At 04:11 PM 3/21/2003 -0600, Mark Van der Meulen wrote:
>>I had thought it would have been on a scale not really possible to
>>represent in BR “domain level” terms; hundreds of thousands, maybe into
>>the lower 7 digits and an explosion that covered a couple of provinces.
>
>Well, that is certainly possible, and perhaps I am giving less credit to the
>new Cerilians than they deserve. I tend to think of them as refugees, but
>they`ve been settled in Cerilia for hundreds of years before Azrai decides
to move in, haven`t they?
Definitely true, plus one has to take into consideration that while they
were “refugees” it`s very possible to look at them not so much as fleeing
as fighting a sort of forced migration–the long-term cultural equivalent
of a fighting withdrawal. Many real world peoples of very fierce
reputation were themselves being forced out of their homelands by other
aggressive cultures in the long standing push and shove of culture
clash. Several of the Cerilian cultures are based, in fact, on real world
cultures that have had long periods of just that kind of paradigm.
Probably another thing to consider is that Cerilia is the end of the tether
in that process for many of the people who travelled there. The
convergence of cultures on Cerilia indicates that there was no place else
to go. The Battle of Deismaar could represent for many of the participants
a sort of massive last stand and, therefore, attract all able bodied
combatants amongst peoples long inured to war.
You know, the more I think about this the more interested I am in running a
“background” BR campaign. Several folks have presented there ideas for
such a campaign in the past, I`ll have to go through the archives to check
them out…
>However, I really think we need to think of the Tribes as Tribal in
>organization before Deismaar. I don`t think they really got organized in a
feudal or imperial manner until after Deismaar, when Haelyns New Ideas >finally managed to supplant the inherent conservatism of the priests of >Anduiras (and similarly for the other cultures). So Im resistant to the
idea that there were millions of humans in Cerilia to participate in
Deismaar. Sure the Andu had settled down and picked up agriculture to a much
larger extent than they had in Aduria, but I would argue that it was still
at a fairly primitive level, perhaps akin to early manorialism ca 800 CE.
“Tribes” is, I think, a slightly deceptive term in this regard. It bears
too much of a resemblance to what many people see as small, relatively
undeveloped communities. One could look at the Mongol hordes as existing
in a cultural system that was largely tribal, yet sophisticated in many
regards and certainly highly populated. Tribe is more of a distinction of
heritage and identity than a statement of cultural/technical development in
regards to the Andurians IMO.
Yikes, thatd make for less than a thousand scions after > > Deismaar. I think > > there should be more than that. > >Why? The thing about biological organisms is that they tend to increase in >number over time (unless limited by their environment). It seems to me that >a logical question when dealing with a heritable trait that confers a >pronounced fitness benefit is why it HASNT spread to the entire population.
Well, youre the biologist so Im sure youre much more familiar with this kind of thing that I, but I would suggest two main factors. The first is the decline of bloodline scores over the generations. They arent really
the same as a biological trait in that unless actively selected for (bred)
or passed on through investiture they will disappear in a few
generations. A bloodline score of 63 or lower will breed out of a
population–if not maintained–in six generations or less.
63
31
15
7
3
1
0
Personally, I think it might make more sense to have bloodline inherit
based more on bloodline strength than bloodline score for a couple of
reasons, mostly having to do with some ideas one what bloodline actually
represents and practical game mechanics. In such a system, however, a
tainted bloodline of any score will “breed out” in one generation if mated
with a commoner. That is not, of course, canon so take it or leave it.
There`ve been somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-80 generations since
Deismaar, so special care must be made to preserve these bloodlines or they
would have long since died out.
The other factor is that the survivability of scions might be somewhat
debatable… They do, of course, gain blood abilities that help them
survive in relation to commoners, but they are also targets for other
scions, making bloodline a somewhat cannibalistic biological trait. I
remember reading a short story many years ago that presented the idea that
intelligence was not really a survival trait for a species since it seems
to lead inevitably to self-extinction. There could be a similar situation
where bloodline is concerned–particularly in BR where the gods themselves
suicided. Divinity would, therefore, be a short-term survivability factor,
but a long term dead end, and bloodline the beginning of the process of
divinity that eventually fails. Many fantasy settings and much fantasy
literature premise the death of the gods in the face of the rising power of
technology, so I think that fits into what is a fairly universal fantasy theme.
Both of these factors would be much more significant in the years
immediately after the battle, so there would have been a dramatic “die off”
of bloodlines in the next several generations. The methods needed to
preserve bloodline and how they were passed on to subsequent generations
would probably have taken at least a generation or three to
discover. There would be no investiture ceremony that passed a bloodline
from one character to another immediately after the battle–unless one
supposes that knowledge was somehow divinely gifted to scions. How long
might it have taken to develop that ability? I dont know, but Id think
it would take years to explore the powers of a bloodline at the domain level.
The “averaging” of parents bloodlines in their offspring would similarly have been unknown to scions in the years immediately after the battle. I generally assume that a bloodline and blood abilities dont manifest until
a child reaches maturity, so unless one is again assuming that knowledge of
how these things work is gifted to scions somehow along with their
bloodline, even the knowledge that the bloodline was inherited would be
unknown for 16-17 years after the battle. Also, unless there was a
fantastic number of camp followers and/or an unusual number of women
warriors on the battlefield most scions would be returning home to mates
who were themselves commoners. The later diffusion of blooded characters
through the population of Cerilia would make the opportunities for
preserving bloodline through breeding much more difficult. If there are
less than a thousand of them there would be only a few in each province on
average. (More in more densely populated provinces, of course.)
Initially after the battle I imagine there was a brief flurry of
bloodthefts that further whittled away at the numbers of scions available
for “breeding purposes” in subsequent generations. This would be possible
mostly because immediately after the battle is the only occasion when so
many blooded characters would have been within proximity of one another,
and because they already arrived to kill each other in the first
place. How many scions died at each others hands in the days after the battle? Thats hard to say, of course, but I`d guess the percentage
somewhere in the lower double digits.
Part of my logic for keeping the numbers of individuals that survived
Deismaar low is to explain why scions aren`t more common. Part of the answer
>may be that the trait also leads to a decrease in reproductive success.
>Upper classes do tend to have lower birth rates, but I think that over the
>years there were many lords who would dally with any wench who would have
>them (or whom they could coerse), and many a lord who enjoyed rapine as one
>of the rewards of success on the battlefield. Perhaps scions have reduced
>fertility for some reason, or reduced reproductive success with non-scions.
Personally, I like to think that the number of blooded characters has been
steadily increasing over the centuries, but in a way that is quite
slow. If there are 10 million Cerilians (all that Cerilian Census stuff I
did a few years ago indicated more like 5-6 million, but that`s very low,
more like 20-25 million would probably be a better number) at present and 1
in a thousand of them are scions that makes for 10,000 blooded
characters. A more “realistic” population would make for 20-25,000
scions. If half that number survived Deismaar I think that would be about
right.
Gary
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