Solving the "elf superiority problem"

[noob]

Yes...and? That's a fundamental problem with being immortal in this setting. You constantly need someone else's input to keep you functional. The gods/ascended get it from their connections to the world (in a bunch of different ways, whether worship, downloaded from the Great Mechanism, or whatever). Those that try to be "independently immortal" fail. Because the First Law is that everything that lives must die. Whether physically or not, there are no true immortals. Without input from the outside, all creatures stagnate and fail.



Making eternal life undesirable is the whole point here. Feature, not bug. Immortals (outside of those with defined roles and thus compensating mechanisms built in) fundamentally represent a rejection of the world's order. As such they are doomed to stagnation and senescence to the degree that they try to go it alone.

As to demons...demons are not inherently evil. Dangerous, sure. Comes with tradeoffs, sure. For one thing, demons cannot interact with the mortal realm without corrupting it, because they are swarming with jotnar. As such, the structure of the world rejects them; demons without a steady food supply (the requirements for such accelerate as time goes on) in the mortal realm get ejected back to the Abyss. The only place they can exist in a stable fashion is in the Abyss. And there they have to fight both each other (for demons can feed on demons as well as on mortals, taking the stolen souls and adding them to their own supply) and the sucking draw of the Oblivion Gate. Demons are a precarious, unstable group of people. Sure, you won't die of old age. But in some respects, you're even more constrained than mortals.



The idea of having an assistant is something that anyone who reaches that ritual would have encountered, unless really really weird things are in play. So yeah, that's not a concern. In principle, they'd require someone to point it out to them.



Dragons have a very long lifespan as a species. Wyrmlings are dragons, they just don't stay wyrmlings forever. Those that fail to make the transformation die untimely, their potential cut short. The universe doesn't allocate based on individual lifetime as much as averaged species lifespan.



There is a pacifist lich despite probability. Because I've already written one in and he's appeared in play. Low probability events happen quite frequently, after all. And don't be so sure about the requirements for becoming a lich. Remember, I've already departed greatly from even the 5e canon here. The lich ritual is usually undertaken by those with arcane power, sure. But not always. Anyone can attempt it--it's not particularly complex. The moral prerequisites are non-starters for the vast majority of people, plus you need the knowledge (not power, but knowledge) to make contact with the Black Lord. The rest is pretty simple. So the primary filters are morality, knowledge, and then endurance.

And as for durations/medieval stasis--the world has had sentient life for ~25k years. And has been in and out of medieval stasis many times. There just seem to be these pesky apocalypses that keep popping up...

Age	Timespan (before present)	starting/ending tech level	Ending event
Age of Tyrants	25k~12k	Non-technological - Iron Age	Orb of All Might gets used, breaking both titans and wyrm. Continent gets cracked in half.
Age of Wizardry/Age of Aelvar	~12k~4k	Iron Age -- High Magitek (crystal spires/toga variety)	Moon's Fall--the 3rd moon gets dropped on the aelvar capital. Eastern continent gets cracked into Noefra and Soefra
Interregnum	~4k~2k	Iron Age, venturing up as far as early Medieval. Noefra mostly depopulated until creation of humans and orcs, then constant war.	Rise of the Red Fang, the War of Blood (continent-scale war of annihilation)
Age of Man	~2k~250 ybp	Iron Age - high magitek (soul-powered and mechanical this time) - mid-medieval	Two events: the War of Souls (magical nuclear war) about 800 years ago, then the Cataclysm (all magic goes away for 50 years, planes changed, massive destruction, 70% mortality worldwide)
Age of Hope	250 BC - present	early medieval - high medieval	None...so far

So there's been lots of progress. It's accelerating and each cycle starts off slightly better than the last, but lots of knowledge and tech gets lost at each reset. Which usually come because people mess around with souls. Not as a direct consequence, but...

• The Orb of All Might drew its power from most of the titan race, diminishing them to dwarves. Then it backfired and made a mess of everyone.
• Moon's Fall capped off a continued effort by the aelvar to shape the souls of the ihmisi; they didn't like that and convinced the moon to fall.
• The War of Blood happened because a hag tried to make a demonhost out of an orc, but the orc ate the jotnar instead, becoming a proto-demon himiself. Genocidal armies, and the rest is history.
• The War of Souls happened because the Western Empire made dragonborn by injecting fragments of dragon souls into unborn human children. Factions didn't like that, and went nuclear.
• The Cataclysm happened when the Nameless got free of the Abyss and led a host of demons and angry creatures around breaking things. Then adventurers got involved and...well...made a mess.

So soul magic is considered like nuclear waste to the Nth power. Only madmen, demon worshipers, and hags touch it.

about your individual over specie lifetime it is false since when an individual lenghten their own lifespan they suddenly lower their idea rate or there would be no good reason to not research a way to just lenghten lifespan.

The hatchling dies regardless of whenever they transform or not since the transformation is equivalent to death too so a hatchling is completely guaranteed to die fast if they do not find a trick like getting drained repeatedly or being turned into an undead: it is as if because all humans can be infested by mind flayers that are entirely different from them the universe decided that it meant that humans had a longer lifespan despite mind flayers being a parasitic lifeform that have nothing in common with humans (even then they are closer to humans than wyrmlings are to hatchlings because mind flayers gains the memories of the infested human).

I just realised since mind flayers can infest any organic race it means that if an immortal version of mind flayers was created then instantly all the thinking organic creatures would be unable to ever have ideas because all the creatures are the "larval state" of mindflayers in their vision of things.
And you can not say "it is natural for a hatchling to become a wyrmling" because it is also natural for a thinking organic creature to become a mind flayer: it is part of the life cycle of mind flayers.
So if all the mind flayers died would all the thinking organic creatures suddenly have their idea rate increase?
Anyway the existence of mind flayers and the fact they are quite long lived means that most organic creatures have a highly capped idea rate: a goblin will have a similar idea rate to the one of an human meaning that an human will have more ideas than a goblin during their life due to the fact that both could be infested by mind flayers (so as humans spends a higher proportion of their lifespan as a non mindflayer they have more ideas as non mindflayers than goblins).

In conclusion it looks oddly as if mind flayers were made by elves to reduce the advantage normally shorter lived races have in terms of idea rate and if that was true it would again cause an elf superiority problem: elves having the highest lifespan have the highest total count of ideas due to the universal potential of organic creatures to become mind flayers (which is a natural thing: you die anyway if you are eaten or not eaten by a mind flayer but in the latter case there is a creature replacing you so it is the exact same argument as hatchlings being counted as having a higher lifespan even through they die even when replaced by wyrmlings).
Or maybe hatchlings in fact have their idea rate higly capped (except for the purpose of learning because learning from nearly no information needs the extremely fast creation of countless ideas) not because they can be parasited by wyrmling transformation (wyrmlings do not even share memories with them) but rather because they can be parasited by mind flayers (which at least keeps their memories and so are arguably more the hatchling)