Dragonstar: The Big Question
John Caspian:
The People
The galaxy is populated with people of all sorts, but the most common kinds are humans—honestly, it seems like we're just about everywhere—elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, orcs, and the various crossbreeds. It's the same on my planet, the same on yours, and the same on just about every planet in the Dragon Empire. There are dragons everywhere, too, although a lot fewer of them. Given the geological speed with which the critters breed, this only makes sense. And you can thank your lucky stars for that. If dragons reproduced like rabbits, you can be sure the galaxy would be overrun with them from one end to the other.
There are all sorts of other creatures too, most of them pretty common from one place to another. Just about every planet has a significant goblinoid population, for instance. And serpent people: The worlds are lousy with serpent people, from kobolds to lizardfolk, who apparently think they've got an in with the dragons because they all have scales. Of course, most dragons find such comparisons insulting.
The strangest thing isn't that you find the same races and species on all the inhabited worlds in the galaxy. It's that all of these intelligent species have a common language that's pretty much identical from one planet to the next. Common, for instance, is spoken by most human cultures on every planet I've ever visited. Sometimes it's a little tricky to navigate around the accents and dialects, but once you get used to it, it's just different twists of the same tongue.
Customs and traditions are often similar, too, though clothing and other cultural details vary wildly. These things are also influenced by the culture's level of technological development. I mean, none of the drow who landed on my homeworld were dressed in chainmail shirts. And the machine-stitched boots I wear now are a far cry from the hand-sewn calfskin jobs I wore every day as I wandered in exile.
Still, people everywhere—no matter their race, their culture, or their planet of origin—all want the same things: food, clothing, shelter, someone to love. Of course, beyond these basics, things can diverge quite a bit.
Just consider your own planet. How many different cultures have you seen in your travels? Imagine multiplying that by the number of planets in the Dragon Empire. Okay, that's an exaggeration since many of these cultures are reflected almost exactly by countless others. And, in the Empire, technological civilization has tended assimilate many diverse cultures. Sometimes when you travel across the Empire you have a hard time distinguishing one world from another. This, of course, gives the bards, romantics, and reactionaries something to complain about, but progress marches on.
The Big Question
I can hear you asking the questions already, the same ones that were swirling in my mind when I signed on with the Legions. How?
How are there dragons all over the galaxy? Heck, how are there humans and orcs and elves and dwarves and everyone else on most every inhabited world? We're all from different planets, right? Why are we all the same? And why do we speak the same languages? It's a big galaxy out there, almost unfathomable in its depth. Assuming you're going to run into people from other planets eventually, what's the chance of them looking like the people who grew up next door to you? Zero. But that's because chance has nothing to do with it.
You're thinking logically, when what you really need is faith. Science tells you that life evolved on another planet is going to be radically different. Sure, maybe ou can argue for parallel evolution and similar theories, but given the vast number of possibilities, the kind of sameness we see in the known galaxy is inexplicable. At least by science. But it can be explained by magic—magic of the most powerful kind.