Humans and Dwarfs and Orcs, Oh My!

[gridlore]

Work continues on my modified Earthdawn setting, which brings me to the subject of non-human races and monsters. Both of which seem to fill most fantasy settings to the brim with all sorts of demi-humans and odd beasties to fight.

We'll start with the intelligent races that are generally considered civilized. Humans, elves, dwarfs, halflings (hobbits with the serial numbers filed off), gnomes, and in more recent editions of D&D, tieflings, and Dragonborn. There are more to be found in various setting books and expansions, but these are the core, mostly derived from European mythology as seen through more modern sources like Tolkien.

The problem here is that humans can't get along with each other for more than five minutes, and have a long, long history of finding reasons to hate each other for variations in skin color, language, customs, or just for existing and being different. I'm trying to imagine how a multi-species environment could exist except as in a state of near constant warfare. Because let's face it; the elves will be looking out for their interests, as will the dwarfs, halflings, and everyone else. Sure, there will be peace treaties and trade, and in some places, you'll have things like dwarf cities with a "foreigners' district" and human cities with the "dwarvish quarter" - probably with walls and its own gate to prevent riots.

But even at that, there will still be misunderstandings, holy wars, and plenty of "we don't serve them squats here!" to be dealt with. I'm beginning to think that, at the start at least, a human-only party would be best. Maybe a dwarf. But since this city has been sealed from the outside world for centuries, odds are it is going to be pretty homogenous if it survived that long.

Then there are the monsters. One thing that has driven me nuts about most fantasy games I've been in is how ecologically out of whack everything is. Big carnivores are rare for a reason! Yet most fantasy world have slavering monstrosities every fifty feet! I understand the need to publish more books to keep the income stream flowing, but the endless books of monsters have only made things worse, as Game Masters feel compelled to add new and better monsters to the game, rather than fully develop a few choice examples and make them ongoing foes. I've often wanted to do a campaign where the push is the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, except instead of Mongols the invaders are Hobgoblins and Orcs. The pull is needing to discover who or what is behind this horde, and stop it before civilization is swamped!

That campaign would feature at most five or six monster types, and the challenge would be not just bashing foes, but out-thinking an army. You could go any of several ways with this, commando raids, raising armies yourself, questing for the magical MacGuffin that will allow you to turn the tide. In my dream campaign, all three happen over the course of the game.

But since an important factor in this game is that the general power-level of the world's magic has fallen from the peak that allowed the Horrors to invade in the first place; I'm going to make most monsters a mystery. Other than a few scraps of rumors from just before the cities sealed themselves into their Kaers, everything is going to be new to the characters. Which means that I can play with abilities and powers a bit, just in case someone has memorized the Monster Manual.

Yes, I'm an evil Game Master. I revel in it. While I don't go for Total Party Kills as a rule, I like to make players work for their experience points and treasure. Besides, fear of the unknown is one of the great fears, and being an old Call of Cthulhu player, I like a little fear in my games. The best part is there is an entire category of monsters, Aberrations, which are defined as totally alien to the Prime Material Plane. What better for leftover Horrors and minions? Along with legions of undead, twisted descendants of fallen Kaers, awoken dragonkind, and a few others. But all in moderation and all fully developed.

So there are my thoughts - some of them, anyway - on non-human intelligent species and monsters, both in general and as they relate to my Earthdawn setting. I'm not throwing shade on how anyone else runs their games, but this is how I prefer to do mine. Tomorrow, I'll write about treasure and magic items.

Comments

[feyandstrange]

It might help to look at layering the hate here. Like, say, the Vietnamese and Chinese gangs hate each other, but the Asian neighborhoods will form a fairly united front against the mostly-black gangs on the other side of the highway, which also feud between themselves but can come to a truce when it comes to the Asians muscling in on their turf. So think about gangs in a city, and how they interact; each has their own turf, there may be larger alliances, there may be temporary truces, there may be wars.

Cities are often places of trade; there will be rules for how the hating factions can meet up and trade and so on. IT's towns and countryside where you don't know where the border is this week that can really screw you over. A city - even a larger town - has peace and trade in its own interest, a small town will ride you out on a rail though.

For medieval settings with hate, it's fun to look at religions in human history. Is this town PRotestant or Catholic this month, and how hard are they cracking down on the minorities this year? Are the Jews funding one side or the other, or have they been run out of town? (And have the Protestant-Catholic hate folks been able to agree that we all hate the Jews, or are they being used as pawns?) Elf merchants may be allowed into the city and to do commerce, but they aren't allowed to run a business within the old walls, and can't own land, and pay higher taxes. Dwarves carved out a loophole for existing businesses of theirs because the human king at the time was indebted to his eyeballs to their miners, but they can't form new businesses, which is why the dwarf "bar" over there is a bar, restaurant, hotel, moneychanger, appraiser, repair forge, and temple now, all crammed into what used to be one inn. Halflings were until recently treated pretty well by the human kings, they had their own "quarter" within the walls as well as lower tax rates on some of their trade, but since the halfling war forty years ago, the halflings were driven out and now the quarter is mostly troop quarters and criminals, and the king is debating whether to raze it or give it to the mariner elves, who would cut him some trade concessions for it, but his humans really hate elf pagans right now so it would be awkward politics. In all this, we can't always see that the elves have three different factions, the dwarves five, and the halflings lost the war because the ones traditionally allied to the woods elves refused to fight for a king from the wrong family line. But those alliances seethe beneath the surface, and can affect things strongly.

[feyandstrange]

As to big carnivores; this is one reason I love to throw swarms of small critters at my players. Way less glamorous to fight a ball of vampire rats than a vampire dragon, yes, but rats are in unlimited supply in the sewers. You can adjust rewards on some critters by offering bounties, too. The City pays two silvers for every dozen adult rats, unless there's a plague of rats, in which the rate doubles. And thanks to the kobold war, there's a huge bounty on kobold heads, which means kobolds are relatively rare but very valuable. This can lead to your players chasing after one measly kobold past much larger monsters because they need that fifty gold bounty.