The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Snakefing(Just as an aside, how the heck do D&D dwarves eat? They are supposed to like ale and meat - but living underground, I'm not sure how they would grow grain for the ale or raise cattle or sheep. Best I can figure, they must subsist on slimes, fungi, and lichens they can grow in their caves, and water from deep aquifers. My "dwarves" ended up being short, stocky, hairy humans who live in the mountains and build in stone, but they live on the surface to tend sheep and hunt mountain goats.)

I think that, because they typically can't have ale or meat, their love for it is overplayed on the surface due to their lack of it.  Dwarves love it because they can't get much of it.  Maybe they brew other alcoholic beverages with mushrooms.  (That sounds at least a little gross, but it'd explain where they get the alcohol tolerance.)  

Okay, that took it off topic.  Anyways.

Hmm again.
I finally have a few minutes to sink my teeth into this one.

I write this from the perspective of a GM that has run a very long campaign: and from an honest perspective as a GM who admits that things have changed dramatically from whence it began.

Originally more of an outgrowth or reflection of much of the fantasy of the time, my fist look at race was very superficial, with seperate cultures and religions, and sometimes even seperate countries for different races.  
As my more scholarly readings and experiences began to color this, and I started to understand migration, warfare, gamete theory, and ethnicity better, race began to be more of a challenge to me as a GM, and I started to complicate the interactions of my setting.
[spoiler=Weber's definition of 'Ethnicity']
'Those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for group formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.'-Weber

Dump the word human from the beginning, and mix a healthy dose of Weber's exasperated skeptisism of real racial differentiation (in that he finds it is mainly internally created and
maintained), and the revolution of my setting was on.
[/spoiler]

so I set it up so that purity and racial beloning-ness was a feature of the past in Celtricia, but that the last millenia leading into the current time was one of diminishing importance of race.  'Aculturated' orcs fight with town militia against their less civilized, 'tribal' cousins, making the race less important than the cultures that are swallowing them.  Race vs culture vs country vs history makes for a interesting storyline.  And that is what all race is doing in a setting, either adding to the richness and individuality (stress that word, please) of A Gm's work and a player's experience or detracting from the setting with poorly written, typical stereotypes.  Elves have been fading for millenia, but the time of the humans seems to be slipping as well, and the industrious hobyts and orcs are actually the most populous races in Celtricia.  Yes, elves are bright and tragic, but Bugbears are actually smarter on average than any other player race, just not fertile.  These racial differences make the world richer by their differfences.

Race plays a huge part in my setting, and my setting would be weaker without it.  I could, perhaps get a similar effect from different ethnicities of human, but the wider divergence of possibities given by different lifespans, and greatly different abilities make actual race differentiation a worthwile tool.    

Quote from: Xathan(Aside: why are evil races always the more dramatically physically different?

Ease of vilification.

If I'm trying to write a race designed to be hated categorically, making them look far-removed from the humans playing the game will make them easier to classify as "other", and harder to empathize with.

(I like to play with this idea, as well. The most dramatic "other" in the Jade Stage are the elves, and it's not because of the green blood. It's because they feel no love, empathy, or affection, rendering them mentally and emotionally separate from everyone else.)

This is an awesome thread full of fascinating ideas. I am enjoying it!

[blockquote-The inestimable LC](I like to play with this idea, as well. The most dramatic "other" in the Jade Stage are the elves, and it's not because of the green blood. It's because they feel no love, empathy, or affection, rendering them mentally and emotionally separate from everyone else.) [/blockquote]

Mine are my Bugbears.  I made them a playable race in '86, when one of my groups ran into one of my bugbears, who are incredibly sarcastic, and he became the most popular NPC of that year.  Most players from other games spend a while grappling with bugbears (the Gartier, as they6 call themselves) being the most intelligent PC race out there, on average.  Big, strong, and sarcastic as hell, they are distrusted by almost all.  
They are an anti-hero race, as they were created as an 'ogrillite' race (read that as 'bad, enemy') in the beginning of the Age of Heroes, but over the millenia, as things have changed, they have moved closer and closer to the civilized world.

[ooc=from Celtricia site]

The Gartier question is a very complicated one. Of all the Ogrillite families, the Gartier are the most difficult to grasp and the most tortured. When created in the beginning of the Age of Heroes by Anthraxus, they were bred to lead. For thousands of years, almost every humanoid tribal band has been either led by a bugbear or bugbears, or they were the brains behind it. When asked about their near worship of irony and sarcasm, they often reply with a variation of, "You spend hundreds of generations trying to tell every bloody goblin and gnoll which hand is for eating and which is for ass-wiping, and unsuccesfully mind you, you'd be a little jaded too". Strong, smart, and hardy, they were the perfect captains and generals for the other ogrillites...except they were too smart, and too clever, and for generations they looked in at the civilized world, and hated it for not being able to be part of it. Every gaertier for thousands of years has, internally and mainly subconsiously, despised themselves for being a barbarian and being outside civilization. The gartier hatred of culture and civilization was not the orcash or ograk mindless hatred whipped by priests and zealots, it was the deeper mirror of hating what they could not have but knew they were worthy of.

So, to understand the civilized gartier, on the surface all self-reliant and sarcastic, you have to take what was has been passed on from parent to child for years about how soft and unworthy the civilization of towns and cities is and what they have perached to their near-idiot followers, and add that to a near 75 years, just over one lifetime, of being allowed to partake in this civilization, and stir in the very-prevalent racism and prejudice of beings generally weaker and stupider than yourselves. Then add in all the tribal gartiers sneering at you for 'going soft' and 'being a hobyt-lover'...now maybe you can understand a tiny bit of the Gartier mentality. On a good day, they hate the rest of the world more than they hate themselves.

To circle back to the question about their mercenary appearance, I think it is that very solitary nature you are seeing. Julian, The Horn-minister in Waiting in Igbar, has actually taken it under advisement secretly to create a situation that would speed the acceptance of the gartier, due to the possible benefit and also the posible backlash. [/ooc]

Beating on my player's expaectations is a favorite pastime, and making a traditionally stupif enemy race a tortured, brilliant group of outcasts has made my players really thnk about the racism in the setting.

I really considered editing out that parenthetical comment, because I didn't want to derail the thread with specific examples of my own ideas. But now I guess they're helpful, especially since multiple people are doing the same.

So, I was halfway through wording a comment about how this Gartier thing relies on contrast against the players' OOC knowledge about what "bugbear" typically means (knowledge none of the characters would be likely to have, I presume), until I realized I'm doing exactly the same thing. :ermm:

It's really fascinating information, but for some reason, the font it's posted in is barely legible on my computer.

truth disguised by art...Out, out, damned font...

It's kind of sad that ugly so often equals evil.  It throws out some nice possibilities for skins to wear.  Plus beauty is in the eye of the beholder: I actually think a lot of the Monster Manual uglies look lovely.

I've been meaning to respond to this for some time.  If you don't understand something in this essay, please say so right away so I can try and explain it clearer.

I think it's both a matter of habit and that it's felt to be an expectation of the genre to some extent.  Non-human races seem to be one of the least broken tropes in fantasy.  

The Fantasy genre's founders, people like Tolkien, did use multiple races in their literature, and Gygax, our direct ancestor, borrowed a lot from them because that's the only thing he had to base what he was doing off of.  Thus, we are left with multiple races as one of the foundational tropes in fantasy gaming.  However, I think a lot of us have come to realize that in using multiple races, things such as actual cultures (emphasis on the plural, there) for each race, get left out.  However, as most Fantasy game creators I know are not really anthropologists, so creating even just a single culture in itself is difficult for reasons I will discuss a little later.

Another reason people hesitate to use only humans, I think, is because humans are familiar, and designers want something fantastic in their settings.  Non-humans seem to be an easy way to go about this.  As I mentioned above, however, most designers are not anthropologists, and creating cultures is, in my opinion, actually one of the harder things to do in setting design.  Thus, many of the non-human races have their race and culture merged into one whole, when this shouldn't really be the case.

So why is creating a realistic culture so difficult for many setting designers?  It's a related set of problems.  The first problem is what I'll call cultural reflex.  When designing a culture, it is easy to base them off of your own culture in some aspects.  Many of these are the idealized aspects that we like to say we have in Western society; things like the equality of women and minorities, a single common language for each culture where there would be a single language that overreaches multiple cultures or many dialects, and many others.  However these can also include direct opposites to these idealized aspects, such as a culture rife with inequality of some form, or a culture in which one gender or the other is in control.  Cultural reflex is a problem because it doesn't allow a designer to truly create something that is fantastic, just something that is different than what they are familiar with.

The way to not fall into the trap of cultural reflex is taught in basic anthropology classes, and should be one of the tools in a designer's bag of tricks is to learn to distance oneself from their own culture.  Go look at some of the cultures you or others have created and see if you can't identify elements common to both the fictional culture and your own culture.  However, it's not to say you can't ever use aspects of your own culture, just use them sparingly and diffuse them through various cultures.

The second problem is what I'll call identity reflex.  Identity is, in this case, your image of yourself.  Things like your gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, cultures and subcultures you associate with, and many others determine your identity.  While identity is an individual thing unique to oneself, as the philosopher David Hume puts it, 'the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects,' meaning that it is easy for many designers to simply approach design without trying to include identities they are not familiar with.  A better way to put it would be it is difficult for most designers to go beyond the identities they are familiar with.

The administrator of Dicefreaks, who is African-American, at one point had a thread entitled something like 'Where Are All the Black People?' commenting on the lack of usage of the various skin tones found throughout the human species in fantasy games.  I believe he stressed, and I would like to stress, the importance of not including stereotypical or cultural reflexes when dealing with another identity.  If one was to make a dark-skinned culture, one should avoid making it an 'African' culture.  The same can be said for any skin color, especially because one wouldn't normally think of it, for white people and European cultures.

Looking at the general make-up of fantasy gamers, I will make some fairly safe assumptions.  The majority of gamers are white, educated, middle class, and male, ranging from around high school and college age to middle age.  All other groups are smaller minorities than in the whole population.  The vast majority of gamers do not create their own settings, so they are a minority of a minority.  Thus, the problem of cultural and identity reflex becomes quite obvious: if a designer does fall into the trap of either of these reflexes, they are putting themselves, a subset of the larger population, into what should be a wholly different culture.  The problems are greatly increased when dealing with a different race, which should have a different physiology and psychology than a human.

For now, I'm going to leave it at this.

Do you use multiple races, and if so, why did you choose to include them?

I include them, and they fit into a mythos that I'm trying to work out for my campaign world. They're not playable though; pcs have to at least be mainly of human origin.

Do races serve a function in your work, to support or highlight a particular theme?

Yes. They serve to emphasize two things: that pre-human civilizations existed, and as beings that embody a struggle between good and evil in the world. For example goblins in my setting are a genuinely evil race by their allegiances to demons and evil gods.

Do you get the sense that many people write in multiple races as a matter of habit, or just because it's often expected in the genre?

Yes. For reasons that limetom stated above it's hard to avoid it.

If so, do you think that's a problem?

I think it's a problem when the world in question is meant to demonstrate certain themes. For example in the Al-Qadim setting it often seemed silly to have an Arabian Nights setting with elves and dwarves in it. On the other hand the vaguely Tolkienesque settings work well with it.

What awesome things are made possible by the use of multiple races? What problems are caused?

I think the main thing that is sometimes fun with multiple races is that players can make up some exotic type character for the pure fun of it. Some people get together to game almost the way you'd play a video game; you don't want too much thought in it under those circumstances. For those gaming groups I think it is a lot of fun, I've been part of one or two and when you get together only now and then and what you really want is just to have a blast doing a little 'ultra violence' then why not?

On the other hand if what you want is a more intense roleplaying experience then you want something with a little more depth.

My personal thoughts:

Wensleydale has created a very interesting race, the Duer, that are truly exotic and unusual in that they sense the world totally differently from humans. I think that this is a good example of clever race building.

I would also add that certain D&D ideas are so strongly wedded to any kind of fantasy gaming that it's hard to remove them, just as its hard to remove the Star Trek/Star Wars ideas from Sci Fi.

QuoteWensleydale has created a very interesting race, the Duer, that are truly exotic and unusual in that they sense the world totally differently from humans. I think that this is a good example of clever race building.

Ooh. Thanks, Tybalt. I'm only vaguely sure, however, that they didn't fall into the Cultural Pitfalls (as I will henceforth know them) Limetom described. This may be because they are partially based off human cultures, in inspiration if not in fact. What about that, Limetom? Is basing 'racial' cultures (which the Duer don't really have apart from in a very wide sense because of their origins) off real, human cultures a good idea?

Quote from: limetomThe way to not fall into the trap of cultural reflex is taught in basic anthropology classes, and should be one of the tools in a designer's bag of tricks is to learn to distance oneself from their own culture.  Go look at some of the cultures you or others have created and see if you can't identify elements common to both the fictional culture and your own culture.  However, it's not to say you can't ever use aspects of your own culture, just use them sparingly and diffuse them through various cultures.

Even if you've taken a basic anthropology course this is still going to be hard.  I should know, I'm in that situation.

Now I have to ask this question: Would it be worse to you if a designer simply made the culture up without any regard to how the elements in a real culture work?  Because I think, unfortunately, that would be the result if we kept people to such a high standard.  Not trying to chew you out for your opinion, just saying that we might want to try not jumping to the conclusion that people who take the easy way out don't have to.

Do you use multiple races, and if so, why did you choose to include them?

Yes and no - Haveneast is populated by a vast majority of humans (though of different ethnicities, as will eventually be covered), and the other things that populate the world besides animals are few in number, far-spread, and quite powerful supernaturally, as well as being quite removed from human thought. Theoretically one could still play an elf or a dwarf or a goblin, but each of these would have their own problems for various reasons (elves and dwarves being one and the same and minor shape-changers, goblins being harmed by sunlight, etc.), and they generally wouldn't be allowed in games I run anyway. I chose to include these races with their fairly drastic changes because of a desire to use some real-world mythology while keeping things about fantasy that I liked.

Do races serve a function in your work, to support or highlight a particular theme?

Oh yes - if anything there's an underlying theme to The Fairytale and the Nightmare that things like elves, dwarves, dragons, and giants are quite alien and bizarre, and sometimes nothing more than embodiments of evil that humans must battle to protect their world - ask me about the dvergar :). Humans in Haveneast are the world's greatest hope and at the same time the world's greatest fear, and the supernatural creatures that shadow them are what influence them to choose a side. The human race definitely takes the spotlight.


Do you get the sense that many people write in multiple races as a matter of habit, or just because it's often expected in the genre?

I get the sense with some settings that their creators are adding in additional races almost out of fear of not getting enough attention if they don't have race x or sub-race y.

If so, do you think that's a problem?
Yes and no. If a race can be brought into a setting and "survive" as a functional aspect, then that's fine. However, too many races becomes a problem regardless of how well they mesh, at least for me, due to a rooted belief that even under a lot of supernatural influence you wouldn't have a large caste of races evolve and continue to coexist in any one world. It seems to me that too many races causes too many problems and headaches of trying to remember specific blocks of details for each race, i.e. "centaurs in this world west of the mountains have a culture that vaguely resembles this real-world one, have a matriarchal society just like the -insert race of distant area-, but they are not fond of -insert other race- and have an alliance with -race-". Pretty soon you can be playing Guess Who, fantasy world-style.

What awesome things are made possible by the use of multiple races? What problems are caused?

After what I've said you may or may not be surprised to learn I'm currently DMing a Forgotten Realms game with all of its fabulous sub-races. There is always with a variety of races to choose from the ability to play something that is even remotely "alien" or representative of an ideal, as has already been mentioned. Sometimes it's just cool to play a four-foot tall alcoholic axe-murderer that came from some sacred clan inside a mountain. But the problems remain of creating real cultures and justifying why there are all of these sub-races. Some settings can give a "reason" by using lots and lots of gods (but that can be another problem if they're not segregated into pantheons - definitely another topic worthy of a discussion thread), some can use magical catastrophes or plane-hopping, and hey, who knows - maybe on some other distant world a single race could get isolated into groups whose needs are so radically different for many millenniums that they do each turn into something that some people would equate with the level of differences between fantasy races, we can't be sure.

QuoteThe administrator of Dicefreaks, who is African-American, at one point had a thread entitled something like 'Where Are All the Black People?' commenting on the lack of usage of the various skin tones found throughout the human species in fantasy games. I believe he stressed, and I would like to stress, the importance of not including stereotypical or cultural reflexes when dealing with another identity. If one was to make a dark-skinned culture, one should avoid making it an 'African' culture. The same can be said for any skin color, especially because one wouldn't normally think of it, for white people and European cultures.

This for me is a much bigger problem than the multiple fantasy races thing - there is a major lack of colored peoples in settings, I find, though I think Forgotten Realms makes an attempt to solve that (even though most of the areas that include them haven't been covered in many supplements). If you've read Vilydunn you know I've done something about this with the Nusans and the Tulsi (the only actual "white" people are the Aust'ene, who would be a sort of Scandinavian/Slavic people who are isolated from the rest of the continent). Their culture looks at times like a cross between Ancient Greece and some stereotypical Far East material, but it's unique as well. I'm a white male, but I find it alarming that there is so much focus on new sub-races for fantasy creatures when different ethnic groups get shafted for representatives in settings.

Actually the biggest and most powerful nation in my game setting IS made up of people of colour; the Yasg Empire, whose dominant races look various types of Asian, Melanesian and Black. The 'barbarians' are the Celtic High Kingdom for the most part.

A few thoughts I've seen on this subject that intrigued me and led me to this idea.

1. In the novel Maia one of the main characters says, "Where I come from real people are black..."

2. In Charlotte Stone's The Four Wishes the main character Cheon falls in love with a black slave girl only to find that she is really a high caste woman of an ancient civilization that patronizingly regards Cheon as a northern barbarian. The former slave refuses to remain with her, since it would be an embarassment to her.

3. In Samuel R. Delaney's writings of his Neveryona setting (which I got some serious inspiration for Yasg from) the civilized humans are mostly various shades of brown, with fair skinned people being stereotyped as 'barbarians'.

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with defaulting to 'medieval europe' which let's face it is the ancestry of the average gamer in the USA, Canada and Europe. It's only in the last ten years that I've begun meeting gamers from places like Bogota and Singapore online.


Wensleydale: At the end of the day we're simnply human; you can't help but take examples from things you understand. You almost have to stretch yourself. In my current game I often have to to demonstrate the lack of humanity of a dragon the pcs are travelling with--trying to see life through the eyes of a flying creature that considers the average biped food, is obsessed with treasure, is unnaturally long lived and is mainly solitary by nature requires a certain degree of exaggeration.

It is certainly true that I fall victim to the cultural and identity reflexes as much as anyone. I try to avoid creating cultures that are nothing but pure stereotype, and I try to incorporate elements of a wide variety of world cultures. But there's no getting around the fact that I'm not an expert in world history or cultural anthropology. So lots of cultural assumptions float in from my subconscious.

Still, even though I'm vaguely aware of these things, there is a countervailing weight. Most of the people that I would be playing with share my culture and assumptions. I try to confound these assumptions somewhat, but at the same time they provide a background of shared understanding, so I won't have to spend as much time explaining things to people.

For example, if I have a nation called Ngelebwali, I know that name will invoke a certain set of stereotypes. Central African, dark-skinned, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," Tarzan, white man's burden, Rudyard Kipling, etc. There wouldn't be any point in giving the nation that name if I didn't mean to use those stereotypes as a jumping off point. Similarly if I used a Scandinavian, Indian, Chinese, elvish, dwarfish, or other recognizable name. So of course, I incorporate some of those elements into the culture I create.

Now, knowing that this will be very stereotyped, I may do some historical or anthropological library research. What were these people really like, especially in relation to the historical time period that I am wanting to invoke? What were their religions and myths? So I'll try to incorporate some more historical/mythical details to round out the picture.

Then, I'll choose one or two elements to deliberately twist or change, usually to bring it more in line with the fantastic cosmology of the world I am building, but also just to introduce some exoticism. Making things exotic by making them seem mostly familiar, in order to emphasize the one or two exotic elements that I want to play up.

In the case of Axa, I also tended to displace the cultures by putting them into climate zones that are greatly distinct from their historical backgrounds, or put them in contact with cultures that were historical distant or non-contemporaneous. So the African-sounding culture is placed in a temperate-to-cold climate, with deciduous and conifer forests, and lots of rugged coastlines. (For Americans, think New Jersey up through New England and Maine.) Greek-based culture in contact with early Assyrians.

I'm not sure that it makes a lot of sense to try and create a culture completely de novo unless all the players are cultural anthropologists. Us normal gamers like the stereotypes because they provide a shorthand to ground our understanding of the culture - a theme that we are familiar enough with that the variations on it will make sense.

Do you use multiple races, and if so, why did you choose to include them?
I use multiple races for two reasons. Firstly, I was jumping the bandwagon with the multiple races ideology. Like many of you have said, it's simply one of the accepted conventions of most fantasy gaming that isn't historical. You HAVE to have other races. Secondly, it's becuase I wanted to be easily compatible with 3.5 D&D, although it seems they're shuffling the races for 4.0, so...

Do races serve a function in your work, to support or highlight a particular theme?
They do now.

Do you get the sense that many people write in multiple races as a matter of habit, or just because it's often expected in the genre?
yes, and yes. I think that they also fall into the traps that certain races are certain ways, or have certain cultures. Elves are tree-huggers, dwarves are drunken scotsmen, etc.

If so, do you think that's a problem?
It depends on what you want. If you want true creativity, those multitude of races have to be unique and break something, else you're just following the cliche.

What awesome things are made possible by the use of multiple races? What problems are caused?

I think races open up a whole window of exploring the true concept of otherness. There is no such thing as a complete other, especially in fantasy settings. You need to communicate them to your audience, and even by saying 'they can't be communicated' communicates something of their nature, which aids us in understanding.

Races give you a beautiful way to explore certain aspects of the human psyche. For instance, take our responses to bloodshed, reverse them, and strip away inhibition and reason. You get Orcs, maybe some dwarves, or Reavers. The fun part comes in where you can dissect these beings and their culture, figuring out why and how it would tick. If your culture has no inhibitions in regards to bloodshed, their moral code most likely has nothing about murder, their law code is most likely extremely strict, etcetera.

I think the pitfall most people fall into when creating races as 'true other,' is that all they do is remove aspects of humanity, and allow the race to continue to exist without filling in that gap. Elves, as was stated above in one example, that don't feel love. Alright. That's odd, but what are the repucussions? Why do elven mothers care for their young? Is it instinct, logic, self-preservation? Is there any sort of sympathy whatsoever? I also think that the opposite aspect is not taken enough; where one adds aspects that most humans lack. For example, most people feel comfortable in a place that's familiar. What if a particular race extended that to something other than place? objects, other people, or similar?

just my two cents.