Dragonsfoot Magazine Adventures--Call Out

I think it's possible that the game-system could "equalize" non-human PCs (via level limits, etc.), but the "cheat" to my way of thinking if the theft of mystique. The player gets a hit of "insta-cool-by-association", which inadvertently robs that creature's impact when encountered in the wild.

These "civilized" monsters result in Bryce's frequent admonition of "Why not just use human bandits here?"

I get that other milieu may want to explore non-traditional gaming tropes/situations. That's fine, but to me these are all "What If?" scenarios. (Implications of one nasty little city with goblin-slaves sounds cool...but it doesn't belong codified in a Rule-Book). I'm just preaching about consequences when using exotic (PC/NPC) races in a vanilla D&D world. Hell, I'm even dumping on venerable products like City State of the Invincible Overlord (maybe Greyhawk City too?) for having shops run by ogres, fairies, etc. You've flattened the palette, and it's gonna be hard not to have it seem like everything is just "peoples", and the game you are playing is called RPG Politics.

Which, again, is fine---if that's your bag. (...but sucks if you are trying to make your dungeons scary)

It's like when Daleks all of a sudden show up in a Dr. Who episode. Long-time viewers think, "oh, crap!....this is gonna be good.".
Not the same effect if they saw Daleks every week. Now replace Daleks with Drow.

Call it a Theory of Scarcity. Supply and demand. A zero-sum game with cool-factor.

(Dwarves and Halfings non-withstanding...these are essential just short humans anyway. Not much mystique there to steal.)

EDIT: Bringing home Beoric's point, I do the same with paladins! You can encounter them...but you can't be one. Although I do (grudgingly) allow wood elves, they are pretty rare in civilized areas--attracting a lot of attention---and my players get super-excited when they encounter one. Also, you can't roll up a High Elf, they're reserved for NPCs too.
 
Last edited:
squeen said:
The player gets a hit of "insta-cool-by-association", which inadvertently robs that race of it's impact when encountered in the wild.
Click to expand...

Depends... if a player is using a Lizardfolk character, for example, I should think that meeting other Lizardfolk would be his time to shine. It's not as though there's a shortage of races in D&D so that some other race can't become "the mysterious one".

squeen said:
Hell, I'm even dumping on venerable products like City State of the Invincible Overlord (maybe Greyhawk City too?) for having shops run by ogres, fairies, etc. You've flattened the palette, and it's gonna be hard not to have it seem like everything is just "peoples", and the game you are playing is called RPG Politics.
Click to expand...

I have my own problems with CSotIO (yes, I own a copy and have used it) - everything is so fucking zany there all the time, it kills the immersion for me and my group. "Uh oh, a gorgon is rampaging across the park turning people to stone, and an ogre mage is running down the street polymorphing people into sheep, and an army of skeletons has just burst through the main gate... oh well, just another day in the City-State!". But that's more of a "why the hell would the average person ever choose to live there?" type-problem (coincidentally, the same question I ask myself every time I see a reference to Gotham City), less so about different monster NPC races co-mingling.

Again though, it's all irrelevant if everything in your world is congruent from the get-go. If people mingle with monsters regularly in your campaign world, sure you pull some fantastical races off the table, but the world never gets so full that you can't add in another race or faction. You block off only one of many, many avenues to generate mystique.

For what it's worth I don't know many groups who are ever "wowed" by a monster race... individual monsters, sure, but the races rarely seem to invoke wonder. Running afoul the mysterious Jabberwock is much more exciting and wondrous than meeting a village of vegepygmies. Most of the fun of meeting weird races comes from the amateur anthropological attempts to connect with them, not so much in finding out about how radically different they are from standard races. Neat, sure, but "mystique"? I don't know. To me, there's no need to shut down someone who wants to play an orc in a world where you've already decided that orcs can mingle with society without being killed on-sight; there's enough mystique remaining to be generated from amazing places, dangerous situations, wondrous characters, freaky monsters, and clever plots instead.
 
As a player we had a few "Dalek" races (the drow, some particular goblins, the telepathic gnolls, etc.) that would cause us to poop our pants just a little bit whenever we encountered them. It was cool.

In Star Trek, the Borg have lost almost all impact due to over-use. The Klingons have also become kinda a joke from normalization too.

Anyway, you've heard my cautionary tale. Toss it around in your mental D&D salad as you see fit.

EDIT: One last stray thought on Orcs --- if certain monsters aren't always evil by nature, then what is left? Mad wizards, extreme cultists/secret-societies (of any race), and undead. I'm not saying that doesn't work...but it does explain their increased use in both D&D and movies.
 
Last edited:
squeen said:
One last stray thought on Orcs --- if certain monsters aren't always evil by nature, then what is left?
Click to expand...

Key word is "certain", which implies a narrow band in the great spectrum of all monsters that be.

Though I think the general issue is the over-homogenization of monster-races - if all orcs are evil in your campaign, so be it, but if not, then what's to stop the appearance of "good" orcs, or even player-character orcs?

I guess I don't like painting entire monster-races with one broad stroke, because to me that's what differentiates a race from an animal. You can expect the same interactions/intentions from animals over and over, but sentient beings with thoughts and feelings and agendas? Just seems too simplistic to me to have them all be evil dicks all the time, you know? Maybe if their whole spiel is being "animalistic", then OK, but otherwise it's a bit unrealistic. To paraphrase Bryce, humans are just as capable of committing horrific atrocities as any fantasy race, so why not just stick with humans for that stuff?
 
Last edited:
I was most musing on the recent rise of "evil cultists" (a.k.a. Nazis-stand-ins) as fictional villains across all mediums.
 
Yeah Lovecraft died in 1937. Evil cultists have been around a long time, and not sure where the Nazi stand-in idea came from.
 
squeen said:
Let's not forget the Bard, too!
Click to expand...
Hey, remember this intro to “Singing a New Tune” in Dragon #56?

(A conversation of a DM with two NPCs; Jake Armageddon, a half-orc fighter/assassin, and Jake’s brother Alphonse, a cleric/assassin.)
DM: Guys, I’m glad you could come. I want your opinion on a particular subject.
Jake: Go ahead, boss. Whatcha wanna talk about?
DM: Urn . . . bards.
(The two valiant half-orcs immediately run into the nearest corner, cowering and whimpering.)
Alphonse: Ach, sss, it hurts uss. It hurts usss, nasssty DM.
DM: Don’t worry, I’m not going to bring one here right now. I just wanted to talk about them.
(Jake and Alphonse apprehensively come back from the corner.)
Jake: Boss, bards are just plain mean! Me and Alphie will probably be in the runnin’ for guildmaster pretty soon now, but these bard guys could lick the tar out of both of us.
DM: Which ones are worse, the old-type bards or the newer- type ones?
Jake: Well, I’ll tell ya, I’d rather run into a division of Sherman tanks than one of the old ones, and the newer ones are just as bad ‘cept nowadays there sure are less of ‘em, ‘cause it takes them so long to become one.
Alphonse: Ach, sss, nasssty bardsses.
DM: Jake, where did you learn about Sherman tanks? . . .

squeen said:
These "civilized" monsters result in Bryce's frequent admonition of "Why not just use human bandits here?"

I get that other milieu may want to explore non-traditional gaming tropes/situations. That's fine, but to me these are all "What If?" scenarios.
Click to expand...
squeen said:
I was most musing on the recent rise of "evil cultists" (a.k.a. Nazis-stand-ins) as fictional villains across all mediums.
Click to expand...
These kind of drive home the point of why I do like not-automatically evil humanoids.

I have never seen an orc, or any other humanoid, written in a way that makes then even as scary as a real life human can be. Depraved-style orcs are, at best, like human reavers of various types – in fact they come across as less evil because they aren’t doing these things to their own people.

I do agree that if you are using a humanoid you need to be doing it for a reason, and those humanoids need to be (at least) culturally or (preferably) psychologically different from humans. The ingrained militarism of hobgoblins is an example. They are a chance to create societies that might not be plausible if you did it with humans.

(Speaking of plausibility, I hate standard pulp-fiction style cultists, because generally humans don’t approach their religions like that. Humans generally rely on religion to convince themselves they are good people, and pulp cults generally include a lot of peons engaging in behavior that no amount of denial could justify. Nazis don’t behave like pulp cultists, their mooks try to convince themselves of the whole master race thing. That is harder if you are feeding your own people to an aboleth.)

When my players choose to run demihumans or humanoids, I like to make them have a lot of contact with NPC demihumans or humanoids, so they have lots of examples of culture and behaviour. It is then up to the player to decide if they are going to roleplay the culture or be some sort of humanlike aberration.
 
The Heretic said:
Recent?
Click to expand...
Been watching quite a few movies from the last 10-15 years because the kids are home --- seems like the most ubiquitous villains are groups of hidden-in-plain-sight fanatics with a twisted agenda that the protagonists mows through. I compare this to 35 years ago when most villains were some overt or disguised version of the Soviets, or 50+ years ago when everyone were actual WWII German Nazis.

The difference being perhaps that the latter two had heavy accents and couldn't blend in very well unless they were some sort of double-agent. Also, modern-cultists (in cinema at least) seem to have a less well defined ideology that is usually hand-waived. The Soviet/Nazis cuckoos were at least plausible, and never had to explain themselves because the audience just knew they were against us...like orcs. :)
 
Last edited:
squeen said:
Been watching quite a few movies from the last 10-15 years because the kids are home --- seems like the most ubiquitous villains are groups of hidden-in-plain-sight fanatics with a twisted agenda that the protagonists mows through. I compare this to 35 years ago when most villains were some overt or disguised version of the Soviets, or 50+ years ago when everyone were actual WWII German Nazis.
Click to expand...

That makes sense. My comment was made in the context of D&D, where this trope has been used to death for ages.

I don't watch movies so I wouldn't have noticed what you've described. The last movie I watched in the theatre was, *ahem*, the Force Awakens
 
The Heretic said:
The last movie I watched in the theatre was, *ahem*, the Force Awakens
Click to expand...
Ok, but when was the last new movie you watched?

I remember after we watched SWtFA, my daughter turned to me and joked that we should at least give them credit for recycling.
 
The Sith Temple in the last Star Wars movie (Rise of Skywalker) was visually pitch perfect for a D&D "Dark Citadel".
It was just breathtaking to see one's imagination come to life like that.
 
Last edited:
Beoric said:
Ok, but when was the last new movie you watched?

I remember after we watched SWtFA, my daughter turned to me and joked that we should at least give them credit for recycling.
Click to expand...

Lol, there is truth to that.

The last new new movie I saw was probably Noah. I'd have to think hard about that. I'm just not a movie person.
 
Beoric said:
I do agree that if you are using a humanoid you need to be doing it for a reason, and those humanoids need to be (at least) culturally or (preferably) psychologically different from humans. The ingrained militarism of hobgoblins is an example. They are a chance to create societies that might not be plausible if you did it with humans.
Click to expand...

In a way, I do the opposite. I was thinking about this the other day.

Several of my players often say things like "that's ridiculous" or roll their eyes at the weird lizardmen and their dumb religions (for example). Meanwhile I am over here making every effort to include only cultural attitudes that I can find some precedent for among human beings on Earth! So I guess you would call it "humans in green drag" or whatever.

But even though the NPCs think things that (as far as I can tell with my DM-level reading list) real humans did think once - since they don't share the players' own 21st-century worldview, they're assumed to be idiots! It seems like a lack of any kind of broad-mindedness (or ability to put oneself in another's shoes, maybe). Sure you could say "uhhhh just get new players dude" but the fact is that not everyone reads books.

Would it be better if my lizardmen were nothing like humans had ever been? I don't know, maybe. Worth a try next time I suppose.
 
TerribleSorcery said:
Would it be better if my lizardmen were nothing like humans had ever been? I don't know, maybe. Worth a try next time I suppose.
Click to expand...

Whenever I include a monster race that I want my players to find "alien enough", I make them speak in a language that can't be understood without magic.

Non-verbal communication does some serious heavy lifting in terms of delineating between the familiar and the bizarre - for example, as the monsters point to player helmets and then to their own heads, they leave PCs to wonder "Does he want this? Does he know what it is? Is he scared of this?"... then when they hand over the helmet, the monster starts to eat it and it freaks the players out, or it gets angry and starts pulling it's own hair out, or whatever weirdness. You have them do weird things in groups, like join hands and chant, and then when players try to do what they think is expected, you throw a twist their way and make the monsters suddenly not-cool with their actions, and so the party worries about how not to offend, or how best to win trust, etc. . It all makes for some great roleplay.
 
DangerousPuhson said:
Whenever I include a monster race that I want my players to find "alien enough", I make them speak in a language that can't be understood without magic.
Click to expand...

I take the exact opposite approach, having monsters clearly speak their alien minds. It's very much in the style of Jack Vance, where the predatory deodands will knock on your door and plead with you to open it because they are hungry. Scrutability makes them more playable too as there is levers to pull to get diplomacy going (or it's possible to realize no compromise is possible). Last session, the players ran into some spell spiders and got a friendly reaction roll. After a bit of back and forth they decide to trade away a scroll for silver and having one of the spell spiders guide them invisibly to another location in the dungeon. The spell spiders have human-like hands and fondle their fangs when they get excited.

Mage: Can I inquire, master Weaver, what will you do with the scroll? Eat it?
Spider: You insult me, wizard. Like all civilized people we eat only liquified flesh.
 
Oh you can absolutely do that too, but if I want genuine "what the fuck are these guys all about?" reactions, I take verbal communication off the table.

Imagine if your spell-spiders came at the players with smiling faces, arms outstretched, hands full of silver, pointing fervently at the party's bags and pouches. Or better yet, if they lobbed a silk bag full of silver at the party's feet and made "unfurling" motions with their hands. Certainly makes for a memorable encounter, even if it runs the chance of the party misinterpreting the action as hostile.

I find it really detracts from the "alien" nature of the creatures if they speak Common/English and can just easily explain their actions and intents. Sure the intent might be weird (like "are you gonna eat the scroll?"), but that's a weird intent, not necessarily a weird creature. Normal creatures can have weird intents too.

If I go to movies, the most alien-seeming creatures are usually non-verbal - the Xenomorph, the Thing, the Predator, the Blob, etc. When they can vocalize and explain stuff, it kinda kills the weirdness vibe (picture how much more alien the blue natives from Avatar seemed before you heard them speaking English, how strange they were before they could explain how their world works).

I'm not saying that you can't run weird, alien creatures with communication; I'm just saying I find it easier to convey the atmosphere of weirdness if they can't communicate verbally.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top