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