On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Noam Izenberg wrote: > And to bring this on topic (I'm still reading PotD, so don't know if > any of these answers are forthcoming, or whether I simply missed them): > Is there a reason why an empire-less Dragaera was not simply overrun by > the East during the Interregnum? The shorter Fenarian life-span can > imply faster adaptability to major changes. 120 years into the > Interregnum, a feudal Fenario would be perhaps 5 generations deep into > a world where the Dragaerans were relatively quite weak. Perhaps a > partial answer lies in this question. Are the diseases of Dragaerans > (like the various plagues of the Interregnum) communicable to > Fenarians? Excellent questions. Re diseases, I believe we have no evidence, but I'd be inclined to think the J didn't mess with the basic cellular mechanics to the point that viruses couldn't learn to pass to Ds from Es, given that they live in close proximity (v. Guns etc for more). Re an Eastern invasion, remember that the Fenarian treaty might still be remembered, that 200k years of bad stuff coming from the West might be remembered, that it's not simple to cross the mountains, that the pre-Disaster Empire wasn't that dependent on battle magic (as portrayed by Paarfi, anyway - why the east edge of the Pepperfields wasn't just mined or walled off by sorcery is unclear to me - SKZB arranging that in most battles the wizards would cancel while the grunts fought), that the Gods have influence on both sides, that there might well be no pressure in the East to launch an invasion (I believe that mass movements like the Vandals on Rome tend to be because of events upstream), that the western landscape is rather inhospitable, that it takes a long time to conquer a continent, and that any armed Dragaeran would be a formidable foe to the average lowtech Easterner.