There are no Elves or Dwarves in my setting but are there any other species? As far as I know Neanderthals didn't make it down to Southeast Asia but two of our other cousins did.
I stumbled upon an intriguing line in the Wikipedia entry about Denisovans (an extinct type of human).
"Denisovans may have interbred with modern humans in New Guinea as recently as 15,000 years ago."Here's an article that discusses their existence in Southeast Asia until relatively recently and their possible interactions with Homo Sapiens Sapiens (our direct ancestors) : The Denisovans May Have Been More Than a Single Species
"But a different group of Denisovans lived in Southeast Asia, around what is now Thailand and Vietnam. The third group called the islands of Indonesia home. Those two southern groups diverged from the Siberian Denisovans over 250,000 years ago. That’s before anatomically-modern humans even appeared. And at least one of these groups survived well into the late Pleistocene, dying out just tens of thousands of years ago."It seems that Denisovans created what is to date the world's oldest jewellery showing skilled crafting of delicate stone including a drilled hole and polishing of the material: Denisovan Bracelet. If Denisovans could create jewellery perhaps they had their own cultures and languages?
An artist impression of a Denisovan and an overview at our current knowledge about the species:
First portrait of mysterious Denisovans drawn from DNA
The other species is Homo Floresiensis (found on what is now the island of Flores), colloquially known as hobbits because of their height. They might have gone extinct 50,000, possibly due to the arrival of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. There is evidence they used stone tools and some scientists believe they used fire for cooking.
I haven't fleshed out any ideas about either of these species but I can definitely see justification for including both species as hunter gatherers with the Denisovans having a more developed Paleolithic level of technology.
Since there is evidence of interbreeding it may be that our ancestors didn't notice major differences between us and Denisovans, but I think it would be interesting to give some thought as to how they behave and think in distinctive ways. Otherwise they are the same as other hunter-gatherers.
Wikipedia: Denisovan
Wikipedia: Homo Floresiensis
I'm not sure what you could do to make Denisovans (or Neanderthals for that matter, if the setting ever expands that far) different from modern humans in game terms. Homo floresiensis, of course, has the massive size difference. I've been thinking about the idea for a while, but haven't really gotten anywhere with it.
ReplyDeleteThere are two obvious tropes that could be applied but neither of them have immediate appeal to me.
ReplyDeleteThe first is to portray Denisovans as more gentle, peaceful, spiritual or closer to nature in some way to contrast with the more aggressive Sapiens who later supplanted them. This is a form of the Noble Savage trope; whatever is more primitive must be more virtuous. And the virtues we judge them against are of course our own.
The missionary who was killed by the Sentinelese he wanted to convert shows those ideas of virtue and morality don't necessarily translate across cultures and projecting anything on to other cultures is a mistake.
The second is the other extreme, that they are more primitive than the Sapiens, yet close enough to invoke some 'uncanny valley' type discomfort. This is then enough justification to fight them without remorse. It fits in well with Sword & Sorcery and Fantasy themes where there is a species that are unquestionably the bad guys (e.g Howard's Pict, Tolkien's Orcs).
I don't have any objections to using these tropes out of any kind of principle. But I'd like to explore something a bit more nuanced, especially if it provides people with a more fun and interesting game and potentially a new character option.
If they have a slightly different brain structure and a different type of cognition that is something to explore. Perhaps their brain chemistry interacts differently to psychoactive substances or their perception and senses are tuned differently, they see, smell and hear on a slightly different spectrum than Sapiens. That's line of thought might lead somewhere but I would want to develop something a bit more interesting than a +X on perception rolls.
I understand that there needs to be some kind of stereotype or exaggeration so people have something to relate to, and I'm fine with that. I just want to avoid reusing the same old templates; Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Vulcans, Klingons etc.
If you have any ideas let me know.