"They believed it was contributing to the ongoing problem they were having with warfare and wanted a clean start."

"I suppose if warfare was an ongoing problem maybe that'd be a reasonable measure to take."

Nod.

"But it's definitely possible to have lots of technology without warfare."

"It's very encouraging!"

"Elves are a very peaceful people but even the orcs haven't really had wars in a long time."

"What are orcs?"

"A very long time ago our world had a - bad god - and one of the things he did was breed Elves into orcs, who were magically bound to serve him. Orcs have more - societal problems - than Elves but they haven't had wars or anything."

"...a bad god sounds like a serious problem."

"The good gods stopped him. But it was very bad until they did. And now he's explained why he did it, and it can't happen again."

"Why did he do it?"

" - our world had, uh, has, a bigger god, who designed the whole thing from the beginning. And he enjoys horrible tragedies, so his grand design was - very satisfying as a tragic story but pretty terrible to live. And the evil god, Melkor, was angry with the plan and decided to see if he could derail it by any means possible. Including being even more horrible but less satisfyingly so in case that's what it took to break fate."

"We talked the bigger god into not being omnipotent anymore. And Melkor is in prison."

"Good."

"This was all many thousands of years ago."

"I have no idea what was going on in my world thousands of years ago."

"Everyone just dies, huh."

"Yes. Angels call humans 'mortals' but we're not much harder to kill and don't live much longer."

He shakes his head. "What is the afterlife like?"

"The Librera doesn't go into much detail."

"Librera?"

"It's the book the settlers wrote about the precepts of our religion."

"It sounds interesting."

"It's honestly a little dry in places, but it's important."