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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2301967" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, rant aside, fantasy does provide some interesting sort of questions we can ask.  Although this is something more of a science fiction question, its always interesting to ask how the differences in the sentient species effect thier culture.  Take giants.  What are the cultural effects of being huge?  Or elves.  What are the cultural effects of living for centuries?  But fantasy isn't perfectly suited for such questions.  Take mind flayers.  If you start looking at the common humanity of mind flayers, I think you are asking for philosophical trouble because mind flayers weren't created to be a creature with differences that emphasize a common humanity, but to be utterly inhuman and have features that emphasized its utter inhumanity.  A narative discourse that sets about to justify the culture of mind flayers because they are 'born that way' is going to get tangled up, and misses the fact that they are monstrous on purpose and that they are better used as a symbol for what is monstrous than as a mirror into some aspect of or humanity.  "Don't hate me because I'm a creature that can only survive by eating the brains of other sentient creatures.", lessens there value as a symbol and makes the author as potentially deluded about the nature of that symbol as the character's in his narrative would be.  It would be like taking the aliens of Alien and making them into empathetic beings.  You are missing the point.  The question provided by mind flayers and Aliens is not, "What things are not essential to our nature as humans?", but rather, "How do humans react when confronted by an utterly alien predator that thinks of them only as food?" or even if you prefer, "If something was inherently evil, what would it be like?"A more interesting take on this would be to have a race which shares a clear common 'humanity' with the other sentient races, but fails for its part to recognize that.  I'm thinking for example of the Green Martians in the ERB's Barsoom stories, which is alien in form, but as we latter learn near kindred to the other 'men' of Mars.  How would a member of a culture like that take discovering that he in fact shares common humanity with the other races, as for example the black martian racist Dator Xodar discovers when John Carter convinces him that the other races of mars are not mere beasts.  Or how would a member of a more seemingly enlightened race take discovering that they are near cousins of a barbaric race, as for example a Gnome discovering that Gnomes and Goblins are the same people?As far as ecological forces go, I wouldn't imagine that they'd be all that different in a fantasy world unless you had a truely fantastic ecology - and I'm not sure I've ever seen one done in a published campaign.  The closest I can think of this the magical crisis being experienced in Larry Niven's, 'The magic goes away'.  If mana turned out to be a non-renewable or semi-renewable resource, it might force cultures that depended heavily on magic to go to extreme lengths to keep thier supply available.However, just because the ecological forces are the same, doesn't mean that you can't recast real world cultures in fantasy terms.  For example, what if you did the Aztec empire as a necromantic culture whose ritual sacrifices were performed in order to drive an economy dependent on undead slaves, or what if the Aztecs literally did need to appease demons which they had become culturally dependent on?   For example, the psuedo-aztecs might have formed a pact with a group of demons in order to win a war against a neighbor, but in order to keep the demon from turning against them, they now have to continually war on all thier neighbors in order to keep the demon fed.   And because all thier neighbors now hate them passionately, they fear to seek any solution to the problem, because without the demon they would almost certainly be wiped out by thier now enraged neighbors.</blockquote>

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