Worldbuilding, nonhumans, and the inaccurarcy of Earth parallels

[pawsplay]

If dwarves/elves were as diverse as humans, would they be anything else than short/thin humans?

Most likely. Humans are a long way from covering all the possible differences between all thinking creatures. We are all so much more alike than different.

 

[DandD]

Dwarves and elves are diverse. That diversity lead to the different bajillion elf-races with different stat modfiers. Dwarves are less popular, which is why there are less dwarf races with different stat modifiers.
Nobody needs to be reminded of gold elves, gray elves, high elves, wild elves, forest elves, silver elves, moon elves etc.
Some settings use the elf-approach, and make bajillion human-races with different stat modifiers.
It's ultimately flawed.

 

[mmadsen]

Well, as long as you have humans, there's likely to be some sort of "technological progress" unless you have a good explanation why there isn't.

Technological progress is far from inexorable. We live at the end of centuries of progress, so our perspective is skewed. Technological regress is common too, especially after the collapse of a large, prosperous empire.

 

[Fenes]

Dwarves and elves are diverse. That diversity lead to the different bajillion elf-races with different stat modfiers. Dwarves are less popular, which is why there are less dwarf races with different stat modifiers.
Nobody needs to be reminded of gold elves, gray elves, high elves, wild elves, forest elves, silver elves, moon elves etc.
Some settings use the elf-approach, and make bajillion human-races with different stat modifiers.
It's ultimately flawed.

The glut of elven subraces made them, at least for me, nothing more than humans with pointy ears and a snotty attitude. I don't really see any difference between those elves and humans - other than elves usually being overpowered and over-fanserviced.

 

[Rackhir]

Thing is, that most of the other races even ones like Giants and orcs aren't that different from humans. Lets face it most of them are really just aspects of human societies or personalities personified. Human societies can differ far more than your typical fantasy races generally do. So humans have been dealing with "the other" for our entire existence. There's nothing appreciably more terrifying about an orc horde than about the Mongols, or Tamerlane or any one of the nomadic tribes that have terrified and conquered more settled people.

So simply adding more "species" to the world is not necessarily going to produce a dramatically different world.

It's also probably worth pointing out that historically and to a frighteningly large extent even today, magic was/is real to many people and "works". So while real magic might be flashier and more powerful it isn't necessarily going to change the societies that much. However, it could quite conceivably bring about a "technological" Renaissance far earlier and leading to a much higher level of development than we possess now.

David Webber has a series that has a magic "tech" based society clashing with a science/psi based society, that has some decent extrapolations as to how something like that might look (though both are at more of a WWI level of tech).

 

[Kheti sa-Menik]

What I'm seeing in many campaign settings, to a greater or lesser degree, are points at which humankind could be poised on the brink of technological breakthrough but an event or series of events occurs in which mankind's attention is shoved into dealing with these events (war on a massive scale, cataclysmic natural disaster, etc) and either loses or cannot continue with progress. Given that most campaign settings are smaller in size than Earth, a large scale event would have more an impact one everyone.

In Greyhawk, the Twin Devastations; in Dragonlance, the War of the Lance; in Birthright, that explosion thingey. I seem to recall similar events in FR.


IMC, the total landmass of the campaign world is signifigantly smaller than earth and the following events seriously interfered in humankind's development:
- There was a "Doomlord" that arose and using foul creatures and sorcery, waged war on the blossoming civilizations for over a thousand years. His empire covered nearly all of the southern and continent. Humankind barely survived.
- A cataclysmic series of natural disasters beginning with an earthquake that broke the supercontinent in two. Thousands died, civilizations were destroyed.


I think landmass and events such as these (as well as racial diversity and magic and the other items folks mentioned) play a huge part in answering why humankind may have ben around for thousands of years and yet has not climbed to the peaks of our technological advancement.

 

[Mallus]

to the point where our real-world society is unimaginable to someone from the Middle Ages or even the Renaissance.

But the people haven't changed all that much.

And yet, your standard D&D fantasy setting continues for centuries, even millennia, without appreciable progress in science, and retaining many of the same cultural and philosophical traits it did three thousand years ago.

So do we.

But I'm not sure if many worldbuilders have seriously considered the effects of genuine nonhuman cultures would have on the development of their human neighbors, and their overall effects on the development of the world.

I'm not sure you have seriously considered that even among the inveterate D&D worldbuilders there's little call for this kind of inquiry. Most people build game worlds to house their knockoffs of Conan, LotR, and Naruto, not to run detailed simulations of (heavily Western-biased) technological development.

It's cool that you want to run Middle Earth through the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, but not everyone shares that interest. It's not because they haven't thought things through, it's because they have and found that kind of thing doesn't serve their needs.

 

[DandD]

Societies with real functional magic and different species living all together (or warring each another) would be like the Final Fantasy Settings, for example Ivalice.

 

[gizmo33]

I don't think real-world people know even how humans and human societies really work. Extrapolating that feeble amount of knowledge to an imaginary world with non-human intelligent creatures I think it just too steep of a hill to climb. At least in terms of something with a smattering of scientific rigour. That being said, as a world builder I don't mind putting together a rationalization of how things work in my world based on some general principles from real life. But I really try to avoid pretending that there's something definitive or scientific about what I come up with. I shoot more for "plausible" or "convincing", or sometimes even "remotely possible".

 

[Ruin Explorer]

After the Mongol conquests shouldnt everyone be using recurve bows and discard their old designs? How long did it take gunpowder to finally replace the pike as a main infantry weapon?

You're very very VERY confused if you believe it was "cultural reasons" that stopped pikeman formations being replaced purely by musketeers. They were replaced pretty much as soon as technology allowed it. The cold hard fact is, people with primitive matchlock or even flintlock muskets are pretty terrible for assaulting positions, or for resisting cavalry charges or the like (particularly the latter). Until muskets became reliable enough, and gained bayonets, fielding a purely musket-bearing army would have been inviting your own massacre.

When firearms were still young, the formations employed were typically "pike and shot", with them working together in different roles. Whilst "Musketeers" may simple be a "better" unit in Civilization or whatever, it's not that simple in real life.

As for recurve bows, they're extremely difficult to make, requiring specialized knowledge and specific materials. It's not "cultural dislike" that stopped them from spreading as much as they could, it's that the information wasn't being exchanged, and/or that even when it was, the device had little advantage over cheaper, commonly-made weapons that were already in use.

It's also VERY IMPORTANT to note recurve bows DO NOT survive well in damp conditions, and require significantly greater care in handling and maintenance than simpler bows. So, there are plenty of good reasons for not adopting foriegn weapons beyond this bizarre suggestion from you that people in the past didn't take weapons on their merit. They most certainly did. This is not a new idea. Whilst in many cultures there is a strong strand of military conservatism, there are also always people willing to do what it takes to win, and when that involves adopting new weapons, it will occur.

I mean, really, why do you think this idea is new? The Romans, for example, used Auxilliaries for a reason, you know, and adopted a great number of ideas over time. Only bizarre "trapped in amber"-type cultures (which inevitable get rolled over by another culture with a few hundred years of trapping themselves) like the Spartans fail to use better weapons when they come across them.

I agree with the rest of what you're saying, but unless we're talking about a culture conservative to the point of suicide, newer, better weapons will be adopted.