Set and Setting is a series of posts intended as aid in fleshing out a world by way of setting-specific rule design and reinterpretation.
Introduction
Flowing naturally from the
character generation post, here’s something regarding the races of man and
their choice as avatars for play.
In a shocking leap of logic that’ll
have any reader gasping in bewilderment, I’m for promoting difference
through rules structure. Nobel prize incoming. What follows is expressly
UN-creative fare: If you spelunk around the OSR for weird weirdness, you may well
afford this post a wide berth, for inside you’ll find the familiar reeking scent
of vanilla, as familiarity befits starting points.
Against Enablism
There is an ongoing trend of
dilution that began long ago, starting with the decision that any race should
be eligible to belong to any class rather than representing a class all of its
own. This has been spilling like crude oil ever since, puddling alongside pervasive
notions of anachronistic cosmopolitism onto a warcraftist morass out to choke
the very concept of fantasy and all the wonder it may once have held.
This problem is well summed up by
Goblin Punch’s Arnold K. (who runs a minimalist system, but whose good posts know no boundaries), that the different races all play like they’re just
humans in funny hats. The price to pay being that all of the racial paintjobs feel the
same and play the same, with the question of “who’s human and who’s not” being
met with a shrug of indifference: to the average player what matters is the
class, because that is the dam behind which most of a character’s gameworld-affecting
capabilities – and thus aesthetic signifiers – are contained.
Tackling this through system
alone might seem awkward, thankless and unfruitful; but even if running a
stable of trained character actors who could even agree on what a given interpretation
were to sound like, the realization becomes that mechanics is all one has
that’s non-debatable. If adequately encoded and stressed, what a player can or
can’t do in the game world ought to loop back into some semblance of character
inhabitation.
Past accepting that immersion
requires incentive comes the realization that there’s only so much that can be
practically systemized in order to differentiate a handful or more demihuman
races, short of giving everyone a battery of psychological prescriptive
behaviours, different dietary requirements, different temperature tolerances,
different sleep cycles and turning it all into one bloated, unmanageable chore. I’m only half-joking with this
list, if a difference between races is gameable (i.e. size) it should
definitely be played up. If it is not significantly or reliably so (diet,
psychology), it has to be tossed by the wayside.
“You Will Never Be One Of Us”
Such is the distillation of
Essentialism.
Ponder, as applied to these
constructs, on what grounds would a demihuman think or utter this to a man?
Then, think that the reason ought to be preferably physical, sooner than mental
or (gods forbid) psychological, as these are the facets that lean most heavily on
the rules and are the least liable to be glossed over at a game table.
As a creator, one holds on to
whatever images carry iconic power and actively avoids going against that flow.
The demihumans’ essentialism is an important parcel of their otherness and the
physical aspects that set them apart should be emphasized: you don’t count on
ever encountering a fumbling Elf or a Dwarf with a glass jaw, much as the
reverse is true, with dwarven long distance runners, elven weightlifters and
half-orc weaklings being a mold that’s simply not up for the breaking block.
This unvarying constance, closer
to archetypal than actually human, is precisely the purpose that demihumans
exist to embrace: just
as a dwarf’s reduced speed and height are hard-etched onto the statblock and
not something a player can overcome by generating a high number, so too should
its toughness. It’ part of what defines a dwarf, part of its inherent
archetypal nature.
Weighing the issue further, one
arrives at a junction: too few differences and it all becomes watered down, too
many and the bloat becomes unmanageable. I settled for the
time-proven philosophy of striking where it counts: the attributes. This implies
an organically halfway solution, falling short of race-as-class, but with
certain life paths being manifestly suboptimal.
Notes on Demihuman Psychology
No player I’ve ever seen has been
capable of sustainedly sidestepping the reality of play as a human person to
any significant or relatable degree. Even a polished roleplayer will struggle
and have a challenging time at pretending to be a different gender, let alone a
whole other creature. In fact, relying on the vagaries of competent roleplaying
to evoke such differences would be like tossing a coin into the air and
counting on it landing sideways on the floor everytime. It can happen, but
no-one’s holding breath that it will.
The burden of expressing these
differences should be laid squarely at the feet of the referee’s worldbuilding
effort, to be sketched and highlighted through the figure of the non-player
character. All player characters of the demihuman persuasion are simply
expected, for whatever conceivable reason – as merchants, as outcasts, as
slaves, as hostages linked to a peace treaty – to have become acclimated to
life among men and being, at most, eccentrics rather than the proverbial
stranger in a strange land.
Between the Mythic and the Tolkienesque
I’m neither out to reiterate the whole descriptive shorthands of the fantasy household names nor to warp them out
of all recognizability and thus practical use. I do interfere with them in
minor, mostly unsubstantial fashion (for instance: condensating the subraces, as they brought little to the table, other than dilution), the better to suit my fantasy, oftentimes
preferring to read closer to the mythic sources (on which I am no authority, let
it be known) than the pastiche-laden ersatz that DnD constitutes.
This and other posts of this kind
are not meant to replace the whole of the handbooks, at least not in one swoop,
as they contain notions and definitional shortcuts still very much of use to me
and the shared vision at the table.
Allow me to name a personal sore
thumb: Halflings.
Hobbits were genially devised as personable
everymen for a children’s book, with a competent reprise in the much darker
followup. As playable characters they’re just… lacking. The concept of goodly
disposed, bucolic, cottage-owning, orchard-growing landed gentry doesn’t really
hold water, especially for darker or more primitive settings. They also lack
mythic substract and blur way too easily into gnomes if you stop staring at
them for a second.
Unkempt, botulitic, warren-dwelling, cannibalistic primitive savages are much more my speed. Pygmies, of
greek telling, if looking for the mythic analog.
The Crunch
Each race has a size hit-die, an
alignment, an age spectrum for adventuring (with each level beyond the first adding
an appropriate die to age if generating a levelled character), some special abilities and, most definingly, a dyad
of prime/nadir attributes.
I’ve tentatively opted in for the
classic alignment scheme – Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic – reflecting the races’
essence and to act strictly as a mechanical keyword, with no gameplay-related prescriptive
effects whatsoever.
Prime and Nadir attributes are,
respectively, the highest and the lowest rolled scores, who must forcibly be
attributed in the corresponding entries, ensuring an invariably strong score on
the prime and an unfailingly dismal score on the nadir, serving as a soft take
on race-as-class, shaping these characters’ set of viable life paths and perspectives.
The bonuses, more than just a
simple mitigation device, are a way to push already high values past the realm
of the humanly possible; whereas a man will tipically be limited to the 18th numerical
gradient of any facet of being, a demihuman will not only frequently exhibit
extremes that only a vanishing proportion of humans ever touch, but also flirt
with the superhuman reaches of the 19th and 20th degrees.
The Races of Man
Men
Our own selves. Versatile, adaptable, capable of occupying both the
loftiest perches of idealism and the lowest rungs of debasement, oftentimes
within the confines of the same individual, weighed down by the leaden whole of
the human condition. Fated to supplant sooner than coexist, man will not stop until every monster
has been slain, every mountain has been conquered and every dark corner of the
world has had a light shone upon it.
Alignment: Neutral
Age: 10 + 2d6 years
Height: 4’8” + 2d10” *
Weight: 110 lb. + (* x 2d4)
lb.
Size: Medium (d8 hitpoints)
Speed: 30’
Special abilities:
- Receive one additional mulligan
token at character generation.
Half-men
The most abundant of the demihumans. Half-men (also called pygmies or
halflings) shoulder, if anything, as weighty a burden as mankind. Short of
stature, violent by nature, they proliferate quickly and live short lives, reaching
physical maturity at six years old and living only to be forty. Their preferred
habitat are the hills, whose soft earth they hollow out with their communal
burrows. Ferocious and carnivorous yet civilized after a fashion, their shortness
in years shackling them to a legacy mired in barbarism, compensated by the fact that
they never want for unproven youth brimming with hot blood to take up the
mantle of tribal hero.
Alignment: Neutral
Age : 5 + d4 years
Height: 2’7” + 2d4” *
Weight: 35 lb. + (*) lb.
Size: Small (d6 hitpoints)
Speed: 25’
Ability score adjusments: +1 to Dexterity, +1 to Constitution, +1
to Charisma.
Prime attribute: Dexterity
Nadir attribute: Wisdom
Special abilities:
- Can move through the space
of any larger creature.
- May attempt to hide from
sight whenever obscured, even if only by a larger creature.
- As long as unengaged and not expressly drawing attention to himself, a half-man has a 50% chance of being
targetted last by attack.
Dwarves
Focused, industrious and bellicose, dwarves are a relatively numerous
race, held in check by the natural confines of their underground living
environment and their specious reproductive capabilities. Renowned smiths,
relentless bargainers and inured drinkers of spirits, they slowly and
diligently carve out their mountain holdfasts one pickstroke at a time, feverishly
driven by a hunger rarely sated, for gold, for gemstones, for precious metals. Their interests rarely conflicting with those of men, as they are
loath to brave the open sky and even less the rollingly chaotic expanses of large
bodies of water.
Alignment: Lawful
Typical adventuring age : 30 + 2d10 years
Height: 4’ + 2d4” *
Weight: 125 lb. + (* x 2d6)
lb.
Size: Medium (d8 hitpoints)
Speed: 25’
Ability score adjusments: +2 to Constitution, +1 to Strength
Prime attribute: Constitution
Nadir attribute: Dexterity
Special abilities:
- Darkvision 60’
- Worn armour does not impact
a dwarf's encumbrance.
- Resistant to poison damage and
at Advantage on saves against being
poisoned.
- Dwarven combat training:
proficiency with battleaxe, handaxe, throwing axe, warhammer, light and
medium armour.
- Stonecunning: mastery on all
Intelligence or Wisdom checks related to mines, tunnels or stonework.
Elves
Dwindling in number, slow to mature and fiercely isolationist. The
fair folk dwell in the fae-touched places, within deep woods and upon tall mountain spires, completely unsoiled by man or civilization,
avoiding contact with the outside world. Their hedonistic, unknowable ways
coupled with the hauteur of the gifted shaping a civilization with a siege
mentality, as elven presence is encroached upon on all fronts by the multitude
of lesser spawn of the gods, which has these self-styled exemplars of creation
marked for doom. An ancient rift has further split their number onto two
distinct lineages, the grey elves, who took for theirs the rigid demeanour of
the mountains they settled, and the wild elves, fierce and unpredictable as the
shooting growths of the verdant primeval forests they inhabit.
Alignment: Lawful (grey) or Chaotic (wild)
Typical adventuring age: 40 + 2d20 years
Height: 4’6” + 2d10” *
Weight: 95 lb. + (* x 2d4)
lb.
Size: Medium (d8 hitpoints)
Speed: 35’
Ability score adjusments: +2 to Dexterity, +1 to Intelligence.
Prime attribute: Dexterity
Nadir attribute: Constitution
Special abilities:
- Low-light vision 60’ (dim light
counts as bright)
- Keen senses: proficient in the Perception
skill.
- Fey ancestry: Advantage against charm, sleep and
paralysis magic.
- Elven weapon training: proficiency
with the longsword, shortsword, shortbow, and longbow.
- May innately cast a level 0
spell once per day (randomly determined at chargen).
- Can attempt to hide when
lightly obscured by foliage, heavy rain, falling snow, mist, and other natural
phenomena.
Gnomes are the scarcest of demihumans. Possessed of a nature verging on
the utterly magical, touched by but a few aspects of the human condition. They
form communities in a loose sense of the word, with kiths of a handful of
individuals living in symbiotic proximity with both mankind and other worldly
animals. They are strongly associated with places of dwelling, abandoned or
otherwise, often lairing unseen amid the beams and nooks of the homes of unwitting
benefactors with whom they share living arrangements, struck in indirect and
haltingly ritualized fashion, but otherwise having few dealings with its
prosaic inhabitants, while being attracted to the innocent and impressionable,
drawn by their sense of wonder.
Alignment: Chaotic
Age: 30 + 2d12 years
Height: 2’11” + 2d4” *
Weight: 35 lb. + (*) lb.
Size: Small (d6 hitpoints)
Speed: 25’
Ability score adjusments: +2 to Intelligence, +1 to Dexterity.
Prime attribute: Intelligence
Nadir attribute: Strength
Special abilities:
- Darkvision 30’
- Advantage on all mental saving throws against magic.
- May innately cast Minor Illusion once per day.
- Can become invisible for a few minutes
once per day (Effect lasts until a "1" is rolled on the proficiency die, checked once per minute, concentration required).
- Through sounds and gestures, can
communicate simple ideas with Small or smaller beasts.
