February is World Building Month. Day Twenty (Yesterday): Dragons Next Door

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twentieth question comes from Kelkyag and is for Dragons Next Door

How did a magic-ignorant to magic-averse race of technology users wind up the clueless dominant race in a world full of magic, some of it not at all subtle?


Nobody is quite sure! This goes well with How do dweomers originate?.

The problem is, humans showed up. As far as anyone can tell, they showed up already knowing how to hurt dragons and ogres and centaurs, how to fight against spellcasters, how to do more damage than anything that small and seemingly-helpless ought to be able to manage. They showed up already deadly.

Well, that’s one theory.

Another theory is that the humans, by their sheer mundanity, seemed to hold off the other races, who didn’t know what to do with something that small and that helpless and still determined to push on.

Another theory is that they’re the pet project of some ancient spellcaster of one form or another, and that they are protected from being overrun by said spellcaster’s, well, spells.

What is true is that humans aren’t entirely clueless. They’re just used to living in their areas, while the magic things live in theirs. They’re used to thinking of many of the magic races as lesser, smaller – in terms of, ah, enlightenment, they’re back at least fifty years from IRL, possibly closer to a hundred and fifty. Dweomers, of course, and in other ways tinies and pixies, have always existed alongside humans when they chose to – and, indeed, dweomers don’t even have their own cities (Unless you count the region in which the Black Tower resides, but that’s a story for another day). But most of the strangest races have lived in their own places and only within the last fifty years begun co-existing with humans in the same cities.

After all, the tiny fragile things have such interesting toys.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/675937.html. You can comment here or there.

0 thoughts on “February is World Building Month. Day Twenty (Yesterday): Dragons Next Door

  1. I am not so enlightened. 🙂 If most humans live in mostly-human cities and never learn anything about non-humans (lazy/why bother/not my problem/…) … most humans are clueless, even if there are some that aren’t. Unless you count the region in which the Black Tower resides, but that’s a story for another day Yes please!

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