Ch. 37

  Race: Humans

  Classifications: Elvenoid, Primate, Sapient, Sentient, Tool-using, Social

  Typical characteristics (adult): 150-200 cm, 60-100 kg, mostly hairless, low vitality, modest strength, low agility, high endurance, high intellect, high wisdom, high spirituality

  Commonality: Very rare

  Threat: Individual (low), community (very high, and increasing with size and age)

  Discussion: An offshoot of the primate branch of dungeon monsters, humans are what you might imagine an elven or dweorem version of a primate might appear like. Naturally weak, the strength of humans is found within the communities established within dungeons. Unlike other tool-using monsters which tend to only use what the dungeon spawns for them or that they can take from delvers, humans tend to make tools from whatever raw resources they have at their disposal. And unlike the few other tool-making monsters which tend to only make a handful of different items, humans both make a wide variety of products, both martial and civilian, and iterate on such products to constantly improve them. Moreover, this cycle improves both over time and with increasing community size. With access to appropriate resources, a sufficiently large and old human community can create weapons and goods that rival those of the sapient races outside of dungeons. As a result, dungeons with human populations also tend to have well armed other monsters as well. And while no surface community has ever been established, the academic consensus is that humans would be able to do so relatively easily.

  As a result, whenever human monsters are detected in a dungeon, their extinction is often a high priority. Even a small community of a few hundred will often have a surplus of goods, however crude, and will be heavily fortified and trapped, requiring a huge investment in order to remove them. Once a community reaches ten thousand or so, the cost to remove them is often too high and instead efforts turn to containment.

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  One of the rarer monster species found within dungeons, discussions with friendly dungeons have revealed that humans are a high cost, high reward monster option. The high costs come from several factors. First, the dungeon needs to spawn a significant population in the first place in order to establish a breeding population. Second, while omnivorous, humans have some of the highest food caloric requirements per kilogram of any known dungeon monster. Third, humans have relatively slow maturation cycles. Even within the accelerated cycles within a dungeon, a human can take up to 18 months to reach maturity, with most of the first 12 months of them requiring care and being unproductive members of their societies. Fourth, humans also have relatively slow breeding cycles. Female humans give live birth, typically one at a time and, due to a quirk of biology, usually can have no more than 10 or 12 children. Fifth, because of their primate heritage, humans often need wide open spaces. And finally, because a large part of human's strength comes from their ability to create and effectively use their own tools, a wide array and amount of raw materials need to be provided to effectively support such endeavors. As a result, in order for a dungeon to create a stable human monster population, they need to direct significant resources at both setting up their habitat, spawning them, and then supporting them, often for years if not decades before they become relatively self-sufficient. Moreover, given that the surface races will wipe out such monsters as soon as they are found, dungeons who do successfully create human communities usually do so because they spent the extra expense hiding away such populations. As a result, while a population of humans will give a dungeon at least one heavily fortified position and improve the overall combat readiness throughout the dungeon, that initial set-up takes a huge investment that dungeons are wary of.