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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1992056" data-attributes="member: 7240">The death rate from European disease in Mesoamerica was pretty close to 90% -- and that was only half of the cataclysm. Add onto that a simultaneous invasion and attempted destruction of all written records. If Nahua society can continue to exist after epidemics and forced labour kill 80-90% of its inhabitants, contemporaneously with a 300-year occupation and large-scal e religious conversion, I think one can easily make a case for survival.I'm inclined to agree.I think D&D is more the way that people in the High Middle Ages saw people in the Early Middle Ages (what you call "Dark Ages"); the original Arthurian romances were all written from this point of view. Because medievals were not interested in historical fidelity the way were are, these stories were a weird hodgepodge of early and late medieval things. I think some of your statements are a bit historically problematic but they are bang-on in terms of the literature and myth that these ideas have generated.I'm not sure that "notice" is the correct term here. Certainly, the theory that the "progress" of a civilization is primarily linked to endogenous rather than exogenous factors has remained popular at the level of popular history up to authors like Oswald Spengler in the 20th century. But most historians now tend to link the majority of crises of civilization to ecological, biological or external demographic factors. A huge demographic disaster can wreck a civilization regardless of whether it is going through a time of perceived decline or a perceived rise. Fortunately, in the world of gaming, these two things can be linked: the hubris or decadence of a society might anger a particular god -- an agricultural or weather god, for instance. A god might also attack an arrogant or hubristic kingdom with war or plague.This is a very important point. As I mentioned in my first post, demographic collapse tends to cause a high level of per-capita wealth and a labour shortage. Among other things, this tends to lead to an increase in technology, even if coupled with a simultaneous decline in science. But this is just one manifestation -- the point is that society will tend to value activities that require smaller inputs of labour, even if they require larger inputs of capital. Thus, pastoralism will often replace agriculture as land becomes more abundant and agricultural labour more rare. Because of the way that D&D magic in many ways resembles tech, in a world where there is magic, one of the immediate effects of the demographic collapse will be an increasing reliance on spellcasters. Now onto my stuff:One thing you need to consider is how long did the cataclysm itself last. The strange darkening of the sun that affected Europe in 540 "lasted" for about a year; but the extremely wet summers and springs lasted for another 30 years; and the climate did not fully recover for another 400 years. It also seems to have triggered ecological conditions for a plague epidemic that hit Europe shortly thereafter but then continued to reappear in smaller epidemics for about 200 years. On the other hand, the Black Death was about 5 years long. So, you might want to ask yourself how long the cataclysm takes to unfold, how many aftershocks it had and what permanent effects it may have left behind.Another thing to consider is that because customs often act to curtail birth rates when a population is at a higher level, when populations decrease dramatically, often customs change resulting in higher growth rates. This can make a huge difference given that human growth patterns are exponential rather than linear. Thus, the new societies might allow for polygamy, early marriage and an end to sexual abstinence before weaning. There are two other major factors concerning culture loss. Oral tradition cultures tend to be much harder-hit by major demographic collapse -- even if the old are not especially susceptible to the catastrophe, a specialized oral society can be severely harmed by even small demographic crises. The other factor is how urban the society is -- while a community of 50 suffering a 90% loss would cease to function, a community of 500,000 would not. Even in catastrophes that have a significantly higher initial death rate in urban centres the rural areas are often hit harder. One could argue that the early Middle Ages were different in Greek Europe than in Roman Europe because the population of Constantinople was large enough to survive the collapse relatively intact whereas no centre in the West, by that point, was.</blockquote>

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