TNE: Enough vs. Too Many Cultures

[Beth_Naught]

Huh.

That thing where every Hive Mosyna queen has to have over twenty offspring just to keep up with the death rate is really going to suck for them, then.

[Username17]

But it's totally possible. They actually have substantially more than 20 babies each. They start shortly after puberty and are simply pregnant or birthing just about all the time. They don't actually have to raise or nurse young, because other hive members take over those roles. They are literally only required to be pregnant and lead the hive. A Mosynan Queen would probably be a bad choice for an adventurer though.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

But it's totally possible. They actually have substantially more than 20 babies each. They start shortly after puberty and are simply pregnant or birthing just about all the time. They don't actually have to raise or nurse young, because other hive members take over those roles. They are literally only required to be pregnant and lead the hive. A Mosynan Queen would probably be a bad choice for an adventurer though.

-Username17

Just how often could a human woman give birth safely?

I know that the record for the most prolific woman was something like... 50 children (lots of twins and triplets); and the record for the oldest woman to give birth was 60 (happened recently, involved in vitro fertilization).

I'm guessing that family lines that had queens that could give birth to many children without complication would be more likely to give birth to queens that also have similar abilities.

Or is it something in their diet that simply makes them either tougher, or more likely to have complication-free pregnancies?

Or something that they do, or use, like magic.

Maybe they give birth to litters?

Or, for all we know, there are no Hive Mosynan queens that even give birth. For all we know they could use bought/captured/enslaved female humans and convert them into axolotl tanks.

[Username17]

90 years ago, the maternal mortality rate was 1%, which is probably about what the Mosynans are looking at after you factor in their ability to flash pasteurize things with their minds. Nevertheless, that means that probably half of Mosynan Queens die in childbirth. Which is honestly horrifying, but not really that noteworthy when you consider the fact that they are a desert tribe in pre-industrial society and their life expectancies are even so probably better than comparable tribes in Earth's history.

-Username17

[IGTN]

A thought occured to me about this:

When the biggest piece of productive labor you do each month involves poring blood onto Senician blood vines, women are going to have a reputation in society as having an easier time doing productive labor. And childbirth is going to be thought of in terms of productive labor because and equivalent to the blood that isn't spilled to make that happen.

If I remember what I've read right, women don't generally menstruate every month unless well-fed, by feudal standards. This means that Senician women will probably end up better-fed and bigger and stronger than women elsewhere.

I imagine you already considered this when you made their villages ruled by the grandmothers.

[Beth_Naught]

Nah. The reproductive system (other than the heart and brain) is one of the last things to go haywire when you're starving. No menses means no children, pretty much.

I'm glad you're bringing up Senicia in this context though. Right now I can only see them sitting there, totally self-sufficient and smugly bucolic; I don't know enough about how they interact with the other cultures and I don't know if their sacrificing of the Corn King (soundtrack: Rite of Spring) is enough of a hook.

[Beth_Naught]

With regard to funerary cults:

Reading through the Culture Foci thus far, I have a much stronger sense of Angkor than I do of Knossos, in pretty much every urban area - and that's even been raised as a design axiom. Though Angkor Wat was a site for funerary rites, not even the king who commissioned the temples was buried there - it really is a scale model of the City of the Gods. Every religion that was practiced there teaches reincarnation.

As people living on the continent have genuine deductive evidence that the soul does not linger around the body unless you forcibly staple it in place, corpse preservation and necropoli probably don't have much traction in the cultural unconscious.

With that said (and harkening back to the original "Too Much?" of the topic) there's lots of room for a culture that believes that Sheol is a place about six feet underground that one goes to bodily, or that the deified ancestors are going to need their corpses back someday, preferably in good working order. Said culture is going to be kind of atavistic and would probably be located in a backwater. But plausible; lack of empirical confirmation has seldom stopped people from believing something.

It'd need more reason to exist than providing a backdrop to "We loot the crappy tomb of your crappy saints 'cause we can, and flaking the gold leaf off of their crowns pays for our crack habit," because that adventure is...crappy. But there's enough evocative material there to draw inspiration (heh!) from.

Much of that evocative material is actually modern fantasy anyway. Heinrich Schliemann was as much an author of Trojan fanfic as he was an archeologist.

[baduin]

With regard to funerary cults:

Reading through the Culture Foci thus far, I have a much stronger sense of Angkor than I do of Knossos, in pretty much every urban area - and that's even been raised as a design axiom. Though Angkor Wat was a site for funerary rites, not even the king who commissioned the temples was buried there - it really is a scale model of the City of the Gods.

In my opinion this applies to Knossos as well. Wunderlich proved that it couldn't be a real palace, but he is quite obviously talking nonsense when he talks about it being a tomb. There were no bodies found there, for one thing.

As for the ancestral ghosts, no culture I know said they can die. If they are not fed and cared for, they suffer, dwindle, turn into predatory demons etc, but they endure.

http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/mummy/Aft ... it/ba.html
"The Egyptian's believed that there are only three kinds of beings that inhabit the hereafter: the dead, the gods, and akhs. Akhs are those who have successfully made the transition to new life in the next world, where they live with the gods. The dead are those who have failed to make the transition. It is said that they have "died again," with no hope of renewed life."

In other words, the aim of the funerary rituals and offerings is not to ensure the survival of the ghost, but to allow it to "survive in style".

...there's lots of room for a culture that believes that Sheol is a place about six feet underground that one goes to bodily, or that the deified ancestors are going to need their corpses back someday, preferably in good working order.

Remember that my proposition of ancestral-worshipping culture is not about the present. The Culture Focus series is about the modern era, long after the fall of the Atayalan Empire and the end of the giant tomb era.

[Beth_Naught]

Wunderlich proved...

My totally unsolicited (and probably condescending) advice is: when you see a book ostentatiously authored by Professor So-and-so, and their Professorship is in some field unrelated to what they're writing about? Raise your hackles, because they're trying to slip you an implied ipse dixit mickey under their degree. Even a crackpot sanctuary like Wikipedia refers to The Secret of Crete as "widerlegt gehalten" - refuted. Wunderlich is another fanfic writer.

And not to put too fine a deconstructionist point on it, but that's okay: it means only that his oeuvre should be judged on purely literary merits. In the case of Minoan Crete, The King Must Die is just a better story than Wunderlich's Knossos - not coincidentally, because it allows Renault to give Theseus something to do other than stealing the idols.

A fantastic quest down the Nile of antiquity needs to look a little more like Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Sidon (wherein you never see a pyramid) and less like Team America: World Police (wherein pyramids loom metonymically over every streetcorner).

[Judging__Eagle]

Nah. The reproductive system (other than the heart and brain) is one of the last things to go haywire when you're starving. No menses means no children, pretty much.

I'm glad you're bringing up Senicia in this context though. Right now I can only see them sitting there, totally self-sufficient and smugly bucolic; I don't know enough about how they interact with the other cultures and I don't know if their sacrificing of the Corn King (soundtrack: Rite of Spring) is enough of a hook.

Yeah, except that under observed instances, when women are on starvation diets they stop mensturating. It's about conservation of resources.

[zeruslord]

I think I'd prefer the mythical Egypt, with armies of slaves, the chariots of kings, and a half-built pyramid.

Especially to starvation diets.

[IGTN]

Since this has become the History thread, I thought I'd mention a thought I had when reading the discussion on Hive Atayalan.

Specifically, the iron-users who crushed the empire don't need to be one tribe. You might have one tribe who starts making iron weapons. They start using them to raid their neighbors, protected from their magic and cutting through their defenses.

Some of their neighbors steal, or independently develop, the secret to iron working. Whatever it is, it only needs to happen once for each tribe. The native mgical traditions of the iron tribes start being suppressed or even destroyed in favor of void magic, because its interactions with other magic actively impedes it for most advanced magic.

One of those tribes then decides to start playing the conquer and hold game. Maybe they have more manpower. Maybe they have better communication. Maybe they have mind-influencing abilities to make them able to assimilate conquered people easier.

Anyway, by doing this, the secret to iron working starts to spread, since the conquered peoples are now being used to mine, smelt, and wield iron. But they soon find themselves with an excess of warriors, now that swords and shields are cheap. Their warriors want to win glory like the Bronze Age warriors, so they get sent in a huge horde at any place that seems like a viable target.

They overrun their supply lines, and so can't hold territory for the main kingdom, just loot and move on. Some of them decide to move in to Atayalan castles and become kings.

A generation later, the void kingdom still has an excess of warriors, and no real enemies. They start making war on their neighbor kings, who start raising armies of their own. Iron starts fighting iron. Warriors from the conquered tribes start to hold rebellions, since going to battle in any direction is equally dangerous. The void kingdom falls apart. Maybe this happens even before it starts sending raiders.

By the end of this, the void kingdom has dissolved back into the tribes that it was made up of, or at least most of them, and maybe some new ones, iron use has spread into the Atayalan Empire, and Atayala is toppled.

[baduin]

As for Wunderlich- his interpretation of the Knossos Labyrinth does not need to be refuted, since it makes no sense. On the other hand, his arguments against the "palace" interpretation are based on the actual properties of the building materials and cannot be refuted. The temple/tax storage idea has growing acceptance.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Jp-s2rsc7QEC&hl=en

In addition, his book includes a lot of generally unknown information about the ancient Greek culture.

His arguments for the connection of Crete and Egypt have been proved by the later discovery of the Avaris palace.

http://www.philipcoppens.com/crete_dead.html
http://www.auaris.at/html/helmi_en.html

To return to our game. The early states did not have money economy; they had a simple system in which the king took goods from producers, (often with religious justification) and distributed them as necessary. This is the general rule: the division of labour starts at the orders of the state, (your village will make shields for me, your neighbours will keep horses for my army) and free trade emerges later.

The barbarians always try to conquer the civilised areas, because those are much richer. In fact, the excess wealth from civilisation, in the form of tribute and loot, together with the example of the Empire, allows for the formation of barbarian kingdoms. If it is possible the barbarians try to become the rulers of the conquered Empire. If they succeed in keeping the mechanism of state working, they become the new ruling dynasty, as it happended repeatedly in China. If the barbarians are not able to administer the state, it breaks down and they are again reduced to small tribes - as it repeatedly happened in Europe.

In Atalaya, since the barbarians use the void magic which interferes with the magic used by the civilisation, they necessarily must destroy and empoverish the conquered states. As the result, the immense hordes (similar to those of Atilla) which conquered Atalaya, without any more loot to gather and without source of tribute would revert to their constituent tribes in a generation. But in the meantime those tribes have suffered the catastrophic collapse of their social structure. In the end, most of the area of the former empire will be covered by the new, ministates, mostly using the imperial language, but ruled by barbarian overlords, with the mixed culture.

[Beth_Naught]

I think I'd prefer the mythical Egypt, with armies of slaves, the chariots of kings, and a half-built pyramid.

Especially to starvation diets.

Hear, hear.

Also, ($setting == meta_eurasia) is some bad tired mojo.

[norms29]

Huh.

That thing where every Hive Mosyna queen has to have over twenty offspring just to keep up with the death rate is really going to suck for them, then.

now that I think about it, would it be over fourty offspring to keep up with the death rate?

[Beth_Naught]

Twenty children would give you, on average, two who are capable of reproducing. At the limit of unlimited children, you'd observe a roughly even split between the sexes, and population maintenance.

Since truly random distributions contain streaks, however, and since every streaky deviation is unfavorable in this scenario, twenty is a strict but weak lower bound and the real number must be higher. That's still not accounting for any sort of elevated mortality rate such that you'd expect when you live off of gravel.

So whatever sort of Fire magic Hive Mosyna is using to kindle life also results in lots of monozygotic twins - it kinda has to. Which isn't even out of theme for Ormigan emulation.

People have done more unsettling things in the name of survival - vide Pitcarn Island - but it's some unsettling Quiverfull heebie-jeebies all the same. A PC who's playing Mosynian royalty would be playing a runaway who's not due any prodigal welcome if they change their minds.

[Username17]

Since truly random distributions contain streaks, however, and since every streaky deviation is unfavorable in this scenario, twenty is a strict but weak lower bound and the real number must be higher.

Not true. Males are unfavorable, females are favorable. You technically only need one fertile male, every fertile female is a Queen.

-Username17

[Beth_Naught]

<Shrug> Leaving aside the oft exaggerated risks of genetic bottleneck, that's true, provided you're willing to embrace the paradigm of uncle dad.

It works that way - but it's beyond my personal squick threshold.

[Username17]

You don't have uncles or dads. You have Drones and you have Queens. People are actually raised by the nursery workers, so whoever happens to be the genetic father or mother of any particular person is so unimportant that probably no one even knows the answer. All the Drones have to mate with all the Queens that aren't already pregnant. What order they do that in and who actually succeeds in impregnating who is meaningless. The only Mosynans who have the luxury of mating for love are pregnant Queens or sterile workers and warriors.

And if that's beyond your personal squick factor, that's fine. Because frankly the Queens and Drones won't normally feature front and center in most plots, since they also have to stay at home. Yeah, it's a small tribe with very few fertile members, so there's a lot of incest. But they don't keep track and you don't have to directly confront that fact at any point.

The people who are actual player characters and combat hirelings are all sterile, so whatever romantic feelings they happen to have or not have are completely irrelevant to the Hive. If you want to have a monogomous relationship with another warrior or a person from another tribe that's fine. If you want to be celibate or gay, or whatever, that's fine too. Nothing you do will ever produce offspring, so whatever you do in your bed with whoever you do it with is totally beyond the give-a-damn threshold of the Hive Council. Only Queens and Drones have their sexuality defined for them, and it is defined by necessity not by morality.

-Username17

[norms29]

EDIT: nevermind, I remembered it wrong.

[Crissa]

Distribution of sex among a population is not random with streaks but influenced by outside factors during gestation.

If you have queens and nursery workers, they can literally choose how many of each they're raising at any given time.

-Crissa

[Username17]

Twenty children would give you, on average, two who are capable of reproducing. At the limit of unlimited children, you'd observe a roughly even split between the sexes, and population maintenance.

re-read the original culture focus (I'd quote it but it seems to have disappeared between now and last night), it was one in twenty is fertile, so fourty children will average 2 capable of reproducing.

It's still around. It is Here. Also, it's in the collection of TNE threads stickied at top. But the relevant quote you're looking for is:

Fully nine tenths of children raised in the wastes will never be able to have children of their own.

It's not just humans. Warriors have to sort the millet grains that can be planted from the millet grains that are dead. The dead seeds are for eating, since they will never grow. But it is a 1 in 10. Which means 1 in 20 is fertile and a woman, which is the only important number as far as maintaining a population next generation. If they could alter the odds so that there were more fertile offspring on the Queen's Council and less in the Drone Harem, they would do that in a heartbeat. But they can't, so they don't.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

How likely is it that no one will want to play a drone or queen?

I bet that if there was a novel written by the average RPG-derived novel author for this culture it would center on a fertile queen/drone that does not want to be a queen/drone and wants to adventure instead, and struggles to live their dream.

[Username17]

How likely is it that no one will want to play a drone or queen?

I bet that if there was a novel written by the average RPG-derived novel author for this culture it would center on a fertile queen/drone that does not want to be a queen/drone and wants to adventure instead, and struggles to live their dream.

Uh... why? Their powers are totally useless. They can get pregnant despite living on a Uranium stockpile. And... that's pretty much it. If they leave the desert their super powers of "being able to bear children" is going to be totally laughed at by pretty much everyone.

Other Mosynans can, from the point of view of any story that generally matters, do anything they can do. A worker or a warrior male cn still get an erection and even spray sticky white bukake of justice if for some reason that is required. He can fall in love with whoever and engage in sexual intercourse if for some reason that is important. It's just that his individual sperms look like Blinky the Fish and his man paste won't make a woman pregnant. He's like a man with a vasectomy, which is why he became a worker or a warrior in the first place.

Unless your story involves settling down and spending a few years raising children, the powers of the Drone Harem and Queen Council don't do anything. It's worse than trying to set yourself up a Moskitian Boat Builder or a Scrap Pile Reforger. At least those people can set up shops on other sides of the world where their talents would seem fantastic and valuable. A Queen's powers only look fantastic and valuable in her home land. If she runs away to adventure her fertility magic looks like the stuff that fucking everyone does normally because they don't live on a pile of uranium.

How many people seriously want to play a character whose entire deal is that they are an expert crafter? And of those people, how many people seriously want their craft skill of choice to be "craft: baby human?"

-Username17

[Roy]

Depends on system. In 3.5 where 'being a crafter' means you get every fucking item in the game for around oh... 11.25% market price, thereby getting about nine times as much wealth, and thus as much power without touching the infinite loops... hell yeah! That's how you do everything better than everyone else. 'Being a crafter' automatically makes you the Mother Fucking Batman.

If it's mundane stuff, or some other system, no one gives a shit. If everyone can just get infinite cash, and thus infinite power, no one gives a shit.