Mature for Their Age
Varying maturation rates in fantastical creatures is grounds for some truly bizarre social conventions. Think about it for a minute. In a cosmopolitan metropolis like Waterdeep or Absalom or Ankh-Morpork, you’re going to have racially diverse peer groups. Check out these generic “Capital City” demographics ripped straight from the Pathfinder settlement rules:
Population 18,000 (14,000 humans; 1,000 dwarves; 1,000 halflings; 500 elves; 1,500 other)
Not all of those guys are going to be sequestered away in their own little ghettos. They’re going to have inter-species friendships, inter-species romances, and (as Cleric and Wizard found out today) inter-species daycare centers. The DnD 5e Players Handbook addresses some of this aging weirdness directly, offering this handy world-building nugget:
“Elves are considered children until they declare themselves adults, some time after the hundredth birthday, and before this period they are called by child names.”
And in the dwarf section you’ve got this extremely cool bit about the long view dwarves take on relationships:
“You take the time to get to know a human, and by then the human’s on her deathbed. If you’re lucky, she’s got kin—a daughter or granddaughter, maybe—who’s got hands and heart as good as hers. That’s when you can make a human friend.”
And that’s all well and good for the adventuring-aged characters that are the meat and potatoes of these games. But when you look at this stuff from a worldbuilding perspective it’s awfully difficult to picture these kids growing up together. I mean, what would The Little Rascals look like in a fantasy world? Are dwarves members for a dozen years before they grow out of it? Do elven children become depressed and withdrawn when their human friends get too grown up for hide-and-go-seek? And just pause for a moment to consider Fighter’s mom there in today’s comic. She probably remembers a time when Wizard and Cleric were “the big kids,” but now she’s the one in charge of babysitting.
All of which has left me curious. Have you guys ever tried to address this kind of thing within your own worldbuilding? How did it go?
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Our world’s Elves tend to be reclusive for exactly this reason. It’s really impossible to make friends with a human in a mere 70 years. The elves that did venture out were usually merchants or business owners that didn’t go out to make connections and friends.
It also annoyed them that they would make a deal with a couple of human loggers for the ability to cut down part of their forest for a few (200) years, and when they came back the loggers had been replaced by a bustling town that refused to leave. After all, the town had grown up here for 6 generations, and then these imperialist asshole elves came by and said the land was really theirs!
Human-elf relationships were tense in our world.
That’s solid world-building. You’ve always got these human/elf border clashes, but it’s nice to see the rationale rooted in physiology rather than “elves are just protective of forests.”
And it get’s worse: I’m pretty sure by RAW the native outsiders use their own aging tables regardless of the race of the parents. Imagine a pair of human serfs getting themselves a little oread, or a sylph – that will take 60 years to reach late teens, effectively requiring to be raised by his parents, then siblings, and then nephews. Or worse still, elves giving birth to a tiefling or an aasimar – and then having to watch their child grow old and die before their “elder” siblings even chose adult names.
That’s a good quest hook for a tiefling. They have to find some way to remove their demonic essence, otherwise they’re doomed to grow old and die. It’s like a built-in curse / character motivation.
That is my built in quest hook for half my characters regardless of race. NOBODY wants to grow old and die. =P
The thing is though, in general PF at least (can’t speak for DnD) the Outsider races, while hitting maturity long before an Elf, might outlive even the oldest elf. Their max age is anywhere from 256 to 850 years, compared to an elf’s 354 to 750.
I would think that means outsiders start with a more human-like nature when they’re young, but slowly drift towards an alien mindset as they age. Elves just start snooty and stay that way. 😛
I always sort of viewed the whole “a child for 100 years or so” thing as what their culture views them as, not necessarily their mental/physical development. At least not in a 1 for 1 way in how it works for humans. For one thing, being or having to deal with someone being a toddler for three decades would probably drive you mad. (Or maybe this is why humans are more populous and it has nothing to do with natural birth rates. The other races just don’t WANT children that much and half of them grow up completely bonkers.)
As far as dealing with adults, I mean, I understand the fun of that fantasy level thinking of how time passes but…. really making friends and experiencing time works the same no matter how long you live. A human might not usually be an elf or dwarf’s best age-old pal, but regular friendships and other relationships? Probably works out fairly normally. Elves aren’t Ents, they think and speak and need to eat and have bowel movements at the same speed as humans so social interaction and trade can’t be all that different.
Gotcha. So elves and humans actually do mature at the same rate, but an elder human and an elder elf are in very different places psychologically. For example, an elf might make allowances for human elders being immature because that’s culturally expected.
Seems like a nice workaround without having to deal with the centenarian toddler problem.
I don’t know if I’d say that dwarves and elves mature at the exact same rate as a human does, but a lot of that “100-year-old child” bit is probably cultural rather than physiological. Just look at how many different ages various human cultures in the real world consider to be “adulthood”: many cultures have “sweet 16” celebrations for coming-of-age, while Spanish cultures celebrate the “quinceañera” (15th birthday), the Jewish bar/bat mitzvah occurs at the age of 13, and legally in most places in the USA you aren’t considered an adult until the age of 18 or 21. All the while, it’s been scientifically proven that we reach physical, intellectual, and sexual maturity some time around the age of 17, IIRC.
Imagine how it is for a culture that lives not 70 years, but 700. Maybe your children reach maturity in, say, 30 or maybe even 50 years instead of the 17 it takes for a human. But your culture has to prepare you for roughly ten times as many years of life as a human, so your actual cultural standards for maturity end up being roughly 100 years of age (which is still a smaller percentage of your lifespan than the human being considered an adult at 17 or even 13).
Now I’m wondering what dwarf / human Romeo and Juliet might look like.
HUMANEO
With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt;
Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.
DWARFIET
If thay dae see thee, thay wull murder thee.
Plus a’m ainlie fifty-three years auld ye perv!
I’ve always treated ‘age’ and ‘adulthood’ between races as being largely similar. Ditto pregnancy, because the idea of an elven woman being pregnant for 8 years straight is a bit ridiculous. I’ve always said, in my games, that there’s never more than about a 20% age difference between the races. So, for example; A 12 year old human is roughly the same developmentally as an 11 year old dwarf, or a 10 year old elf.
The big difference in age isn’t biological, but sociological. A 24 year old elven boy might be done physically maturing in terms of growth, maybe roughly equivilent to a 20 year old human man, BUT his culture doesn’t consider him an ‘adult’ yet. The elven culture would see him as needing at least another several decades before he would understand what it means to be an elf, what it means to have a ‘long view’ of the world. Now, that 24 year old elf could pick up his sword and bow, and head off into the sunset for adventure. He might even be able to ‘pass’ as an adult since he’s fully matured physically. But any elf who learns his age would still consider him a child because he is just too young.
I think that “they mature at the same rate” is the cleanest solution to this problem. By the same token though, some systems assume that creatures actually do mature at different rates. Check out this bit from the half-elf racial listing in Pathfinder:
“Half-elves raised among elves often stumble unprepared into each new stage of life because their elven relatives are unaccustomed to the speed of their maturation.”
It’s a neat idea even if it is a minor detail. However, I just can’t quite picture what it really looks like in practice without winding up at the ridiculous centenarian toddler, 8-years-pregnant type of scenarios.
This approach always seemed awfully “human-centric” to me. I mean, look at our aging rate compared to most other animals – it’s ridiculously slow. By the time we reach adulthood, most other creatures has already run out of lifespan. A 2 year old dog is fully capable of taking care of itself. A 2 year old human essentially has a permanent helpless condition. According to my exhaustive research ( that is, about 30 minutes on the internet), the difference is much smaller when it comes to animals with comparable mental capabilities to our own (other great apes, elephants). Still “dwarves are todlers twice as long as we are” seems much less jarring to me than “more or less adult dwarves and elves are still considered kids for decades because reasons”.
I imagine that Dwarves physically mature at the rate of Humans, but their beards take decades to properly grow in. And that is their true sign of adulthood.
For the lady dorfs, we can go with something like hair length. After all, while I see them frequently braided in fantasy art, it’s rarely actually cut.
For elves? I imagine their alien aspects (longer lives, long term thinking, intimate familiarity with the founding principles of magic so easily picked up that you’d think it was genetic memory) that they can often be distracted or distant. I imagine their younger members looking at the world through a fey-like lens of wonder. Elven ‘early teens’ could look like adults, but be far more prone to flights of fancy and whimsical behavior.
I like that “fey-like lens” a lot. Elves aren’t immature. They’re just using “detect magic” constantly or looking at individual leaves and going, “Oooooh!”
“She said she was 100! She looks 100! How was I supposed to know she was only 88?”
Hey, 88 is legal in Kyonin.
Just had a situation happen last night where some elf kids were playing a prank on the PC’s. Someone asked how old they were so I said “whatever the elf equivalent of a 10 year old human is”. Which wasn’t the best on the spot DMing I’ve done but it workd.
Well let’s see. You said DMing, so I’m going to assume some version of D&D. Let’s go with 5e for the sake of argument. If we make the (extremely questionable) assumption that humans and elves mature at proportional rates, we’ve got this thing in the bag! The 5e PHB tells us that humans are considered adult at 15 and elves are considered adult at 110. So we just do a little algebra:
10/15 = X/110
Solve for X and we find out that those elf kids were 73.33 years old. Simple!
Yup, 5e D&D. The idea of a bunch of 73 year olds hiding in a bush giggling is a little weird, but I’m not ruling it out as a possibility for my retirement…
Naw. There’s no need for a bush. Just sit in the basement and giggle. Bring dice.
In our game world, elves are effectively immortal unless killed. But they can reincarnate pretty much whenever they want, so long as they perform a complex ritual. Most of them do as soon as old age starts to hinder them, and a lot of them skip the infant/toddler years because it’s inconvenient to be helpless for decades. Most elven adventurers have standing agreements with their families to start the ritual in the event that they somehow die and can’t be raised. Natural-born elven babies are very, very rare (who wants to be pregnant for ten years?) and generally are an indication that a new soul has entered the world. You also have very, very few elves found in the various afterlives.
Dragons handle it differently. They can procreate with any race (we’ve had gnome, dwarf, and human PCs so far), but doing so comes at great cost. They have to share their life force with their partner, cutting the length of their own life so they and their partner (and offspring) have matching life spans. This is permanent, even if one member of the pair dies. There’s one way this can be an advantage, though: dragon-elf pairings are by far the most common, because the dragon gains the elf’s immortality.
I dig that dragon angle. I’m guessing you’ve got “all dragons have shapeshifting powers” in this scenario. Im working on a similar setup in my next novel. Slutty friggin’ reptiles…
Do dragons’ mortal lovers and children at least get something out of the life-force? Extended lifespans or magical powers or something?
It’s not directly related, but it’s still about how life expectancy affects cultures, so…
I actually once wrote up an in-setting explanation as for why the long lives of dwarves and elves cause the respective races’ lawful/chaotic tendencies.
Elves usually live in forests or otherwise relatively untouched nature.
That means that nine out of ten times, problems solve themselves if you just wait a few years or decades for things to balance out again. So, elven culture developed a very laid back “if it’s not an immediate issue, it’s not an issue at all” perspective.
On the other hand, if a dwarf sees a tiny crack in one of the pillars of a great mountain hall, that crack is only going to get worse with time. Even if it takes decades, the dwarf will be around to see it turn from a tiny crack to – if left alone – a full cave in. So for dwarves, every tiny problem matters and must be dealt with sooner or later.
This bears further study. What say we get a decent sample size of elves and dwarves and have them take the Myers-Briggs?
In a world I’m building, dwarves and elves are the ones in most positions of rank and power. As individuals they can spend a few centuries securing a position and still have centuries to spend in it, while humans take generations for their family to get there, and generations more to try to hold on to it. Add in that humans often only plan for a few decades ahead, and you sometimes get a rebellious heir, and it’s little wonder why humans are most often seen as “new wealth” with only temporary power.
The large difference in lifespans also makes things like history a bit different for the different races. An elf can think back to events that happened when they were a kid, a dwarf remembers their parents talking about it, and the human is clueless about it as it was forgotten in the last dozen or two generations.
So I gather that you’re assuming cosmopolitan nations rather than the typical “Dwarfistan” and “Elfsylvania.” If we do away with elf/dwarf monocultures, that does make quite a bit of sense.
My thoughts on it are that people travel, some will settle in foreign lands, and then they’ll have families. Unless a race/culture is very xenophobic others will live in their lands, and some will live in the lands of others. How -many- of each race populates an area will definitely change, but there should be variety.
Shorter lived races with decent birth rates can definitely change it, too. Say some humans helped an elf village, and settle down there. If they have families, then in only a couple hundred years humans will be all over the place, even if 80% of all the elves remember the time before any humans knew about the place.
Come to think of it, that might be part of why dwarves and elves aren’t that fond of humans…
It really depends on what part of the dwarf / elf culture you want to bring up. If you’re going for tradition and proud woodland warriors and similar, then they might not do much mixing.
I always find that the population statistics are interesting in Pathifnder. Check out the “Sample Settlements” section at the bottom of the page over here:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/settlements/
Those population numbers are a window into the setting’s assumptions about race. Like the good folks at XKCD say:
https://xkcd.com/904/
The age thing is one reason why the fantasy novel I’m working on has no dwarfs or elves in it. There are humans, the dragonborn-like race, various animal-like races like Kitsune, Catfolk, and Naga, and finally the ‘spirit’ people such as dryads and naiads. Almost all of them have equivalent lifespan lengths although the none-humans tend to reach physical maturity a bit earlier. The dryads, naiads, and similar being are essentially immortal.
It’s definitely a world-building problem that every author has to deal with. Sounds like you’ve got a fun mix going in your stuff. 🙂
Thanks. Now if I can just figure out the villain I’ll be able to pull the plot together and actually start writing it.
Running a dhampir charated who raised the human party leader when he was a child. She remembers walking him to school because they were both in the same class, when she could afford it, even though she was in her 50’s. By the time she finally stopped going to school she was the equivalent of a straight A student because she had gone to school for about 60 years. Still looked like she was about 13-14 at that point.
Shades of Interview With a Vampire there. Nice.
I try to avoid this sort of situation. If I didn’t, though, I might use it as a reason why different races segregate themselves. Elves don’t like watching those cute little kids grow up and die, humans feel uncomfortable when the elvish babe/hunk mentions meeting their grandparents.
A more serious worldbuilding attempt would need to start with just what degree of racial integration exists and what form it takes. I mean, the existence of separate races with wildly different appearances and lifespans and whatnot indicates a substantial level of segregation, since the races haven’t mingled enough for those differences to be “averaged out” even slightly.