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Nothing vs. Slith?


Slarti

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Jeff appears to have finally settled the old debate in his AMA, and the answer (for once) isn't Other (Vahnatai):

 

Q: Which is your favorite race in the Avernum/Exile world? Regardless, I want to state that I've loved the various small touches here and there that make a nod to your party makeup, like all the fantastic racism towards the nephilim in my party in Avernum 3.

 

A: I always really liked the slithzerikai.

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I am pure human, yeah, 100% fresh from my mother's womb.

 

I don't know, it seems even the skyrim community are fond of argonians and stuff

 

But I do find slith's somewhat cool, I once did a party full of sliths and received some special slith-only messages from some encounters on AV3, I hope Jeff does more of those things.

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Eh, Humans and Demi-Humans can be really tiresome - as cliche' as "Catperson" and "Lizardman" may be, by comparison they're as fresh and interesting as the Vahnatai.

 

I think I was lucky, then, coming on board the RPG genre with Exile 2. I think "Person", "Scrawny Person", "Midget", and "Jake the Fat One" wouldn't have been nearly as compelling.

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out of all the first trilogy races i always feel like the sliths got the rawest deal. they're all allegedly descended from exiles from slith country; they're unwelcome in avernum from the get-go, and even as allies in the empire war they never exactly secure the friendship or loyalty of avernite humans.

 

unlike the nephilim, who have as much business trying to go back to the surface as the humans, it's hard to even say whether the sliths would want part of valorim as a new home.

 

unlike the olgai vahnatai, who have their own priorities and leadership, or the nephilim, who are apparently a leaderless internal colony (and to be fair, it seems like the avernum government treats assassinating independent-minded nephil leaders as a serious policy goal), the sliths have leaders who seem to be pretty willing to follow avernum anywhere, and it doesn't seem to do them any favors.

 

in conclusion, i love the slithzerikai and i'm married to all of them

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They're unwelcome in Avernum because the majority of the sliths start interacting with humans by massacring the First Expedition and continue in that vein until the death of Sss-Thsss. And then, well, the sliths of Gnass don't really have much to do besides collaborate with Avernum. Their numbers are tiny, they're still unwelcome in their homeland, and Avernum at least tries, sometimes, to give them a fair shot.

 

—Alorael, who could try to draw interesting parallels between the Empire's age-old official policy of wiping out nephilim and the intermittent slithzerikai impulse towards wiping out all the humans. Maybe it was just murderousness that made them assault the First Expedition, but maybe they got a very accurate view of what the Empire would do and have a firm belief that it's better to do than to be done unto.

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They're unwelcome in Avernum because the majority of the sliths start interacting with humans by massacring the First Expedition and continue in that vein until the death of Sss-Thsss. And then, well, the sliths of Gnass don't really have much to do besides collaborate with Avernum. Their numbers are tiny, they're still unwelcome in their homeland, and Avernum at least tries, sometimes, to give them a fair shot.

 

—Alorael, who could try to draw interesting parallels between the Empire's age-old official policy of wiping out nephilim and the intermittent slithzerikai impulse towards wiping out all the humans. Maybe it was just murderousness that made them assault the First Expedition, but maybe they got a very accurate view of what the Empire would do and have a firm belief that it's better to do than to be done unto.

iirc, unless the second trilogy retcons events pretty heavily this isn't really how things went with the first expedition - in motrax's approximate words, "they were arrogant and they were slaughtered".

and that's someone who liked humans! the evidence is that they were imperious jerks and the expedition was a comedy of errors by smug magic conquistadores and not much in the line of earnest first contact gone tragically wrong.

 

and really, counting that as a reason for "humans" not to trust "sliths" is a little silly. even the avernites seem to see the first expedition more as a stupid and doomed imperial project than to look back on them nostalgically as their predecessors. avernum history seems to date back from the first struggles between the newly-exiled tower of magi clique and the haakai. and sss-thsss's people are on the other side of that (even then there are sliths who aren't!), but that's something that ends with the events of avernum 1. ten years and a shared fight against a genocidal foreign invasion later, the people who were never part of that at all are still held collectively responsible. it's a little ugly, isn't it?

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You need to stop the invaders before they establish a beachhead. The Vahnatai failed to do so with the Sliths and then the Empire because they were asleep. The Sliths tried and failed as did the Britons/Celts when the Romans came, the Angles/Saxons came and of course when the Normans came. The Normans and Japanese for the most part succeeded in preventing invasions. The indigenous people of the Americas and Oceania essentially did not even try to stop the invaders, which in some areas (e.g. Aztec areas) was somewhat understandable, but in many other areas was a huge mistake.

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The indigenous people of the Americas and Oceania essentially did not even try to stop the invaders, which in some areas (e.g. Aztec areas) was somewhat understandable, but in many other areas was a huge mistake.

 

There's no possible way they could have. The Europeans could efficently project force into America/oceania via the sea, and the natives couldn't correspondingly threaten Europe without a navy. The resources that were at stake (spices in Oceania, gold/silver in the New World) were sufficently valuable that even had the natives been able to repel the invaders before a beached had been established, the Europeans would have simply kept trying until the natives were overwhelmed.

 

Really the only plausible counterfactual that you can think of where Europe doesn't end up ruling the world is if all the nasty diseases are in the Americas and are carried to Europe instead of the other way around, but that wasn't the case, and you could make the argument that pre-modern Europe would be economically helped by a large plague like it was post-Black Death (redistributed land, labor becomes more valuable, real GDP per head goes way up, etc.).

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No game in either trilogy explicitly says what interaction there was between the First Expedition and the sliths. We don't know who provoked whom. But given that the expedition managed to provoke Motrax, one of the more friendly and laid-back dragons, into either killing them or just casting them out, they certainly weren't good at diplomacy. Arrogant and slaughtered indeed. As an aside, though, the First Expedition wasn't there as conquerors, nor were they really there as diplomats. They were explorers. Encountering anything intelligent, much less in huge numbers, probably came as a giant shock. And then they handled it terribly.

 

But that's not really what Avernum has against the sliths, that just sets up the tone of how sliths treated later humans. When the first exiles to Avernum showed up, the sliths attacked. And kept attacking, relentlessly, until all of the hostile bands were killed off. And then, in A6, they're attacking, very successfully, again. Yes, the few sliths in Gnass were friendly to Avernum, but to the majority of humans sliths were a terrifying hostile force. It's probably to Avernum's credit that they integrated Gnass as well as it did.

 

I also think you're overstating the racism: sliths were among the few sent up to Upper Avernum and seem to do fine. They're respected, and even part of the highly secret Bunker. The fact that they don't appear in large numbers is probably more due to the fact that they're simply aren't very many sliths as part of the Kingdom of Avernum. But what evidence is there that the ones who are are treated as second-class citizens?

 

—Alorael, who really finds it remarkable how well Avernum deals with friendly members of species with whom they've had major conflicts. The nephilim start out as more or less an opposing nation-state within Avernum, but they're eventually integrated, at least somewhat. (And remain prone to banditry, but then, so do the humans.) The sliths of Gnass remain in Gnass and don't suffer any massive waves of anti-slith violence. The vahnatai nearly get Avernum destroyed because they don't distinguish between Avernites and the Empire, then join forces, then go on a human-killing rampage, then turn on Avernum in force. Avernum still maintains diplomatic relations and a somewhat tense peace with the ones who are left (i.e. not the diehard Rentar followers). The Empire kills non-humans as a matter of course, but Avernum seems surprisingly willing to recognize that an enemy made up entirely of one species does not mean that species is entirely made up of enemies.

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As an aside, though, the First Expedition wasn't there as conquerors, nor were they really there as diplomats. They were explorers. Encountering anything intelligent, much less in huge numbers, probably came as a giant shock. And then they handled it terribly.

 

having said that, historical precedent suggests that explorers can turn into conquerors pretty fast if the opportunity arises

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Dantius, I did not say that I thought that they would have succeeded, I said that they did not try. The French traders and English and Dutch colonists in North America were extremely vulnerable for several years. There was not a huge amount of readily accessible resources apparent in North America (other than maybe fur) that would have justified replacing failed expedition after failed expedition. The colonies in North America were not enough of a prize for any of the European nations to spend much to keep them. Great Britain got bored with the situation after a relatively small expenditure of its military (though they were weak is a land power), France sold their portions at very cheap prices, the Dutch and German states never really got started. Central and South America were a little more readily exploitable, but only kept Spain and Portugal in the game a little longer. It has only been truly obvious in the 20th century how valuable the US/Canada would have been to France, Russia, Spain and the UK and how valuable Brazil would have been to Portugal has been even slower to emerge. That said, the Native Americans or Australians would not have been able to stop the Europeans due to lack of organization and technology.

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Well, North America and Brazil never were the real prizes, which is why everybody was so eager to get rid of them (or, at least, not fight to their last gasps over it). The really valuable bits were the East and West Indies, or what we'd now call the Caribbean and Indonesia, because then you could get spices, sugar, cocoa, coffee, indigo, and that basically gave you license to print money in Europe. It's hard to get a sense of just how important that was today- the Dutch East India company, which had a monopoly on spices in the East indies (duh) would have had an adjusted market cap of $7.5 trillion dollars today. That's half the entire annual output of the US, or the entire stock market of Japan plus the entire stock market of China, or all the gold that's ever existed plus all the silver that's ever existed- and that's for just a few measly islands in Indonesia. You'd better believe the Europeans would keep trying until they ran out of men given that's how big the prize was.

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As an aside, though, the First Expedition wasn't there as conquerors, nor were they really there as diplomats. They were explorers. Encountering anything intelligent, much less in huge numbers, probably came as a giant shock.

I'm not sure this is entirely true. They were explorers more than an army, yes; but they came armed to the teeth with magical weapons, like mythical heroes -- or end-of-epic adventurers -- with a variety of powerful items (like the onyx scepter and Demonslayer) that you don't hand out to somebody who's mapping an empty cave. They surely didn't expect what they found, but they must have expected some kind of intelligent, hostile life.

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I think the First Expedition expected monsters, and they got them. And, to be fair, that's also what their interactions with the sliths seem to have amounted to, although that could be a matter of only having a hammer and seeing everyone as nails. But the caves were very much seen as a hostile, alien environment. They were supposed to be over-equipped to deal with any problems. (And they were, but the problems seem to have been poor leadership and terrible decision-making, which the Empire especially just couldn't really work around.)

 

The First Expedition couldn't turn conqueror because they expected no one to conquer. They weren't colonizers because the caves were not a fertile, welcoming land. If they'd found something amazing down there maybe they would have been followed by someone else, but just disappearing confirmed the Empire's opinion that this was a bad place and perfect for dumping bad people.

 

—Alorael, who now adds to his ponderings whether the Empire-Avernum war would have turned out differently if the Empire's best stuff hadn't gone missing and if it maybe hadn't suffered a cultural setback in discovering that being a really awesome adventurer gets you sent on a suicide mission. Or exiled. It's possible that Avernum got to be so great because everyone with the potential to hit level 50 and take on entire armies for the value of their gear was sent down there for attitude problems or horrific criminal behavior. Which would actually explain a lot about the sociopathic nature of the lying, stealing "heroes" Avernum gets saddled with, judging by the reports on these forums.

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I also think you're overstating the racism: sliths were among the few sent up to Upper Avernum and seem to do fine. They're respected, and even part of the highly secret Bunker. The fact that they don't appear in large numbers is probably more due to the fact that they're simply aren't very many sliths as part of the Kingdom of Avernum. But what evidence is there that the ones who are are treated as second-class citizens?

i feel like we might have different ideas of "doing fine"! the sliths there complain about having no choice but to work under terrible environmental conditions as part of a political project that everyone involved has ambiguous or negative feelings about. the bad environment is exacerbated by the slith workers not being a priority for firewood (despite needing it way more than humans).

 

on top of that, though, the sliths and humans seem to have two different ideas about what the sliths should be doing. the sliths use their traditional construction methods, and the humans (including some of the leadership of new formello) are angry and exasperated with their using time and materials on "useless" statues. (surely if the point of the shared construction is proving sliths and humans can live and work together, there's nothing "useless" about integrating slithzerikai traditions into building a settlement shared between humans and sliths -- but try telling the avernites in new formello that.)

 

the sliths face disrespect and cruelty, and official neglect and hostility. them even being there is written as the gnass sliths, after decades of friendship between gnass and the avernum, still being treated as having a lot to "prove". even playing along with that, they're not given an opportunity to do so without having the rug pulled from under their feet.

 

(and when unspecified services makes a secret weapon, the human mage lives and the slith blacksmith dies - coincidence, maybe, but still unfortunate.)

 

in conclusion, we can debate "racism" per se (i didn't use the word!), but i think it being a raw deal they are dealt is hard to debate...

 

The First Expedition couldn't turn conqueror because they expected no one to conquer. They weren't colonizers because the caves were not a fertile, welcoming land. If they'd found something amazing down there maybe they would have been followed by someone else, but just disappearing confirmed the Empire's opinion that this was a bad place and perfect for dumping bad people.

the first expedition went to exile knowing that exile was habitable, and knowing they'd encounter demons plus whatever the empire had previously banished there. (the dragons come from the surface, remember.)

that's a minimum case based on what the games talk about the empire knowing about pre-1E. i think it's rational to infer that, as slarty said, they were armed to the teeth for a reason. the apollo missions didn't carry guns. (one of the soviet programmes did. for hunting. really.)

 

the first expedition was basically the empire invading hell. the guys who went along with that were exactly as cocky and doomed as that suggests, and i think everyone who lived in its shadow knew that.

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Well, the Empire hadn't previously banished anything there. I doubt they knew about the dragons: if so, they clearly would have come better prepared to slay them. On the surface, it wasn't an expatriation campaign for dragons, it was an extermination campaign -- as it was for other magical creatures. But they seem to have known about some of the monsters, presumably by scrying:

 

Linda: "Many years ago, when these caves were first found, the tyrants above sent down a variety of troops, led by a group of adventurers."

Ursula's ghost: "Curse these caverns. Curse the day they sent us to clean them of vermin... Of the monsters. The lizard things, and the demons, and the snakes and gremlins and eye beasts and such."

 

Ursula does also mention exploration, but her statement above is pretty clear evidence that they came expecting to be following the Empire's policy of extermination of non-humans, including towards the sliths.

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Well, the Empire hadn't previously banished anything there. I doubt they knew about the dragons: if so, they clearly would have come better prepared to slay them.

 

in a2cs, motrax explicitly claims to have been banished to avernum:

 

"They ask me about the vahnatai. But I cannot remember anything about them. They were active so long ago, before I was banished to the underworld." The once-mighty creature lies limp on the stone. "It is hard. I am old and tired."

 

if the empire didn't do it i'm not sure who could have

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Is it possible that Motrax was not speaking literally? Perhaps he and the other four fled into Avernum during the slaying of the dragons, which basically would have amounted to banishment, even if it was implicit rather than explicit.

 

Also, I love the sliths and the dragons because they are scaly and fancy. I occasionally try to find a lizardman stuffie, to no avail. :(

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Yeah, everything else makes it clear the dragons _fled_ to Avernum to avoid persecution. Maybe it felt like banishment.

 

Also, Motrax is hazy, confused, and senile by A2, so given the discrepancy and lack of any other evidence to support his claim, I'm writing it off the same way his "brothers" (or brothers, if A2CS is to be believed) write him off.

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Calling the caves "habitable" at the time of the first expedition is a bit of a stretch. They were survivable in that there was water and some lizards to eat and a small amount of edible fungus. Linda and her ilk altered the native fungus to increase its productivity for food, light and construction materials, without which, being banished would have been a death sentance.

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Linda wasn't part of the original set of exiled mages. Erika is the only one who is consistently mentioned in connection with altering the fungus for food, though there are conflicting statements as to whether the luminescent fungus was her doing, or that of the Vahnatai.

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Empire discovers caves. Empires sends powerful bands into the caves to see what's up. They all die. Empire decides that this makes it a perfect dumping ground for undesirables, who will presumably die quickly and miserably. (This is better than execution? Or was this intended to be worse than execution?) The banished include powerful mages, who make the caves more habitable and are part of dealing with the endemic demon problem. Somehow, at some point, the Empire decides it's a good idea to check what's going on, just in case, and then has at least some permanent spying operations in Avernum.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the history doesn't really add up. But that's okay. If you don't look too closely it's fine, and if you are looking that closely you're probably the type to cobble together fanon to justify the whole thing.

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The Empire did nothing with the caves, just after the First Expedition. It took some time (at least decades) before they started to exile people there. But really, the least realistic part is that the Empire put resources into teleporting people instead of just killing them. But--BEEP

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This is very much the same question that can be asked about England and Australia. Banishment to Australia became the number one punishment for everything for a while. Was the cost of shipping undesirables to Australia worth it?

 

well i mean, the british empire did want australia as a colony: transported prisoners were a convenient source of cheap labour. as of e/a1 the empire doesn't appear to have a similar interest in the caves, on account of how their main economic resources are awful mushrooms and animals that are either sickly or ill-behaved

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Australia was established as a colony first, and the use of convicts for labor was convenient. You'll note England didn't stop executing people for capital crimes! The Empire doesn't either; it's the incovenient in-betweeners who they don't want around but can't really justify killing who get sent down. But unlike Australia, Avernum isn't a colony. It gets no desirables, has no harbor, and any resources extracted can't be sent home.

 

For banishment to make sense, some combination of conditions must be true: the portal has to be not all that expensive to maintain once created (maybe it's the one made for the First Expedition?), the Empire must have considerable desire to not execute but to not simply imprison, and transporting prisoners to the portal must be reasonably cheap and easy.

 

For the first, well, maybe. Portals are literally magic. For the second, I can see trying to avoid mass murder to limit the spread of rebellion, which seems to be a perpetual problem for the Empire. And if the portal's cheap then it's cheaper than imprisoning someone for a long time since you provide no food, no water, and no guards. Which goes into the third: it doesn't have to be cheap to move people around, just cheaper than locking them up forever. What really seems strange, though, is that any benefit of not killing people would be gained by sending them into an uncertain but presumably grim fate from which no one returns. Is it really that much better?

 

—Alorael, who settles on "Hawthorne was crazy and didn't need to make good decisions" as the final justification. Which actually explains a lot of the nature of the Empire, really.

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Exiling also developed gradually, remember: it was the previous Emperor Hawthorne who started the practice; Erika complains about his son, the current Hawthorne in EFTP, rapidly increasing the rate at which people were exiled. Later games support the suggestion that this second Hawthorne was nastier than average for the Empire's ruling class, so it seems likely that this was a widening of the grounds for exile, rather than a shrinking of the grounds for execution. That helps make the wide variety of grounds for exile that we hear about sound a little more plausible.

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I went back and looked at my notes on this from EE, and there are a few interesting clarifications. Micah was definitely there before the mages. The first Hawthorne was the one who exiled Erika and company. And Motrax apparently lived in the caves before the Empire became genocidal toward dragons, so his comment about exile is extra confusing.

  • No direct comments whatsoever about when Exiling began, or how long there was between that time and the arrival of Micah and the Five. We do know that some of the exiled magi helped work on the portal to Exile before being exiled.

 

http://encyclopedia.ermarian.net/wiki/Talk:Timeline_of_Ermarian#Dating_Research

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Continuity is hard. Authors who are especially concerned about it end up employing someone or have some dedicated fans who check their drafts before publication to make sure that things are consistent from novel to novel. Other authors just don't care about it and figure that while some fans will obsess about issues like was Motrax exiled or not, most won't care. I doubt Jeff spends much if any time on continuity. I would prefer a greater degree of consistency, especially now that we are on the third version of the games and so there has been plenty of opportunities to fix the errors, but it does not prevent me from enjoying them.

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Linda wasn't part of the original set of exiled mages. Erika is the only one who is consistently mentioned in connection with altering the fungus for food, though there are conflicting statements as to whether the luminescent fungus was her doing, or that of the Vahnatai.

i like to think that erika and the tower of magi mages all claim partial or total responsibility for exile being habitable because they're from a society where people with power casually rewrite history and get away with it. who can say what if anything the vahnatai did to contribute to that, but the balance of evidence points to the caves being theoretically habitable by humans before the first expedition. sliths have similar requirements to humans, after all, and they lived there for at least a little while by then.

 

also, my memory of A1 is hazy and i've only played part of E1 but my memory from the later games is that a lot of the macrofauna of exile were introduced by the empire as part of the xenocide, which i've always assumed included the six (as of A1) remaining dragons. presumably there were other than humanitarian concerns in doing this - all there really needs to be for this to make sense is a ritual of (Mass) Teleport Other which competes favorably with spending a platoon of soldiers and and a half a dozen mages and priests trying to kill whatever it is outright.

 

this sorta helps explain why there's overlap between valorim and avernum, between the vahnatai caves and upper avernum, and between avernum and upper avernum, but little between upper avernum and valorim and none between valorim and the vahnatai caves.

 

so, basically, chitrachs and hydras would have been the largest animals in the original avernum ecosystem, along with a lot of animals occupying niches like birds and rats and so on. everything else should be assumed to have been introduced in the last century. that's what i think, anyway. dragons would just be the biggest and most impressive example of that.

 

Australia was established as a colony first, and the use of convicts for labor was convenient. You'll note England didn't stop executing people for capital crimes! The Empire doesn't either; it's the incovenient in-betweeners who they don't want around but can't really justify killing who get sent down. But unlike Australia, Avernum isn't a colony. It gets no desirables, has no harbor, and any resources extracted can't be sent home.

in point of fact, there were limitations on transportation (first to america, later to australia and always to a few other places) but it wasn't something like a capital crime / less-capital crime divide. it was a form of leniency which was commonly available for most of the many crimes that carried a death sentence, such as stealing a pound of silverware, murdering a man in cold blood, or being a homosexual. (which exile/avernum is pretty much unique in terms of "evil carceral empire" stuff i've encountered in, you know, acknowledging.) i'm no expert but the question of who gets transportation and who gets the rope seemed to be more procedural than ethical, in which respect avernum sorta-but-only-sorta mirrors real life.

 

and to muddy the matter a little further, transportation was mostly a way of shipping unfree labor to free landowners and capitalists, wholly unlike the situation in avernum (altho the Abyss has a loose parallel in pirate republics and maroons and so on, kinda)

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the balance of evidence points to the caves being theoretically habitable by humans before the first expedition

I don't think that's true except maybe with quite a great emphasis on 'theoretically'. The mages aren't the only ones who talk about how critical their magic was not just for repelling hostiles but for allowing daily necessities to be available daily. And there are plenty of old people around who aren't affiliated with them or with Micah; surely someone would say "nahh we were fine, we just needed their help with the sliths and demons" if that were really the case.

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The caves were survivable. They had air, they had some light, and they had some edible fish and lizards and maybe even fungi. What they definitely did not have was enough of anything, or enough of anything cultivatable, to support the human settlements. It's likely that sliths have both different dietary requirements and lower metabolisms. Maybe they lived happily on fish that wouldn't support humans.

 

 

I'm not sure what xenocide you're talking about. The Empire didn't, in any obvious way, intend the exiles to wipe out anything. They were just dumped. The only thing really worth targeting was the sliths, and they came very close to wiping out the Avernites. Someone on the surface sent down some cows, probably just as aid. What other surface megafauna is there in Avernum? The lizards, the major beast of burden and food animal, are native. And the dragons weren't, according to most sources, banished. They came down on their own long before the Empire knew the caves were there.

 

—Alorael, who at the very least notes that Motrax was there to greet the First Expedition, which was the Empire's presumable first foray into the caves. It's not like they tossed in giant, magical, fire-breathing reptiles, waited a long time, and then thought to send in some adventurers to see what happened.

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—Alorael, who at the very least notes that Motrax was there to greet the First Expedition, which was the Empire's presumable first foray into the caves. It's not like they tossed in giant, magical, fire-breathing reptiles, waited a long time, and then thought to send in some adventurers to see what happened.

 

+1000

 

thx for laughs of day.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The caves were survivable. They had air, they had some light, and they had some edible fish and lizards and maybe even fungi. What they definitely did not have was enough of anything, or enough of anything cultivatable, to support the human settlements. It's likely that sliths have both different dietary requirements and lower metabolisms. Maybe they lived happily on fish that wouldn't support humans.

eh: you can buy food from sliths, and a party of sliths doesn't seem to eat any different. i'm willing to accept a handwave over that as a gameplay element, but nothing really suggests that sliths have any inherent edge over humans in living in exile except being amphibious (or well-adapted to water) and thus being less endangered by the caves' cold, vicious lakes and rivers. they live in the wettest parts of the caves, and they're the most threat to human settlements along the water.

 

if i had to headcanon something up to explain the discrepancy you're pointing to, it'd be cultural. humans are still, after generations in exile, pretty squeamish about eating a lot of meat sources that don't seem to be poisonous or vile. humes and nephs also use weapons which are objectively worse for the conditions in exile - swords and bows, not exactly great for a dark and twisty place with little metal.

 

incidentally, it'd be worth thinking about that a common strategy for cold-blooded animals without easy access to consistent temperature conditions within their comfort range is eating more...

 

 

I'm not sure what xenocide you're talking about. The Empire didn't, in any obvious way, intend the exiles to wipe out anything. They were just dumped. The only thing really worth targeting was the sliths, and they came very close to wiping out the Avernites. Someone on the surface sent down some cows, probably just as aid. What other surface megafauna is there in Avernum? The lizards, the major beast of burden and food animal, are native. And the dragons weren't, according to most sources, banished. They came down on their own long before the Empire knew the caves were there.

i always got the impression they were banished, but other people have said that was more of a "pushed to flee by human aggression" situation.

 

also, i think i was unclear - i didn't mean they sent things down to exile to be killed by the exiles, i meant they sent things down there as a way of leaving them tantamount to killed (much like the exiles themselves), presumably in the hope the caves themselves would kill them. or else the other things they sent down there would. i expect it's not a humanitarian thing but a cost/effort thing.

 

the lizards are likely native. (there's giant lizards in valorim, but also in the vahnatai caves. who knows?) less clearly native, still possibly so: basilisks, gazers/eyebeasts, giant rats, giants. nativeness indeterminate or stated both ways: gremlins, goblins, ogres. categorically not native: humans, human domestic animals besides lizards, nephilim and nepharim. not native but not from the surface either: sliths, vahnatai, chitrachs, null bugs. who can say: giant spiders (esp. GIFTS), slimes, giant bats.

 

undead don't breed and hence don't really count, but isn't it interesting that there are no new forms of undead in valorim?

 

—Alorael, who at the very least notes that Motrax was there to greet the First Expedition, which was the Empire's presumable first foray into the caves. It's not like they tossed in giant, magical, fire-breathing reptiles, waited a long time, and then thought to send in some adventurers to see what happened.

i'll confess when you put it that way it sounds silly, but it's not hard to imagine a situation where the teleportation magic requires a valid target (i.e. not into solid rock, magma, a giant nephil smiley face, etc) and all they knew about it, before the first expedition confirmed where it actually was, was "straight down a few miles and far away". in that scenario we can assume they'd have thought they more or less sent the dragons to hell - maybe literally - but found to their displeasure that the dragons (perhaps along with other nasty things they gated away as part of the campaign to clean up the surface world of dangerous nonhumans) still lived somewhere it was possible to walk.

 

 

I don't think that's true except maybe with quite a great emphasis on 'theoretically'. The mages aren't the only ones who talk about how critical their magic was not just for repelling hostiles but for allowing daily necessities to be available daily. And there are plenty of old people around who aren't affiliated with them or with Micah; surely someone would say "nahh we were fine, we just needed their help with the sliths and demons" if that were really the case.

i mean, that is what the old-timers emphasize about micah and the mages! i'm not gonna go out on a limb and say no one from the early days credits the mages with exile being human-habitable, but nothing about the tower of magi or any of the other mages' abodes or bodies of work screams "agricultural engineering". (patrick, a little? maybe?) the closest any of them get to obvious magical research into apparently mundane things is erika, and i think if we can agree on nothing else it should be that if anyone's lying about their contribution to exile and getting away with it because they're powerful and deranged, it's probably her.

 

the long and short of it for me has always been that the party is roughly as capable of surviving in the vahnatai lands, and in their unreclaimed outlands, as they are in exile. erika or the triad sure musta been prescient to fill the dark waters with luminous and edible fungi, eh?

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i'm not gonna go out on a limb and say no one from the early days credits the mages with exile being human-habitable, but nothing about the tower of magi or any of the other mages' abodes or bodies of work screams "agricultural engineering". (patrick, a little? maybe?)

 

There are garden research areas in the Tower of Magi in A:EFTP and A:CS, in the center north that you have to pass through to get to the center of the tower. In A4 they are funding an agricultural research station near the remains of the tower.

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