Cosmopolitan Age
The Cosmopolitan Age on planet Teppala was a period of time characterized by poor living standards for human beings and a return to a subsistence based way o f life, and increased interaction with animals.
Background
In the centuries leading up to the Cosmopolitan Age, military and political power had been streamlined in the empire of Anzan, which controlled more than half of the human-habitable land in the world, and nearly all of its major cities. When Anzan was torn apart by civil war around 4200 AD, there was no foreign power waiting on the sidelines to take over its role in world affairs. Instead, humans simply no longer had a major military power.
With the collapse of Anzan, human civilization and cooperation fdewll apart. The mountain tribes such as Gala, Ihhai, Litila, and others, reverted to tribal rule instead of cooperating with the lowland powers around them. This meant that the tropics was now cut off from the northern civilization in what had been Repilia.
The period immediately preceding the collapse had seen the center of power shift markedly northward. From the tropics to the NW corner of the continent, as the climate warmed. The climate was still warming, but it was now mostly during winter instead of summer. This meant that the climate was also becoming more habitable fo other animals, including predators of humans.
Humans in the Cosmopolitan Age
Since human society fell apart early in this era, the resulting human societies had little in common. Nevertheless, they all shared some characteristics in common:
- War was very uncommon, as humans had little to gain for their efforts.
- Agriculture was mostly confined to the tropics, even though the climate of the north was warming.
- Human population declined due to massive predation by wild animals. This was nothing new: it was just that the humans living in the areas where they were being eaten the fastest had been living in safe, walled-off cities when the food supply had been sufficient. Now almost all humans were rural and were easy prey for various animals, especially the firebird.
- Humans began to participate in animals' wars whenever the animals' territory overlapped the humans'.
- Technological progress was halted and in many areas went backward.
Humans were not at the top of the food chain. Indeed, they never had been, but as above, during the peaks of human civilization they had been able to hide out from predators in compact cities where even though the firebirds roaming the sky above would have no trouble finding a meal among the thousands of people in the city center, the humans were capable of fending off an attack when they were able to fight back as a team.
Humans generally avoided war, as they had little to gain from conquering a nearby territory and a lot to lose if they were unsucessful. The few wars they did participate in generally were not continuations of Anzan-era conflicts but new, ex nihilo conflicts resulting from happenstance environmental changes such as the flooding of the whole of the territory of a minor coastal tribe.
However, humans soon learned that they were not alone on their planet in their capactiy to fight wats. The dolphins of planet Teppala were unaffected by the collapse, and continued their slow but presistent war as if nothing had happened. THis war was against 2 major alliances of dolphins, oje living in coldf water and the other living in warm water. The dfolphin nations had strictly defined borders but no internal boundaries; all dolphins where werlcome anywhere n their own nation, but not in the other nation. There was no pacifistic neutral nation, but pacifists were also welcome in both nations.
The human societies that bordered water that was deep within the territory of each of the 2 folphin nations were unaffected by the war. But the boundary between the 2 was ever-shifting, and humans who were caught in between had to play very carefully as their boats could be bumped from blow by a dolphin if they were perceived to be allied with the wrong dolphins.
