Encounter-a-Day

By all accounts, humans are a young race. The eldest people of the land, the elves, are sure that humans did not exist as recently as three millenia prior. Yet curiously, no one knows where humanity came from. It’s as if the annals of history were scrubbed clean of any reference to them.

There are rumors that they were first born by the mating of elves and dwarves, and that the two have committed to a great conspiracy to hide the truth. Another popular belief is that the humans were created by the gods as a punishment for some long-forgotten crime to conquer the world, earning them the sobriquet “the Chosen.”

Nonetheless, the humans have proven a remarkably rugged race which has risen to prominence despite its youth. They say that there are now as many humans as there are others combined, and it is not a difficult claim to believe.

The burgeoning human civilizations faced many hardships. All the other races resented the Chosen, and early on it was all they could do to stave off war and extinction. Lacking military strength, they relied on their charisma and guile. Even today, humans are renowned for their skills at diplomacy and negotiation.

Not welcome anywhere else, the humans built their settlements in neglected floodplains along rivers. They developed dams to save themselves from having to rebuild every year, and the permanent settlements that allowed proved an incredible boon. Now the humans could control of the rivers, and thus control trade.

Not despite, but because of, their short lives, the humans are the foremost academics in the world as well. The other races are content to passively allow themselves to soak in knowledge over the years; to a human, time is short and precious, and knowledge must be accumulated, codified, and dispersed as efficiently as possible.

Human universities can be found on all corners of the globe; even some of the largest elven and dwarven cities now host them. The dwarves have a grudging respect for the metallurgical advances human alchemists discover, while the elves are barely able to keep up with the magical advances. The elves have a natural affinity for magic, true, but what the humans lack in talent they more than make up for in inspiration.