Multi-Species Worlds in Fantasy: a Thought Excercise

[NecronLord]

Necronlord, do you have a problem with grammar and context? The reason I used the word "evolution" in that statement was specifically to exclude magical explanations (something people do all the time here). They are explicitly not what I'm asking about, and I clarified that they weren't what I was asking about several posts before you showed up. Also, contextually, I used Pathfinder as an example, not as the sole setting I am asking about. You treated the thread as a Pathfinder thread when it is actually a generic High Fantasy thread-- that's why my first objection was to point out that the Merfolk I'm using were pulled from Magic: the Gathering.

I have barely touched on it because my understanding of Magic the Gathering extends to ‘it is a card game’ ‘it produces some lovely art’ and ‘its fiction has some really super-powerful magic-user types called Planeswalkers in it’ and that’s about it. I have played it all of twice. However, it’s my understanding that gods, planeswalkers and similar things have likely shaped development of species in that setting too.

You are interpreting my question in a way that is fundamentally incorrect, and you appear to be cherry picking my statements in the OP to support that interpretation. That's kind of annoying, 'cause that's the kind of thing that tends to hijack threads even when done in good faith. This thread was inspired by one that got derailed, after all...

If you want such a comprehensive answer, feel free to ask and I'll answer with respect to your world,

Yes, please do. I have nothing wrong with your points about artificial selection, its just... well, nothing I am unaware of. Wouldn't artificially selected races tend to be selected to have specialized purposes? That's one problem I see with that idea. Fantasy races tend to have their niches and schticks, but they are nonetheless usually generalists.

But… that describes a great deal of fantasy. The Triton Fortune Hunter you linked is clearly substantially different from This Merfolk Wizard who is again clearly specialised differently from This Lady who is different to these guys with the fins on their arms who are different to this guy with the dorsal crests. In fact googling MTG Merfolk seems to bring up no two that look the same. Likewise lots of fantasy, particularly RPGs, proliferates with types of dwarf, elf, halfling, etc, that I see as specialized, even if only cosmetically.

These may not all come from the same world, or what have you, but they’re all presumably related in that they’re wholly or partially hominid, and they’re all different breeds of merfolk, and presumably specialised for different tasks – or simply bred for their varying looks – and some appear to be hybridized by different creatures. For the purposes of artificial selection, ‘looking cool’ is a trait people breed for, hence why so many breed of goldfish have twin tails that offer no survival benefit in the wild (and indeed a penalty).

But, on with your example:

The reason I’ve not really replied to the example of the world you’ve given, is because it seems to me like asking ‘if we dropped off Grey Wolves, Chihuahuas, Greyhounds, Rottweilers and Portuguese Water Spaniels (best metaphor for merfolk I can think of) on an isolated continent, which would prosper best?’ It’s a fair bet one wouldn’t expect the wolves to go, but they’re the ones that need protection in reality, because historically they’ve tended to be the ones humans have hated. For the same reason, I don’t think dropping fantasy races, isolated from magic and their original contexts, on a planet tells us much about their relative survivability in their normal environment, nor how plausible catfolk might or might not be in Pathfinder/MTG/etc.

But, with that disclaimer out of the way; I imagine that they’d all survive for quite some time, they fundamentally seem to have the same level of intelligence.

Small Breeds (Goblins, Halflings)

The description you linked of goblins gives them characteristics like ‘childlike’ and ‘cowardly’ so perhaps they would be at a disadvantage. Halflings and goblins appear to be small, but that’s not fundamentally a survival challenge, various ‘pygmy’ peoples such as the Efé (apologies for the terminology, there doesn’t seem to be a better catch-all term I’m aware of, and the comparison to fictional people is not intended to be demeaning, and brief googling doesn’t reveal any better terminology to use), though larger than our fictional halflings and goblins demonstrate that people can hunt and perform agriculture despite being smaller than the human average. Homo forensis died out, but was by all indications not comparably intelligent to homo sapiens, with a very small brain-case, while homo-sapiens with smaller than average stature have survived to the present day just fine.

Behaviourally, I would conjecture that goblins’ cowardly behaviour is not a result of systematic oppression and would not be a factor in our example, so functionally they’ll be in the same category as the halflings, except confined to eating meat only.

Verdict: Survivable

Carnivores (Goblins, Catfolk)
There’s no question that a territory can sustain large carnivores; lions, tigers, Polar Bears etc exist. Our question then should be can our meat eating goblins and catfolk become apex preators and survive that way? And of course in past eras, giant land predators like T-Rex, Cave Lions, Phorusrhacos and what have you also existed for thousands of years each.

There’s no reasonable question that our catfolk and goblins can make kills, they’re stone age, so spears, spear-throwers and possibly slings, are going to be in their arsenal, as well as traps, fire and other tools. They could kill off the viable prey of their environment as they began to do well, but one would imagine they would survive regular cycles of famine when they did so, or be nomadic.

A carrying capacity will exist in their environment, but they may regularly hunt themselves into peril, but, being intelligent, presumably they’ll learn, and obviously their society will take off if they learn writing and animal husbandry.

The linked description gives catfolk a wisdom penalty, but describes them as excellent at working together, that’s almost certainly going to be very useful for them. The curiosity will also help them in all sorts ways on the civilizational timescale.

Verdict: Goblins Survive

Merfolk

Merfolk are dicier. Assuming they can make spears and things, they can probably do reasonably well to defend themselves from predators, and the other species aren’t going to get them. The lack of fire underwater is a serious problem if they need to spend too much time underwater, though, and they might be inviable, or at least be regularly predated. I imagine they’d quickly adopt the most land-dwelling lifestyle possible, for use of the advantages of fire, in terms of warmth, defence and cooking.

I can envision them basically becoming fantasy Phoenicians over time; extensive bathing culture, but otherwise land-dwelling sea-trading people.

Verdict: Move to coastal lands

Development

As for each other, well, as we see in history, people of equivalent intelligence have had their destinies determined by the availability of congenial crops, accessible copper and tin deposits, then iron then coal and so forth, and beasts of burden, as well as climate; the people who end up in dense forests will not develop technology as quickly as those who have plentiful space for agriculture and settlement, and I don’t really think any of these species would die out on their own merits, they’d be influenced, but they all have a big human-like brain that can solve problems for them.

I see no reason to believe any of them would be permanently alienated from one another, of that multi-breed cultures couldn't form, nor any reason to believe that say, human-led-genocide notions are any more probable than Rule Zendikar, Zendikar rules the Waves. Access to domestic-able animals and raw materials are far more important than physical stature when it comes to developing the means to exploit your environment.

[Elheru Aran]

A random thought: there's no fire underwater, of course... but there's volcanoes and lava, isn't there?

Of course the question there becomes would the merfolk be able to endure or survive the heating of the water around them from such a heat source...

Alternatively, they might have some form of native magic that simulates fire or induces direct thermal effects upon objects, a 'heat ray' as it were. But that's perhaps extending too far into magical effects for Formless' comfort...

[NecronLord]

A random thought: there's no fire underwater, of course... but there's volcanoes and lava, isn't there?

Of course the question there becomes would the merfolk be able to endure or survive the heating of the water around them from such a heat source...

Alternatively, they might have some form of native magic that simulates fire or induces direct thermal effects upon objects, a 'heat ray' as it were. But that's perhaps extending too far into magical effects for Formless' comfort...

Well these ones can get onto land and do their forging there, so it's only super important in the stone age, when fire's a big deal for scaring predators away. After that, they'd be a sticky proposition to fight for the same reason the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Vikings, the British Empire or the United States was/are, because they'd almost certainly be very good at picking any coastal target they please and able to retreat whenever it pleases them, and do their industry/commerce/art/literature/education in land settlements, perhaps Islands, or things like Venice.

[NecronLord]

To elaborate a bit on how the Merfolk, with presumably limited ability to settle away from water, could prosper, consider the importance of coastal dwelling and rivers in human settlement, the likes of early settlements in the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Yellow, Yangtze and other rivers for human cultures, even today, I can't think immediately of many capital cities that aren't on rivers or coasts, Washington, London, Paris, and say Berlin, Beijing to lesser extent, are all on sites that would be immediately accessible to three-day-land seafolk.

If the merfolk can survive for a time long enough to make expeditions out of the water then they can access most of the prime land for settlement, and perhaps build their residences in the water or on the coast and emerge to work on land (and what an amazing fortress it would make, every merfolk settlement would be actually in the moat!) - Obviously I'm presuming they can manage up to days without going too far from the water, if they're more on the order of hours, then they're less likely to become the drivers of technological advancement.

[Simon_Jester]

One problem for classical merfolk is that they are effectively quite handicapped on land. Without legs, all they can do is sort of... slither... so they pay the penalties of high body mass and have an inefficient method of locomotion. Plus being unusually sensitive to any roughness or discomfort in the ground, I'd expect.

Seals can survive for quite a while out of the water- but they don't live there, for obvious reasons.

Merfolk with weird magical abilities to suddenly conjure up legs for themselves when on land are an entirely different thing, of course.

Necronlord, do you have a problem with grammar and context? The reason I used the word "evolution" in that statement was specifically to exclude magical explanations (something people do all the time here). They are explicitly not what I'm asking about, and I clarified that they weren't what I was asking about several posts before you showed up. Also, contextually, I used Pathfinder as an example, not as the sole setting I am asking about. You treated the thread as a Pathfinder thread when it is actually a generic High Fantasy thread...

Well, the question about generic high fantasy was pretty well addressed before NecronLord showed up, I'd say.

What it comes down to is that you are very unlikely to encounter multiple intelligent species on the same planet at similar stages of cultural and technological development unless:

1) Some non-natural or exotic force promoted the emergence of several intelligent races simultaneously, or nearly so.
2) The intelligent species that exist are not in a position to directly compete for the same resources, either because of needing different resources, or because of being unable to struggle over territory in an effectual way.
3) The competition only plays out over a short timescale (e.g. Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthals existed for hundreds of years in the same region, probably even thousands, but not tens of thousands).

If (1) is violated, you get the "apes or angels" problem. The Iron Age is a slice of human history roughly two or three thousand years thick, layered on top of a hundred thousand years or more of Stone Age prehistory, and with an unknown but possibly large layer of technologically advanced 'high civilization' on top of it in turn. If you started polling intelligent species at random points in their history, the odds are most of them would either be cavemen or super-advanced beings, or would have already gone extinct due to natural or artificial causes. So there shouldn't be any Iron Age species that 'naturally' emerged in the last ten thousand years, nor should there be any Iron Age species that 'naturally' have existed for a million years. A world in which there are many species all at roughly the same level of technological and social development is necessarily an "unnatural" equilibrium by the standards of what we know on Earth.

If (2) is violated (say, if three different species all compete for the same land and resources and live next to each other), the odds are that this will end in one or more of the species being wiped out, unless supernatural or other 'exotic' barriers are in place to prevent such an event.

If (3) is violated, well... you'd better have rules (1) and (2) in play or the equilibrium of many species is not stable.
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NecronLord is pointing out that (2) and (3) are big deals, which is entirely reasonable.

If you want such a comprehensive answer, feel free to ask and I'll answer with respect to your world,

Yes, please do. I have nothing wrong with your points about artificial selection, its just... well, nothing I am unaware of. Wouldn't artificially selected races tend to be selected to have specialized purposes? That's one problem I see with that idea. Fantasy races tend to have their niches and schticks, but they are nonetheless usually generalists.

Thing is, the role they're selected for might be "serve the wizard Yogboliax," in which case they might well be generalists who simply go find something else to do after Yogboliax dies. Or their purpose might be "worship the god of the forests" or "serve in the mines of the Mutator Lords," in which case as long as they keep doing so, the god of the forests (or the Mutator Lords) will have no reason to over-specialize them.

Also, intelligent beings tend to think of things to do other than what they are 'specialized' for.

Plus, when you get right down to it a lot of fantasy races ARE overspecialized. They live in a single unique biome and fail to thrive in other biomes. Or they are so consistently aggressive and warlike that they're incredibly bad at almost everything aside from warfare- eternally doomed to be some evil overlord's minions, because they cannot find cultural purpose or a relevant role in the world without that defining who and what they are.

I am reminded of the Dungeonomicon and associated works, which have their faults, but make some interesting points on this general subject:

http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Tome
http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Races_of ... rld_at_War

For instance...

Orcs are the product of a generations-long war against the other races. Unfortunately, they haven’t realized that they’ve lost this war. Why the war starts is simple: orcs are, as a race, stupid, ugly, and weak willed, but very strong. Being stupid, ugly and weak willed means that other races tend to always get the upper hand on them and tend to always get the better end of any deal, and other races also tend to not want Orcs around. Orc goods are always a little worse than goods produced by other races, and orcs are generally a little rowdier and less pleasant to be around.

At some point the orcs realize that they are much better in battle than other races, and they decide to fight for a little respect and fair treatment. Then the war is on. The only problem is that orcs win battles, but lose wars. Other races have natural advantages or just greater intelligence, so any war tends to go badly for the orcs in the long run. Powerful melee combat ability doesn’t mean much when elves attack from the bushes with longbows and then run way and all the races have superior battle plans and ability to lead their troops.

Once the war has been decisively won, the orcs are driven out of their lands and pushed into some badland, hinterland, or some other undesirable terrain far away from trade routes and civilization and usually full of monsters. The other races then go back to their lives, but here’s the trick: the orcs don’t. As far as the orcs are concerned, the war is still on because the orcs are still stuck in the worst land in their area, scraping by in the wilderness with minimal natural resources and almost no access to the products of civilization like arable farmlands, centuries-old cities, and trade goods like the products of skilled craftsmen from other lands (which can include magic items).

All of orc culture comes back to this issue. Orcs are constantly warring on other races not out of innate need for violence or evil inclinations, but because they are fighting for their survival as a race in lands considered undesirable by every other major race. Orc raids are not only for food and booty, but for all the things that orc culture cannot produce like tools and weapons. Without these things they cannot survive in the wilderness, and they cannot produce them in the wilderness living as nomads who hunt and gather for survival.

Orc hordes are not an indication of warlike racial tendencies, but of population issues. Once the orcish population in the badlands grows too large to be supportable, they must conquer new lands or else face death by famine and disease. Hordes are formed of "excess" young males that are sent off to carve out new lands or die trying... both results ease the burden on the few resources in the badlands.

The fact that orcs are constantly in a war footing means that they easily offend other races with their tactics. Rather than fight elven guerilla fighters who sap their resources and manpower, they’ll burn the forest down, and rather than fight dwarves in their millennia-old and heavily entrenched deepnesses filled with traps, the orcs will collapse the tunnels and dig the booty out of the rubble. The fact that most races fight defensively means that orcs only gain tactical advantage by being extremely offensively-minded. The fact that orcs do not have supplies coming from the badlands means that while they have no supply trains to cut, they must conduct blitzkrieg-style war or face starvation, and they cannot afford to hold troops in reserve. They often just don’t have the resources needed to conduct honorable or civilized war, and their attacks seldom have finesse or timing on their side, meaning that they only win battles through overwhelming force. Night raids are their specialty, as they have darkvision and are sensitive to light.

The flip side of this is that this is the behavior of a species which is headed for extinction as soon as someone decides to organize a crusade into the otherwise uninteresting badlands to put an end to the orcish threat once and for all...

This is the sort of thing that would happen a lot when you have several intelligent species potentially competing for the same resources. The ones with inherent disadvantages (such as being stupid and bad at operating in large organized groups) get shoved out into the worst available land. They are then choked out of existence, either slowly (if they are not a major nuisance or threat to other species), or quickly (if they do pose a nuisance or threat).

[NecronLord]

Yeah, traditional merfolk are basically condemned to require magic to develop anything but simple tools, or perhaps an inordinately long time. These guys seem to basically be Mon Calamari though.

[Simon_Jester]

In Magic the Gathering there are essentially five kinds of magic, associated with five kinds of mana: white, green, red, blue, and black. Each also has an associated terrain type.

In general, when crafting a new setting for stories (and cards), Wizards of the Coast will assign each type of mana to a different dominant intelligent species. Green mana is traditionally associated with forests and there are usually though not always elves associated with said forests. Red mana is traditionally associated with the mountains, and WotC has somehow settled on goblins to represent those mountains

Blue mana, which is associated with the oceans, and which represents the magic of the air, the sea, and of the mind... they very often pick merfolk to be the dominant blue-mana users of a setting. This means they've probably gone through ten or so iterations of "merfolk" in the past twenty years, all of them different.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd say, halflings against humans yes, dwarves against humans maybe because it depends on what you think a 'dwarf' looks like. Dwarves that are just 25% smaller than humans in all directions would get their asses kicked, dwarves who just happen to be short and broad and muscular and burly might be able to handle themselves pretty well in that sense. At least, to handle themselves long enough for a conflict between emerging species to persist over long periods of time.

Reach is a killer. You're just ignoring what size actually means with edged weapons, polearms and bows. This isn't a matter of humans just having some incremental advantage in how much they can bench press. Its a matter of when one side makes first contact every single time N squared means the other side gets completely destroyed. The same situation the Persian light infantry found themselves in against the Greek hoplites, except the humans would gain this would a much wider range of weapons rather then just with clumsy full pikes.

It doesn't have to be true literally every single time either, but it might well approach so. They could be the same strength and the combo of greater reach, greater ability to balance long polearms, because the hilt portion can be longer, and higher upper body momentum would still be decisive. The more primitive the fighting the more all of this would matter too, and the more likely humans would be to inflict complete genocides after victory, which they would be all the better placed to do since they'd have a greater ability to overwhelm fortifications and literally to run down a beaten opponent on the field of battle.

Humans would ruthlessly exploit these advantages too, it was already common enough to place larger warriors in front of the smaller, when the enemy is must[i/] be smaller you could go even further and make specialist weapons to further exploit this.

The Dwarves only major advantage would be they could breed more people off the same land in some contexts, but that in turn would only matter if farmable land was scare (and then for improving land humans might have an advantage in turn) or populations were high. Which goes back to my assertion, that low populations over long periods which are simply not in direct competition is what would be required to ideas like this to work.

[Simon_Jester]

Okay, you're right, I'm not factoring in reach.

Although I'm not kidding when I say that I've seen fantasy portrayals of dwarves where their 'reach' with their arms would be at most a few inches less than that of a human on average. And an advantage that small is almost inevitably going to disappear into the background noise along with, say, being able to make higher-quality weapons and armor consistently (which is a standard dwarven schtick).

I will freely concede the general point that any humanoid species whose limb length and physique is such that they average several inches less reach than a human will be at a massive disadvantage in battles against humans.

Conversely, I would expect physically gigantic races of humanoids to have a similarly decisive advantage against humans, though. A race of giant thug-people who average seven feet tall would be as invincible to premodern humans as premodern humans would be to a bunch of 4.5-foot dwarves.
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The only times the size disparity becomes anything other than very relevant is when it is stupidly small (i.e. no more than a few inches of height and reach)... or so great that it means the two species aren't even living in the same world as each other despite being next door neighbors. Pixies the size of rabbits, or giants the size of trees, are so physically different from normal humans that combat between the two is almost a meaningless concept- any conflict would have more in common with pest control (for the huge species confronting the tiny one), or assassination (for tiny species trying to kill off a huge being with poison or something).

[Broomstick]

Well, the whole thing about poison is a good point - the short-statured humans in Africa make extensive use of poisons to help take down big game. Like elephants. I mean, really, there are historical accounts of pygmies taking down elephants with a combination of traps and poisoned wooden spears. Actually a lot of human groups make use of poisons. South America is well known for that, from the "poison arrow" frogs to the coumadin, which was originally a hunting poison of the South American natives.

If you have the shorter of the two societies discover/develop poisons early then that might offset some of the advantages of the taller/greater reach species - at least until the taller folks get poisons of their own. If the shorter folks get crossbows or guns first that will, again, offset the advantages of sheer height.

But all other things being equal yes, the taller people will be at an advantage in combat.

[Formless]

Alternatively, they might have some form of native magic that simulates fire or induces direct thermal effects upon objects, a 'heat ray' as it were. But that's perhaps extending too far into magical effects for Formless' comfort...

Nah, I'm not trying to be a douchebag about it-- besides which, Merfolk could always just come on land to do manufacturing. The real problem I see merfolk having with metals is that the damn stuff corrodes in sea water even if they could forge it. Unless they have some sort of protective paints or whatever they could apply, and I don't see anyone finding a way of purifying titanium any time soon.

In Magic the Gathering there are essentially five kinds of magic, associated with five kinds of mana: white, green, red, blue, and black. Each also has an associated terrain type.

In general, when crafting a new setting for stories (and cards), Wizards of the Coast will assign each type of mana to a different dominant intelligent species. Green mana is traditionally associated with forests and there are usually though not always elves associated with said forests. Red mana is traditionally associated with the mountains, and WotC has somehow settled on goblins to represent those mountains

The designers have said that the reason goblins are the face of red mana is that traditional dwarves are boring creatures (although dwarves have appeared in Magic before, in red). They once, as a joke, did a blog post where they showed the "evolution of the dwarf" into something they would find interesting. Drop the axes, drop the beards, make them greedier, if they are going to be miners give them cave adaptations, etc. etc. until finally they arrive at a creature that might be described as a duergar, but which they concluded was basically a goblin.

Kithkin are the M:tG take on hobbits/halflings, though. So I guess they find hobbits more interesting. I agree. But Kithkin are white aligned and love grasslands, because they needed a white aligned race that wasn't humans.

When they want to they can make quite civilized goblins, though. For instance, Mercadia was secretly (or not so secretly) run by a conspiracy of goblins that were in turn loyal to Phyrexia. Clever bastards, just not very wise in their choice of allies. Plus sometimes they make goblins skilled artificers, and one schtick of goblins is that they are always the only people who have gunpowder. Always.

Blue mana, which is associated with the oceans, and which represents the magic of the air, the sea, and of the mind... they very often pick merfolk to be the dominant blue-mana users of a setting. This means they've probably gone through ten or so iterations of "merfolk" in the past twenty years, all of them different.

Yeah, although that isn't unique to merfolk. Elves and goblins have also gone through iterations as well, like the half-deer-half-fascist elves on Lorwyn, or the goblins of the Japanese inspired Kamigawa setting who had turtle shells growing on their backs. The appearance of elves tends to return periodically to the familiar appearance fantasy fans expect, though.

They actually had a period where they didn't want to do merfolk anymore precisely because of the question "how do these people interact with the surface dwellers, again?" It was always something they knew was silly because so many other sea creatures in blue had the same problem, but they nonetheless experimented with a gray alien inspired race called the Vedalkin. But fans really wanted to see a return of merfolk, so finally the designers decided to return to the idea they had in Mercadia where the merfolk had legs and feet, but took out the bit where the merfolk used magic to accomplish this. That was the Zendikar iteration, and it seemed like an agreeable enough compromise to fans that they haven't changed it.

[Sea Skimmer]

Okay, you're right, I'm not factoring in reach.

Although I'm not kidding when I say that I've seen fantasy portrayals of dwarves where their 'reach' with their arms would be at most a few inches less than that of a human on average.

Well people can use whatever lables they want in fantasy, but that's pretty non compliant with the idea given the span of human sizes.

And an advantage that small is almost inevitably going to disappear into the background noise along with, say, being able to make higher-quality weapons and armor consistently (which is a standard dwarven schtick).

Yeah they tend to have that, but that only works in a entirely static situation, which is typical of fantasy, but not appropriate if one wishes to invoke questions of evolution that by definition require highly dynamic change. The Dwarfs would need to hold such an advantage for millennia spans of time, yet if were stuck with an earth sized planet and humans reproducing like humans the decisive conflicts for this will would probably be in the bronze age!

Conversely, I would expect physically gigantic races of humanoids to have a similarly decisive advantage against humans, though. A race of giant thug-people who average seven feet tall would be as invincible to premodern humans as premodern humans would be to a bunch of 4.5-foot dwarves.

Which is exactly the problem at stake. Even very disorganized bands of 7ft Orks would just whip out lesser species that had multiple advantages, as long as the Orks were not actually as dumb as animals. Human vs 4.5ft Dwarf isn't nearly as bad as it can be.

Well, the whole thing about poison is a good point - the short-statured humans in Africa make extensive use of poisons to help take down big game.

The environmental stability of animal poisons tends to be extremely low though, so its not really feasible to go equip an army with them unless you have glass containers at the least. This is pretty true of military toxins too, which is a big reason why so few different chemical agents ever crop up. Its not for want of compounds which are merely toxic.

Like elephants. I mean, really, there are historical accounts of pygmies taking down elephants with a combination of traps and poisoned wooden spears. Actually a lot of human groups make use of poisons. South America is well known for that, from the "poison arrow" frogs to the coumadin, which was originally a hunting poison of the South American natives.

Many also used it in warfare, but with rather limited results because you generally needed to apply the poison immediately before use and inability to store it. This is not a hard limit for fantasy but honestly, if were talking about trying to make 30+ species balanced with each other you have to consider just how many different niche advantages that's going to start requiring to tier everyone with each other! If it was just 2-3 then it would be far easier.

Comparisons to hunting are not useful in general though, animals are just stupid. While many use crude group tactics they lack the forethought and deliberate planning of human intelligence, and tend to be pretty predictable about those tactics. They don't do things like actively destroy traps or indeed seldom fully exploit their full physical strength in battle because evolution (vs other animals) generally doesn't favor such risky behavior. I'd expect pygmies could take down a T-rex if they wanted, but they'd still be in deep crap against some 7ft Orks.

If you have the shorter of the two societies discover/develop poisons early then that might offset some of the advantages of the taller/greater reach species - at least until the taller folks get poisons of their own.

That's the problem, an advantage like that just isn't going to last for centuries if they're living side by side the whole time. Constant warfare is an excellent driver of innovation.

[Simon_Jester]

Okay, you're right, I'm not factoring in reach.

Although I'm not kidding when I say that I've seen fantasy portrayals of dwarves where their 'reach' with their arms would be at most a few inches less than that of a human on average.

Well people can use whatever lables they want in fantasy, but that's pretty non compliant with the idea given the span of human sizes.

Typically when this happens, the artist is drawing dwarves who have arms proportionately longer than a human, on a shorter body.

I will again note that there are a lot of fantasy versions of dwarves where this isn't in play and dwarves would definitely be giving up six inches or more of reach to the average human.

And an advantage that small is almost inevitably going to disappear into the background noise along with, say, being able to make higher-quality weapons and armor consistently (which is a standard dwarven schtick).

Yeah they tend to have that, but that only works in a entirely static situation, which is typical of fantasy, but not appropriate if one wishes to invoke questions of evolution that by definition require highly dynamic change. The Dwarfs would need to hold such an advantage for millennia spans of time, yet if were stuck with an earth sized planet and humans reproducing like humans the decisive conflicts for this will would probably be in the bronze age!

True in that the dwarves would need to invent metalworking first and keep a decisive edge of skill and innovation in that area for all time; it's been portrayed that way more than once but I agree it's less than likely from a realistic point of view.

[Purple]

It might happen if we throw in environmental factors. Like say dwarves evolved or were pushed into mountainous areas that happen to have a much higher availability of good quality copper and tin. So even if the others catch up technologically the dwarves can simply outproduce them. So a dwarven quality breastplate might be no better technologically than a human one but a dwarven army can afford to give its troops full plate armor at a time when humans can only afford the bare minimum.

[Simon_Jester]

And yet such an advantage evaporates when everyone discovers iron, because while tin deposits are rare, iron is all over the place. Which is actually more or less what happened to a number of Bronze Age nations; cheap iron weapons made it easy for invaders who were in many respects more primitive to overrun them.

Skimmer made a valid point in that technological advantages of any kind tend to be short-lived. They don't last 'forever' on the timescale of a human civilization, the way biological advantages do.

Also, while such advantages might conceivably somehow balance a "one on one" relationship for very long periods of time, they would become very unstable as the number of species being balanced against one another increases.

[Purple]

The OP did specify that he wants these civilizations to get the iron age. And my description fits that requirement. It also serves to as you pointed out produce a sudden spike of drama right there at the start of it for extra points.

[Sea Skimmer]

It might happen if we throw in environmental factors. Like say dwarves evolved or were pushed into mountainous areas that happen to have a much higher availability of good quality copper and tin. So even if the others catch up technologically the dwarves can simply outproduce them. So a dwarven quality breastplate might be no better technologically than a human one but a dwarven army can afford to give its troops full plate armor at a time when humans can only afford the bare minimum.

That doesn't work out too well strategically. Mountains are very hard to log without machinery and bad places to grow food and raise livestock. Metalworking requires immense amounts of free labor and fuel, not just access to ore. Exploiting coal requires much more effort and areas geologically rich in coal tend to be lean on metals, a soft vs hard rock issue. Coal territory would also be pretty bad for traditional Dwarven underground living ideas, though of course nothing requires they do so.

It isn't for nothing that people deforested entire countries before they tried to exploit coal for smelting, even though it was used for home heating at the time of the pyramids. Coking oven are large fixed infastructure, while wood could be converted to charcoal on the spot given nothing more then a supply of dirt and water and still made for cleaner fuel. Straight coal will produce horrifically impure metals, and even then most coal is still unsuitable for metallurgical coking.

Sure you might find some niches where everything matches up, but if its at the cost of ceding the far more productive plains and lowlands to humans and other larger species then shear weight of numbers would become pretty decisive unless the later were entirely metal poor. One might also ask how exactly the Dwarves would ever establish these niches in the first place, but that's not an absolute kind of question. I would think a wetland area would favor the evolution of a smaller species more so then rough mountains, but I suppose it could go many ways.

[NecronLord]

Well in Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, the dwarves (and everyone else) originally ceded the plains and productive lands to orcs and Morgoth's humans, as Morgoth overran kingdoms one by one setting thier underground homes are fundamentally defensive structures as well as resource gathering apparatuses, and the environment was sufficiently dangerous due to roving orcs etc that even elves lived in dwarf-constructed underground halls (Menegroth, etc) so it's more a case of being driven to the most defensible position, forcing dwarves to take to building places like Moria.

One might reasonably imagine that hobbit holes are also originally defensive - the Michel Delving in Lord of the Rings is supposedly the largest dwelling of the type and is occupied by a family clan who use it as a sort of keep, where the sheriff and mayor live, and they keep their lockup for prisoners, and have many above-ground buildings around it. Perhaps the well-to-do in later ages, like Bilbo, built their houses in the same style just as people with the money often put decorative ramparts on castles these days.

On the flip-side of course, even Morgoth built his fortress underground, for much the same reason (fear of the Valar).

Of course one of the things that can definately said for Tolkien is that he's a pretty solid worldbuilder, who went out of his way to justify why dwarves lived underground, and showed various other people (Elven Kings Thingol in the Silmarillion and Thranduil in the Hobbit have 'keeps' underground, the former explicitly built by dwarves).

In some D&D settings (particularly Mystara!), there's often a large amount of natural cave systems like the 'underdark' that pre-exists people like dwarves, gnomes, drow, etc, adopting this lifestyle, so they don't necessarily hew out the entire cave systems so much as decorate/adapt them.

Tolkien's dwarves of course, are able to work harder and longer than humans:

Since they were to come in the days of the power of Melkor, Aulë made the Dwarves strong to endure. Therefore they are stone-hard, stubborn, fast in friendship and in enmity, and they suffer toil and hunger and hurt of body more hardily than all other speaking peoples; and they live long, far beyond the span of Men, yet not for ever.’

In that setting dwarves are physically stronger too and so can presumably throw javelins further and maybe draw a potentially heavier bow than humans, if it's short enough.

Of course, in that example they're created by gods and so forth, but their phyiscal toughness, resilience to exhaustion and injury, probably make lifestyles that wouldn't be too desireable to humans tolerable to them; naturally they'd still find it easier to make land-dwelling fortresses, but in that setting they have a tendency to get demolished by trolls and balrogs it seems.

In LotR it seems that a lot of dwarf cities are natural cave systems they've fortified; Menegroth is often translated as 'thousand caves' but is literally 'thosuand excavations' but others like Moria seem to have natural open areas they've worked, and there's the city Gimli founds in the Glittering Caves at the end of the story too. Not all are necessarily partially artificial and some aren't given an origin story like the Bar-en-Nibin-noeg "House of Ransom" but at least two or three incorporate large underground spaces. Goblins also seem to like living underground in the setting; they of course seem to have been displaced from large scale land ownership by humans after the defeats of the Dark Lords.

But something is pushing these folk to build in caves, and not just dwarves, and it may be that there's many large, dry (but with potable water) cave complexes around naturally and they only have to fortify/alter them.

Dragon Age I think has the dwarf cities join natural cave systems. Some D&D setting things do too.

[Sea Skimmer]

Ceding control of the surface simply turns underground facilities into tombs. Anything intelligent will simply burn you out of it will be in a position to take no losses doing so. The defenders will simply be asphyxiated while rendered utterly helpless long before they are all dead. What's more even if they have secret exits and air shafts those will only be revealed by the attempts to exhaust smoke, and you're really pushing far past iron age technology to engineer such a facility in a worth a damn manner anyway.

The earliest known use of chemical warfare was for this purpose too, burning sulfur used against attempts at sapping under fortress walls around 400 BC or some such. In an era before mechanical ventilation defense against this would be pretty well impossible, and technology never really helped that much against this problem anyway. Air supply problems tended to become a big the reason why forts in the world wars either surrendered or had the entire garrison wiped out. The tech advances that help you build a better tomb also let you attack them even better. The Brialmont forts at Leige are prime examples of the problem of even a shallow buried fortress with no powered blowers. Conditions got horrific in some of them very quickly once they had to close up under attack. Basic problems like just cooking food come into play.

Even nuclear bunkers could typically only survive 72 hours without external air, though once you have nuclear power you at least have options on paper to engineer around it given underground well water.

Of course your stock and trade fantasy authors ignore this glaring problem, it isn't heroic enough or what have you, but it is an ancient tactic if hunters against burrowing prey and absolutely no leap of logic as a result.

Mountains may have value as refuges, but because the avenues of approach are narrow on the surface. Going underground is a horrible idea.

I'd contend that they'd actually be better off in a completely opposite situation. As nomads on the steppeland, or seafarers akin to the Polynesians. Then their small size and lower good requirements could actually be an advantage, and in the steppeland case they'd be able to field better cavalry at a much earlier point before horses were bred to modern sizes, something that only took place around ~800 AD in real life. Before that human riders couldn't be heavily armored because the gross weight was simply too high for the animals. As long as they have enough space to evade the sprawl of fortified human settlements this might work out fairly well. Though kinda goes back to my earlier thinking that you just need low population densities in general.

As seafarers the lower weight and shorter height would be a big advantage in raft-ship design, though this advantage might not mean much in combat with early ships that only had a single deck. But humans would at least not have any advantage over them in turn except when already on deck in a boarding action, and Dwarven vessels might be built with shallower draft to help them escape such. As far as day to day rowing and sailing goes smaller size should be no problem, any weakness can be compensated for with a slightly larger crew. Not like kids can't sail.

[Sea Skimmer]

Hmm in further thought I see new problems. One is that fantasy just utterly loves to have fully developed late Medieval cavalry and horses no matter the actual intended date or development. Tolkin IIRC partly avoided that by specifying mainly mail rather then plate armor but I don't think he was consistent on it. Even full mail suits would be excessively heavy for early cavalry in any event.

Problem two is that the ocean might be full of amphibious sea monsters that render low remote islands as nothing but snackbars, and three link to this one is that completely new forms of transport and or threats might exist on land as well to invalidate my assumptions. For example the open Steppe would be a very bad place to have to fight off dragons or magic T-rex packs. But hey, if only small 'islands' of land are inhabitable the odds of Dwarves and others surviving though inertia rather then combating other species directly would only go up.

[Purple]

Even full mail suits would be excessively heavy for early cavalry in any event.

Well I would not say that. The combination of a chainmail hauberk and leggings with a plate helmet was pretty much standard atire throughout most of the middle ages. And it was used by both footmen and cavalry. And if you want to look even further back to antiquity just look up the term Cataphract.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd say you need to google up when the iron age started and when cavalry was first recorded in history before you start thinking the Cataphract demonstrates anything contrary to what I said.

[Elheru Aran]

To expand on Skimmer's irritation:

Weapons are almost universally developed first. Protection comes second.

Cavalry uniformly follows a pattern of being first very lightly armed (bows, javelins, a helmet and shield if that), being used largely for scouting and harassment. Due to weight issues-- mail armour is pretty heavy if it's going to protect you suitably, no way around that-- you don't really see proper heavy cavalry developing until you have organized militaries that center around their use as a shock force to break enemy lines. There's a reason the Cataphractii didn't develop until, what, the 300-400 AD's? even though the Romans had the technology for them before then.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, Skimmer's argument is that until, oh... some time around 500 to 1000 AD, horses capable of carrying armored men reliably simply did not exist, or at least were not available in enough quantity to equip formed military units of heavy cavalry.

From what I know, I'd say the Parthians pioneered this rather earlier than that, but it was quite a while before anyone could match them. And for the first millenium or so of the Iron Age, there wasn't anything like the Parthians' heavy cavalry anyway.

[Purple]

We are clearly talking about different periods. You are talking about the very early iron age where as most fantasy seems to happen in the early middle ages (circa 10th century or so) at the earliest and right up until the high middle ages.