Now with less elves!

Monday 3 November 2008

No, this is not a response to the recent poll, but just an update about what I have been doing with the elven population.

I just slayed about half of them.

(This is more for my own reference than yours, but if you care, keep reading.)

I said recently that I thought there were too many of them, and though I could have gone back and rerun my simulation with different parameters to get a population more in line with what I had imagined, I didn’t feel like putting them all back in villages again.

So instead I just went through and picked out a few dozen long-​​dead elves and deleted all of their descendants — basically what would have happened if they had died young. That in itself was a rather interesting simulation, because it shows just what exponential growth can do: get rid of an person four or five generations back, and that can make dozens or even hundreds of people never be born at all. Makes you glad none of your THOUSANDS of ancestors died in infancy.

I was very, very careful not to delete anyone whose descendant was someone we know. That was actually my criteria in determining whose ancestors were “available” for deletion. Hopefully I will not find any that were accidentally deleted. Only kisór elves were removed.

Population breakdown (for all elves, not just kisór): Adult male: was 60, now 58 Boys: was 149, now 80 Adult female: was 558, now 347 Girls: was 384, now 165 Total: was 1151, now 650

The adult male group was practically unaffected, because we “know” effectively all of them — they’re either khírrón, or among Lar’s little band, and I could not do much to the latter without affecting the story itself in terms of some of the slaughters that I have mentioned.

The population of the underground is now 141, with 11 adult males, and 40 adult females, which is about what I had imagined.

Some of the interesting side effects of this were that Uncle Mustache is down to a slightly more palatable count of 13 illegitimate children, and Osh is down to 5. Unfortunately Imin is down to practically none again so maybe I will have to make him some more.

Anyway, for those of you who care enough about what happens to underground elves (or maybe just elves when they are underground?) to read this far, here is your reward: