Re: Renaming the Unhuman Wars

--- David Shepheard <david_shepheard@???????.com>
wrote:

> > The Unhuman Wars is largely a name given to the
> > conflict by humans. Humans
> > did not participate in any meaningful way.
> 
> Is this canon material or your opinion? If it is
> canon material, can you tell us where it is from, so
> we can check it out ourselves. If it is your 
> opinion, that is ok, but you need to give us a clue.

Maelstrom's Eye (don't know the page #).  I recall a
scene where the good elven Admiral was talking to
Teldin about the Unhuman Wars, how it was named such
because humans felt it had nothing to do with them.  

This was later contradicted in RPG products,
particularly Lost Ships (Barge of Ptah fighting
goblin-kin) & LotSJ (Octopus & Cuttle Command
entries).


> Letters of Marque are carried by privateers - not
> pirates. While the two may have similar methods,
> privateers consider themselves to be similar to 
> mercenaries. Pirates are just thieves, but
> privateers are people who support a cause, but want
> to be paid for their work.

Privateers are essentually Agents of the Crown.  They
were historically used to conduct warfare between
states far from the boarders of said states, typically
in colonial waters.


> As far as I know, the SJ timeline is not very well
> developed.  I'm not sure if Paul has left out a lot
> of unimportant events, but I get the distinct 
> feeling that very few human governments are actually
> active in wildspace. At the moment, I can only think
> of the Shou Lung and Netherese.

Rock of Bral, Vodoni, & the royal house of Greatspace
are the only three I can think of off-hand which have
a powerful SJ presence, outside of Clusterspace. 
There are organizations, but none have a definate
"home base" from which they originated.

 
> In the "present day" organisations, like the
> Pragmatic Order of Thought, or religions, like the
> Celestians, seem to have much more influence than a
> king or emperor.

Yes and no.  In terms of reach, yes, since they're
spread out across many spheres.  In terms of manpower
& resources, probably not.  For the most part, they're
widely-scattered ships & agents, typically no more
than a dozen ships per given sphere.  Assuming the
organizations are mostly the officers (most crewmen
are just paid lackies, not likely to be actual
members), any given organization will have only
hundreds of members.  Overall they may have thousands
of members, but would be hard-pressed to muster a real
army to "hold ground", as it were.  They could perhaps
take a few (small) cities, but would be ground to bits
trying to sieze large swaths of land.


> There has to be a reason why humanity is focused on
> multi-sphere bureaucratic organisations instead of
> kingdoms.  Perhaps humans had no real organised
> presence in wildspace, before the Unhuman War, and
> the organisations from the SJCS are organisations
who
> had some sort of involvement in The Unhuman War.

I'd look at the purpose of each individual
organization.  The Tenth Pit wants to rule trade
routes, ala the Zhents of FR.  The POTS are a response
to rampant slavery.  The Long Fangs are
assassins/thugs for hire, only vaguely organized. 
Etc.


> I don't think The Unhuman War can be looked at in
> isolation. I think that we need to carefully
> evaluate the entire period around the war, before we
> can even *think* about tinkering with it.

Here's how I've come to view the Unhuman Wars: the
wars themselves were the tail-end of a very long
period of time, at least 200 to 500 years, during
which goblins had increasingly grown stronger &
bolder.  They went well beyond petty piracy to where
they became an actual menace to whole worlds.  As the
goblins grew more powerful, so did the elves, who
began stockpiling weapons, training, gathering intel,
and growing a bumper-crop of ships.  The Battle of
Kule is when the elves finally made their move,
crushing the largest orc fleet.  They then spent the
next century pummelling the heck out of the goblins,
and drove them right out of Known Space.

For the other races, they were glad to be rid of the
goblins.  However, once the goblins were gone, it
became the elves who were greatly feared.  In an
effort to make peace, part of the elven fleet split
off into the Sindaith Line while at the same time a
huge number of ships were decommissioned to create
"Crown" bases, such as at Karpi, Spiral (Crown of
Corelleon), & Gaya (Rainmiste).

Humans by no means were "absent" from the Wars but
lacked the unified means of fighting back against the
goblin hordes like the elves did.
 

> I suspect that the elves may have deliberately
> relaxed their control on specific human spacefarers
> in order to fill wildspace up with ships that 
> will mostly fight against the Unhumans, Illithids,
> Neogi, Beholders and other races that could cause
> trouble to the elves.  Despite their lack of 
> respect for nature, and frequent association with
> evil causes, wildspace-humanity could seem to be the
> lesser of two evils. However, without looking at the
> canon, that is a totally uneducated guess.

I think humans did have some presence in SJ prior to
the UWI, and did put up a fight, but were no means
effective.  I think the rise of human spacefarers
(along with other races, such as dwarves & gnomes)
have little to do with the elves.  They just don't
have the power to keep everyone down on planets; their
fleet measures in (low) thousands of ships, certainly
not enough to put heavy patrols around every
groundling world and keep the
neogi/beholders/illithids in check.

Adam



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