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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deuce Traveler" data-source="post: 3551505" data-attributes="member: 34958">Well, it seems that I am the only one to risk the bite of the Shark with a simple point.  The dying elven nation is actually one of my main themes in my current campaign here in ENWorld.  The elves are hopelessly doomed, just as the dragons are doomed in literature.  No one would deny that elves and dragons are powerful races, however it is not to the powerful that the world belongs but instead to the quick.Let's say the average human lives to 70 years old and an elf to 350 years old.  So an elf lives five times as long as a human.  In a block of 350 years an elven couple might have 2.5 children, which means an increase in the elven population of 25%.  An elven settlement of 1000 will have 1250 elves in 350 years.  In the same block of 350 years five generations of humans have 2.5 children each, for a family's population increase of 6.1 by the end of the 350 year block.  So a human population of 1000 will have 3052 people by the end of the 350 year time block, or almost 3 times the population.  Let's hope for the elves sake that they aren't the typical land-hungry humans.But look... on the northern border of the elven lands are some orc tribes.  Now these folk are even shorter lived than those pesky humans and more aggressive, every one a warrior.  Now they live to about 50 years of age, and each orc couple has 2.5 children also.  That means that in 350 years there are 9.5 family members per original couple, and a villages population of 1000 orcs will have 4769 orcs by the end of a 350 year time period, or more than 4 times the population of the elves.So now the orc horde decides to attack every generation, because well... that's what orcs do.  After the devestating conflict the orcs are ready to go about it again in about 15-25 years, just long enough for the human population to repopulate and withstand them.  The new elven generation aren't even teenagers yet and are unlikely to constitute a fighting force.  The orcs or humans won't wipe out an elven nation within a 100 years, or maybe not even in a thousand, but as time passes the orcs and humans continue to breed while the elves continue to fade away in both population and influence until they either must flee to lands unaccessible to others or be skewered beneath their torched Great Tree.There are actually real-life parallels to great fallen or falling civilizations in history and in modern times, for those interested, for example the Roman Empire.</blockquote>

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