[CWBP2] Races

[Deadshade]

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The era is late middle ages and for more details: http://www.cartographersguild.com/co...tml#post240381
although I'm not sure if this post is up to date...

That is about the highest level of technology for the most advanced countries. Some might be a little ahead but most are lagging behind.

We still do not have any countries, not officially. And I don't know where civilization developed first or how they would spread.

Good question: How old is the oldest civilization?

You surely don't need God(s) for the creation of the world. You may need one for the creation of the Universe because physics doesn't offer something definitive and "quantum fluctuation of the void" is just a sophisticated concept to say "God did that" or "Randomness did that" what is in practice the same thing

But I like this kind of questions because they show that even a totally fantastic world has finally many hidden constraints that it must respect if it wants to stay logically consistent.
Unfortunately for civilisations our sample consists sofar of 1 sample what is not statistically significant.
Assuming that the evolution of life on earth is representative of most (not all !) life generating processes in the Universe then we can say :
- once liquid water existed, apparition of primitive life came really fast
- the life spent by far the largest part of its evolution in a primitive (archaea-eucaryote) form

So that gives approximately the following calendar in billions of years (I took some outrageous simpifying hypothesis in points where no unique answer is known) :
- birth of the Sun and the planetary system at 0
- creation of liquid oceans and plate tectonics at 0.5
- first archaea and photosynthesis at 1
- first multicellular at 2.5
- first land plants and bilateria at 4
- first intelligent species ancestors at 4.444
- first intelligent species at 4.4498
- first civilisation at 4.449994
- middle age (where your world is now) at 4.449999

So what you see is the hallucinating exponentialo-exponential acceleration towards the end. The Nature (or magics) needed 4 billions of years to go from nothing to worms, 200 millions to go from mouses to semi intelligent apes and 200 thousands to go from humanoids to civilisation.
So considering this to be a kind of standard, your oldest civilisation can't be older than a few thousands years and the planet not much older or younger than 4-5 billions of years (what implies a small sun).

An interesting case would be a total wipe out (e.g 100%) of all higher level species, civilisations included. In this case the nature would "spare" the first 4 billions years of evolution and would produce new intelligent species and civilisations in "only" 500 millions years or less.
If some small group of the inteligent species survived the total wipe out then their civilisation would be 500 millions years old. However in this case it is higly improbable that their civilisation would stay "stuck" in the middle ages.

[Falconius]

As old as you want to make it? I'm not sure why this (civ age) needs to be defined any more than in just a general sense. Especially before anything specific has been developed in terms of... well anything. It's kind of like deciding what colours are going to be in your painting, instead of deciding what the subject itself is going to be. If you like "modern" art garbage, than I guess that is a valid approach, but it doesn't really end up with anything worth while. Only in this case it's not just limited to one's own work it will also bind everyone else's too. If we develop more specific things area by area it will develop more naturally. So instead of just saying "there are Vikings in this world" which is essentially meaningless one could make a Viking country in a plot or one could develop a Viking culture and place it on a plot, and then people who come by later will say oh look there are Vikings on this continent I'll account for that in my map or story. The difference is that they are not just ideas of Vikings but a specifically developed and defined Viking. Holy crap, I'm not making any sense...

I think the approach to take regarding civilizations and races etc, is the same we take with maps. Come up with a specific civ/race idea make a development (wip) thread and start writing it down. If you know where you'd like to put it in the world, claim that plot and attach the information to it. If not just leave it in the air to let mappers and story tellers to grab it as they will. But I think specificity regarding these topics is as important as it is for the mapping part.

[Azélor]

I mean more something like: when did the first civilizations started to appear? 1000 years, 5000 years, 10 000 years?

I like the idea of wip threads, I never said otherwise. I also believe that worldbuilding and mapping does not need to be done by the same person. A lot of mapper are really bad when it comes to populating places. And a lot of world builder can't make maps or don't have the time to do it.

[Wingshaw]

I mean more something like: when did the first civilizations started to appear? 1000 years, 5000 years, 10 000 years?

I'm not part of this project, but I am trained in archaeology, so perhaps I can help in this regard.

There is some issue about how you define civilisation:
--if civilisation is 'when did people develop culture?' the answer is probably tens of thousands of years. Australia's Aborigines have had a continuous culture for about 50,000 years, and the Neanderthal probably had some level of culture.
--if civilisation means 'when did people start making things/using tools/having property?' you can go back to Ethiopia, 2.6 million years ago.
--if you prefer 'when did nations/organised states appear?' then the Harappans (Indus Valley) sit at about 3000 BCE; Babylon is 1900 BCE; and Uruk c. 4400 BCE
--my preference is to use the origins of settlements to mark when civilisation began. Settlements (usually) result from having surplus food (a product of agriculture), which means not everybody is having to work on food accumulation, which gives some people the chance to develop other skills, and, hey presto, you suddenly have metallurgy, pottery, writing etc. The agricultural revolution and rise of cities has been radiocarbon dated to about 11,000 BCE.

So, short answer to your question Azelor: civilisation began about 11,000 years before the Common Era (i.e. 13,000 years before the present).

Hope that's helpful. Happy to lend my knowledge again, if requested.

THW

[Ghostman]

Wait, we're assuming life forms of the setting are in general naturally-evolved? When did that happen?

[Azélor]

Wait, we're assuming life forms of the setting are in general naturally-evolved? When did that happen?

No, I don't think we said that. Not explicitly at least.
But we will need to take some decisions at some point.

[Ghostman]

I think we should just leave it undefined. As long as the people of the world have no reliable way to discover how plants and animals came about, there will be the possibility that any of a number of mutually incompatible explanations may actually be correct. It'd also be good if participators would have the freedom to introduce fictional flora and fauna without being constrained by limitations of evolution.

[Deadshade]

It'd also be good if participators would have the freedom to introduce fictional flora and fauna without being constrained by limitations of evolution.

Well I would just like to precise that evolution is absolutely no constraint. It has actually more "imagination" than any of us could have.
Who would have imagined this ?
(Chlamyphorus_truncatus).jpg
And that's living today, don't even try to look at the inimaginable things from a few millions years ago.
About any fiction somebody can imagine will be far surpassed by the abilities of the evolution to create totally surprising things

[Azélor]

I think we should just leave it undefined. As long as the people of the world have no reliable way to discover how plants and animals came about, there will be the possibility that any of a number of mutually incompatible explanations may actually be correct. It'd also be good if participators would have the freedom to introduce fictional flora and fauna without being constrained by limitations of evolution.

Ok now that we settled this, can we go back to the original topic ?

Again, I don't mean to decide what races lives in each valley and in the back countryside but just about deciding what are the most common races.

[Azélor]

Maybe it would still be a good idea to have an official explanation?

Possible explanations:

1- scientific explanation
2- magical explanation
3- divine explanation
4- other explanation

Question 1: How the world was formed?
The formation of the stellar system, the planets and the geology.
This question has been discussed a lot in the astrophysics topic and it is mostly a scientific explanation.
But we haven't yet explained how magic came to the world or what makes the poles of energy work.
I already suggested that some of the energy might have come with the old star entered in the planetary nebulae stage.

Question 2: How life came to the planet?
The flora and fauna: their apparition and evolution (if any).
The previous posts gave the scientific explanation for this question but it does not need to be hard science. It could be magical or divine.

Question 3: How intelligent races came to this world?
Ideally, that is suppose to be the subject of this topic. But I don't mind if we talk of the other things.