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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LurkAway" data-source="post: 5726208" data-attributes="member: 6685059">An enormous diverse prestigious metropolis sounds like it has a significant percentage of sophisticated educated people, and the royalty and upper class are probably fabulously wealthy and content. It's not easy to convert this status quo.If there was a disaster and breakdown of alliances, turning 100% xenophobic seems improbable. It's absurd to think that ALL the non-humans and ALL the gods are to blame for some disaster. You might scapegoat one particular race and their pantheon, or you might appease them, or you might turn to another divine patron to support you, but it takes a strange twist of paranoia to turn your back to the entire damn universe.Although anything is gonzo-possible, it seems improbable to believe in superiority over all non-humans and the gods themselves. For every human dragonslayer you put on a pedestal, your political and clerical opponents will put another dozen racial and divine dragonslayers up there with him. And for every story of a human that slays a dragon, there will be a story of a dragon that burns down a village. The people know well enough that if the metropolis should go to war against all non-humans and blacklist the gods, there will not be enough non-divine human heroes to win a World War much less defend their city from counterattack.Finally, I think the xenophobic war-mongering empire-building is at odds with the intellectual universe exploration. The scientific and arcane minds at the prestigious universities need money and resources and, well, stability and cooperation to even begin to dream of understanding the secrets of the universe. War will suck away all that, and draft the scientists into war mages and combat engineers. Only after the empire has been built can resources be pumped back into intellectual research of that ginormous scale.</blockquote>

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