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The Glyphstone
2009-08-07, 07:26 AM
In the current stage of my homebrew setting, I'm working on the various human cultures/groups. What I'm not sure about is how to go about setting up my timeline of development for how long it took them to form a stable civilization. Assuming they just pop into existence (in this case The Gods Did It - By Accident) as a full-developed species in sufficient numbers to maintain a population, and the following specific factors:

1)Local environment isn't important - each of the four major groups lives in a different place, so I need a baseline before applying this factor.

2)Magic is small-factor or irrelevant - at this point in the history, there is no arcane magic, only a small bit of divine magic and what is mechanically psionics, both of which are either stingy or not well understood. I haven't finished my overhaul of the magic system either, so consider the growing people to be totally nonmagical for now.

3)Similarly, intervention or involvement by nonhuman races is minimal. I can always modify this later, but for now I want to focus on development in isolation.

My end goal is something that could recognizably be called a civilization. It doesn't have to be a unified government, one of my four is going to be a scattered group of barbarian nomads before they're unified in a war and similar unimportant setting details. I just don't want to overshoot in either direction - RL human society has only been around for a couple thousand years, so having 10,000 years of history and still only in medieval-era tech would be as unrealistic as 100 years from primitive barbarism to fully functional and organized nations.

kamikasei
2009-08-07, 07:44 AM
Depends on how "organized" they are when the gods pop them in to existence. Humans didn't start off as a blank slate even at the point where we could say we became biologically modern, after all - we inherited various models of social organization from our ancestors.

I'd have to look through my copy of Guns, Germs and Steel to give you a precise estimate, but if you're talking about how long it would take to go from small clans of related individuals to a large civilization of strangers bound by law and tradition with specialization and dedicated bureaucrats, priests, scholars and warriors, a good example might be the settlement of Hawai'i. If I'm remembering correctly that took something on the order of a few centuries to a thousand years to become a full kingdom. If you're talking about a larger area where individual kingdoms/empires can spring up and compete against each other you could get fairly rapid technological progress.

However, the major take-home message from that book is that environment is a huge factor, as the landscape, physical and ecological barriers, and animal and plant species available for domestication all affect how easy a technology is to develop and how easily ideas and innovations can spread (which amounts to "how big a pool of potential innovators have you got working").

jmbrown
2009-08-07, 08:11 AM
By definition, a civilization is when people settle into a single area and form a relationship based on a division of labor and social heirarchy; basically, when people form a culture. Town A and Town B might be similar, but they each have their own written records and traditions. The latter part being important to a civilized society.

I'm no social scientist (or whatever study is involved in this) but I'd say it takes at least a generation or two before a society develops a cultural identity unique to them. When the American colonies were formed, the settlers took with them their European mannerisms. A generation later they began to form their own.

Anyways, the environment is one of the most important factors as is contact with other civilizations. The easier it is to adapt to the environment and the friendlier (or not) they are with their neighbors determines the speed at which they develop. Isolated communities often develop slowly while clustered communities develop quickly; basically an "evolve or die" situation where you have to grow to keep ahead of the power curve. Historically, cities grow the quickest by the coast or a large body of water due to the resource intensity so environment is probably your largest factor and you should consider it first and foremost.

Lysander
2009-08-07, 08:20 AM
The interesting thing about the modern age is how quickly we progressed technologically. In 100 years we've learned more about how the world works than in a thousand.

So it's completely fair to have sudden bursts forward, then regression, dark ages, renaissances, etc over the course of several thousand years.

Why not copy real history to get a sense of timing.

Telonius
2009-08-07, 08:31 AM
Ideal conditions:
Ready sources of water and food
Building materials (stone, wood) just lying around waiting to be used
Metal ore is plentiful, high-quality, and nearby
Lack of plague
Lack of velociraptors/martians/other predators

I'd guess about 1500-2000 years if they're totally starting from scratch (technology isn't much more complicated than Dog, Pointy Stick, Sharp Rock, Tent, Clothing, and Fancy Hat Means Chief). The more technology they have going into it, the less time it will take.

Stegyre
2009-08-07, 08:44 AM
FWIW: For issues like this, I like to cheat. I'll take one of Sid Meier's excellent Civilization games and run through a few turns, letting the different races develop technologies, communities, etc. As desirable, I can even use the generated maps (and make adjustments I deem appropriate).

Yora
2009-08-07, 08:51 AM
I'd guess technology is the most important factor. If the humans can make use of the technologies of other races, I'd go with the approximation of say 1,000 years.
But if they have to develop all their tools and weapon from nothing, it would take much longer. Real world humans needed about 200,000 years to get to the state we are in now. And we lived as cave men until about 10,000 years ago.

Narmoth
2009-08-07, 08:57 AM
What knowledge do they start with?
Are we talking pre-stone age (that is, monkeys with sticks) or do they have farming communities?

OverdrivePrime
2009-08-07, 09:34 AM
To me, civilization means permanent structures, agriculture and specialized division of labor. For time for civilization to rise from basic tools and a small group of people into a healthy, agriculture-based society, I think that South America provides the best baseline. Australia arguably is less hospitable to growth of civilization, but Australia seems like a special case since pretty much the whole damn continent burned down not long after humans showed up.
Anyway, South American civilization is impeded by a geology, continental shape and orientation, a complete lack of draft animals, lack of domesticatable helper animals (unless you count llamas), few livestock of any sort, no ready grains, etc. The poor folks down in Central and South American took 1200 years to domesticate corn so that they could finally have a stable crop.

Anyway, depending on which archeological digs you go by, civilization took between 8,000 and 12,000 years to show up in South America, but once it took hold, it did rather well. (Until a bunch of foreigners with crazy germs showed up and wiped out 90% of the population.) So, generously, that's about 8,000 years for civilization in the least optimal conditions outside of desert or tundra. 4,000 years seems to be the absolute minimum to go from nomadic tribe with chipped-stone technology and no domesticated animals to buildings, agriculture and specialized cultural roles.

kamikasei
2009-08-07, 09:38 AM
Are we talking pre-stone age (that is, monkeys with sticks) or do they have farming communities?

Just got to say that there's a very wide middle ground between "monkeys with sticks" and agricultural societies. Hunter-gatherers with language have a great deal of time to accumulate technology and knowledge that can be carried on the move and transmitted orally, and all of that is going to be necessary before agriculture can begin.

bosssmiley
2009-08-07, 09:47 AM
I'd guess technology is the most important factor.

Technology is a symptom, not a cause. The most important factors in the rise of civilisations beyond the medieval subsistence-and-despotism model are:

the establishment of property rights
freedom of inquiry
scientific method, and
right of exit

These necessary preconditions translate over time into innovation, earned and rationally reinvested wealth, an established corpus of scientific knowledge, and, ultimately, power. All these factors are most likely to manifest in the event of a weak or divided central authority.

BTW, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel isn't a patch on David Landes' Wealth and Poverty of Nations. GG&S explains what happened and why, but doesn't go into satisfying depth on the how of the why of it.


RL human society has only been around for a couple thousand years, so having 10,000 years of history and still only in medieval-era tech would be as unrealistic...

Sorry, but no. There were recognisably urban settlements in the Near East by about 8,000BC and empires by ~3,000BC. What you get is millennia of local authority, then a few technological and cultural innovations (food storage, bureaucracy, the development of the war chariot, etc.) allow local big men to extend their reach and hold to non-local areas.

As for how long it takes to bootstrap a civilisation from tribalism to a recognisable monuments-and-history civilisation, look at the history of the rise of civilisation in our own world. You can see that

the first farming society arose ~10,000 years ago,
the first hieratic/despotic territorial empires arose ~5,000 y/a, with trading city-states coming in at about the same time (surplus for export, see?),
the first transcontinental naval empires rose about 1550AD (~500 y/a),
the first industrial society had manifested by about 1800AD (200y/a),
the first attempt to leave our world came in the 1960s (50 y/a).

The highly rapid Roman Gallic / American models of development are grossly atypical and only work if you have an existing civilisation dumping financial, technological and demographic capital into the new area at a prodigious rate. Bootstrapping a civilisation is much slower, a lot harder, and requires the kind of decades-long social focus that actually militates against the long-term causes of cultural success I talked about at the top. Angel investors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_investor), for all the hassles that come with them, can be a big help.

Success builds on success, and imitation is *much* easier and far more rapid than innovation (assuming you have a culture that tolerates either...).

brujon
2009-08-07, 10:29 AM
Some factors have to be considered before making any estimates(some of which have been mentioned). Namely:

Is the race fully developed and inteligent when dropped from the skies by the gods? This is important. In real world, we have evolution, which takes ludicrous amounts of time. If the race is fully developed when dropped from the skies, they just have to interact and understand the world around them.


Predators. How is the ecology of the setting they're into. Predatory action creates an "arms race" of a sort, when the squishy smaller but intelligent races have to defend themselves with whatever is at hand. This accelerates somewhat the adaptation proccess, but if the predation is TOO much, it disaccelerates the proccess.

The environment. Is the environment friendly? How is the winter? How is the summer? If the winter is too harsh, people tend to develop a sense of community rather rapidly, because hugging can offset the cold. There's also many adaptations that have to be developed on the fly, such as winter clothes. If you don't do it, you die. Also, harsh winter encourages the hunting of large game, which requires more people, which requires coordination. You have to stock up on food if you're going to be months deep into a cave waiting for the winter to subdue. Harsh summers, specially DRY summers work similarly. You can't survive without water the same you can without food, and that means most of the time, people will try to move to areas that have water when their own water dries up. And moving is best done in groups, so it helps develop a sense of community, too.


So, assuming they're settling within a temperate climate, with a harsh winter and mild summer, with large and small game, where the predators are bears, wolves, wild dogs and large cats, there's rivers and lakes nearby, caves and covers where they can be relatively safe in winter. I'd outline a timeline like this...

1st to 4th generations: Develop necessary implements, like winter clothing and hunting spears. Notice essentials of living in a harsh winter, such as snow serves as a natural refrigerator, where you can store food. And start using fire as a means of warming oneself.

5th to 10th generations: Improve on necessary implements, more efficient winter clothing, straight spears and sharper stones on hunting spears. Start building rudimentary cover alongside water-sources and start fishing as an alternate means of supplying necessities. Start building an rudimentary language to more easily transmit the growing information to younger generations.

10th to 15th generations: Mostly developing the language, but simultaneously creating means of establishing hierarchy, thus iniatiating the culture. Pretty stones become differentiating elements, younger males are trained to hunt, females learn to knit fur and cook. More weapons are developed, such as the axe and stone sword.

15th to 30th generations: Splitting of the tribe in more than one faction due to size and views. An rudimentary but efficient language permits the sharing of experiences with other tribe members, speculation starts to arise on uncommon phenomena. Magic and Psionics are seen as unnatural and thus "special". Religion starts. Pottery and woodcrafting starts. Development of written language starts.


30th to 50th generations: Discovery of metal. Observation that fire causes metal to melt and become malleable permits the start of metal crafting. At the end of the 50th generation, metal weapons can be crafted. Permanent structures are settled. Size of tribe now exceeds 200 members due to permanent settling and hierarchy. Permanent settlings permit further development of written language. Bow and Arrow facilitates hunting and permits more tribe members.


50th to 60th generations: Size of tribe now exceeds 500 members. Trade with other cities for materials and wood-craft and pottery is now common. Farming is done to supply needs, hunting is now done only for meat. New methods to craft metal causes other weapons to become obsolete. New metals are discovered. Written language now used to record happenings and religious texts.

70th to 80th generations: Size of tribe now in excess of 1500 members. Large ruminating animals are bred for meat, hunting is now for fun and special meats. There's expansion of territory and atrittion with other tribes. There is war. One culture assimilates the other and territory is now expanded. A clear hieararchy exists, other types of metal can now be crafted. War points out the need to develop armor. There's now a culture, fully developed and with their own superstitions and specialtys. From 75th generation and onwards new technologys will be developed. Scouts are sent by the town chieftain to discover new cultures and start diplomatic relations, culture continues to expand along the territory, new layers of hierarchy follows. The creation of a policing force becomes a necessity. Training schools for military and scholarly pursuits begin to appear. The world at large continues to be unexplored, and cultures too far away are unknown.

*One generation equals 25 years.


In my opinion, that's what would happen if a fully developed bunch of humans were to be dropped in this setting. After permanent settling, language and written language are developed, you can mirror the development of existing cultures. As i see it, after 2000 years (The 80th generation), the culture will be at the same general position as the cultures of ancient greece before naval developments, or the celtic cultures of ireland.
When diplomatic relations start, development is rapid.

Yora
2009-08-07, 10:35 AM
Technology is a symptom, not a cause.


The highly rapid Roman Gallic / American models of development are grossly atypical and only work if you have an existing civilisation dumping financial, technological and demographic capital into the new area at a prodigious rate. Bootstrapping a civilisation is much slower, a lot harder, and requires the kind of decades-long social focus that actually militates against the long-term causes of cultural success I talked about at the top. Angel investors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_investor), for all the hassles that come with them, can be a big help.
That's what I wanted to get to. If you have another civilization allready providing the technology, it will be adopted within one or two generations. While having to develop it all from the idea that you hit harder with a stone than with a bare fist, takes tens of thousands of years.

You didn't counter my (intended) point, you strengthened it with details. :smallbiggrin:

Narmoth
2009-08-07, 10:47 AM
Just got to say that there's a very wide middle ground between "monkeys with sticks" and agricultural societies. Hunter-gatherers with language have a great deal of time to accumulate technology and knowledge that can be carried on the move and transmitted orally, and all of that is going to be necessary before agriculture can begin.

Yeah, but that's the far end. So I asked where in between they start

kamikasei
2009-08-07, 10:49 AM
Yeah, but that's the far end. So I asked where in between they start

That wasn't clear, and the period I describe would have been some hundreds of thousands of years long, so I wouldn't really call it the "far end" of anything.

bosssmiley
2009-08-07, 10:55 AM
That's what I wanted to get to. If you have another civilization allready providing the technology, it will be adopted within one or two generations. While having to develop it all from the idea that you hit harder with a stone than with a bare fist, takes tens of thousands of years.

You didn't counter my (intended) point, you strengthened it with details. :smallbiggrin:

What do you know, we argued around to the same answer from different directions. :smallbiggrin:

Da Pwnzlord
2009-08-07, 11:28 AM
I think it would take fewer then 15 generations to get a highly functioning language together. I read somewhere that one school for deaf children, a independent complex sign language developed, complete with it's own syntax and everything. That was just kids, who would stay around in the "culture" for significantly less then a lifetime. And they weren't even using voices, which would presumibly be easier. It would take 5 generations, tops, to develop a language.

Writing it is another ballpark completely though.

ArchaeologyHat
2009-08-07, 12:42 PM
Where are you starting from, having just evolved/come into existance or the development of Farming?

How developed do you want this "Civilization"?

Have other Civilizations existed before or do they exist at the moment?

If you're choosing having just evolved/come into existance, a reasonably complex nomadic hunter-gatherer culture will appear pretty soon. This Culture will last for a long time.
In the Real World Homo Sapiens has been a Hunter-Gatherer culture more than it's been every single other kind of culture put together. Homo Sapiens evolved in the Middle Paleolithic (Middle Old Stone Age, the Palaeolithic as a whole stretches from 2.6 Million years ago to 10,000BC) which went between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago. But only really colonized outside of Africa in a big way in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age,), a period that begins at c10,000BC and which turns into the Neolithic (New Stone Age) at some point between 8,000BC and 1,000 BC depending on where you are. (Or very debatably it's possible to argue that the Mesolithic never ended for some people, the the !Kung tribe of Africa and the Nanamuit "Alaskan Eskimo" thrive to this day).

The Mesolithic brings us an increased complexity of society. Lying between the "first artists" of the Upper Paleolithic and the "first farmers" of the Neolithic what the Mesolithic brought us wasn't clear until fairly recently. More recent developments however have revealed that the Mesolithic brought us the first sedentry societies, in the form of Hunter-Gatherer-Fishers who lived by the coast and exploited largely non seasonal marine resources. The Mesolithic is also the period that brought us the bow and arrow and for this reason and some collections of Mesolithic Skulls in Germany and the Balkans, some believe it to be the first time humans actively waged war on one another.

Evidence for Farming suggests that Farming first appears in Mesopotamia at sometime around 8000BC (at a very very rough figure), we have to this day no idea why it happens. The House Mouse Mus Muscelus Domesticus, a species that can only exist in reasonably sized towns appears at around this time. Very soon after it appears in the Indus Valley region in Northern India/Pakistan and in China.

It appears to have been developed independantly in a number of places around world. Mesopotamia, the Mediteranean and Egypt seem to have fairly advanced societies by about 2,000 BC. However the Neolithic only reaces Britain by 5,000 BC and even then we have absolutely no proof of any large settlement and farming in Brtain untill the late Bronze Age (About 700BC). Lots of monuments, Barrows, Stone Henge and the like, but no large-scale settlement or farming.

It's probably fairly easy to argue that human "civilization" has established itself by the Iron Age or Late Bronze Age, at about 1300 BC in the Near east.

If Civilization has existed before, take a look at the rise of Medieval European nations and the Dark Ages or perhaps even the colonial Era with regards to America Australia etc.

The Glyphstone
2009-08-07, 06:55 PM
Definitely a lot of excellent information, I'll try to answer questions. Never thought 'civilization' could be such a murky term.

-There is one previous civilization, but they're long extinct, with nothing but really old ruins and buried artifacts from...I've been calling them the Precursors, and haven't even decided if they're humanoid yet.
-I'd figure on full biological and mental development as a starting point, but nothing more advanced technologically than simplistic hunter-gatherer groups. Note that this is a general genesis, summarily...the other nonhuman races appear at roughly the same time, so there won't be any trading with other cultures to boost technological advancement at the beginning.
-I hadn't expected environment to be such a controlling factor, though I should have in retrospect. There's four major human cultures/countries, differentiated (at the moment) by their specific environment.
--Group 1 is placed in the northern, cold lands and tundra - subarctic, but not totally arctic.
--Group 2's native lands are probably the best in terms of living conditions, a wide band of mostly temperate European-ish land.
--Group 3 gets the desert, a sort of North African/Egyptian climate. Could probably be looking at the Mesopotamian civilizations for hints here.
--Group 4 is an unknown. They're in the same climate bands latitude-wise as Group 2, but I haven't shaped their home ground yet, except I know it's going to be a bit ugly. I'm currently split between desolate steppes/grasslands and arid canyon/mesa terrain. They're going to be the last group I work on culture-wise, so they can be set aside.

All three/four appear at the same time, and in the same condition, so I suppose environment will actually be the biggest controlling factor. There is a massive, effectively impassable mountain range and some nasty thick forests cutting across the SW-NE line of the continent, so 3 is basically completely isolated from 1 and 4, with minimal contact from 2. 2 gets a little bit of contact, or will once they start expanding, with 1 and 3, but they're on the opposite side of the landmass from 4.

Lupy
2009-08-07, 07:50 PM
Well, agriculture was invented ~10,000 years ago. This enabled cities and towns to exist. You know the rest.

AKA_Bait
2009-08-07, 09:38 PM
This is a very, very complex question to which there isn't any really right answer. In terms of a D&D setting, I'd just figure out what made the most intuitive sense and run with that and then take the ideas mentioned here and use them to explain why a particular group is where it is civilization wise rather than starting at genesis and trying to project the ideas forward.

That said, here are two thoughts:



So, assuming they're settling within a temperate climate, with a harsh winter and mild summer, with large and small game, where the predators are bears, wolves, wild dogs and large cats, there's rivers and lakes nearby, caves and covers where they can be relatively safe in winter. I'd outline a timeline like this...

5th to 10th generations: Start building an rudimentary language to more easily transmit the growing information to younger generations.

10th to 15th generations: Mostly developing the language, but simultaneously creating means of establishing hierarchy, thus iniatiating the culture.

*One generation equals 25 years.


In my opinion, that's what would happen if a fully developed bunch of humans were to be dropped in this setting. After permanent settling, language and written language are developed, you can mirror the development of existing cultures. As i see it, after 2000 years (The 80th generation), the culture will be at the same general position as the cultures of ancient greece before naval developments, or the celtic cultures of ireland.
When diplomatic relations start, development is rapid.

Obviously I edited that down a bit because I wanted to highlight my objection. I'm of the opinion that a fully human like species would have a complex language in the very first generation. Written language and formal linguistic rules may take longer to develop but humans, at least, have language (and I'd argue certain logical operations) hardwired into them. I might go so far as to say that hardwiring for a complex language is the very thing that makes them a fully developed human.



I know you haven't figured out the magic system yet, but I think you need to do so before any real estimate can be made because an additional thing to consider is magical development and its interplay with technological development. Presumably both would be taking place over the life of the civilization and the effect could reasonably be thought to accelerate development, stagnate it, or just toss it off in strange directions depending upon what magic can do, when it can do it, and who can use it.

For example, if you run with the technological/scientific model of success leads to broader theories which lead to more success then the development of the 'light a candle' aspect of prestidigitation would be a sign that development of 'fireball' is nigh. Development of fireball would be, in my view, as socially significant as the development of the rifle barrel, it would totally change warfare.

On the other hand, a bronze age society that can cast 'magic weapon' doesn't have much need to figure out how to make steel of the magic is readily accessible. A society with the 'clean dirty stuff' part of prestidigitation readily available wouldn't need washing machines or even much in the way of detergents. At the very least, the rich wouldn't.

Which leads me to that the mere fact of little bits of magic would radically alter social structures or at least have the potential to. You'll probably need to decide to what extent magic is heritable and magical learning accessible. A look at the Temporal Authority section of the Dungeonomicon (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Dungeonomicon_(DnD_Other)#The_Socialnomicon:_Heroe s_in_the_Greek_Sense)might be helpful to get you thinking along those lines over time. Not only will you need to consider what societies would look like at various stages of magiotechnology but in what areas they would have any pressure to improve (either internal in terms of social/governmental pressures or external in terms of wars, dragons and other natural disasters.)

brujon
2009-08-08, 11:52 AM
AKA Bait:

I have to digress on your opinion. A fully functional and complex language is not hardwired into fully mental and biologically developed human... I don't remember their EXACT names, but somewhere in the early 1900's 2 girls were found on the jungles of Thailand. The girls were thought to be long dead, as they disappeared 10 years prior. One of the girls was a 4 year old, and the other was still an infant, 1 year old only, when they disappeared. When the girls were brought to study, they were little more than beasts, animals, really. They growled and barked, and snarled, but didn't spake a single word for years, despite attempts to teach them language. They eventually learned something, but never fully developed their linguistic capabilities. The older girl died at age 19, the other died a little later. They just couldn't process the foods we eat in civilization, they just... weren't adapted to our environment. They ate bugs, small animals, only raw meat and wild berries. They adapted.


There are some documented cases similar to this one, but this is the case were a mere 1 year old survived for over 10 years with only her sister in the middle of a tropical jungle. All their mental and physical development ocurred in the wild, unaided.

And what they found out was that there is a period in life, were the brain is at maximum plasticity, and able to process much more information than any other period in life, and that period is between 3 and 10 years old. After that, the brain just isn't the same anymore, you can still learn, but not at the same rate as before. You can see that with little children all the time. They learn FAST. In one day they learn dozens of new words and form new phrases with them incredibly quick. They even develop new words from the words they now, it's amazing. But after that, their brain kinda slows down.

Ever tried to learn a new language now? It's hard, you take months and months to even begin to grasp the new language(In the case of languages not related to your native, such as chinese or german in some cases). In the same amount of time, a small children is almost fluent.

So, i digress on your opinion that language is hardwired into our brains. It's a socially constructed thing. To develop a language from scratch takes generations. Sure, there's some growls and snarls that signify "this" or "that", and then things begin to become more and more complex, until you have a grammar that can add sufixes and prefixes and radicals to form new words at a short notice. But before that, language is extremely limited and only descriptive.


There are indigenous tribes of the Amazon which are used as models to describe stone-age cultures, so undeveloped that they are. It's the enviroment they live, it has everything they need, close to no natural predators. They just stay there and live and breed. Don't even have a written language. Their language is so rudimentary it contradicts linguistic theories of our times. Yet, evolutionary wise, they're the same as you or I.

Why did their language stagnated to this point, while you have a written language like Cantonese or Japanese, with thousands upon thousands of written symbols, one more complicated and convoluted than the other?

While you have more than a million words in english and counting... etc.. etc..

The thing is that language is developed as a necessity. When you have a condition that sparks the need to be togheter as a group, when you have to coordinate to fell a Mammoth, you NEED language to be fully functional.

Then, when you have language, you can "connect" different brains, like connecting a series of different batteries to increase battery-power, you connect the brains and increase the "brain power". Then you have technological advancement. It's a response to a nature imposed challenge.

How do you develop a steam engine without all the prior knowledge required to do so? You just don't. You have to have language to do that. One guy boils water, see what happens, tell the other guy. The other guy puts a lid on top of the bowl, boils the water, the lid goes flying up, he tells the other guy. The other guy sees the strenght in boiling water and experiments, but goes nowhere. The other guy invents cogs and suddenly the whole thing goes togheter and other guys see new applications.

So, no, it's not hardwired as it is facilitated by the development of specialized brain parts that in a certain age are further able of processing the type of information that is required to understand language. It would take several generations to develop a fully functional language, that can describe new phenomena in a easily accessible way as to facilitate the social interactions that only arise when there's the need imposed by the environment.

There's so much factors that need to be considered, that you pretty much have to guesswork the whole thing based on similar cultures, and EVEN then, you have to see the discrepancies that are seen on similar cultures.

Aztecs, Mayans and Incans, they had the same general enviromental challenges and yet, Aztecs and Incans were vastly different, and Mayans had a rudimentary and yet ridiculously complicated alphabet. It's just mind-boggling.

I think i have said too much and yet said too little. I hope someone finds this useful...

Coidzor
2009-08-08, 03:17 PM
hmm. So what other humanoids are being generated at the same time then and are they having to learn from scratch or are they being given laws and language and such from on high or actually created knowing their laws and language? How far away are they from the humans?

What exactly do you mean by the gods did it accidentally? Were they going to put some elves there but decided against it but their essence they had invested couldn't be recalled completely so something less than elves but more than beast arose?

As for the humans, the desert group is going to be dependent upon a river system for alluvial farming if they're going to develop agriculture. Actually, pretty much both 1 and 3 are dependent upon river systems that flood to develop agriculture in a relatively timely manner.

Something tells me the sub-arctic dwellers are going to split between those who want to get out of dodge and those who want to stay, so you're either going to have to account for that or really box them in. In which case they're probably going to end up like the Inuit unless we're missing out on what you're conceiving of their environment as.

The Glyphstone
2009-08-08, 03:47 PM
Subarctic dudes - actually, the Inuit, with a small dose of classical Viking, is pretty much the end culture I'm aiming at. -they'll be semi-independent tribes loosely organized under a single ruler of sorts.

The desert region does have a big river running through the middle of it, a Nile analogue of sorts. I can't fish out the link right now, but they'll be the ones who grow into the group I was making in an old thread about how integration of undead would affect a society - but that's a bit off-topic.


As for 'accident', I'll try to explain without bogging people down in boring details about the setting. When I say 'accident', it's literal. The gods/Powers had no intention of creating humanoid races at all - at the early stages of creation when this is occurring, they're engaged in a massive deicidal war between themselves. The humans (and elves, dwarves, halflings, and scalekin, my 4 nonhuman primary races) popped up where blood split by warring gods fell down onto the planet and mixed with the essences of the world. They're all appearing at the same time, but relatively isolated from each other - the dwarves are linked to the earth, so they grow up in the mountains; the halflings have a water affinity and come from the coastlines and islands; the elves are linked to fey power and the forests (not a fun place to be in this world), and the scalekin appeared on lands in close proximity to dragons, who are incredibly reclusive and private. The humans 'parentage' is effectively pure divine blood, but diluted from being a mixture of both good and evil god's blood.

This is why I was asking about development rates without magical influence, because it's not until the various humanoid groups have developed stable, self-sustaining cultures of some sort that they actually get any attention from the Powers, who discover that siphoning power from these 'mortals' makes for a particularly delectable and invigorating meal, and start granting them miracles and magic in exchange for their devotion.

brujon
2009-08-08, 04:06 PM
It's a cool idea that creation theory of your setting. Explains everything without being overly complicated. I liked it very much, mind if i snatch some of it for my own campaign world? ^^

The Glyphstone
2009-08-08, 04:08 PM
Help yourself. :)

imp_fireball
2009-08-08, 08:10 PM
Some stuff.

Pretty much this.


Subarctic dudes - actually, the Inuit, with a small dose of classical Viking, is pretty much the end culture I'm aiming at. -they'll be semi-independent tribes loosely organized under a single ruler of sorts.

So basically the progress levels your looking for would be:

PL 0 - Very small tribes (few dozen people). Can't survive at all. Likely the result of people moving into region, dying from cold or animals and then being replaced by others continuously (maybe some event caused this consistent migration? Why else would they move into a tundra?).

PL 1 - Stone Age. They can survive, but technology is just kicking off. Nobody is really settling down yet, although their are tribal wars occurring here and there.

PL 2 - People are settling down, utilizing advanced techniques passed down from ages past to survive (ie. igloos). Farms may be seen here and there (although farming is difficult in a tundra). Organization in all faculties is taking place. Violence and war has likely lead to many bureacracies or one large domineering 'tribe' of thousands.

PL 3 - Large ocean-worthy vessels are being constructed. These warrior peoples are now venturing into far off lands, conducting raids on exotic locales to supplement their expanding population. As one would expect, education and the discovery of written word from more 'civilized' places are slowly being distributed.

----
So over the course of four progress levels (and in my personal view), it would take maybe three centuries to get to the final stage. You can interpret it whichever way you like though.

Don't forget that native indians and african tribes have remained the way they were for thousands of years though.

To see any sort of progression, you'll have to include external factors, such as a history of war (which might be a reason why they were lead to behave like vikings), that saw progression on a rudimentary level.

Haarkla
2009-08-08, 08:45 PM
-There is one previous civilization, but they're long extinct, with nothing but really old ruins and buried artifacts from...I've been calling them the Precursors, and haven't even decided if they're humanoid yet.
-I'd figure on full biological and mental development as a starting point, but nothing more advanced technologically than simplistic hunter-gatherer groups. Note that this is a general genesis, summarily...the other nonhuman races appear at roughly the same time, so there won't be any trading with other cultures to boost technological advancement at the beginning.
...
--Group 3 gets the desert, a sort of North African/Egyptian climate. Could probably be looking at the Mesopotamian civilizations for hints here.


My end goal is something that could recognizably be called a civilization. It doesn't have to be a unified government, one of my four is going to be a scattered group of barbarian nomads before they're unified in a war and similar unimportant setting details. I just don't want to overshoot in either direction
So a Pleistocene start. Assuming you want a literate (for the few), iron age civilization I would say 7,000 - 40,000 years. Possibly the precursors could shorten things a bit.