Felarya fundamentals

French snack wrote:

Karbo wrote:

Some retcon to the soil effects is something I'm considering. Not the immunity to diseases though but the eternal youth could be changed to something like the soil greatly reduces effects of aging for certain species ( not the elves for example ), but not completely. It's more open this way and having some more aged-looking characters in places can be interesting indeed.

I'd rather we didn't, to be honest� I've written all my stories based on the idea that native Felaryans remain eternally young, and that anyone older-looking is automatically identifiable as an off-worlder. Or, in Ajab's case, that he's spent time off-world, since he's the only giant predator who doesn't look very young.

If Felaryans do eventually die of old age, it rather changes the dynamics of the whole place.

Well, I think we can make it that a person will show a slight sign of aging (some grey hair or a few wrinkles) after he/she has lived for more than 500 years (except for Dryads). Living up to such age can be considered as Felarya's "vetaran" achievement.

I'd rather like the retcon of showing people age but making the longevity of years and youth longer till a certain point. I can point out many reasons why i really don't like the concept of someone living forever like "So people only die by other things in felarya" but who knows when that is? you could have a civilization hide themselves away for a millenia, making said person 10'000 years old, and you don't think any kind of social repercussions happen when you look at time relative? Unless felarya is one of those place where external reaction happens a lot to a person so life isn't monotonous or strictly seldom in their sanctuaries and hiding places. Then yeah i'm for certain races/and/or people from planets similar to earth living 300-1000 years.

But if your going to do it comfortably to people like french snack and decide to retcon it. Then the best and most creative way to do it is to mention that some magic recently affected the land to see some folks of aging begin to take shape. Mean while the aging is literally grandfathering itself in while most people still think eternal youth is a thing or that somewhere in the nature of felarya that the "sense" of the magic in the air is changing that routine.

French snack wrote:

Karbo wrote:

Some retcon to the soil effects is something I'm considering. Not the immunity to diseases though but the eternal youth could be changed to something like the soil greatly reduces effects of aging for certain species ( not the elves for example ), but not completely. It's more open this way and having some more aged-looking characters in places can be interesting indeed.

I'd rather we didn't, to be honest… I've written all my stories based on the idea that native Felaryans remain eternally young, and that anyone older-looking is automatically identifiable as an off-worlder. Or, in Ajab's case, that he's spent time off-world, since he's the only giant predator who doesn't look very young.

If Felaryans do eventually die of old age, it rather changes the dynamics of the whole place.

Well that's an interesting idea actually, to make the distinction between native and non-native ^^ Perhaps the creatures who were born in Felarya are infused with this eternal youth, the same way they tend to be naturally taller for example. Whreas for off-worlder, they retain part of it but not entirely.

Bluehorizon wrote:

I'd rather like the retcon of showing people age but making the longevity of years and youth longer till a certain point. I can point out many reasons why i really don't like the concept of someone living forever like "So people only die by other things in felarya" but who knows when that is? you could have a civilization hide themselves away for a millenia, making said person 10'000 years old, and you don't think any kind of social repercussions happen when you look at time relative? Unless felarya is one of those place where external reaction happens a lot to a person so life isn't monotonous or strictly seldom in their sanctuaries and hiding places. Then yeah i'm for certain races/and/or people from planets similar to earth living 300-1000 years.

Complete immortality is one of the thing I'm considering to retcon as well. Thinking back at it I feel most humans are just not meant to live forever, even in a safe environment like the safe parts of Negav. I mean after, let's say 170 years being alive even if you don't get sick, I feel your spirit would progressively shut itself down on its own and you would one day fall asleep and just never wake up back again.  
And maybe the same for a naga, albeit much longer. That would measure in centuries and even longer for Dryads.  What do you think ?

Karbo wrote:

Complete immortality is one of the thing I'm considering to retcon as well. Thinking back at it I feel most humans are just not meant to live forever, even in a safe environment like the safe parts of Negav. I mean after, let's say 170 years being alive even if you don't get sick, I feel your spirit would progressively shut itself down on its own and you would one day fall asleep and just never wake up back again.  
And maybe the same for a naga, albeit much longer. That would measure in centuries and even longer for Dryads.  What do you think ?

I partially disagree. The reason why an agings persons mind slows down and degenerates is due to brain cells dieing or reconnecting in wrong ways upon being replaced. Now in an environment where natural aging is not present, the only way for brain cells dieing is through injury, not over time. This means, that age related issues such as dementia are not present in Felarya and you cant just lie down and not wake up because your brain ceases to function.

Of course one could still get tired of life and decide to suicide, also going crazy is still completely possible, and more likely the older you become. Someone who thought they might have lived long enough, might still find ways to end their life, and also any time spent outside felarya will increase their aging process. What would be interesting to know is the effect of lets say a 500 year old man who sets foot on another world for the first time, whether the aging continues normally from their "Felaryan age of ~20"  or the aging process tries to catch up to the real age.

The immortality more or less arises the question of overpopulation though, especially in the safest regions of Felarya. While wars, crime and the hungry fauna are Felaryas primary means to keep population on a healthy level, safe regions such as negavs middle and high tier should be crowded with generations upon generations of people. It may sound cruel or mean, but we would have to find ways to tackle that issue sometimes, rather than ignoring it what happened until now. Maybe most common people get exiled from Negav after like 200 years and have to live on in the other villages or jungles where they might fall prey to predators? It might be a cruel but necessary rule to make sure the city doesnt explode with people.
We could also massively increases times or likelyhood of pregnancy, causing a human giving birth after lets say 3 years instead of 9 months or that its rather rare for a lady to get pregnant due to the slowed aging messing with the growth of a new life.

A Release system like The Giver works for Negav, but what about little tight-knit communities like the Jungle Bowl? In theory, the inhabitant living there could have kids, those kids have kids, and so on for the next 500 years and beyond. Given how everyone there is metaphorically family, I doubt they'd be keen on kicking someone out to die or anything of the sort just to keep their numbers in check.

thats what we have to find solutions for. I am very sure even in those communities, people might find out they are too many to sustain themselves and thus id assume the tribes would split similar to bee hives or ant hives when growing too large or their "cycle" comes to an end (every year as far as I am aware of)

Back on the subject of mortality, considering the somewhat heavy influence of divinity in the setting, I'm surprised the idea of someone dying of natural cause when his or her time is up was never implemented, especially since Karbo really like Discworld and that's more or less how death work in that setting. It does bring some metaphysical questions, like why do certain races have a longer "time limit" than others, but that's pretty much what D&D does and nobody really questions it. There is another issue of Mezzus, who is an archmage, and he lived for a stupidly long time, a little over a thousand years to be exact, and if the whole immortality thing gets retconned, then either he gets his age reversed, or the trope of wizards living longer comes into play.

On the subject of D&D, there is an ability for the Monk and Druid that I think would work as a compromise for the aging of Felarya, the Timeless Body. Right off the bat, it's a misnomer because you still die when you reach a certain age, but what it does is that you no longer accrue permanent penalties to physical stats from old age like strength or dexterity, but you still gain permanent bonuses to mental stats like wisdom. However, if you got that ability by the time you became a middle-aged person or older, the penalties you already got stick.

So, in the context of Felarya, what could happen is that who grew up and are living in Felarya will always remain as fit as they are in their prime, but if an old man from another world decided to move to Negav, his body won't get any weaker, but let's just say his chronic back pain won't miraculously heal itself unless there's some special therapeutic treatment for that. I still think there should be some aging effect for Felaryan humans, but it could be heavily downplayed. Like instead of hair turning gray and then white, and the person becoming wrinkled all over, maybe hair color just grows older and only a couple of wrinkles show up on the face, but beyond that, the person remain just as fit as he was during young adulthood, just with added wisdom and experienced on top of that. It could lead to a neat little culture clash where a person with duller hair and a couple of wrinkles is considered old for Negavians, but for an outsider, that would be considered still relatively youthful.

Um. I think you are all confusing immortality and unaging. This are two different matters. In Felarya so far you can't became old thanks to the soil but you are certainly not immortal. You can be eaten in the jungle and digested (pretty common cause of death). In the "safe zone" of Negav the most common causes of death are human stupidity and household accidents. Fall from the stars or choking on your food are still perfectly deadly if you are not lucky/be helped, even in fantasy settings. It so happened that we aren't shown it - who would write about character X dying by fall from the stairs while going to breakfast?

And the matter of overpopulation is more result of high birthrate in conjunction with healthcare and has little to do with the length of people's life. For example look at our own planet - some, relatively poor regions are coming through baby boom while others were on decline, 'dying' out. So there is only little probability for wealthy, healthy and unageing Higher or Middle Tier districts being overpopulated - birth control and knowledge of your essential immortality are great deterrents against it. Only Lower Tier and the Underground are in danger - and it isn't as if Negav couldn't grow still. The Underground is certainly growing according the Wikipedia and the above ground city has a lot of space under the Eye for new development too.

So I am for letting the current system. If you are lucky, you can live for thousands of years - but most people will be long dead, because of accidents or their own mistakes.

I keep having to ask rhetorically again because everyone seem to conveniently forget about it, how likely are those lethal accidents going to happen in your average cozy household in your average peaceful neighborhood? Assuming Negav has an average birthrate, how would those accidents prevent overpopulation?

remember that Negav is pre-industrial, so there would be less automated work being done, which increases the amount of people doing hard labour which likewise increases the likelyhood of accidents happening.

Thing is that Negav also leans heavily on magitech and magic in general. Having a supernatural force do most of the heavy lifting for you makes manual labor much less treacherous. Also, Negav has golems. Golems make great workers so long it doesn't require fine motor skills and they're expendable too what with being made of common material like rocks and clay.

Shady Knight wrote:

Thing is that Negav also leans heavily on magitech and magic in general.  Having a supernatural force do most of the heavy lifting for you makes manual labor much less treacherous.  Also, Negav has golems.  Golems make great workers so long it doesn't require fine motor skills and they're expendable too what with being made of common material like rocks and clay.

Using magic isn't less dangerous than using machines. Do something wrong and accident happen. Also if human labour is cheaper, it will be used.

Shady Knight wrote:

I keep having to ask rhetorically again because everyone seem to conveniently forget about it, how likely are those lethal accidents going to happen in your average cozy household in your average peaceful neighborhood? Assuming Negav has an average birthrate, how would those accidents prevent overpopulation?

You would be surprised how many household accidents kill people in cozy and safe American homes. According to American Center for Disease Control and Prevention only falls killed in year 2013 more than nine people out of one hundred thousand and all injuries forty one from one hundred thousand people which was the fourth most common cause of death!

Most causes of death are of course out of question - diseases don't  exist in Felarya. On the other hand TIMESPACE INSTABILITY is a part of environment. Even in Negav there is non negligible probability you could run over one. Hell, there is a story based on this premise - and most humans will end rather badly, as opposed the story's heroes.

Danger of mistakes done during spell casting is issue by itself. Another short story depicted woman who teleported herself in a Drider's lair - normally deadly situation. Manipulate fire badly and you will end burn. Water manipulation could drown you. Earth manipulation could burry you alive ... See the trend?

I disagree. While I'm not one for having every single person a wizard, and magic backfiring is something that indeed does happen, I find it ludicrous that it would happen so often it would theoretically keep a city of unaging people in check for hundreds or even thousands of years. Plus, it's not limited to Negav. You have places like the Jungle Bowl, which is an almost self-sufficient colony that's basically cut off from the rest of the world. Also, how can you get cheaper than animated clay and rocks? The materials are literally everywhere. Sure, the initial investment to get them enchanted might be costly to a point, but given that golems are perpetual motion machines that can be easily repaired with low level magic, I think they're cheaper in the long term. I also wouldn't rely on most stories for truly accurate depictions of what an ordinary life there is like. By their very nature, stories chronicle unusual events because that's just more interesting.

Shady Knight wrote:

I disagree.  While I'm not one for having every single person a wizard, and magic backfiring is something that indeed does happen, I find it ludicrous that it would happen so often it would theoretically keep a city of unaging people in check for hundreds or even thousands of years.  Plus, it's not limited to Negav.  You have places like the Jungle Bowl, which is an almost self-sufficient colony that's basically cut off from the rest of the world.

I didn't said that! I said mundane accidents are enough to do so, together with the birth control. The magical accidents are reducing the ranks of mages available. And the last means of population control is migration. That's even canon. People are crossing the Rocky Fields to search better life for themselves and their families behind the desert. From where do you think those people are coming? Certainly not from the wild tribes in the jungle! They are going in organised caravans with wagons and packhorses. Only Jungle Bowl and Negav can organise such caravans! We don't know of any other human city in east part of continent that can do it.

Shady Knight wrote:

Also, how can you get cheaper than animated clay and rocks?  The materials are literally everywhere.  Sure, the initial investment to get them enchanted might be costly to a point, but given that golems are perpetual motion machines that can be easily repaired with low level magic, I think they're cheaper in the long term.

If this was true then the magicless people will start revolution to kill the mages, the Magiocrats included. Negav isn't some capitalist utopia, it's a dictatorship dedicated to hold people safe AND satisfied. Even if such Golems exists the Magiocrats wouldn't promote their mass production, for political reasons if for nothing else. And nothing in Wikipedia speaks about Golems like you are (permanent perpetum mobile enchantments?). No one integrated them in Felarya yet.

Shady Knight wrote:

 I also wouldn't rely on most stories for truly accurate depictions of what an ordinary life there is like.  By their very nature, stories chronicle unusual events because that's just more interesting.

Which is why we don't hear about those unlucky ...

Shady Knight wrote:

Thing is that Negav also leans heavily on magitech and magic in general.  Having a supernatural force do most of the heavy lifting for you makes manual labor much less treacherous.  Also, Negav has golems.  Golems make great workers so long it doesn't require fine motor skills and they're expendable too what with being made of common material like rocks and clay.

So not only is Negav a pseudo "Intergalatic trade hub" (given that the 'intergalatic' and 'trade' parts should have allowed Negav to be a melting pot of technolgical advancements but because they are surposed to be also limited we have contrived social reasons such a tech-phobia and bias to prevent Negavians taking full advantage of it) But it's also an pseudo "Pre-industrial socitey" where noone actually has to bide to the limitations of a socitey lacking in machines because magic can solve it.

DarkOne wrote:

Shady Knight wrote:

Thing is that Negav also leans heavily on magitech and magic in general.  Having a supernatural force do most of the heavy lifting for you makes manual labor much less treacherous.  Also, Negav has golems.  Golems make great workers so long it doesn't require fine motor skills and they're expendable too what with being made of common material like rocks and clay.

So not only is Negav a pseudo "Intergalatic trade hub" (given that conceited explainations are put in place to keep the tech level in Negav low) But it's also an pseudo "Pre-industrial socitey" where noone actually has to bide to the limitations of a socitey lacking in machines because magic can solve it.

We really need someone to write more about Negav. We know too little about the city to be accurate in our speculations.

DarkOne wrote:

Shady Knight wrote:

Thing is that Negav also leans heavily on magitech and magic in general.  Having a supernatural force do most of the heavy lifting for you makes manual labor much less treacherous.  Also, Negav has golems.  Golems make great workers so long it doesn't require fine motor skills and they're expendable too what with being made of common material like rocks and clay.

So not only is Negav a pseudo "Intergalatic trade hub" (given that the 'intergalatic' and 'trade' parts should have allowed Negav to be a melting pot of technolgical advancements but because they are surposed to be also limited we have conceited social reasons such a tech-phobia and bias to prevent Negavians taking full advantage of it) But it's also an pseudo "Pre-industrial socitey" where noone actually has to bide to the limitations of a socitey lacking in machines because magic can solve it.

Keep in mind, a lot of the issue is that the 'plot' of Felarya has never actually advanced. We're still in the same year or two that we were with Felarya first began.

Also, calling Negav an 'intergalactic' trade-hub is a bit of an overstatement. Technically they probably do trade with multiple galaxies, but it isn't like they are trading with 1000's of worlds. Maybe a dozen? A couple dozen? Some more often than others. I think it's actually in most of their trading partners' best interests to keep Negav low-tech too. A low-tech society is easier to push around in trade negotiations, and has more of a demand for the goods of a higher tech world. It's entirely possible that Negav's trade partners enforce rules preventing most high-technology from being traded with Negav, to make sure they don't advance too much. I'd imagine that trying to procure and reverse-engineer offworld tech is a major political goal of the Magiocrats. Technology is power, and there's nothing actually stopping anyone from advancing in technology in Felarya.

Magi-tech is going to be quite common too. Negavians using local magic to modify the bits of offworld high-technology that does slip through. Using those electrically enchanted stones as battery-equivalents, for example. It's totally possible that that sort of advancement was a local solution to offworlders price-gouging on batteries. So rather than be completely at the whim of offworld tech tradesmen, Negavians just made their own solution. This is a society that has magic-powered anti-grav vehicles (albeit in limited numbers) afterall. They can do some pretty amazing things.

I know I proposed making more copies of The Eye and using them to finally extend the walls ages ago. Or use a chain of them along the ascarlin transport route to make it where only human raiders are an issue. Expanding, advancing, bettering their position, that would be a huge priority for Negav and its people. They aren't just going to sit there and stagnate, lol, and I think it does them a huge disservice to suggest that they would. We need some new, younger, more motivated magiocrats to shake up the status quo. Extend the walls, take back part of the jungle for keeps

rcs619 wrote:

     
I know I proposed making more copies of The Eye and using them to finally extend the walls ages ago. Or use a chain of them along the ascarlin transport route to make it where only human raiders are an issue. Expanding, advancing, bettering their position, that would be a huge priority for Negav and its people. They aren't just going to sit there and stagnate, lol, and I think it does them a huge disservice to suggest that they would. We need some new, younger, more motivated magiocrats to shake up the status quo. Extend the walls, take back part of the jungle for keeps

Wasn't this why Ur Sagol fell? They started securing the jungle against predators, and one day they were all gone, the city was defenceless, empty and turning into ruins. There are limits how much you can push against Felarya before it pushes back and destroys you.

Arnost1973 wrote:

We really need someone to write more about Negav. We know too little about the city to be accurate in our speculations.

Preach to the choir. I've been saying that very thing for a while now.

Arnost1973 wrote:

rcs619 wrote:

     
I know I proposed making more copies of The Eye and using them to finally extend the walls ages ago. Or use a chain of them along the ascarlin transport route to make it where only human raiders are an issue. Expanding, advancing, bettering their position, that would be a huge priority for Negav and its people. They aren't just going to sit there and stagnate, lol, and I think it does them a huge disservice to suggest that they would. We need some new, younger, more motivated magiocrats to shake up the status quo. Extend the walls, take back part of the jungle for keeps

Wasn't this why Ur Sagol fell? They started securing the jungle against predators, and one day they were all gone, the city was defenceless, empty and turning into ruins. There are limits how much you can push against Felarya before it pushes back and destroys you.

Actually that's not the reason at all. The Guardians only actually do anything when the fate of the entire world is at risk (largely due in part to the fact that they live in said world and are probably only trying to save their own asses from the fire when they do anything). They don't care about anything less than that because it isn't a threat to them. The Guardians were never meant as an impediment to humans advancing themselves in Felarya, despite how many people keep bringing up that excuse. Unless you're going to blow up the whole world, they simply don't care.

In Ur Sagol's case it has been strongly rumored (at times by Karbo himself) over the years that their downfall didn't have anything to do with their expansion, but rather with some sort of discovery they made that somehow suddenly made them threatening enough for the Guardians to take action against.

The Guardians are the next best thing to gods. They literally don't care about humans or predators fighting over tiny little scraps of jungle out in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't affect their lives at all. Negav could take over everything from here to the Giant Tree and the Guardians still wouldn't care (I'm not saying they should, of course. That would be a logistical nightmare, and by that point you would actually have to begin dealing with the giant hybrids politically) because it isn't their land, and Felarya is such an unbelievably titanic world that it means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I really wish we could go back to the Guardians being a nameless, faceless force from Felarya's ancient age, rather than specific named characters. Or just struck from the canon altogether. In my experience they tend to be used second-only to the predator sense when it comes to keeping humans down in Felarya (although thankfully with the nerfs to the pred sense, that isn't as much of an issue these days).

rcs619 wrote:

Actually that's not the reason at all. The Guardians only actually do anything when the fate of the entire world is at risk (largely due in part to the fact that they live in said world and are probably only trying to save their own asses from the fire when they do anything). They don't care about anything less than that because it isn't a threat to them. The Guardians were never meant as an impediment to humans advancing themselves in Felarya, despite how many people keep bringing up that excuse. Unless you're going to blow up the whole world, they simply don't care.

In Ur Sagol's case it has been strongly rumored (at times by Karbo himself) over the years that their downfall didn't have anything to do with their expansion, but rather with some sort of discovery they made that somehow suddenly made them threatening enough for the Guardians to take action against.

I think where people have got confused is that some characters in Felarya believe that Ur Sagol's fall might had to do with with their expansion, even though there's no hard proof of this rumour being true. I think Karbo meant to imply that some of the powers that be in Negav are not that keen on expanding the city because they personaly believe in the rumour, and not because they actually know for sure that the guardians would react to expansion or even know whenever or not the guardians actually exist or not.

So basicly alot of members in the felarya community failed to grasp the context of this superstiction and instead interpreted this theory as the actual reason why Ur Sagol fell.

DarkOne wrote:

rcs619 wrote:

Actually that's not the reason at all. The Guardians only actually do anything when the fate of the entire world is at risk (largely due in part to the fact that they live in said world and are probably only trying to save their own asses from the fire when they do anything). They don't care about anything less than that because it isn't a threat to them. The Guardians were never meant as an impediment to humans advancing themselves in Felarya, despite how many people keep bringing up that excuse. Unless you're going to blow up the whole world, they simply don't care.

In Ur Sagol's case it has been strongly rumored (at times by Karbo himself) over the years that their downfall didn't have anything to do with their expansion, but rather with some sort of discovery they made that somehow suddenly made them threatening enough for the Guardians to take action against.

I think where people have got confused is that some characters in Felarya believe that Ur Sagol's fall might had to do with with their expansion, even though there's no hard proof of this rumour being true. I think Karbo meant to imply that some of the powers that be in Negav are not that keen on expanding the city because they personaly believe in the rumour, and not because they actually have evidence that the guardians would react to expansion or even if the guardians actually exist.

So basicly alot of members in the felarya community failed to grasp the context of this superstiction and instead interpreted this theory as the actual reason why Ur Sagol fell.

The thing is though, even in that context it remains a dumb, arbitrary limit placed on Negav to keep it from actually doing anything.

Oh, the Negavians would never better themselves because they believe they would be destroyed. Like I said, we need newer, younger magiocrats who aren't bound by dumb superstition and are actually willing to make big changes. Negav has been 100% stagnant for years now, and that's a shame because it's a cool sub-setting with a lot of potential.

But then again, any changes that make humans even semi-capable of survival tend to be received poorly. I had to fight tooth and nail to get my Isolon Fist updates into the wiki without being diluted too much, and I still get people on DA who refuse to believe me when I tell them what The Fist is capable of.

That... I've thought about before, Cliff. Negav's had 2000 years to expand. That's a lot of turns in Civilization. Enough to make a lot of settlers. If the Guardians destroyed anyone who expanded like some people claim, Negav should be already off the map. There's just zero way not to expand in this kind of time scale.

Then I realized there's no point in even trying to think about it, because Negav's not even a grandfather clause. It was intended to be a city in the middle of nowhere, but it doesn't even function as such.

The reason Negav has not expanded seems to be because it would then absorb far too much time and attention to develop everything to that degree; it seems easier on the setting to have one detailed metropolis with everything in it than to have a streak of close-knit city-states along the river, the largest one being close to the dimensional gate. Instead, we've got only Negav, and almost as footnotes, Motamo, Chomikai, and Nekomura.

Then again, we've already fudged longevity, disease, distance (dimensional gate in Negav), technology (due to the multiple worlds, all in different tech levels at the same time, which have been such for a looong time), language and culture (ditto). It might be unreasonable to require it to behave realistically in those other respects without challenging any other conditions while you're at it.


IMO all change is received poorly by those who weren't expecting it.

rcs619 wrote:

But then again, any changes that make humans even semi-capable of survival tend to be received poorly.

Well I can't talk about your experaices but I personaly tend to find it's not actually semi-capable humans that people receive poorly, it's the perception of semi-capable to fully-capable humans being designed solely for the purpose of attacking the predators (and therefore the fetish) that people get defensive about.

There are two types of people who decide to write from the human perspective.

1: The ones who geniunely want to write about the human experaince with good characters and thrilling storylines.

2: The ones who just want to passive aggresively attack the fetish and those who are into it under the guise of "writing from the human perspective" (or alternatively the ones who have a deranged loose grasp of reality and just want to attack the predator characters for being horrible people...somehow forgeting that the characters arn't real and just repersent someone's kink)

Sometimes it's hard to tell the two groups apart unless great care is taken, so people get edgy.