HillTown Studio Longform Content

This post is inspired by David McGrogan's post about elves and elf sex, which is both a worldbuilding issue and a game mechanics issue that derives directly from the problem of longevity, up to and including immortality. Read on if you're similarly interested in the worldbuilding consequences and how I'm trying to think of such longevity in my games.

Play enough elf games, and you start to see a major problem with race/species/kindred level longevity. “I was there, Gandalf,” Elrond says in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Elrond here is talking about an event 3000 years in the past. True, he is long past the time when he might be personally called to adventure, but even an average Tolkien elf who might join an army or an adventuring party is likely to be quite old in comparison to the humans therein.

The main problem in game terms is what do you do with this kind of longevity? How can mortal or shorter-lived folk even relate to someone whose concept of time stretches across mortal generations? Further, how is a GM to conceptualize the deepness of time when the resident elf has a chance of having been there or at least around during an important event? Fortunately there are many more ways to think about and play elves than the immortal Tolkien elves, but given how much Tolkien remains in the DNA of your average D&D game, there remain ill fits at the margins.

What I want to talk about here are the various means I'm thinking through to deal with extreme longevity. Elsewhere in D&D, extreme longevity is either natural, supernatural, or exceptional. For my settings, I want to think of extreme longevity as either natural or exceptional. In both cases, longevity has a cost, but in the natural case, this is something that has developed through various evolution mechanisms, including social ones. We're perhaps more familiar with the exceptional cases, namely undead like liches and vampires, who can only maintain themselves via external means.

Let's dive into some Yer Shar lore briefly to tease out the expressions of extreme longevity that occur in the setting. There are a few foundational facts to consider here:

1. The entire world is predicated on the exclusion of dragons, which are at the apex of the setting's hierarchy of bogeymen. Because they are outside the world, they have the benefit of being both natural and exceptional. More below.
2. There are no gods, per se, in Yer Shar, though there is certainly belief in them. It is a completely mechanistic simulation that likewise invents simulated gods based on collective belief. Their apparent power is just a collection of privileges that otherwise can't operate outside Yer Shar. Since they aren't beings, per se, they aren't considered in our modes of longevity. If they were, they would be “supernatural”.
3. There are numerous exceptionally powerful immortal beings that remain inside the world, but aren't gods even if they act as such.
4. There are the normal long-lived kindreds, plus others that are constructed.

Just as there are two ways to think about longevity in Yer Shar (natural vs. exceptional), there are two ways to think about them as entities: they can or cannot produce offspring. Handily, this yields us a nice 2x2, allowing us to graph or categorize our immortals and semi-immortals. We still have a gap, however, in that there are no current natural non-reproducing beings in the list. If I were to fill that gap, it might contain the incredibly rare hybrid offspring of, say, elves and humans. But I'll just leave it blank for now.

	Natural	Exceptional
Can reproduce	Dwarves, Elves	Dragons
Can't reproduce	???	Hollowkin, Liches

In terms of the individual, we would normally expect longevity to impact the body most significantly. For anything that isn't immortal in some way, visible aging is one primary signifier. In all cases, though, since everything categorized in this list can die from injury, the main drivers of death are accident or violence. The complicating factor in Yer Shar is that, given this is both a fantasy world and a simulation, true death is hard to come by, and resurrection and necromancy are always on the table. There are even some forms of involuntary resurrection. Fear of this, and knowledge of how the simulation worked drove the Architects to create a mechanism that was capable of providing true death, but that's perhaps for another post.

We can't escape, however, the effects of aging on the mind. For reasons that aren't 100% correlated to real-world reasons, minds in Yer Shar also decline with age primarily because of the accumulation of memories and experience. As a consequence, we should expect that long-lived kindreds will have developed some evolutionary mechanisms to deal with longevity's effect on their minds. This is where we diverge the most from extant lore, especially regarding elves and dwarves. It also affects the exceptional beings, but being exceptional they don't possess innate or natural capacity to manage these things.

First up, let's talk about elves. They are usually the most problematic because they are player character kindreds whose longevity should make them among the most alien in mindset. In Yer Shar, my intention is to develop their sense of longevity as communal, with excess memory and experience siphoned off into memory hives. This offers us a bee or ant model for elven development, and further offers us some interesting reproductive characteristics, should we care to explore them. Just focusing on the memory management aspects, we expect elven communities, wherever they spring up, to maintain secretive hives in which they can deposit excess memory. From a game perspective, to keep elves on par with humans, such a thing may be necessary approximately every century, at which point an elf becomes something of a tabula rasa, starting over at level 1 if they're a PC. The memories go into a slurry that skilled archivists could mine if necessary. For most purposes, elves create diluted mixtures of these memories to share, reinforcing their collective unconscious.

As for dwarves, a similar process occurs at roughly the same rate, but being born of stone (Stonekin is one of their several names), their memories and experiences accumulate in crystals. For a dwarf, the effect is that the crystal expands in size until it must be removed. This is quite visible but could be obscured by beards, hair, or costumes. Like the excreted memories of the elves, such crystals tend to end up in curated archives, especially for those dwarves who obtain some level of prominence. Being discrete objects, they are easier to inspect individually, but also require more meticulous handling and are easily misplaced. Needless to say, finding one in the wild is like encountering a rare treasure, though the prospect of selling such a thing might not sit well with PC dwarves. Being crystals, these resist collectivization processes per se, and therefore don't contribute to broadly shared knowledge. And it's probably worth specifying that once separated they are not enough on their own to stand in for a fragment of the body, say, for purposes of resurrection magic. And finally, like the elves, sharding off memories this way provides a means of resetting the character: PCs revert to level 1.

NB: I'm still working on how I want to re-fit gnomes and halflings into the setting, but questions of longevity aside, I have different ideas of who and what they are.

Everything that's left is exceptional. This is where things get weird. Or weirder. The exceptional beings here range between living beings and undead beings: Dragons –> Hollowkin –> Liches. Dragons are the trickiest, because they are living beings that elevated themselves to immortality through monstrous means, becoming physical monsters in the process. Conceptually they cover a lot more than dragons in the strict sense, but the animating factor for dragons as dragons is that they hoard wealth in every form that wealth can take. In Yer Shar, they are oligarchs in the maximalist sense.

From a longevity perspective, dragons become sticking points for resources. In computation, something that consumes resources but doesn't release them is said to have a memory leak. These eventually destabilize a system, even a large one with a lot of resources. Something as massive as a universal simulation in the computer sense can't really abide such a thing, especially one that can reproduce itself. This, fundamentally, is what makes dragons the biggest and baddest of the setting's BBEGs. It's also why the world itself was formed to exclude them, which in turn is why they insist on intruding. They are external to the setting proper, but they remain a potent fear among all the people of Yer Shar. Further, they still exist outside of Yer Shar.

Crucially, in terms of the effects of longevity, dragons simply continue to accumulate memories and experiences, forming a cancer in the ur-setting of which Yer Shar is a part. They don't suffer from the same age problems, but their continued existence requires them to gather, hoard, and consume such things. As a consequence they are drawn to any dense stores of both life energy and memories. These, of course, occur most densely within dragons themselves, but the immense powers they wield make war between them truly apocalyptic for any caught in the crossfire.

At the other end of the spectrum are the liches, which are exceptional beings that cannot reproduce. They are dead things that will not stay dead and continue, like dragons, to accumulate memories and experiences with no particular need to deal with senescence. Also like dragons they can feed from living things to gain what they need to sustain their existence. The key distinguishing factor between liches and dragons is that liches are incapable of carrying forward any innate living or metabolic process, including reproduction. They are unmoored from the flows of time in ways that leave them functionally dead even though the resources they use remain sequestered and unavailable for reuse. Because such beings do crop up in Yer Shar, and not as outside intruders, they are more directly dangerous.

And finally we have the humble Hollowkin, somewhere between dragon and lich. They were originally created by mining the dense life and experiential energies contained in dragon bones from the long-buried bodies of those dragons who had managed to infiltrate the world, however briefly. They are immortal constructs imbued with a simulacrum of life combined with the fading life energies of the recently dead. This makes them like undead, but the combination of energy sources causes them to transcend the limitations of the undead, except that cannot themselves reproduce. Because they originate from and truck with mortals, even long-lived ones, they have developed their own strategies to manage their minds for the long term. Hollowkin reset rituals are less a firm requirement and more of a cultural commitment that reflects their longstanding relationships with mortals. The effect in game terms is that a Hollowkin can choose at any time to forget who and what they were, though the danger of doing this outside a Hollowkin community is that they are rendered feral, unable to easily rejoin such communities. This is a preferable state for some, but it naturally introduces many more sources of violence or accident that will ultimately destroy them.

This current arc of development represents many years of thought and refinement of my setting. It may or may not be the final state, but whatever that state is, I believe it will resemble this in some way.

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