Interesting Fantasy Cultures

[Ancient History]

I liked Aaron William's theory that halflings, dwarfs, and gnomes were all the same race, they just marketed themselves as three different races - giving the dwarfs steroids and sending the gnomes to nigh school to maintain the charade.

[Prak]

Oh, some interesting stuff to respond to. Let's see...

Making halflings have normal strength is interesting but that's about the extent that I'd want to use anything from the halfling writeup. Heck even on the strength thing I'd rather they could use medium sized weapons than carry more stuff. That's way more fun. Or give em both. Not like anyone cares about carrying capacity.

First off, I applaud the Erfworld reference. Halflings as exhibited by Julian Zammussels is a very entertaining thought. Also, you're right that no one cares about carrying capacity. That "carries like a medium sized creature" ability is purely for theme, just like goblinoids being able to eat directly out of a garbage can is thematic but unimportant power-wise.

That said, I don't want to make the "halflings have the advantages of being small and the advantages of being medium" any more explicit. People can maybe be talked around to a race of ant-like carrying capacity, but I think people will balk at someone bringing a tiny, almost cartoonish Cloud Strife to their grim and gritty fantasy game.

I'm 3' 2", if you include the hair, and my sword is 5' 6". -Halfling Cloud Strife

I want to point out that there's actually a big difference between the Erfworld halfling, and Cloud Strife. Cloud uses an amazingly impractically scaled up sword. It's too damned long to be effectively wielded by someone his size for as wide as it is. In swords you should really choose length or width, and if you want length, you need to be a tall dude, and consider getting a horse. Or you make a very specialized fighting style where your sword is always point up, or point sideways, and never point down.

The Erfworld halfling has a sword that is reasonable length for her height, but much wider, to make up for the lost mass from shortening the sword. It means her weapon is more of a hacking weapon than a precision weapon, and in fact, more of a hacking weapon than any human sword. She's effectively wielding an asian chef's knife made for an ogre

Which means that if she has the strength to put behind it, that thing will[/b] be going through your bones.
[/armchair historian/militarist]

Basically, I like the idea of halflings with wideblade hacking swords, and don't think that blades of that sort are as WSOD-straining as Cloud's sword.

[Shatner]

The character in question isn't a halfling, she's a very chibi looking human because that's how humans look in the deceptively cutesy-poo universe Erfworld takes place in. Her weapon is considered stupidly large by the conventions of the setting because she's a barbarian whose name is a cutesy-poo pronunciation of "the muscles". Not that that has anything to do with your point; I'm just picking a nit.


I'm cool with halflings having differently shaped weapons to accommodate their unusual size and strength. If their swords looked like Chinese cleavers, I'd think that was swell. I'm all for bits of character and verisimilitude like that. However, I'd take some persuading to let them wield medium-sized weaponry. I mean, mass and counter-balance and all that matters.

Edit: or to put it another way, Hey Armchair weapon experts and physicists... could a 30 pound, 3 foot tall critter with adult human strength wield a sword of some proportions that'd let them do as much damage as an adult human wielding a longsword? If so, I can see conceding the point.

[deaddmwalking]

2) When the halflings run out of space they turn on each other. The Settlers will pick a spot via some arbitrary criteria and take it from the halflings holding it. This will set off a lengthy cycle of violence until new frontiers open up or new regions are depopulated. The expanding swarm rarely has an answer for when it has run out of room.


4) I haven't really thought too deeply on what government and politics would be emergent from this setup. That said, this is a race that is biologically predisposed to help other members spread across the land. Whatever culture has arisen has created legends and philosophies and justifications for giving a chunk of their surplus every so often to the Settlers when they come through so they can manifest destiny it up out there, halfling-style.

These two appear to be in conflict. I can see the Steaders welcoming the Settlers, bringing out surplus supplies, and then the Pioneers say 'We're not here for your food stuffs. We're here for your blood.'

If the stay at home halflings aren't very tough so the pioneer halflings can take them, there's nothing stopping goblins or others from taking them either. If they're tough enough that the settlers can't take them, then I would expect the pioneering trait to begin diminishing over time. Of course, there is nothing in your explanation to indicate why some halflings take to wandering, so maybe it isn't genetic.

[Shatner]

2) When the halflings run out of space they turn on each other. The Settlers will pick a spot via some arbitrary criteria and take it from the halflings holding it. This will set off a lengthy cycle of violence until new frontiers open up or new regions are depopulated. The expanding swarm rarely has an answer for when it has run out of room.


4) I haven't really thought too deeply on what government and politics would be emergent from this setup. That said, this is a race that is biologically predisposed to help other members spread across the land. Whatever culture has arisen has created legends and philosophies and justifications for giving a chunk of their surplus every so often to the Settlers when they come through so they can manifest destiny it up out there, halfling-style.

These two appear to be in conflict. I can see the Steaders welcoming the Settlers, bringing out surplus supplies, and then the Pioneers say 'We're not here for your food stuffs. We're here for your blood.'

If the stay at home halflings aren't very tough so the pioneer halflings can take them, there's nothing stopping goblins or others from taking them either. If they're tough enough that the settlers can't take them, then I would expect the pioneering trait to begin diminishing over time. Of course, there is nothing in your explanation to indicate why some halflings take to wandering, so maybe it isn't genetic.

The halflings, as a species, have a strategy they are more-or-less genetically predisposed to follow, and that strategy is meant to build up a cluster of hives, build up population density, then collect that excess population and hurl it some where else to create yet another hive. Of course, you need population mingling otherwise your gene pool bottoms out, so you have a minority that moves from village to village, studding itself out. And after some time, these studs started making extra money moving the surplus from one village (which they were gonna visit anyway) and selling it to another village (which, again, was their next stop).

The halflings turning on one another is an extreme situation for when the excess population has literally no where else to go. Cats don't eat people, but you lock enough cats in a room long enough and they'll eat them some cat lady.

[deaddmwalking]

Actually, interestingly, if you lock rats in a cage with no way out, they will turn on each other, even if there are plenty of resources (plenty of food, water, etc). Open the door, and even if they live in a much higher density, they're fine. All halflings might have this sense that as long as they can pick up and leave, they can be pretty content. Perhaps rather than having 'steaders and pioneers', you should have pioneering be something like a common mid-life crisis. Just like not everyone buys a Porsche and leaves their wife for a 20-something, not all halflings leave everything they've worked for to start a new village, but some could.

But certainly, Hobbits as Hive is NOT Tolkien-esque. The number of changes required to make it work probably invite creating a new race to fulfill this function.

[Shatner]

I've edited my Halflings post to clarify my design goal. Sorry for the confusion.

EDIT: edited portions in italics

Design Goal: Have halflings superficially map on to the Tolkien stereotype, which is a whole bunch of "adventures make you late for dinner" farmers and a few "let's walk to Mount Doom and back" adventurers. I'll actually be introducing some substantial changes to the race and their society, but at a first glance we want sleepy farming villages growing pumpkins and pipeweed, while a handful of halflings set out to combat the great evil that is growing in the East. Also, I want to make a small race that is strong and I'm giving that to halflings. If you're wondering where the goblin's movement of 30 went, this is it.

The midlife crisis approach could work. I'm actually rather pleased with the thought of a mammalian race with starkly divided, genetically-assigned personalities to propel them into socially useful roles... but that's my preference and not because I feel that makes the material substantially stronger.

[Laertes]

Edit: or to put it another way, Hey Armchair weapon experts and physicists... could a 30 pound, 3 foot tall critter with adult human strength wield a sword of some proportions that'd let them do as much damage as an adult human wielding a longsword? If so, I can see conceding the point.

That depends on what you mean by "damage" and what sort of weapon they'd be using. A stabbing weapon like a spear or gladius? Hell yes. They'd be goddamn terrifying with those things. Halfling pike formations would kick ass. A slashing weapon like an axe or zweihander? Not on your life, because there limb length matters.

I'm a very tall man so I fight with a Liechtenauer longsword (a light two handed sword) and I can't see Halflings using those. But I can see them using Roman-style sword and board tactics with a close-range stabbing weapon. They would get inside your guard and stab you in the guts when you were unable to properly bring your larger slashing weapon up to defend yourself. The Romans did extremely well out of these tactics, butchering vastly larger armies.

However, there is a "However". What the gladius and the pike both have in common is that they are not the weapons of a warrior, but of a soldier. They require an extremely high level of discipline to use effectively, and since they are used in dense blocks of infantry they require the Halflings to be well drilled and constantly practising. These are the weapons of either a professional army, or (more likely) a citizen-soldier army like the Swiss confederation wherein every person spends the weekend training for war. It definitely would not work with a race of placid farmers who produce occasional heroes.

[erik]

The number of changes required to make it work probably invite creating a new race to fulfill this function.

Industrious. Work well in groups. Most wanting to stay within the settlement, but there's oddballs out there too. Hoo-rah.

[Shatner]

Edit: or to put it another way, Hey Armchair weapon experts and physicists... could a 30 pound, 3 foot tall critter with adult human strength wield a sword of some proportions that'd let them do as much damage as an adult human wielding a longsword? If so, I can see conceding the point.

That depends on what you mean by "damage" and what sort of weapon they'd be using. A stabbing weapon like a spear or gladius? Hell yes. They'd be goddamn terrifying with those things. Halfling pike formations would kick ass. A slashing weapon like an axe or zweihander? Not on your life, because there limb length matters.

I'm a very tall man so I fight with a Liechtenauer longsword (a light two handed sword) and I can't see Halflings using those. But I can see them using Roman-style sword and board tactics with a close-range stabbing weapon. They would get inside your guard and stab you in the guts when you were unable to properly bring your larger slashing weapon up to defend yourself. The Romans did extremely well out of these tactics, butchering vastly larger armies.

However, there is a "However". What the gladius and the pike both have in common is that they are not the weapons of a warrior, but of a soldier. They require an extremely high level of discipline to use effectively, and since they are used in dense blocks of infantry they require the Halflings to be well drilled and constantly practising. These are the weapons of either a professional army, or (more likely) a citizen-soldier army like the Swiss confederation wherein every person spends the weekend training for war. It definitely would not work with a race of placid farmers who produce occasional heroes.

Firstly, thanks for the info.

As this is a DnD setting, even a race of placid farmers can give rise to a bad ass soldier of fortune because that is the stuff Campbellian heroes player characters are made of. So, even if the race was herpy derpy with weapons, it wouldn't actually limit what people could write on their character sheets.

There are professional halfling soldiers, but they're all Travelers. Halflings travel, travel is dangerous, so halflings learn to defend themselves. Still others learn it so well that instead of moving a surplus from village to village, they protect the people who move a surplus from village to village. In other words, halfling guards and mercenaries are a thing, but they need to move from month to month so you either have them guarding something that itself moves (a wagon train, a caravan, a ship) or you have them continually patrolling an area. I could see halfling mercenary bands who've gotten some class levels and learned to hold a gladius and a towershield. And possibly taken the swarmfighting feat.

Also, Settlers make a habit of hiring veteran Travelers as guides and tacticians when mounting their expedition. I could see them undergoing some Mulan-esque training montage where the band of peasants get taught to wear armor and fight in formation. You may not get Settlers who're more than just enthusiastic peasant levies until the expedition has failed a time or two and the few survivors have been hardened by the whole thing. Actually, that sounds like a pretty bad ass story right there.


Edit: You could have a scenario, perhaps a very long-lived border across which lots of violence has been more-or-less the norm. In that situation, the Steaders there could have shaped up and started doing that Swiss citizen-soldier system you mentioned. Then it's simply part of being a dirt-farming peasant, in that you spend a fair chunk of time farming the dirt and the rest of the time learning to fight in a Swiss square pike formation so that when the militia bell rings you can take your place, shoulder to shoulder, and fend off the orc marauders and/or gnoll slavers and/or rampaging aberrations and/or goblin vampires riding motherfucking werewolves.

[Shatner]

The number of changes required to make it work probably invite creating a new race to fulfill this function.

Industrious. Work well in groups. Most wanting to stay within the settlement, but there's oddballs out there too. Hoo-rah.

Damnit, I want me some militant swarmy halflings! You giving solid counter-examples doesn't help this.

Joking aside, I agree this'd all work well for a new race, especially one that's actually comprised of bugs. Personally, I'm wanting to revamp the existing races in interesting ways, but I must concede that this too is a good way to take things.

[tussock]

but I think people will balk at someone bringing a tiny, almost cartoonish Cloud Strife to their grim and gritty fantasy game.

OK, so, first, small critters use skinny weapons, not fat ones. Giants use stumpy weapons, pixies use long needles. If you care for cube-sqaure laws more than dragons do at least. I mean, at least 3e dragons are fast, but they should really be faster still, and much more elephantine (the artist made them look like a house cat, wrong scale).

Small critters have wicked acceleration, but worse top speed, and they do use relatively higher energy to travel long distances. The energy of travel favours large creatures, a Halfling at 1/4 weight should eat about 1/3 human food baseline, but over 1/2 our food per mile travelled. Still, an army might enjoy two halflings for every human in battle, much like human pike squares beat horse lance charges because of density on the field (ignoring 3e rules when it favours my story to do so, never mind).

That acceleration though, it's what you use in combat, to dodge and lunge and strike. With smaller, thinner weapons. They've got 160% force to weight by the 3e numbers, and realistic skinny hobbits would be double. They can wear armour with the same thickness, only it's stiffer and less easy to dent because it's smaller. As an intelligent adult animal with training and properly scaled weapons, they'd be a mean foe, albeit one terribly prone to being kicked right across the room.


But I save that for Goblins. My hobbits are the little people who everyone likes, and they hardly ever use that special power to stab you in the nuts while you stand there grinning like an idiot.

[Laertes]

So I found an in character voice that I'm fairly pleased with. Please find below the first Human Monologues.

The Minister-General for the Eastland

Mr Minister, thank you for giving us this time.

Not at all. I'm just sorry that I couldn't make more time available. I think it's important that the people know what it is that we're doing. The great battles may be behind us, but the work we do today guarantees the future. I want all my staff to feel - and to be treated - as every bit as vital as the paladins of yesteryear.

I think the first thing everyone's interested in is the settlement plans in the eastlands. Could you tell us about your policy there?

Certainly. After the war we did a survey of the lands we'd acquired in order to see precisely what it was that we'd gotten. Our teams brought back a tremendous amount of climate and geographical data, as well as geology, botany and many other fields. The scholars and archivists will be puzzling over much of that for many years, I'm sure.

For us, though, it was enough to measure the land by two different yardsticks: what sort of plants grow there, and how long the growing season is - that is, how many frost free months there are every year. Lands with very little plant growth, mostly mountains and deserts, were left out of further analysis. We'll let the yrch keep those for now.

At the same time, we did a survey of the Coalition nations, dividing them by the same measuring criteria. In order to see how to settle each type of land, we needed to understand how people make best use of it at the moment. We wanted the eastlands to be settled in a way that made sense and would work, rather than trying to enforce some top-down decree on people's living patterns.

What did you find?

A great deal. Would you like me to go through the various categories?

Please.

Well, the first thing we discovered is that forest isn't so much a place as it is a symptom. Forest grows wherever the soil and water conditions are right for plants to grow just about anywhere. It's why temperate forest soils tend to be heavy and fertile. Tropical forests are a little different but we're far north enough here that it isn't an issue.

Plains, on the other hand, occur on land which isn't naturally conducive to heavy plant cover. Normally this isn't to do with the soil but instead to do with the climate - some of the richest farming lands are under steppe grass. However, climate is a very real concern for farmers and so it tends to limit use of plains lands.

Where there's too little moisture for plains then it fades into semi desert and full desert. We didn't pay too much attention to land like this except along the Golden river flood plain. Even the Great Host aren't keep on having the desert allocated to them as their share of the spoils, so in all likelihood we'll just let the yrch stay there and call it a meaningful peace offering to them.

Children of the Forests

Forest is the land of squabbling local lords. Everywhere we went inside coalition lands, we found that warlordism and feudalism are at their most intense in forest regions. In desert flood plains you get a single all-powerful monarch, and on the plains you get multiple tribal leaders, but the phenomenon of many smaller lords each with many even smaller lords pledged to them? That's a forest phenomenon.

This is, we think, mostly because of the difficulty of travel and the fertility of the soil

Wouldn't fertility lead to larger settlements, not fewer?

Sure, and in riverine regions you get that, because traders can use them to move their goods. But even along the rivers, any person can simply take a piece of land and farm it to feed themselves and their family. Subsistence farming is hard work but it's profitable - profitable enough to feed not only the farmers but also the lords who rule them. In a forest area, assuming you have enough people to farm it, the land itself is inherently valuable. Local lords can say "this area belongs to me" and have that mean something.

As long as the farmers agree.

Sure, as long as the farmers agree. Serfs run away all the time, either to virgin land or to other lords, which is why the eastlands schemes are so alarming for the coalition lords like the Haleberry and Buckharbour Hosts. Forest is inherently a place where small villages make sense, and small villages deep in the forest are difficult to tax.

So why do we have aristocrats at all?

It's the way of humankind and probably everyone else too. If a village gets built in the forest, then a hundred years later you can come along and there'll be someone there calling themselves the lord of it. Maybe they don't use the word "lord", but they'll be the person who makes the laws, leads militarily, and takes a cut of everyone's production in exchange.

That's a distressing thought.

Do you think so? I find it quite positive. People find it easy to hate the aristocracy, especially common-born folk like myself, but if you see them as a natural phenomenon it makes it easier. Politics aside, the point is that lords in the forest zone are local. They might exert feudal control over one another, but they still only have the same personal power base that they had before. If you're the lord of a valley, the next valley over will be ruled by an enemy or a vassal or an ally or even your brother, but it will always be ruled over by someone who isn't you. There is no natural mechanism for exerting control over areas too distant from you. What you see is that lords won't tend to spread their own power too thin by trying to exert personal control over a new village, but will instead place a friend or relative in charge. It becomes a way of rewarding loyal service.

You're right, I suppose. Moving on, what differences are there between forest areas?

We found that the biggest difference was the length of the growing season. The six month growing season line - that is, the furthest point north that you can guarantee six months of frost-free nights - is a big cultural divide. North of it you have wheat and cattle, below it you have corn and swine. North of it people eat oatmeal, south of it they eat grits. North of it the cold kills people, south of it disease kills people. In the north they grow hard fruit on trees and make cider and perry. In the south, they grow succulent fruit on bushes and vines and make wine. It doesn't always hold, but it's a rule of thumb we kept to while resettling people in the eastlands.

The other big difference is cash crops. The south has a longer growing season which means they can afford to diversify into things other than food. Cash crops tend not to be a thing that every farmer grows a little of, though - they tend to be grown on specialised plantations owned by commercial landowners. This is why southern politics, especially in the Bluewater and Marblecliff Hosts, is as dominated by the planter class as it is. Northerners tend to be more dominated by the craftsman class, because their long winters lead naturally to people staying indoors and making things.

So if the south is more fertile, why does anyone live north of there?

Personal freedom tends to be a big factor to forest dwellers - they know they can farm any place they like so there's no need to stay if a place is tyrannical or overpopulated. Because of this they tend to spread out across open land - there's very seldom entirely unoccupied land in the forest zone. But the big thing against the south is disease. Below the six month line, a quarter of children suffer childhood parasites that stunt their development. Below the seven month line, that figure rises to half of children. Below the eight month line, almost everybody suffers from it in one way or another. As a result, despite the longer growing season, the south tends to be less productive.

I can see the problem.

Quite.

Mr Minister, thank you for your time. We'll see you again next week, but before we do, I wanted to ask one final question about the resettlement into the forest zones.

Fire away.

What advice would you give settlers heading there?

I'd tell them to be prepared for a lot of work and to build good community ties. The forest zone isn't an area for lazy people, even if it gives high returns on that work. Because of this, villages end up being close knit places. Even in lone farms, the neighbours will help one another. Be prepared to be neighbourly and cooperate when you need to. We fought this war shoulder to shoulder, we won it shoulder to shoulder, and now we need to enjoy our victory the same way.

Mr Minister, thank you.

[darkmaster]

Really stellar work, I like the framing device of the results of geological survey, very interesting angle to take I really enjoyed the read.

[violence in the media]

Yeah, I just wanted to add that these are great write-ups you're doing and I enjoy them immensely.

[Lokathor]

I must go to work soon, but for now I'll leave the thought that Nobility, within the context of DnD, exists for very different reasons than they do in the real world. Namely, leveled characters with PC classes are the only ones that can face off against larger threats and have any meaningful chance of winning. Those are the folks that become the Nobles, because it's the iron age and your rule is as far as your sword arm can reach.

[Laertes]

It's still the same thing though. The noble protects the villagers and in return they feed and equip that noble. Whether the noble in question be a knight with expensive armour and an expensive horse, or a magician with expensive books and expensive spell components is basically unimportant. Unless you're high enough level to have access to Wish, or adventuring pays so well that nobody needs peasants, the noble still needs peasants to provide their stuff for them.

The forest zone is basically the norm that we assume for most of European Tolkien style RPGs because Europe is the forest zone, with the six-month growing line very roughly demarcating the Mediterranean/Atlantic watershed. This is why it looks familiar. When we get onto the grassland and river valley biomes, differences will turn up.

[Shatner]

Re: Forests
I assume forests would take a special property in DnD-land because they are more than just, as Laertes says, a symptom of the weather and soil. Forests are also home to certain magical critters because reasons. You don't find Dryads outside of forests, and in most settings elves don't actually need to live in forests, but they already do and will stab you with a longsword if you try to clear the trees away. Since forests are arbitrarily magical, it makes forests more valuable and dangerous than an equivalently large and fertile patch of grasslands.

[Laertes]

One more for you. Please excuse the lack of formatting; I'm on my phone and square brackets are unbearably difficult.

Mr Minister, thank you once again for making the time available to us.

Not at all. Letting the people know about the opportunities in the eastern lands is part of my job, after all.

So let's resume where we left off. Could you tell us about the grasslands and the flood plains?

Certainly. Grasslands are a - well, let's discuss grass first. Grasses grow very quickly, especially following wildfires. They can have very deep roots, allowing them to get water from a deep aquifer. They spread very fast and are remarkably resilient to sun and wind. Frost can kill the grass but it will grow back quickly in spring. Unfortunately grass is inedible by humans or any other coalition race. I'm told that yrch can eat it, but - well, they do a lot of things. Fortunately winning wars isn't one of them.

This means you need an intermediate step. Most of the time that intermediate step is ruminant animals. Sheep, horses, goats and cattle can all digest grass and we in turn can live off them. A herd can graze on a single pasture, but the most efficient thing to do is to drive them from pasture to pasture across the plains. This means that herdsmen are naturally nomadic. That's not to say that they all live in wagons, of course. Driving animals between winter and summer pastures is called transhumance and is a popular course, especially in mountainous or arid areas. Tribes which practise transhumance will often have separate summer and winter villages which they move between, abandoning the buildings until the seasons change again - they have no shortage of land so it makes sense. Most herdsmen, particularly in the Great Host, are semi nomadic: they have a settled village which they leave it for some months of the year. In some cases they only send out a few workers, but in others it's everyone.

Herd based cultures tend to be far more egalitarian than forest zone feudalism, but also far stricter. The elders of the tribe exercise absolute control in a very patriarchal way, but they are local and immediate and usually exercise control through extended family ties and religious authority, so can be reasoned with unlike the distant nobles of a feudal nation. Unlike among settled farmers, you can't just go off and farm a new patch of forest if you disagree with the elders: the herds belong to them and if you leave you have nothing.

The thing that nobody remembers about herdsmen is how healthy they are. Farmers remain in the same areas constantly; there's a buildup of parasites and diseases in the soil and water, and there's human waste to dispose of near where they live. Irrigated-zone farming is worse than forest-zone farming, but disease is always present for farmers. By contrast, herd tribes move around; this means they can avoid the worst areas and they don't get buildups of waste and parasites in the same place. This doesn't just mean that fewer of them die: it means that the children grow up healthier and so the adults are stronger, fitter and smarter.

The thing that everybody always remembers about herdsmen is their prowess in battle, and that's true. They know how to ride, they don't have a division between the armed and unarmed populations, and they live in an environment which is healthy and encourages initiative. As a result they make excellent warrior, and because everybody in the tribe can ride and hunt, everybody can fight. This means they have a larger fighting force than most equivalently sized farmer populations, but by the same token they feel defeats much more heavily - one rout can severely deplete much of their adult population.

You and I, and all the other people of the Hosts that make up most of the coalition, are descended in some way from the original nomads that rode out from the Sea of Names. Our ancestors might have interbred with the locals and settled down, but when we see them we see our own ancestry. That's no accident: herdsmen tend to be obsessed with geneology and racial purity. Possibly it's because of their experience with breeding animals.

It's an interesting thought.

Herdsmen tend to live in small communities where everybody knows everybody else. Since all wealth is on the hoof, theft and raiding between clans is very common and is a way to get wealth and status. The more nomadic peoples also end up as excellent merchants, since they can travel great distances but aren't able to craft their own tools and weapons.

Do we have a lot of herdsmen on our side?

At the moment yes, but that varies. Populations are usually small. The same amount of land might be able to support ten to a hundred times as many forest zone farmers as it does grassland zone pastorialists. However, due to the healthy lifestyle they can increase their numbers quickly. The rule of thumb is that in ten years, a population of human herdsmen can double in number as long as there's enough land. When land runs out -

- The nomadic hordes ride to conquer new land.

That's right. That's one of the reasons why we won.

That's herdsmen. Thank you. What about the riverine areas?

Anywhere near fresh water you can generally grow plants, and that means you can farm there. However, unlike the forests, there isn't always new space ready for the taking here. Whomever's in charge of the water can easily see anyone on its banks or using irrigation channels from it, and that means you can't escape taxation and the rule of law.

Oases tend to be the most exploitative in terms of government, but they're pretty small. Lake and river empires are the big ones.

Why empire? Why not kingdom?

Kings are noblemen. They rise and fall like other nobles. They have their own power bases but require the consent of their fellow nobles in order to rule. Emperors have absolute control and rely on a bureaucracy and civil service to run their lands. They have no internal opponents and there's no question of consent. Have you ever been to the Marblecliff Host?

Yes, of course.

The taxes are higher than anyone outside of the irrigated zones would tolerate. Herdsmen would laugh at it and forest farmers would run away, but there they have to put up with it. On the other hand, their infrastructure is excellent because they have the civil service and the taxes for it. More importantly, they have a culture which encourages it.

How so?

Marblecliff - and the other river Hosts - depends on its irrigation network. It's a major feat of engineering, with canals and sluices and flood defences. That's not something that a few cooperating neighbours can throw together: that takes professional engineers and architects working for a centralised authority, backed by large amounts of conscripted labour. The locals complain about it tremendously, but they all benefit from it too. It creates a culture of being willing to work for the common good in an organised way.

Living along rivers encourages people to think in terms of trade, too, which means they end up building roads. It's a paradox that the cultures which have the best natural trade routes also build most of the artificial ones, but there's a reason for that.

I've heard it said that Marblecliff is also a very, uh -

Corrupt place? Oh absolutely. Power corrupts and all that. The taxation and centralised power creates the conditions for tremendous exploitation by the chosen few. However, what people overlook is that it's stable. There's much less internecine warfare than there is in the forest or plains zones. The people in the next valley might chafe under the same tax burden that you do, but they tend not to come over and invade you.

You mentioned conscripted labour. Is that likely to happen for new settlers moving into the eastlands?

No, fortunately not. As part of their war reparations, the yrch are giving us voluntary worker gangs to help us develop the eastlands. Most of them won't be going to the riverlands, but enough will that we can get the irrigation going in a way that causes the least difficulty to the settlers.

Thank you, Mr Minister. Before we wrap up, could you tell us what advice you would give to new settlers going out to the plains and irrigated zones?

We've tried to assign settlers to the areas where their native cultures and lifestyles would fit in well. This means that if you're heading to the plains you're probably a herdsman already, in which case - enjoy! There's lots of open space, and the riverine settlements will be good places to trade. You already know what to do and the setup costs are low.

Along the rivers and the irrigated zones, we've had some difficulties. The river Hosts wanted to colonise the area as part of their home empires, with civil services that are just a branch of the existing one. We've had to put our foot down about this but it hasn't won us any friends there. The war was about liberation and freedom, of course, but everyone's entitled to their share of the spoils and the river Hosts saw that share as being a simple enlargement of their states, which was unacceptable to everyone else.

Over half of our total population is from the forest zone. As a result we've had to put significant numbers of forest settlers into the eastlands river zones. If you're among these, don't worry. Your standard of life is going to increase. The land is fantastically fertile and you can have far more of it than you had before. Trade is going to enrich your village too. You're going to need to learn to work together on a national scale rather than as communities, but we showed that we could do that when we won the war.

Mr Minister, thank you for your time.

[Shatner]

After re-reading the dwarven writeups and the mining discussions, I have concluded that this is the dwarven national anthem.

That is all.

[Shatner]

Good stuff, Laertes.

[fectin]

As an aside, you actually can do large infrastructure through individual action just fine. It's pretty rare, but you can look at things like the Seoul subway system for examples.

[Laertes]

I can't find anything about the Seoul subway system that refers to lone individuals - but now I want to. Source, s'il vous plait?

Even if you built a canal system or irrigation network as a bunch of uncoordinated individuals, you'd need people to maintain it against flooding and silting up, which requires professionals and regular maintenance. Over the long term, most real-life hydraulic empires end up being civil-service states rather than feudal states or tribal states.

[fectin]

The Wikipedia article sort-of covers it.
If you look down to where it's listing out lines and operators, those operators are all owner-operators, and they each own or partly own some chunk of the tunnels too.
There's also an "official" fare card listed in that article, but if you read on, a half dozen other formats are also accepted, and have totally different rules for maintaining balance, what gets returned, etc.

It's kind of like if you had five cell phone companies competing in the same city, all phones were unlocked and GSM, and everything was purchased through a half-dozen brokers who were also competing, anyone else could jump in at any time (constrained only by interface standards), and it all worked perfectly.

[Prak]

The character in question isn't a halfling, she's a very chibi looking human because that's how humans look in the deceptively cutesy-poo universe Erfworld takes place in. Her weapon is considered stupidly large by the conventions of the setting because she's a barbarian whose name is a cutesy-poo pronunciation of "the muscles". Not that that has anything to do with your point; I'm just picking a nit.

Ah, my bad. I stopped reading when he took a break and did text only updates (ie, tl;dr)

So, with the talk of orcs in the Alignment thread, and dealing with Orc tribes in Skyrim, I started thinking about Orc culture. There are definitely some interesting things that can be done (I thought about saying that the human fear-scent was the same scent to orcish noses as the scent of orcish arousal, for one thing, but rejected this because it makes it very difficult for humans and orcs to ever truly live together, which is something I want to at least be possible, if not more than).

So, in the spirit of Laertes' IC posts, here's the Orc Perspective (for my particular version of Greyhawk).

Sympathy for the Orcs

"We believe we were created by the great she-spirit Womb-of-Darkness, and she gave us the last spec of Oerth that no race had yet claimed--the caves and surface darkness.

The dwarves had been given the mountains and deep-caves, the elves the forest, the fields to humans and halflings, and the gnomes had already taken the hills after leaving the dwarves. The underdark had yet to be taken by the outcast elves, but it was home to horrors and aberrations. All that was left was caves, and even they were already home to cunning great beasts and the roads of deadly monsters to the surface. She knew that only the strong could survive, and that the weak need be left to perish, lest they drag us with them.

Gods often demand great deeds and works and faith from their creations. Womb-of-Darkness demanded the greatest task of us--survival. She did not care how, and she had no desire for towering golden idols or dedicated grottos or vast empires. All she cared for was that her children prove worthy of her effort in a world were the very plane was against them.

We're still here so far, so I hope she's proud.

When you're an orc, you live as if a soldier under perpetual siege. There may not be an elven spear or dwarven hammer for leagues, but there may as well be. The fertile fields, bountiful seas, rich mountains and verdant forests are all held tightly by the old races, with not a spit of arable land for a single orc tribe. I don't know what you all do with all that land, but it must be great indeed that my tribe cannot settle down on a single acre and scratch a living from the dust that doesn't require starvation and blood and choking down meat full of maggots the scavengers wouldn't even touch. We came to the banquet of Oerth, and found only crumbs. ...and even those crumbs were taken from us. The dwarves came and saw our meagre plates, they grabbed them from our clinging hands, licked them clean, then told the other races that they'd had a plate towering with food, but we came along and took it, burning it instead of eating it, leaving them nothing but bare plates to show. All because the dwarves found the caves, and our crude ironwork, and in their avarice wanted even that. The shame of the orcs is that we lost to an army of miners who only occasionally fight.

Hm? What do I mean occasionally? Bah. Every orc fights. Fighting is the orc way of life--from the brood pits to the grave, an orc fights for everything. In birth we fight the spectre of death, and when we die, it's because we've been killed in battle. There are no orcs who die of old age. Any orc who feels that end coming goes and picks a fight, whether they can win or not, whether they can stand or must drag themselves with their arms, an orc goes down fighting. You pink-skins have this cute concept of "non-combatants," children and women and elders who somehow don't have to fight, but yet still get fed. Orcs don't have this concept. The old, sick, young, even women bellies swollen with young, are all expected to hold a sword or hammer or ax or spear as best they can when the tribe is attacked. We may not send them on raids, but then, a raiding party is neither every able-bodied male orc. If an entire tribe raids a village, it's because they were traveling nearby and were desperate for food or medicine or saw a poorly defended chance to stop wandering, to settle for just a moment, and live like you soft pink-skins. To survive without having to tear survival from the grave every morning.

An orc tribe that is attacked is an army in waiting. Every member of the tribe who is present will pick up a weapon and fight. Even pitlings who crawled from their mother's womb two minutes prior will not suffer to be put down by some cruel adventurer's sword without doing their damnedest to take at least one finger with them. They will all--how was it one of your skalds put it? Ah yes- they will not "go quiet into that good night." They will rage against the death of the light of survival, even as that light burns the eyes from our skulls. Whenever some new Corelleon-to-be gets it in his ear to wipe us from Oerth, he will have to FIGHT FOR IT, GRUUMSH DAMN HIM!

Hrmm... apologies. Hm? Oh, Gruumsh. Yes, he exists, no he did not create us. Is that what the crazy bastard is saying these days? rmmm... he was a berserker, centuries or more ago, it's hard to keep track. He found truth in another pink-skin saying--"The best defense is a good offense." One night when he was blind with drink-rage, he started arguing with his chief again--likely as drunk as he was--about a belief he'd held his whole life--that the orcs should take the mantle of predator and fight the elves for territory, steal the forests from them, even if we had to burn them down. Gruumsh was drunk, and he did what so many berserkers are constantly advised against doing by their tribe's shamans--he challenged his chief. Make no mistake--shamans don't caution against this because they believe the berserkers are weak, no, they fear the berserkers too strong. A berserker chief would in all likelihood take his tribe into a war that would send them all to the warrior's burial pit--an affront to the gift Womb-of-Darkness gave us.

Unfortunately, Womb-in-Darkness' law is clear, and final... a chief has very few options for declining a challenge without suffering dishonor, or insulting the orc who issued the challenge. The most common way for the chief to do so is to declare that the challenge would negatively impact a larger struggle, and to postpone it. The tribe had just finished a raid, and were in a time of glut. There was no larger challenge (other than survival, but few chiefs are clever enough to cite this), and he was too drink-dumb to think of an alternative. He took the challenge, and the mad Gruumsh won. Decisively. He then, soon after, passed out from his drink. When he awoke, he, and his tribe, found himself the new chief, with no options for either, only the consequence of suffering for his foolishness.

He spent a good while in the chief tent. He called for shamans, women, and more booze. Ultimately, he decided to use his new power to make orkind realize he'd been right all along--that the rightful role for orkind was to shake the elves from their safe forests or burn them all in the failing.

Clearly, he failed in both counts. But he brought enough orcs under his banner--even, or especially, after he'd lost his eye--that he became a new god. Precise timing is uncertain at this point, and the fact that time is more akin to a vague suggestion for the gods makes it even harder to know for certain, but it's believed that Gruumsh at this point, desperate to show himself right, signed a pact with Iuz, the mad half-fiend of human birth who made himself a god, that led to his ascension. This goes to explain the fact that so many orcs live in the Pomarj, and march under Iuz' banner. Even orcs who march under the banners of other would-be dark lords can be easily understood.

Yes, understood. I take it you've lived an easy life, pink-skin. Yeah, well, go find some pink-child who's grown up knowing only the gutters and the boots of passersby. Offer them dinner every night, a bed, or even a safe space on a stone floor with furs to cover it, clothes to wear, and, most of all, power--power to be the passerby who kicks the cur in the street, and all they need do is kill who you tell them to. Watch them leap at that chance. Oh sure, they'll be hesitant at first, but as soon as they know you're honestly offering it, they'll leap at the chance faster than if you threw your pasty crust on the floor. This is what dark-lords offer orkind, add to it the blind eye of their masters when the orcs find some weak pink-skin woman to slake their other lusts upon, and you can now know why orcs so commonly ride under a dark-lord's sign.

Yes, pink-skin. You recoil in horror. You claim that it's still barbaric, that my race is monstrous. But tell me--have you forgotten that when a pink-army conquers a village, there is a special term, warbrides, for the women who are taken as prizes? Do you forget that your vaunted paladins are known for putting orc and goblin and kobold children to the sword when they avenge a raid? Do you forget that you know when an orc-camp has been "dealt with" because you see a long smoke column curling into the sky in the direction from which the raids came? You pink-skins are no less villains than my brothers and sisters who kill and conquer for a nightly stew. You just write the history books and cast yourselves as the heroes.

Hrmmm.... yeah. Print that. Sure. I know you won't. Yeah, yeah, editors... sure. Ha. Even if you did, no pink-skin reader would believe a word of it came from a 'greentusk.'"