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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3574458" data-attributes="member: 30001">How rutheless do they have to be? - there's no mandate for farmers to have to push into that land unless you create one for the campaign (because there's no mandate for population growth and the other factors).  Besides just the possibility of a farmer getting shot by a pixie-dart and waking up in another kingdom could be enough to discourage settlement.  "Cursed land" that's not open to settlement is a concept that I would expect a magical fantasy society to understand.The small woodlands within a given kingdom, plus swamps and stuff - would be the first candidates for clearing - leaving the great primeval forest homelands of the elves untouched.  It's likely that nomadic elves could strike a deal with human kingdoms anyway.Granted, as the population increases then pressures might cause such treaties to collapse.  But that's not a situation that's universal to all times and places - the campaign would simply be placed at a period of time when those forces are not as apparent.  Sooner or later someone is going to invent gunpowder - doesn't mean that a sword-wielding tech-level for DnD doesn't make sense.  There's also no reason that any society is mandated to invent gunpowder, or (more to the point) explode in population, simply because those things happen on planet Earth.  One of the real tricky parts of assuming all possible socieities must be like historical Earth ones is that there's really not a lot of data points for you to compare.Yea, but there are other issues.  One is that there's nothing fundemental about population increases in agrarian socieities across all planets - you have to assume earth climate and crops and so on.  Secondly you haven't addressed the dangers of the fantasy woodland - it's possible that elfin homelands radiate some sort of fey aura that causes crop-blight and much lower-than-average yields for agriculture for the kinds of foods that humans know how to grow.  Lastly, the kinds of cultural transmission that exists in the real world might not exist in the fantasy one - the god of the hunter/gatherer elves might have a vested interest in keeping them at his tech level - meaning that his divine servants intervene at crucial points to maintain the divisions.I agree - the goal would be to make it so that elfin hunter-gatherers look as much like their human counterparts on earth.  That way the basic features are familiar to the players without a whole lot of explaining.</blockquote>

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