March For Our Lives protest march in Washington DC, March 24, 2018 – photo by Ted Eytan, licensed under CC-BY-2.0, image from Flikr via Wikipedia Commons

Looking at the photographs of the “March For Our Lives”/”Never Again” rallies, you can’t help but feel that an entire generation, who have grown up under the shadow of gun violence in schools since Colombine (April 20, 1999), have run out of patience and been energized.

Calls for compromise, like those of Mark Rubio, who suggested “understanding of the other side,” are clearly going to fall on deaf ears; they essentially reiterate the policy compromises of the entire post-Colombine era that the students and organizers of the rallies consider failures, and with which they have exhausted their patience.

I saw one sound-byte in which it was claimed that at the coming Midterm elections, 1 million millennials would have the vote, and at the next Presidential Election, the number would be 20 million. Clearly, if the protests become a social movement that endures until then and which then transforms the protesting millennials into a unified voting bloc, this will bring about a wave of change that no political party can ignore.

That’s a major problem for the Republican Party, who are strongly linked to the NRA, who the students view as the enemy, willing to sacrifice the students lives in defense of the principles they espouse. The Democrats should have a far easier job of wooing these voters, as what attempts at gun control have taken place over the last 40 years or more have almost exclusively been from their side of the political fence.

Whether you agree with the position of the students or not (I do, but I’m Australian, and we have gun control laws that work), it’s hard to argue that this is a defining event for this generation, of the sort that hasn’t really been seen since the Vietnam War, or the Second World War before it. I tend to put the Civil Rights movements of the 60s, Prohibition, and the Unionization/Worker’s Rights movements of the early 20th century, into the same category.

These defining events don’t come along in every generation, but when they do, they tend to be, well, defining, whether you are pro- or anti-; they force those of that generation to choose a side, disregarding past loyalties and familial traditions, and from that stance, like dominoes falling, other stances and positions will flow, crystallizing around this seed principle.

There’s an obvious connection to the “youth vote” discussion that leads off A Political insight for RPGs & Life but, aside from this movement representing a clear and obvious inversion of a political trend of the last few decades (diminishing youth politicization), that article doesn’t really contribute very much insight into the current situation, never mind offering an RPG-related insight.

I’m not entirely sure why, but when I was thinking about this situation, I found myself making an unexpected connection to a couple of past articles here at Campaign Mastery –

• Throw Me A Life-line: A Character Background Planning Tool
• Ergonomics and the Non-human (about Elvish Ergonomics)
• By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves (a sequel to the Elves article).

Specifically, I started thinking about Elves and lifespans and maturation rates and coming-of-age events and Generation Landmark events, and one thing led to another…

Proportionate Age Scaling

Most people, when they think about the longer lifespans of Elves, Dwarves, and other forms of long-lived characters, do one of two things: expand their life-stages proportionately, as shown on the diagram above, or simply add lots of extra years to the adult part of the range.

Few go so far as considering what that does to the demographics of the community. The first implies as much as 80 years of increasing senility in roughly 20% of the population, but that’s rarely shown; what do the elves do with their elderly when they start getting a bit dotty? The second implies that children are relatively rare, simply because more of the population would be adult.

When you get results like this, that don’t fit the norm of what’s established in most games, the temptation is to throw out the entire concept. This is wasteful and neglects a great opportunity.

Challenge your assumptions and preconceptions

What if “senility” in a long-lived species was different to that of Humans? Take Elves – two possibilities leap immediately to mind: Senility = obsessiveness, and Senility = coalescence with nature.

Senility=Obsessiveness

This is probably the more dangerous choice, because you can never tell what subject the obsessive will fixate upon. If it’s pottery, or ancient history, there’s no problem. If it’s arcane research, there will be trouble. If it’s religion or politics, you have a powder-keg.

Coalescence With Nature

Under this concept, aging elves grow ever more tired and lethargic. Eventually, they move so little that moss begins to grow on them, and they start to put down roots. If undisturbed, they sprout branches and become as trees.

There’s a lot that you could do with either concept. But why stop there? Why not redefine adolescent behavior, while you’re at it?

Redefined Aging

Once you’ve gone that far, it seems silly to cling to the concept of races who have different lifespans experiencing the same aging landmarks. Perhaps Elves mature emotionally and physically at quite different rates, remaining skittish and obsessed with fancy poetry and other fanciful impracticalities until some coming-of-age event occurs – if it ever does – at which point they metamorphose, emotionally, into a serious individual, more like Elrond, in the process transitioning from gregariousness to insularity and even xenophobia. Most PC elves under this model should be modeled on someone like Lelldorin from the Belgariad by David Eddings (or, if you want to stick with examples from The Lord Of The Rings, like Pippin and Merry).

Generational Landmarks of the long-lived

If you live a long time, perhaps even remaining “stuck” in a stage of development until transition to the next is triggered by involvement in some external circumstance, the great likelihood is that this will be a generational landmark event of some kind.

Elves, for example, could be happy-go-lucky wastrels indulging their most pretentious artistic tendencies, until some external threat or personal tragedy – the death of one’s parents, for example – caused the elf to set aside such childish pursuits, recasting their capacity for passion into a near-obsession with serious subjects. Mature Elves smile only for effect, under this model. Think of Latins, taken to the extreme.

This means that while there would be a few individuals who would make the transition due to personal circumstances, in the majority of cases an entire generation would mature simultaneously. If PCs – and NPCs – were used to dealing with the more happy-go-lucky elves resulting from a generation of peace, they might underestimate the Elves.

If part of a campaign is a quest by the PCs to “awaken the Elves”, this could become central to that campaign. But even without that option, there is RPG value to the proposition.

Consider the Vietnam war – in general, there were three possible reactions to it: You could oppose it, fleeing the draft if necessary; you could support it, and go willingly to fight; or you could be caught in the middle, perhaps opposing the conflict even while supporting a relative who was in service. No matter what the Generational Landmark event is, there will be at least two reactions, often splitting along generational fault-lines, and the resulting core values will define commonalities shared with a number of others who shared the experience. Of course, when you look more closely, you would find any number of individual variations within that overall generalization.

The Principle

The principle is to decide what traits you want the race to have and define a rational aging progression accordingly. Fit landmarks to the aging process that accord with the aging progression you have defined, and you end up redefining the race in question. Make the right choices, and there might not even be any superficial difference, while the race is entirely different “under the skin”.

Let’s take Dwarves, for an example. In childhood, they might have an overwhelming spiritual bond with the earth, looking upon the process of what other races consider mere “mining” as shaping the earth. Think of the reverential attitude of Gimli to the caverns beneath Aglarond – “When the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! Then Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light flows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-colored floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from the dark pools covered with clear glass” – and apply that passion to the race in general. As yet, though, the young Dwarves cannot do anything with this bond.

When a dwarf enters adolescence, he abruptly loses this connection to the Earth, and – in effect – he spends this entire phase of his life in a state of Addiction Withdrawal, leaving them hot-tempered and on the verge of a loss of self-control at all times.

As they begin to physically mature, becoming adults, they discover that this sense has not been lost, after all; instead, it has become focused into a number of specific channels, each of which provides one of the iconic abilities of the race. With each ability so regained, the bond is renewed and spiritual tranquility returns.

Have you ever talked with an addiction survivor? The experience marks the personality forever after. They tend to be ruthlessly pragmatic and willing to help those who want to be helped, or who they consider friends. Leo McGarry’s story about the Friend and the Hole from the West Wing episode Noel is not atypical: “This guy’s walkin’ down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you! Can you help me out?’ The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole; can you help me out?’ The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me. Can ya help me out?’ And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, ‘Are ya stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’

They also tend to have a fierce protectiveness toward those that they are helping, or who have helped them.

Of course, there are individual variations. Another prevailing trait tends to be a tolerance of those who backslide, a patience that says, “Start Again. Today, and every day, is the first day of the rest of your life.” That part of the ex-addict character would not translate into the Dwarfish character, because the bond has been restored.

Instead, the focus would be on the shared experience that every Dwarf has experienced. This would be something akin to the bond between members of the military. These bonds could be easily misinterpreted as xenophobia to those looking in from the outside, because they would be a shared experience that only other Dwarves understand.

There would also be a sense of having survived the worst possible pain and distress it was possible to know. It is a known fact that mothers have a higher pain threshold than non-mothers, simply because of the experience of childbirth; this would be akin to that, in spades.

Of course, this life journey is something intensely personal to the Dwarf; other Dwarves might understand it, but non-Dwarves certainly would not, and so Dwarves don’t share any information about it.

Under this (example) model of Dwarfishness, you can assume that there would be some few rare cases where the bond was never restored, but the Dwarf learned to live with lesser substitutes. Hotheaded, perpetually angry and resentful at the universe, given to other forms of self-gratification, and lacking the restored bond with the Earth that keeps them spiritually centered, these would make fearsome enemies. Think serial killers and sociopaths who are nevertheless sheltered and protected by the rest of the race, who could not fail to be sympathetic to their plight.

The short-lived

Another problem that GMs often have is in making sense of the short-lived races. There was a time when Orcs were described as living only 15 years or so, for example. Even if you assume that they grow and mature faster than humans, this lifespan is so short that social and technical progress would be almost impossible. Which sounds like a fine justification of the Orcish nature as described in various source materials, but it is simply too extreme; Orcs are rarely described as being sufficiently primitive for this description to stand up. More to the point, they would never live long enough to become formidable threats to PCs!

What is needed is some sort of experience dump, a running start to the “maturity” and physical prowess of the Orc. But, since it’s entirely likely that anything of the sort will go too far in the other direction, we need this process to somehow exaggerate the worst social and personal attributes of the Orcish character.

There are any number of possibilities to consider, but most of them center on the concept of resentment and the loss of a pleasant childhood, and that doesn’t fit the Orcish character. Once they are eliminated, there aren’t too many contenders. One that would fit would be the use of pain – torture – as a conduit for the life experience of the parents and teachers. Stockholm syndrome then makes the new generation ready and willing to inflict pain on others. Generational Sociopathy (or perhaps, Psychopathy), does a lot of the work of turning Orcs into monsters.

It’s entirely possible that without this practice, Orcs would live longer – 25 to 35 years – but would be single-HD creatures and slow learners. Without the resilience that their prowess and ruthlessness imparts, the race would come under serious threat from their equally-nasty neighbors like Bugbears.

This isn’t the only model, by any means, but it is one that works.

Put a little more thought into the impact of different lifespans on the races of your campaign; it’s a shortcut into a more unified vision of what makes those races tick.