RE: sandy & trolls

From: Sandy Petersen <SPetersen_at_ensemble-studios.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 17:34:53 -0500


Stephen Barnes
>Some people are of the opinion that divine spells cast on a HQ
>should be permanently lost. My old GM used this rule.=20

        I think the world is MORE magical on a heroquest, not less.=20

James Frusetta
>Hasni's point was that while single dark trolls are better than
>trollkin, multiple trollkin births are better than single trollkin
>births. I'd agree -- if you have to have the stunted mutants, better
>to have a *lot* of slaves than fewer of them...

        This brings up a subtle ecological point. The fact is breeding faster does NOT give you more people (or trolls)! And having a lot of trollkin slaves can be harmful to the troll species in a very fundamental way. The success of trollkin is evidence of a great decline in troll importance. I'll try to explain.=20

        For most large animals, the limit on population is NOT based on breeding speed. Instead, the environment's carrying limit is the key. Humans live a long time and breed very slowly. In most areas that we live, the area pretty much contains all the humans that the land will support. When agricultural, ecological, or cultural changes increase = the
land's "carrying capacity", then the human population slowly begins to increase until the land is filled up again. Cutting down forests, for instance, normally increases the number of humans that survive in a given area, which is one of the reasons that the human population has steadily increased in Europe over the last few millennia.=20 If humans bred very quickly, our populations would be faster to react = to
ecological changes, but it's unlikely that this would increase the = total
number of humans. In fact, our numbers would probably be fewer, because changes in our biology that would enable us to breed faster would also probably lead to our being more vulnerable to disease, shorter-lived, and less wise (a faster-breeding species couldn't afford a 15-year childhood of training and education).=20 Trolls are ecologically similar to humans; they're social predators at the top of the food chain with the ability to forage. Their nominal breeding rate was only trivially less than humans until it was reduced by nearly 75% via the trollkin curse. Before the curse, a fertile = female
troll gave birth maybe once every couple of years. After the curse, = half
of all births might turn out to be trollkin. After a trollkin birth, = the
female needed to go through a year-long cleansing process and start again - this is a major decrease in birth rate. But this reduced birth rate still should not be a problem if the total number of trolls surviving to adulthood is sufficient to keep the population up. The problem is that the number of surviving trolls is barely sufficient to keep the population stable. =20

        Take a short-lived species like rabbits - the population capacity of rabbits isn't based on how many rabbits an acre of ground will support, but on how fast the rabbits can reproduce to neutralize losses from predators, disease, and natural calamities. If you take = away
one or more of these natural limiting factors, then rabbits respond by = a
rapid (but temporary) boom in population.=20 The population totals of a fast-breeding creature and a slow-breeding creature may be the same, but the factors determining those population numbers are quite different. A Texas field might have both 100 tarantulas and 100 mice. The tarantulas are slow-breeding (males take = up
to 10 years to reach sexual maturity), while the mice are quick = (bearing
a litter at only a few weeks of age, and breeding every month = thereafter
until death). Only 100 tarantulas live in the field because the prey population won't support more than that. Only 100 mice are present because they get killed by rattlesnakes, Harris hawks, coyotes, severe hail, disease, etc. Trolls seem to be a species in the process of changing from a slow-breeding dominant ecological niche to a fast-breeding subordinate niche. Trollkin are important to troll survival, because they provide trolls with a fast-breeding subvariety that can react quickly to changes in the ecology. This is why Dagori Inkarth sometimes suffers trollkin "booms" - just as with lemmings, rabbits, and locusts, occasionally one of the causes of trollkin mortality falls short, and the trollkin respond by "filling up" their environment, eating everything in sight, and going on a rampage.=20

        But trollkin are only useful to trolls as a species if a trollkin's life or death prevents a troll's premature death. Remember that every 3 trollkin eat as much as a dark troll, so as the = environment
nears its carrying capacity, the worth of trollkin is reduced. If = Dagori
Inkarth could support 30,000 uzko, but instead is supporting 15,000 = uzko
and 45,000 enlo, then the result of the trollkin is that they are cutting the potential uzko population in half.=20

Michael Cule
>By the way, whoever asked, I don't think that the Only Old One was a
>Hero, although I'm willing to be corrected. He just survived from
>before Time and didn't maintain any mythological structures of his own

        Technically, I suppose the Only Old One wasn't a capital-H Hero, but he was a very important individual, who would certainly receive his own counter in Dragon Pass terms.=20

>But would you want an afterlife in which you spent eternity
>doing the same things over and over and never being properly aware
>that you're trapped in a loop. And the only relief is when you get=20
>these emergency DI calls from your miserable followers.=20

        That's not really what it's like for the gods - it's not so much that you do the same things again and again; it's that you have the = same
personality after apotheosis that you did before. If you liked = wenching,
drinking, and fighting, you'll spend eternity wenching, drinking, and fighting. It doesn't mean you're stuck with the same wench, the same booze, and the same enemies all the time.=20

Frank Giles
>Bats and dolphins use sonar to locate prey against a uniform
>background and probably don+t actually find out what it is they+ve got
>until it+s in their mouths.

        Both bats and dolphins can tell the difference between different types of prey by the echoes received. A bat can distinguish distasteful moths from edible ones, for instance, or a plastic moth from a real = one.
Sonar is not vision, and it's not just an inferior form of vision. It's its own sense with its own advantages and disadvantages. It's lots better for determining distance and velocity than vision, for instance.

        I think uz are really good at telling one another apart by sonar, if only by the fact that every uz's sonar "ping" sounds totally different (to an uz). All you have to do is hear the guy and you know who it is.=20

        Also, do not forget that trolls are not blind. They have eyes, and they can see quite well in the dark. Adding vision to darksense makes trolls very impressive during the midnight hours.=20

>I propose that darksense is a ranged sense of taste.

        I see no reason that darksense can't transmit taste. Glorantha is not Earth, as everyone has pointed out many times.=20

Sandy=20


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