Five Races: Not terribly true for the Eldraeverse; for one thing, there’s a lot more than five species out there. A lot more. But let’s look at some archetypes, here: Stout (Dwarf): One of the few that does have an obvious candidate, the pseudosaurian kaeth, whose physical strength
Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The Precursors and other elder races were, in their time. Whether or not they still are, or would be if they somehow came back again, is… debatable, and depends heavily on exactly how much physics lies between the current state of the most advanced known technology and
Older is Better/Lost Technology: Subverted in that while there are some awfully nice bits of leftover Precursor and/or elder race technology around, and piles of interesting things buried in the archives (assuming that some leftover perversion doesn’t eat your soul when you go looking for it), it’
Proud Warrior Race Guy: Some people think of the kaeth, the draconic pseudosaurians with the heavy-metal biology among the Imperials, as this, but while they are certainly violent (er, kinesthetic) enough, their sense of honor also is comfortable matching the Empire’s general Combat Pragmatism and eschewing of Martyrdom Culture,
Martyrdom Culture: Strongly averted by the Empire, who as firm devotees of Living Forever is Awesome consider this sort of thing absolutely, completely, utterly idiotic. It may be better to die for your beliefs than to die in bed for nothing, but whenever not absolutely impossible, it’s a damn
Fish People: Averted. While there are aquatic people in the Associated Worlds who can trace their evolutionary ancestry pretty directly back to piscids (“fish-analogs”), none of them are the least bit humanoid. They are, in other words, fish people, but not Fish People.
Fisher Kingdom: The Empire is a moderate example of the first type; while not involving any actual mental modification, or other self-integrity violations (unlike the mind-warpers of the Equality Concord or various pharmacrats, for example), it is a fully mature information society (much more information-dense than the high end of
First Contact Math: This is what the specialized Contact I – Contact XII family of languages are built of. They are, however, rather limited for any other use, so their principal use in practice – after you walk up from I to XII – is limited to passing along a real language to
In today’s random postage, something I just wrote on the worldbuilding mailing list, in response to the following: Do your worlds have a Peace town [city of refuge], where people can go in order to avoid the law? Not as such, or at least not officially. (Certainly people, like,
Firing One Handed: Works much better with the small examples of personal arms, pistols and such, whose vector-control recoil compensation is very good indeed at making it manageable, and come with an aiming system that plugs directly into your personal-area network, which is to say, brain. Nevertheless, averted for heavy
Filk Song: See Future Music – in-world, this is a major genre. Personally, I’d love to have some actual filk set in the Eldraeverse too, but since I have yet to attract a filker, or, in fairness, write enough so to do… (And in any case, I need to attract
Future Music: While the Empire has been around for a very, very long time and as such has accumulated far more musical genres that I can reasonably describe, here are some notable ones – with staying power – in Imperial space: Digital: This isn’t a parallel to our electronic music; it’