occured in some places and not others and are spread over a time-frame of more than 13,000 years. Apparently, for one society to have risen to the level of sending manned space missions to the moon and start developing personal digital information technology, which will become at least the third paradigm-altering change in the lifetime of a long-lived member of the civilisation, while another society has no knowledge of how to harness fire or make bone fish-hooks is not only realistic, it is a real example from our world.
Item, genetic and cultural hypotheses advanced for the differing rates of technological development in different areas of the world have consistently failed to address the evidence sufficiently to even rate as real science. Subject to individual variation, humans all over the world have the same innate capability to reason, to innovate, to create, to learn and to adapt.
While cultural barriers to technological advancement are a very real thing, anthropological research demonstrates that variations in cultural receptivity for innovation is never a constant in a temporal or geographical sense. In other words, assuming that you're talking about more than one culture over more than one generation, the odds of this variation converging around a more-or-less norm for humanity increase. Unless a region is somehow a monolithic cultural entity******** maintained in generational stasis, cultural factors will not suffice to explain why they failed to innovate on their own or adopt new innovations.
Item, any changes in lifestyle, even ones as minor as adopting a slightly 'better' tool, are fundamentally decisions made by individuals for their own reasons. While these vary enormously, on a long enough time scale, the trend is for the average to cluster around economically sound strategy, if only because suboptimal strategies tend to endanger the lives of those who practise them until fairly recently and even if they survive, the individuals or societies with strategies closer to optimal will dominate, assimilate, displace or destroy them.
Item, any human or human-like society will innovate at a certain rate, highly dependent on a lot of factors, over time, but they will also suffer the loss of some knowledge, which may include knowledge of technologies. This rate of innovation correlates fairly well with both the overall number of people in the society and the population density, suggesting that humans who interact with other humans tend to have ideas.
By contrast, the rate of knowledge loss******** has a dramatic reverse correlation with population. As should be obvious, this means that there is a certain size of society at which technological progress is stagnant and even a size at which it will regress with each generation, with the death of older, more knowledgable members coming faster than they can pass on all of their skills. An example would be the Tasmanian aborigines, cut off from all contact with others and living in a land which would not support a dense population at their current methods of food production, they gradually lost important, life-sustaining technologies like boats, fire and fishing gear.
Item, that the above rates are really only important for societies isolated from their neighbours by factors of geography, cultural or religious conflict or specisism. It turns out that most of what people use, whether in the Paleolithic or today, wasn't actually designed by people in their own immediate society. Most of it came from abroad, either as a direct copy of something else or by idea-diffusion, i.e. knowing that it was possible inspired a local to develop his own method for doing it.
Conservatively, 99% of human inventions were actually invented by others first and made their way elsewhere. And no, this doesn't mean that there is some mythical society which came up with most everything out there. What it does mean is that since most useful inventions eventually make their way to every culture with even the remotest contact with the originating one, even if removed by hundreds of middle-men and some 8,000 miles of distance, everyone only has to invent a little on their own and can then adopt, adapt and improve from others.
Item, crucially, the presence of innovation is perhaps a necessary factor for technological advancement, but it is not a sufficient one. Without a food surplus to feed specialists who cannot feed themselves, a society cannot afford to adopt a new invention which requires any kind of specialised skills.
More generally, until economic conditions support the adoption of a given technology, accounting for all hidden costs of the technology and all the technology it builds on, it doesn't matter whether or not someone has a bright idea, brings back a proto-type or blueprint or even builds a working model. If there is no surplus of food and resources to use to feed those working on it and learning the skills to use it, it can't be adopted, no matter how much it would help in the future.
Furthermore, any invention whose initial stages of development offer no advances over other, known methods of accomplishing a task of equivalent benefit to either the individual or the society******** will require not only a food surplus to feed specialists who will work on developing them further, but a resource surplus big enough to finance the investment for the duration, as well as the ability to either carry all the tools of development with them on their wanderings or the predictability that comes with at least semi-fixed settlements.
It is also easy to underestimate the time preference of people when discussing societies in the abstract. Even were he possessed of perfect foresight and understandable blue-prints for a range of inventions, why should any individual member of a hunter-gatherer band choose to minimise his current food gathering, which will probably mean his children starving now, in order so that his remote descendants, probably too far removed to even know his name, would have an easier time dominating their neighbours militarily?
Even the simplest ideas usually require hundreds or thousands of man-hours to put into practise, especially when you count the time needed to learn the craft underlying them first. It takes ten thousand hours to become an expert at something, they say. While hunter-gatherers usually had fairly generous allotments of free time compared to most people of the Neolithic until now, that doesn't mean it was infinite.
If you have to devote ten thousand hours to studying each craft needed to build every individual tool to build even a simple technological artifact, and you are limited to doing the actual work only at those times when your band returns to the fixed place where you store the tools you've amassed (maybe once or twice a year), you'll be dead before you see any returns personally. And if there is any change in the migratory patterns of typical prey animals or the weather or anything else, you might find your entire work wasted, as you are forced to move far away in search of food or remaining with your life's work and starving to death.
Item, the fact that a given technology was discovered later than another one in our history does not make it unequivocally better. In particular, even widespread adoption does not dictate that the technology must be better in all respects, only that there are good odds that in the specific situations that those societies found themselves, the benefits outweighed the flaws.
Let us take the example of the bow and arrow. They seem like such a marvellous advance, right? After all, the farther you are away from something, the less risk there is when you attack it. Small, weak humans could now threathen large, dangerous animals. Yay, prehistorical us! 
On the other hand, consider their cost. In order to build a good selfbow, you require specially chosen wood and you must season it for, you guessed it, at least a season. Just that requires that you live in an area where there is good wood for bowmaking, that you have access to this wood without being at too much risk of being killed by rivals living near it and that you will periodically return to some dry place where you put your wood and that you can trust that the odds of someone stealing it or something ruining it are low enough to justify the bother of selecting and gathering it.
You could build an unseasoned bow, but that would be a terribly inaccurate and weak hunting tool. The wonderful range advantage discussed above is reduced so much that it might as well hardly not exist. Everything said about the weaknesses of bows against other hunting tools will apply to these doubly.
Now, once you have your bow, you must have technology to build arrows heavier in the front, otherwise they'll never fly straight. While fire-hardened spears might conceivably be hurled with a fair degree of accuracy, arrows demand the technology to secure arrowheads to a shaft, meaning that you have to be at the height of stone-shaping technology to even consider it.
Also, even if you can attach heavier arrowheads to lighter shafts, you need them to be sharp. If they are not, they'll only kill the tiniest animals, animals which owing to their low mass compared to the difficulty of finding enough of them usually make up less than 10% of the food of hunter-gatherers and generally less than 3% in areas where larger animals are available.
Sharp arrow-heads may be made from flint, of course, but these are fragile and break easily. You can count on losing or breaking far more of these than you would of flint spearheads, because they are smaller and therefore more fragile. And well-shaped flint is a significant expense, representing hours of work by an expert at a place where you can find the best flint, which means that the total worth to someone who is not an expert flint-knapper and does not live right next to a source of them might be reckoned in weeks for each arrowhead.
Then there is the fact that until the invention of bronze, lying far, far in the future (demanding furnaces, among other things, which in turn demand a settled existence), nothing you've got to use as arrowheads, not even if you were to use copper, is hard and strong enough for you to rely on penetrating skin any thicker than human or gazelle. Gazelles are good eating, it is true, but with their speed and their alertness, they are much harder to hunt than some of the larger herbivores. In general, the largest animals are the most efficient source of food counted in calories or protein per man-hour.
This is not to say that a good flint arrow shot from a powerful, efficient bow will not penetrate the hide of an aurochs or other large grazer when it hits at the right angle. It will and easily. But hit at the wrong angle and you lose a valuable artifact for no return.
In addition, any bow powerful enough to bring down large animals would require not only very advanced wood-working skills and the time and predictability of movements to return to a site a season later, but it would also require an archer who trained for hours every day in drawing a heavy bow. It is not enough to be strong in a conventional sense in order to be able to draw such bows. This is a fairly specific motion, relying on muscles which are not trained by many forms of human activity. Almost no one has strong muscles adapted to draw a heavy bow unless that he has trained to draw a heavy bow from childhood.
This, in turn, demands that not only do you make this expensive artifact for every adult who expects to use one, but that you will need to make a series of them of increasing draw weight for children who are supposed to grow up to be archers.
Even if you accept the limitations inherent in the weapon system and decide to target nothing larger than gazelle with it, there are still significant hidden costs yet to be considered. Smaller animals are harder to hit, for one thing, and the supposed advantage of range is worthless if your accuracy limits you to less than 30 yds anyway. That range is well within spear-thrower range and a strong man might even hurl a spear that distance without any mechanical aid. And spears are heavy enough to penetrate hides more easily than arrows.
So if the bow is going to be worth anything, your hunters will have to be as accurate with it as they are with thrown spears. Preferably more accurate, in order for there to be any real advantage, as the ability to carry more reloads for bows than spears isn't really an advantage in most hunting and when you can only afford a couple anyway.
There are, however, considerable barriers to developing that skill. Quite simply, the act of throwing a projectile relies on intuitive mental processes honed by literal million of years of evolution, not to mention that it is a skill that all societies, no matter how poor, can afford to have children practice as play. By comparison, bows must be aimed by 'feel' in the same way as thrown weapons, but instead of your mind intuitively knowing the trajectory from its awareness of your own body, you have to develop the mental 'feel' by painstaking and constant practice.
Not for nothing is it said that archers cannot be trained. It is a skill developed over a working lifetime, starting in childhood. It therefore follows that the only societies that can afford to adopt the bow are those that have the wealth, in resources like flint and good wood as well as in surplus food, to build a lot of bows and to arrange for those who mean to use them to spend a lot of time practising with them from childhood on up.
This lengthy case study is an example of why even seeing a technology in use or getting instruction in its benefits is insufficient to make it practical to adopt unless the economic conditions support it. A culture can live next to an advanced culture with many technological marvels without adopting any of them if their own resources go not give them the opportunity to spare anything for investment in technological advancement. New gadgets cost, in time, in food and in other resources.
Item, all modern cultures that have been discovered at a 'primitive' stage have shared a single trait. For some reason, they have been unable to trade extensively with the rest of the human race. In this case, their rate of 'advancement' has been limited by how many people they could support with their own food production. As it turns out, in order for this to be so many that innovation proceeds at more than a crawl, intensive acriculture is required.
Item, the flora and fauna that fulfill the extremely restrictive qualifications for being domesticated by humans in order to become the foundations for acriculture are divided very unevenly over the whole world. Even where they are relatively abundant, the wild species that humans selectively bred for prefered qualities were so far removed from their modern forms that the yield of early acriculture was only marginally higher than that of hunting-gathering by man-hours.
In areas with abundant wild game and/or abundant edible wild plants, hunter-gatherer methods might have a superior yields per man-hour, in calories and particularly in protein content. Unless, for some specific reason, the population density had become so high that the yield per acre mattered to anyone, it was simply not worth it to take up acriculture in those areas. Even quite close contact with other civilisations which did practise acriculture would only be likely to spread the technology of cultivation if the areas were similar enough for similar methods of cultivation to work.
If seeds from your distant neighbours will work where you live (or animals will thrive), he'll have done the hundreds or thousands of years of selective breeding for you and you can merrily start growing your own crops (or herding animals). This applies if the latitude (and thus length of day) and other factors which affect climate are more or less the same. This explains why 8,000 miles of east-west distance are easily spanned quite quickly, with everyone using mostly the same methods and even seeds.
If, on the other hand, the climate is so different that the specific qualities that the seeds have been bred for are useless, or worse, harmful, it is quite likely that not even an extensive education in the methods of another culture would produce skills transferable to starting acriculture in a different latitude. This is why 700 miles of north-south distance has sometimes been enough to prevent the spread of the technology of cultivating land for ten thousand years or more.
In this case, the people who 'refuse' to take up the new technology are not being stubborn or stupid. They are, on the contrary, acting in an economically rational manner by choosing to pursue their food production strategies in the most efficient manner available to them. The domestication of plant species which would grow on their land might well be a process which would take hundreds or thousands of years until the man-hour yield surpassed what they were gathering with their own methods.
Why do it, then? Remember, even a 10% reduction in calorie 'income' is likely to mean that you have to watch an extra child of yours die over your lifetime. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles are fairly comfortable in many ways for adults, but there is little place for young, helpless children and unless birth control and medicine are somehow advanced far beyond the rest of society, they will die at a high rate and any failure of food staples will affect them the worst.
Since there is little food surplus and no place to store it, there will be times of plenty and times of famine. Even if your daily calorie yield is normally higher than you need, it is neccessary for even the worst days to be above what everyone needs in order to prevent children from dying from causes related to nutritional diseases.
A Summary of the Author's Unnecessary Verbosity
All this is a very long-winded way to say that in order for new technologies to be adopted, even by people who already know the principles behind them, the economic conditions have to allow for it. Only with sufficient population densities is there enough exchange of ideas that innovation (both home-grown and adaption of external ideas) outpaces knowledge loss and these higher population densities can only be supported if the food yields per acre are sufficiently high.
Thus, a society without access to easily domesticatable plant or animal species might never develop dense population centers and thus never access the peculiar feed-back loop whereby innovation stimulates further food production, which in turn stimulates larger societies and more surplus to invest in new technologies, which in turn stimulates more innovation, and so on. This is called an autocatalytic process, that is, a process which provides its own catalyst, and it is what usually results in 'advancement' to a 'higher' form of civilisation.
How Does This Apply to Toril?
In Case You Are the Trusting Sort to Take the Author's Word for the Scientific Stuff
First of all, I hope I've dispelled the idea that any period of time, whether that be 50,000 years or the roughly 40,000 years of Toril's apparent history, is long enough for certain technological developments to be inevitable.
Without certain conditions, people simply don't have a chance to develop new things that are adopted by other people in their society. Even if the greatest genius in the world could invent pretty much everything we can imagine in his own lifetime, the odds are that he wouldn't be able to build them and even if he could, it wouldn't be economically viable for his fellows to do the same, because unless they have a way to store surplus food, they'd starve to death while trying to learn to do it.
We move then, to 'advanced' civilisations falling and 'turning back to barbarism'. As Eric Boyd rightly pointed out, magic is the quientessential 'elite' technology. It is by definition possessed only by a small minority of societies. Yet it offers some very tempting short-cuts to technological advancement. Quite simply, it offers the ability to circumvent many of the 'supporting' technologies needed to create precisely what you want, when you want it.
The ability to make tools or weapons out of bronze or iron (or to steel iron, even later) is a gargantuan advantage. Yet the increasing sophistication of the furnaces required to generate the ever more intensive heat needed for smelting is a powerful limiting factor. Basically, no chance of doing it without inventing hundreds of preliminary things, not to mention developing permanent settlements and a complicated political structure. Even so, it takes a long time to get right.
That is, if you are using the same methods as we did on Earth. If you can create enough heat by magic, your problems are far less. You can jump over millions of man-hours of tedious and unproductive work. From bone and stone you can go fairly directly to mithril, adamantine and custom-designed hypermagical miracle-materials, assuming that you suddenly develop enough magic.
But consider the weakness in your society thereby created. If the help of a mage or at least the use of a magical item is required to produce the metal tools that a society relies on, the number of people who know that secret will be proportionally much less than the number of people who know what is involved in smithing in our world. Everyone who has seen a horse shoed has at least an idea of what is involved in blacksmithing, and assuming enough generations of trial and error, his descendants would probably be able to duplicate it, assuming they fulfilled all the other technological and economic conditions.
Compare that to a society where even if you see steel being shaped, you are left utterly mystified by the process by which it is heated so much. Not only is it secret knowledge, it is secret knowledge useless to anyone without some innate spark of magic.
The knowledge most vulnerable to being lost through periods of harsh conditions, upheavals or simple isolation is knowledge that is either very specialised and requires a long time to learn or knowledge that has no immediate uses for short-term survival.
Knowledge that shares both traits, as well as having perhaps been confined to an elite of a previous culture destroyed by a catastrophe, can all too easily be lost. When that elite is not only small in number but also without skills that are valuable in short-term survival, it is very likely that not only will they not survive to pass on their skills, but even if they did, they would find that as non-producing burden on the band, their prestige is now lower than that of nearly any other member. No one wants to learn from the old geezer who can't do anything right but says that if they stick with it, they'll see benefits years, decades or even generations from now.
The only way that such knowledge has a reasonable chance of being preserved through a catastrophe which destroyes a civilisation is if it is written down somewhere. Yet this too is deceptively limited. Written sources are only meaningful if there remains someone who can read them.
Most ancient forms of writing were logographic or syllabagraphic. In all of human history, only one form of alphabetic writing was independently discovered. It then spread through the world through copying or idea-diffusion. This suggests that alphabetic forms of writing are infinitely difficult to come up with as an idea.
The more complicated forms of writing were usually only used by the educated elite. In some extreme cases, all the discovered written sources of a language can be traced to less than a hundred people living over a period of some three to five centuries. This suggests that even if we have only found one tenth of the stone tablets, it is still entirely possible that in a civilisation spanning much of the eastern Meditarranean, less than ten people at a time could write. You can be almost certain that these ten royal scribes did not spend their days practising hunter-gatherer skills or even merely going camping and would thus not be likely to survive in any catastrophic event.
In a society founded on magical lore and ruled by mages, there is even less reason to suppose that the common folk knew how to read and write. Now the ruling class has an added incentive, in addition to those known from our history, to keep them ignorant of the mysteries of reading and writing.
So you see, it doesn't really take a lot for almost all the knowledge of an ancient civilisation to be lost to the descendants of that culture. Occupied at first with trying to survive from day to day, those who did not die in the first horror would mostly die of disease immediately after it or hunter in either the first few days (while still making their way away from the ruined settlements, now home to more survivors than food) or, even if they made it through that, of hunter and cold in the next winter.
Being a hunter-gatherer is a skill-set, every bit as complicated to learn as that of other professions. Throw someone into it with no preparation and he'll fail nine times out of ten even in perfect conditions. And catastrophic ends to civilisations are rarely perfect conditions.
The powerful mages that survive the crash might be able to survive, of course. Their magic and so on. But each of them knows a limited amount of spells, no matter how great, and those spells are geared toward a society where he had servants and slaves to do the tedious fetching and carrying, as well as, well, no way around it, a range of semi-skilled and skilled support work. Without these people, all of whom are now busy trying to gather food for themselves or their families (or are dead, because being a highly trained house slave is pretty useless in the wild), your spells aren't going to be able to restart civilisation on their own. If they are, you aren't a mage, you're functionally a demigod.
So, having found out that most of the people will die in the first year, we're left with the process of rebuilding from that. Assuming that the population is dispersed enough in the initial horrors (which it has to be, in order to gather enough food to live) and you'll have a few generations passing before there are even enough people to attempt to recolonise. And given that the overwhelming odds are that anyone who knew advanced technology, magic or reading and writing died in the first generation, how much knowledge remains?
If the climate simultaneously changed or you were driven from your former lands, the odds are that you'd need a whole new food production skill-set anyway. So you can't even apply any knowledge you manage to save until you learn a whole new way to cultivate the land in order to support a higher population density.
If the survivors are left in land that is not fertile enough to support high population densities with any cultivation method available to them within a generation or two, they'll probably be no better off than any other group of hunter-gatherers, except that their oral traditions will contain more 'useless' legends and less practical survival stuff. So when fertile lands are again available, the odds are that other groups are better suited to take them over, being more numerous.
In this way, it is quite possible for a formerly great people to remain 'barbaric' for a long time, possibly forever, simply because the land that they occupy doesn't offer an economic opportunity for anything else.
If you add them being of a species that the dominant civilisations of the day won't recognise as people or will at least have very limited contact with, the dual crucial mechanisms of copying and idea-diffusion will be crippled. Instead of trade, you'll have fleeting glimpses in the distance. Elves who consider humans to be odd-looking great apes with sparse fur are not likely to teach them much and even if the elves try, few or any of their 'acricultural' lessons will be directly applicable to humans occuping different terrains than their chosen forests. Not to mention that humans require radically greater amounts of protein.
With that in mind, human societies cannot simply learn everything from elves or any other progenitor races, not unless the methods of acriculture available are useful for the humans and enough to create the economic conditions for further investment in technology.
Perhaps the greatest thing I ever learned in the field of evolution, whether genetic or memetic, is that the usual method is that a great diversity of species or ideas is thrown more or less randomly around, but only those who find suitable ecological or economic conditions survive to breed.
The trajectory is not an inexorable upward stride, slowly and stately toward Our Glorious Selves, but long periods of more-or-less stable equilibrium while conditions don't favour any change, occasionally punctuated with exlosions of diversity resulting from some great internal or external change.
And even if we were to draw a line from start to finish, ignoring all the roads not taken, abandoned ideas whose time had not yet come or extinct species, it wouldn't be straight upwards. It would dip up and down for every region in the world. As conditions may one day support a settled society with intense cultivation and an ever increased array of new technology, so may they also conspire to bring down those proud societies and reset the 'tech tree' in that part of the world.
In a world where other societies still retain that knowledge, it may be possible to obtain it again from them. If there aren't any other societies currently using acriculture applicable to your needs, you are geographically isolated from them or these people are unwilling to trade with you, perhaps because they don't consider you 'people', well, you will have to start from the beginning. And hope that you are located somewhere with the peculiar mix of initial conditions that even allows for intense cultivation of land.
*And species, for that matter.
**And not accidentally so, we quietly reasoned, each finding his own pet explanation for why a particular form of government, culture or religion should have been the prerequisite for these heroes of early science.
***If you think that childhood me must have been an insufferable prat, I beg you to keep in mind that any number of perfectly adult people have gone their whole lives believing implictly that since the chain of causation has clearly done its ultimate job in placing them in their appointed place, any links that don't obviously lead to them personally may safely be ignored as false starts and failed experiments.
****Ironically, 'cadet' branches of humanity, i.e. ones who most likely never evolved into anything living on Earth today but went extinct for one reason or another, most likely had technology equal to or better than our direct ancestors and they had it for longer.
*****Again, what is meant here that anatomically modern humans and whatever species we evolved from (homo ergaster? homo heidelbergensis? not-yet-discovered African fossil of a small population descended from either?) did not have, in the vulgar parlance of faux-anthropology, something that amounted to even the most primitive 'barbarian' society, because that would be to imply that chimps and gorillas more-or-less have 'barbarian' societies.
******For reference, the same kind of social structure used by great apes.
*******Itself functionally impossible for a region of any size with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In fact, impossible without a fairly advanced level of technology. Thus, medieval China and early-modern Japan could do it and actually managed to significantly retard technological advancement, but those two were, at the time of the questionable decisions made by their respective elites to isolate themselves, among the most advanced cultures on Earth.
********Widespread literacy combined with durable media for storing data would also have a heavy reverse corelation here, but the evidence suggests that not only is writing a bizarrely difficult technology to invent but that unless a society has a significant resource surplus, it is also a skill that will not be maintained over time, regardless of theoretical long-term benefits. Also, even with 100% literacy and stored media, you will find that this rate never reaches 0%. The knowledge lost may be knowledge that people did not consider important to preserve, like that of an out-dated method to perform a certain task, but unless we are willing to postulate perfect foresight, a certain proportion of 'useless' knowledge will turn out to be something which could have led to more efficient technological paths later.
*********Familiar modern inventions that emerged from a tech-tree which was developed for decades, centuries or even millenia, sometimes at great cost, before it was proven to be more effective than the existing technology include not only the steam engine; but the internal combustion engine, powered aircraft and the refinement of gasoline from petroleum. Less obvious, but no less true, ancient iventions like the bow were significantly inferior to competing muscle-powered ranged weapons for millenia after their discovery, and, in some ways, remain so today. I will revisit the example of the bow in the main text. |
| evildmguy |
Posted - 19 Dec 2005 : 16:35:58
Wow! Thanks for all of the replies!
As I said, I understood that this was my issue. I didn't understand how to make those ages work for me.
What I mean is this: I like planning the things. I find fun in that. And I like layering things, even if they are never followed. It makes it fun for me. So, that's why I am interested in the when and where these former "kingdoms" were.
For example, it seems to me that Waterdeep should have at least six layers of growth, if someone were to excavate it. (Humans current, Netherese outpost, barbarian outpost, elves, perhaps giant or dragon as well.) Now, some of those might be gone, but I think it is cool, again mostly for myself, to have that detail ready. It also explains why things can be found under Waterdeep's flagstones, sometimes magical and sometimes historical.
So, when I do something, I want to know I am using the right history of the area.
Other ideas:
It could be that many things were lost due to the elves Sundering of the continent. Perhaps that caused a lot of past ruins to be destroyed.
It's always the case that the next civilization builds with the remnants of the older ones. Perhaps they were "mined" for their blocks and are now part of the new buildings. (That could be interesting! Imagine a house that has passive protection because it used granite blocks with runes of protection carved in them from before.)
Again, this wasn't an attack on anyone, merely my attempt to understand it and find a way to use it in my games.
Thanks for the replies!
Have a good one! Take care!
edg |
| Dhomal |
Posted - 18 Dec 2005 : 03:34:03
Hello-
Eric - I must say - wow. That is a very well thought-out comment - and one that makes some good sense!
The only question I have - mainly curious about your point of view - is why you think that having more generations alive at the same time stagnates certain types of societial growth. (*I'm pretty sure one of those words back there is spelled wrong - you guess which one...*)
I'm not actually saying I dont agree with you - necessarilly - just curious why you made that conclusion. I would imagine that some people could argue that that is not the case - but its all theoretical actually.
Again though - beautiful - and to-the-point. Bravo.
Dhomal |
| Mkhaiwati |
Posted - 17 Dec 2005 : 17:20:37
one other point about the Chosen being insane. Yes, Ed has said repeatedly that they are insane. Yes, that hasn't been shown well in any material in the Realms.
One possible reason for this inconsistancy would be that Ed (in his home world) plays and envisions the Chosen as insane. However, both TSR and WotC had to limit many aspects of the world as Ed envisioned it. Another example of this is that evil cannot be shown to win in any situation in the books. The Zhentarim are shown as idiots in the books, which is not how Ed has planned them or played them in his world.
So I guess, my point being (I tend to ramble) is that they are insane, but TSR/WotC will not show them as being insane.
Mkhaiwati |
| ericlboyd |
Posted - 17 Dec 2005 : 10:39:58
Without addressing all the questions posed, I would posit two key differences between the Realms and Earth:
1) In the Realms, the presence of very-long-lived races means that there is more generational overlap than among the exclusively human cultures of Earth. In other words, the number of generations concurrently alive among the Fair Folk is far higher than among humans(usually 3, sometimes 4, rarely 5).
I would argue that the degree of concurrence of generations exponetially increases cultural and technological staticism. In other words, the longer-lived the race, the more generations alive, and therefore the more resistant the culture and the technology is to change.
2) The difference between magic and technology is that the former is an elitist approach to solving technological problems, while the latter is ultimately a democratic approach that eventually spreads to the masses. For example, the magic missile spell and the pistol both solve roughly the same problem. However, the former is available only to those who study (wizards) or inherit (sorcerors) the requisite ability, while the latter can ultimately be made available to every farmer, without restriction.
I would argue that the existence of magic greatly undermines technological advancement. If I really want to do X, the easiest course if for me to create a spell to do X rather than try to invent something to do X. However, if a society wants to do X, the longer but ultimately more effective course is to invent something to do X and share it across society.
Spell-casting elites can easily add to their personal power by using magic in new ways, but ultimately such approaches remain the province of the elites, who have little incentive to share their power with others. Ultimately, this traps cultures at relatively static technological levels rather than allow them to advance technologically at Earth-like norms.
--Eric |
| Dhomal |
Posted - 17 Dec 2005 : 06:37:09
Hello-
The other element of this thread was the seemingly long histories of 'the world' and its denizens.
I too have noticed that recorded (And I use that term loosely) history goes back many thousands of years - tens of thousand actually, and maybe more (my memory for these things is poor at best). I also felt that it was an AWFULY long time when compared to recorded Earth history. However - thats the key - We should not be comparing the two so closely - as long as the end result is to say that the Realms is wrong - or stunted. There are - even now - some small pockets of society here on Earth that have existed in nearly the same ways - for thousands of years. The Masai from Africa come to mind (I saw a show on the importance of Cows through the ages - and they were mentioned as being fairly un-changed for thousands of years) - and some of the South American or Asian secluded groups of people would probably be good examples too.
Also - in just a simple way - how do we know whether or not Earth is a Good example? Perhaps - if we were ever to find that there is life 'out there' and get to the stage of 'comparing notes' if you will - that Their socoiety did not evolve over tens of thousands of years, or more? Granted - we could also find out that Earth is slow - and most were ready for space travel by the time we started perfecting flint weapons!
But I digress.
What I am saying is - Yes - I can see that there is a Very long Timeline involved with the Realms' history. It bothers me in a way - as I can't 'grasp' it fully - based on what I know. However - I take it as given - and assume that its OK. In some ways - it increases my 'Awe' of the realms that much - and Truly - THAT is something I wish never to have torn away completely!
Dhomal |
| evildmguy |
Posted - 16 Dec 2005 : 14:30:08
quote:
Originally posted by Arivia
If you've got Heroes of Horror, some of the mental symptoms of a depravity score might work(page 65). It's no surprise I'm suggesting this, though-I'm reading the section through for the first time right now!
quote:
Originally posted by Kuje
Ravenloft material has also had many mechanics for insanity both from 2e and 3/3.5e.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Fortunately, I am not using DND rules and the system I am using allows for insanity. So, from my standpoint, there is no problem. If Ed says they are insane, I can easily add things to my conversions that show that.
As for the other parts, I guess it is too bad neither of them are Core Rules, so that they can be used in write ups of characters by WotC to show the insanity of characters. Ah, well. I guess I will merely have to ask you guys more often!
Have a good one! Take care!
edg |
| The Sage |
Posted - 15 Dec 2005 : 23:52:17
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
quote:
Originally posted by sleyvas
Then, others that live long times with power go similarly insane. Larloch lives in his bastion of strength, surrounded by hordes of undead, living only to tinker with magic. Others, such as Szass Tam, have bided their time and now just dream of domination.
I honestly don't see those as signs of insanity...
Really, for the most part, I don't think we've seen anything (or very little) that shows the mental instability of the Chosen, with the exception of Sammaster.
Dreaming about world domination is hardly a recipe for insanity. The motivations of Szass Tam present a clear and concise mind behind these actions -- with a drive toward overall domination fueled by personal ambition and a pursuit of power.
Szass Tam has the benefit of "bidding his time" thanks largely to his lich-status... but to have manipulated and plotted for so long since his rise to the status of lich (and gain certain slight or minor victories along the way) would seem to suggest that the Zulkir of Necromancy has been in control of his mental faculties for a very long time.
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| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 15 Dec 2005 : 22:53:34
quote:
Originally posted by sleyvas
I'll agree with the assessment that most of the Chosen are insane (those that aren't the seven sisters). Khelben working with the zhents by giving them a powerful artifact... kinda insane to most who hear of it. Khelben's insanity is more that he's begun viewing people more as objects on a chessboard.
I don't see Khelben's actions as being a reflection of mental instability... He's working to prevent a greater evil. If I knew of an evil greater than anything else in the world, and knew I could stop it, I'd work with evil groups in a heartbeat if it would stop the greater evil. It's the whole "lesser of two evils" thing.
quote:
Originally posted by sleyvas
Elminster's insanity is more of a stubborn will to do what he will no matter what (even as people pull his innards out, he might crack a joke).... its a kind of twisted disregard for his own life. Some might call this heroism, but it could also be considered masochism.
It could also be confidence in (or resignation to) the fact that he will likely survive, since he's got a goddess on his side. After this kinda thing happens a few dozen times, it becomes old hat.
quote:
Originally posted by sleyvas
Sammaster just went freaking power mad and formed the Cult of the Dragon. There's hints that insane Archmage of Undermountain is a chosen of mystra.
Sammaster was insane, definitely. And while Halaster doesn't have the strongest grip on sanity, he's not a Chosen of Mystra. Says Ed:
quote:
and it seems that ‘the new’ Mystra has freed him from the worst magical effects of its thrall, returning him to sanity. She did NOT make him a Chosen, but instead made a ‘separate peace’ with him, giving him the status of a free-willed agent (from time to time she’ll ask him to do something for her, with new spells or augmented powers as his reward or price, but she will do absolutely nothing to coerce him into service, nor look upon him unfavorably if he refuses).
quote:
Originally posted by sleyvas
Then, others that live long times with power go similarly insane. Larloch lives in his bastion of strength, surrounded by hordes of undead, living only to tinker with magic. Others, such as Szass Tam, have bided their time and now just dream of domination.
I honestly don't see those as signs of insanity...
Really, for the most part, I don't think we've seen anything (or very little) that shows the mental instability of the Chosen, with the exception of Sammaster. |
| Kuje |
Posted - 15 Dec 2005 : 22:50:54
Ravenloft material has also had many mechanics for insanity both from 2e and 3/3.5e. |
| Arivia |
Posted - 15 Dec 2005 : 21:33:36
quote:
Originally posted by evildmguy
quote:
Originally posted by Kuje
Well,
Thier creator, who is Ed Greenwood, has said repeatedly that they are all insane. If that isn't good enough, then I'm not sure what else we can say to convince you. :)
As I said, I haven't followed the Realms much over the years, so didn't know this.
All I can say is I wish DND did have rules for this so that they could be shown to be insane. Ah, well.
Thanks!
Have a good one! Take care!
edg
If you've got Heroes of Horror, some of the mental symptoms of a depravity score might work(page 65). It's no surprise I'm suggesting this, though-I'm reading the section through for the first time right now! |
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