Man in Space's Obligatory Medieval Fantasy Setting

[Torco]

cool idea, i like it.

a thought: seeing as in fantasy humans are generally portrayed as populous, outbreeding the longer-lived races of various mythos, was this Genocide of Man a significant depopulation of the world? like, are there now entire islands of new growth forest spotted with castles and half-rotten barns, human-style stone wells standing randomly amidst prairies?

[Man in Space]

cool idea, i like it.

Thank you!

a thought: seeing as in fantasy humans are generally portrayed as populous, outbreeding the longer-lived races of various mythos, was this Genocide of Man a significant depopulation of the world? like, are there now entire islands of new growth forest spotted with castles and half-rotten barns, human-style stone wells standing randomly amidst prairies?

You know, this question got me thinking. I almost said "yes"...but then I realized: Man was a nomad. (He built the occasional stone wall or bridge or shrine or tomb or henge or pile of rocks or what have you but there's no real cities to speak of and the constructs were generally for "community use".)

There were certain territories that belonged to specific clans; it might also be accurate to say that specific family lineages had certain rights to the land, which was overall really only kind of weakly possessed and appreciated to some degree as a community resource ("community" here meaning "ourselves and these other sentient fellows we share this world with"). There were few truly permanent settlements, though at certain times of year enough people would converge like Burning Man, probably light up their own Burning Man, get lit up themselves like they were at Burning Man, and then go out and try to kill a magical power-breathing lizard with Bronze-Age-if-that-level equipment. Levity aside, men were the ones who had, by far, the most run-ins with dragons.

For their part, dragons were annoying to the denizens of this world in multiple ways, one of which being they could not simply be exterminated entirely and be over with it. In their juvenile, subadult, and typical adult forms, they are vital members of the ecosystem--among other things, they were known to control insect populations. Dragons are also quite naturally intelligent, more or less on par with various primates on Earth, and some rudimentary tool use appears in legends and lore. These dragons can vary in size, the largest being roughly on par with the komodo, and generally, if you're not a dick to them, they won't be a dick to you. The dragons you do have to worry about are those in musth. Draconic musth isn't really about reproducing so much as it is a sort of destructo-spin mode from which a dragon never recovers. The affected dragon--obligatorily male--begins a growth spurt like mad, which, naturally, requires lots of food, specifically meat, of which many sentient beings of this world are made. In addition to this increase in size comes a suite of neurological, magical, and psionic changes: the dragon greatly increases in aggression towards anything other than dragons (whether sensu lato or sensu stricto depends on the type of dragon you're dealing with), greatly increases the magnitude of its reservoir of élan vital, and augments its nervous system. The result is that you get a larger and more powerful dragon that proactively hunts, blasts Dadaism of all the senses into your minds, overwhelming you with a half-semiconscious intent, not quite sentient but not quite animal, that begins haranguing you in fits, starts, blasts, broken words, half-formed ideas, and decayed images (and you get a migraine to boot). It was not unknown that this caused catatonia, coma, stroke, amnesia (temporary or permanent), memory loss, and even death--though, admittedly, such outcomes were rare, far more frequent in legend than in real life. Regardless, the sample size is affected some because many of the other sentient beings would be either incinerated, crushed, slashed, ripped apart, flung somewhere, set on fire, spit with acid...you get the idea. Musth-mad dragons are famously dangerous just by being in proximity to one, a proximity that only ever gets greater as the dragon grows.

The exception to this was men. Men, though not immune to corporeal assaults, were immune to magickal and psionic assaults; they simply did not possess the necessary faculties, much like, I guess, Rocky in Project Hail Mary couldn't sense electromagnetic radiation--he simply got by without. The other senses of men were said to be far keener than any of their peers', and they would roam the land in their respective allotments; if a musth-mad dragon were to be found, they would be far more likely to run into it than any other sophonts. The dwarves were known for their esteem for, and friendly relationship with, humans; men, being transient, did not really establish any sort of mines anywhere, but the dwarves were grateful that men could just deal with the (to the dwarves) occasional dragon and did appreciate their efforts. Man's weapons, therefore, did contain a fair few worked metal elements, courtesy of the dwarven smiths and craftsmen.

Man's immunities extended to the fairfolk as well. The fairfolk were mildly telepathic, in addition to their other abilities--low bit-rate, sure, but enough to get the gist across to non-fairfolk...except men. Occasionally you'd get kind of a diglossia situation where the fairfolk speak in their language and the men speak in their language, though you also could encounter a fairfolk with a dwarf or (much more rarely) a deadfolk, and have the interlocutor converse with the man while using their limited telepathy to hear and speak through the interlocutor--that being said, these often had considerable tension involved due to both whatever issue was at hand and the unhappiness the fairfolk had with having to do two-step translation. It should be noted that, remarkably, when such situations occur and a fairfolk attempts to magick the man in some way, nothing happens--even to the hapless interlocutor. What exactly this means has been claimed to be many things by many people.

Behind the scenes, of course, the internal politics of men were a morass. In "recorded history", there'd been an occasional khan of men that would unite or otherwise bring to heel most of the population of humanity but more often it was a number of territorial lords who waxed, waned, and faded in or out over time. As a rule, their establishment/leadership (such as it was) preferred to play things close to the vest and were considerably opaque to outsiders. Nonetheless, men did find their niche, not having any permanent settlements because they didn't need to, filling the void the other sophonts left. Their lack of home was their home, their function to complement everything else.

The combination of their immunities to magic and psionics, their impetuousness and lack of patience (especially for the long game), their ability to produce leaders who manage to unite them, and the opacity with which their inner machinations were shielded to the other flavors of sophont (despite that often being customary for-me-but-not-for-thee sort of stuff on the part of said other sophonts), the elves decided that men were a threat. The fairfolk were all too happy to join in, both for similar reasons as the elves and just for the chaos of it all. The deadfolk balked took little action either way. The dwarves attempted to resist but were coöpted and coërced for the simple fact that durable, high-quality, nonmagical weapons were needed, and the dwarves were press-ganged into service as the arms makers.

Several different methods were used to cull humans. Obviously, combat is the standout example. There were other methods--one that even the elves found horrifying was salting the earth for thousands and thousands of acres. The spread of plague was encouraged; you could say the biologic science in this world was its own, unintentional Manhattan Project with an incredible amount learnt due to the constraint of magic failure in this event. Evidence suggests there were several deliberate stampedes. Some unusual geologic features have been interpreted--controversially--as relicts of Iron-Age geoëngineering. It was an incredibly complex, highly coördinated strike; after all, the elves, with their longer lifespans, were willing to take the time to observe and to plan. There were occasional reports of the occasional "man sighting" or a "brood", but these too were extinguished.

The dragons turned racist because of Charles Darwin. In the absence of men to deal with them, more and more dragons entered musth; some legends chalk this up to humans being some sort of natural "inherent nullifier" to draconic magick that, when removed, eliminated the anti-magick check that populations of men tacitly placed on the dragons they encountered. More and more musth-crazy dragons were slipping into the wilderness and becoming harder, better, faster, stronger, and what's more, they began to exhibit a worrying new trait: aggression towards other dragons. Docility, through its low survival rate and the founder effect that surviving dragons ended up expressing, eventually removed itself from the gene pool. Dragons would now attack basically anything deemed a threat to the existence of their "brood" or "family" and/or themselves.

A state of détente exists between the elves and the fairfolk, except the nuke of this world is basically medieval bioweapons. The fairfolk would never admit it, but they do fear the elves somewhat, because the elves went out of their way to engineer plagues that kill other sophonts; the fairfolk do have a modicum of expertise in this area, though they have much more of it in that of ways of killing the land itself, and in both cases they managed to find a way to do it that stripped all the élan vital out of it, so it would be effective regardless. The dwarves are on the weak end of the Melian dialogue and look on the whole event with abject horror. The deadfolk don't like to talk about it.

[Glenn]

I apologize for my delay in posting on this thread (to be honest, all to often my usual modus operandi is to compile a growing list of threads that I want to respond to, without actually responding to them, until I finally either post all of my replies at once, or throw them out and start over.)

Thank you for sharing this world, as you continue to flesh it out. I am most intrigued by the deadfolk and the fairfolk, as they seem the most different from "conventional" fantasy species. (I find it interesting that in current fantasy, "elves" and "fay" seem to have become two distinct categories; I can remember a time when they were not categorized so neatly.)