From: Joerg Baumgartner (joe@sartar.toppoint.de)
Date: Mon 02 May 1994 - 00:12:19 EEST
Nick Brooke in X-RQ-ID: 3853
> More grist to the mill: Carmanians were certainly polygamous (by which I
> mean the Shahs and the richest Satraps at their more decadent periods;
> certainly less than the 3% mooted here). They also originated the customs
> followed by some Lunars of maintaining harems (and bath-houses, too!). I'm
> worried that real-world polygamy crops up only in hot countries, but this
> has always been a problem with Gloranthan climate (hairy Nordic barbarians
> in the south, with Mediterranean/Middle Eastern empires to the north), so
> I'm just going with the flow and ignoring the resulting "implausability".
> Besides, the summers were hotter before the Moon... and you've got to have
> something to do in the long, cold winters...
If it releaves your worries, King Harald Harfagre (Finehair) of Norway had more than two dozen wives. Other chieftains who could afford to offer each wife a full stead to keep the keys might have had, too, not to count the concubines which were in fact sub-wives with claim only to a cottage, not a full stead. Nothing to do with latitude...
For the climatic inversion, check out the height of Dragon Pass. The Elf Sea lies about 1000 metres above sea level, and to the Rockwoods there is a continuous rise from there, until the mountains themselves rise another 1500 metres in average, so that the higher peaks will easily be over 4000 metres above sea level. The Bush Range would be at almost 1800 metres above the sea, then, and the wide upper Oslir valley would still be at 1000 metres around Furthest. Ten degrees lower temperature than lowland in the same latitude (assuming that Valind feeds the Middle Air so that the barometrical altitude cooling is replaced by a similar effect, whose presence is evident from Inora's realms in the Rockwoods) will result in hairy people.
But I will add my doubts about Karasal and Erigia having temperate climate.
Paul Reilly in X-RQ-ID: 3855
Sandy:
>It is possible (but I'm not sure) that the Brithini and
>>Vadeli are a different species from Homo sapiens.
> Aren't the people of Seshnela and Loskalm descended from Brithini
> colonists? At least according to the history in Cults of Terror. Of
> course they could have 'evolved' into a different species.
Same thing happend to the Agimori, who apparently changed species when they first drank water.
>> I classify trolls as a separate order within the mammals, the
> I think that that is convergence rather than a common ancestor. Rock
> digesting ability is kind of a tipoff... I think that Kyger Litor ate
> something of the Man shape and learned the shape, prodauce Man shaped
> children.
In my alternate evolution, rock digesting was something the turf-eating filterer ancestors of the trolls developed, abusing vestigial organs (I don't think exist in Real Earth, but what the heck).
>> Trolls give milk, have body hair, etc. They're obviously mammals. I
> Interesting. We play that this is a similarity of form but that there
> are underlying differences. The 'milk' is a modified and enriched form
> of blood (rather than sweat as in mammals), the hair is chitinous and
> more similar to caterpillar hair than mammal hair, etc.
What a great new industry - trollkin silk manufactures! Feed 'em dirt, and harvest fine black silk. Whole new trade routes wait to be established!
I'd stick with the spiral proteine helix for troll hair, and leave two-dimensional helices to real insects. The presence of bugs in cold Hell, well, bugs me. Troll biology has nothing else in common with insectoids.
> Sweat is one of the distinguishing features of a mammal. Do you think
> Trolls sweat? Their heat tolerance seems a bit low.
Maybe their extremely mineral-rich sweat (they eat the stuff) doesn't evaporate well, thus diminishing cooling effects.
>> Dwarfs I'm not sure of. I have yet to be convinced that
> Constructs. Living machines (the true Mostali) built them.
Misconstructs, since they are actually growing things. <g>
Not too different from human creation myths, by the way...
--
-- Joerg Baumgartner joe@sartar.toppoint.de
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