how does a culture recover from an apocalyptic event?

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Okay lets look at it a different way. Kobolds are grass and elves are oaks. When fire burns down the forest, which is going to colonize first? Which is going to dominate the landscape? If a few of the oaks survive, there is a chance they can revive their community (unless a 3rd party, like squirrels, eats all the acorns). And grass is known to weaken tree roots.

Well, to be fair, saving poor conditions or the intervention of fauna grass always looses the struggle for sylvan succession.

 

[DMH]

Why are you going after the Elves?

All the evil races see all others as a threat. If the elves can be erraticated forever, why not do it after a few (kobold) generations when they are still weak? And the same with the dwarves and gnomes?

If they went to war with the goblins or orcs (who can field almost equal numbers) they would threaten their own existance.

But let's get beyond this numbers game, what would the post-apocalyptic Kobold dominated world look like?

Good, I am tired of arguing this point. I made my guess of the post kobold world in post 79. What is yours?

 

[DMH]

Well, to be fair, saving poor conditions or the intervention of fauna grass always looses the struggle for sylvan succession.

That is part of my point from post 79. If the elven allies who are not affected get involved, then the elves have a good chance at surviving.

 

[fusangite]

After a cataclysm that eliminates most of the population (and most competitors, but not most food supplies), a rapidly reproducing species can quickly flourish. Once resources are constrained, rapid reproduction no longer pays off.

Firstly, this may be true in the animal kingdom but it has not been true amongst human groups historically. When demographic disasters hit, pastoral and hunter-gatherer cultures with lower birthrates, surprisingly, tend to gain dominance over agrarian cultures with higher birthrates. This tends to be because these smaller cultures are less immediately impaired by labour shortages and reduced population density than their faster-growing, denser neighbours.

It seems like everyone is imagining what will happen 100 years after the cataclysm without considering the rational actions of everyone in the first century.

Secondly, the term "eliminates most competitors" obscures the fact that the ratio of population between the various humanoid competitors remains the same. What remains obscure is what they are competing over. I think you're doing evolutionary biology here without reference to any sociological factors.

Thirdly, don't most D&D worlds still have big wild areas that are generally uninhabited by intelligent humanoid societies? If so, don't the kobolds already have large areas of untapped resources into which to expand even without the cataclysm?

Fourthly, what sort of cataclysm is this that doesn't affect food supply? Unless this is a plague that affects only humanoids and nothing else, I don't buy the argument that the food supply wouldn't be as or more greatly impacted by whatever the event is. A much more typical cataclysmic model is one that wipes out the food supply, thereby subjecting populations to disease and starvation.

Fifthly, based on the Monster Manual, it appears that kobolds have a very high infant mortality rate. This suggests to me that most kobold mortality is not caused by other humanoid species. So, even assuming that the cataclysm impacts humanoids exclusively, it will actually cause an increase in the ratio of things that kill kobolds to kobolds. For instance, if a key factor in kobold mortality is weasels eating their eggs and the cataclysm only affects humanoids, the ratio of weasels to eggs will skyrocket, spelling bad news for the eggs, and, eventually, for the weasels too.

But let's get beyond this numbers game, what would the post-apocalyptic Kobold dominated world look like?

I'd be happier to discuss this if I weren't being told that it was the inevitable outcome of a cataclysm.

Still, I will offer this:

I think rather than thinking about a kobold-dominated world, it would be fun to imagine more generally a reptile-dominated world. I think it would be quite interesting to have reptiles get a decisive upper hand over mammals. I see the kobolds as the bureaucrat caste in such a society with the most senior kobolds as sorceror-mandarins who advise the Dragon Emperor.

I see this resulting from some kind of permanent warming/seasonal screw-up so that winter never comes. I can see this reptilian empire keeping a tight lid on magic to ensure that winter never comes back. I picture tropical rice paddies doubling as fishing pools being worked by human slaves commanded by lizardfolk pastoralists who treat humans little better than the other draft animals they have working the fields and whip their slaves from the backs of giant geckos.

I see the empire having very different faces depending on whether it is night or day. I see the hot muggy nights as the times when the kobolds open their bureaucratic offices and hear the petitions of the subjugated peoples who have been working all day in the rice patties.

I can imagine a guerilla movement located in the coldest mountains making raids down to the big fortified hatcheries and public torture of the egg-smashers.

How about that?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Hurrah for Fusangite!

I'm totally in agreement with everything in that last post.

Also, and this has nothing do with anything, grass wins with help and unfavourable conditions, Oaks win otherwise, I didn't mean to confuse.

And to back it up his point about food supply, the reasoning behind the argument for flu hitting NE america most harshly is that the food supply appears to have collapsed and then cause mass starvation, something that is associated with particularly nasty flu epidemics since they tend to buck the trend of normal diseases by killing off the healthy adults, ala the Spanish flu, rather than the children and elderly.

The Mojh from Arcana Unearthed would make an interesting addition to the Kobold culture.

So we have a lizard system coming out of this.

Giants are the traditional competitors with dragons, what would that look like?

I'll try to come up with something for centaurs myself.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

One conclusion we might all agreeably come to out of this conversation is that you might see the DnD world becoming more organized according to biome or climate generally.

So that the Elves and allies become rooted in colder and more coniferous areas. Dominating heavily during the sunnier seasons and going on the defensive when the goblinoids attack during the long nights from their bases in decidous areas.

Kobolds and Dragon kin dominate the warm and wet areas, possibly seeing aquatic races as their main competitors.

Giants and Centaurs dominate the plains and tundra. Probably with a wide variety of kingdoms but the Cloud and Storm Giants functioning as the universal nobility given their ability to effectively defend against flying menaces.

Humans, being the generalists, are the real loosers. They loose their military might and never gain it back. In the end, however, they prove to be the only effective generalist race and become the default traders, diplomats, and, yea, even adventurers. Plus they have some reputation as scholars since the majority of the prior sucessful civilization was theirs to start with.

 

[fusangite]

Because the people who were killing them are gone.

(a) On what evidence do you presume that good-aligned humanoids are the primary factor in kobold mortality?
(b) No they are not. Even if good-aligned humanoids are the primary factor in kobold mortality, the day after the cataclysm, the ratio between these individuals will be completely unchanged. In relative terms, exactly the same number of kobold killers will be there.

Why would adventurers kill them when survival is much more at stake?

Precisley because survival is at stake. Good aligned humanoids are not stupid. Why would nearly being wiped off the face of the earth cause them to stop paying attention to other factors that could wipe them off the face of the earth. Wouldn't they be more sensitized to things threatening to bring about their extinction? Furthermore, as I keep saying again and again, historically, cataclysms make people more warlike not less so. So, how is it that you keep asserting repeatedly that the cataclysm will cause people to fight less?

Okay lets look at it a different way. Kobolds are grass and elves are oaks. When fire burns down the forest, which is going to colonize first?

These things are not comparable. The ways that grass and trees compete are not analogous to the ways kobolds and elves compete in terms of their respective deadliness to eachother and a half dozen other ways. Also, we're back to guns and butter here. Why are you designing a microeconomics-style problem where there are only two humanoid species?

Which is going to dominate the landscape? If a few of the oaks survive, there is a chance they can revive their community (unless a 3rd party, like squirrels, eats all the acorns). And grass is known to weaken tree roots.

I spoke too soon. Your metaphor is completely incoherent. It doesn't resemble anything.

90% of the humans and allies are dead. That means there is a lot of open land for anyone who can control it.

(a) How do we know that before the cataclysm the world ran out of open land? If there was a signficant quantity of "open land" before the cataclysm, I guess the kobolds would already be in charge even before the disaster.
(b) Don't we already know that kobolds favour subterranean locations over open land?
(c) As I keep saying, land hunger is not always (or even usually) the cause of wars.

If the kobolds take a chunk far away from the surviving human (and ally) communities, who is going to travel to the kobold to kill them?

Why would the kobolds have the resources to take this land right after the cataclysm? They have been exactly as decimated as the humans.

Wouldn't they be more worried about keeping themselves and their kin alive than going out to kill a threat they don't even know exists?

Why would they suddenly become unaware of the kobolds' existence? And why would they cease thinking that their surivival is contingent on preventing monstrous humanoids from killing them. A survival-obsessed group is more likely to attack potential threats than a prosperous complacent one. Take a look at the Iroquois or the Avars or the Byzantines under Justinian.

Yes. The other lizard peoples are larger and take more time to get to adult size.

Elves are 70% the size of humans and yet, by your math, take 7-10 times as long to reach maturity. So clearly size is not the main determinant of how quickly a creature reaches maturity. Look at how much faster horses reach maturity than humans, despite their considerably larger size. Other than size, is there any other basis on which you can assert that other lizard creatures take longer to reach maturity than kobolds do?

Post 79. I already mentioned monsters and how they would alter the dynamics of the situation.

So, you have arbitrarily excluded everything that could do a better job of global domination than you believe kobolds could. This isn't actually a valid argument. "Let's decide to arbitrarily ignore everything that undermines what I'm saying" is not actually a rational or valid point.

I thought we were talking about surface land competition.

No. You're insisting that conflict and population are primarily dependent on questions of land occupation and I'm saying they're not.

 

[fusangite]

Ah, but if the generational demographics also favor dwarves?

I would have thought that lifespan was at least as important.

Isn't that what I just said? The reproductive lifespan is the single most important factor. If you go from 30% of women living to menopause to 70% -- that's your biggest factor.

Aren't the industrial demographic shifts brought on more by the increased likelihood of people living through a generational cycle than anything else?

Actually, the industrial revolution was not great for life span. However, a contemporaneous cultural shift reduced the average marriage age for commoners by a considerable factor and reduced taboos regarding sex before weaning. Thus, women weren't so much living longer as starting to have kids younger and having more kids per decade.

 

[DMH]

Well since we are obviously not going to change each other's minds, I am not going to bother to continue after this. I just have few points:

How do we know that before the cataclysm the world ran out of open land?

We don't. We do know that a great number of cities are empty and farmland abandoned. The best land is open to whoever can control it.

Elves are 70% the size of humans and yet, by your math, take 7-10 times as long to reach maturity. Other than size, is there any other basis on which you can assert that other lizard creatures take longer to reach maturity than kobolds do?

1) You didn't say elves, you gave reptile people as examples. Elves have a longer generation than the reptile people because the author's decided to make it so. In the PH, they start their young adulthood at 110 years. Or are you contesting that?

2) Their turnover rate. They are not considered snacks on legs like kobolds are. If the turnover rate wasn't as high as it is, then the kobold peoples would be gone long ago.

And lastly, if you had bothered to read post 79, you would see that I do not expect kobolds to be in the position of power after a long period. But only after they and the other humanoids drive the long-lived races into extinction. Evilhalfling had the same idea in post 18.

So, you have arbitrarily excluded everything that could do a better job of global domination than you believe kobolds could. This isn't actually a valid argument. "Let's decide to arbitrarily ignore everything that undermines what I'm saying" is not actually a rational or valid point.

You are right. The answer to the original question is there would be no humanoids left. Dragons and other monsters would take this opportunity to kill all of them.

 

[Sarellion]

As for past remembrance, I think it's hard to say. It's one of those things that is very dependent upon who was wiped out and how advanced technology was at the time of the apocalypse. For instance, if an apocalypse happened today on Earth, very little information would be completely lost since we have so many duplicates of information. This would hold true since the invention and proliferation of the printing press.

If an apocalypse happened today on earth we would lose most information. Informations today are stored on mediums that don´t last long. Paper doesn´t last as long as parchment, magnetic tapes demagnetize, cds won´t store information so long, too. Of course the internet will break down and we haven´t talked about how to access information, without the infrastructure to power and maintain computers, cd players and what else.