Eightfold: Monstrous People

"Orc is not man. Prick orc, you bleed."

Since James Holloway lately put up my requested episode of Monster Man ('The Things are Also People: Monstrous PCs',) it feels appropriate for this installment of 'Luke's world-building process' to focus on the integration of monstrous races into my early modern setting.

Your typical D&D monstrous humanoid race occupies the role of the barbaric, or even savage, tribal society existing on the fringes between more civilised state-level cultures. When the early states are forming into more sophisticated sociopolitical entities, it becomes more and more unlikely that there would be a tribe of brutal raiders living down the road, without someone sending the actual army that they have now - or the mercenaries that they can afford - to do something pointy and irrevocable about them. So what, in this scenario, are orcs - for example - all about?

I've tied this in with the broader process of world-building. I know that the mortal races were created by the Young Gods, a sprawling pantheon of relatively crap divinities that git gud by pooling their efforts and adopting combined personae. For each race then, I started by defining the gods that actually created them.

Actually, back up a step. I started by dividing them up into cardinal, secondary and tertiary races. Cardinal races - giants, dragons, elves, dwarfs, dragonborn, orcs and tortles - were the early successes, secondary races - including humans, halflings, goblinoids and gnomes - are the up and comers, and tertiary - including lizardfolk, gnolls and kobolds - have never been much cop, at least as social influencers.

Then each race gets a loose set of creator gods, a relationship with those gods, a potted history of the race since the Cataclysm broke the world and split the population across the continents, and a brief demographic overview. For example, those orcs:

The orcs were created by the Dark Lords, an unknown number of unnamed Young Gods with the goal of creating the perfect race, not to rule, but to serve. They are powerful and hardy, able to live where others would die, and made specifically to follow. They were the original horde, sent forth to conquer, and in the early part of the mortal age they gained a dark reputation for savagery, but in the midst of their conflict with the nascent Regime, the orcs turned on their creators and destroyed them. In the ensuing confusion they were pushed back into the barrens and the swamps, but they recovered and returned as a proud and independent people.

The culture of the orcs is tribal and shamanic, with each tribe fostering its own traditions. The one constant is that each tribe has a totem, an icon built up over generations and representing the soul of the tribe. In a similar fashion, individual orcs collect tokens from those that they meet, sewing them to their clothing. The tribes of northern Yethera maintained tribal banners, each chief adding a new panel so that they grew from simple pennants to great tapestries telling the tale of the tribe to those who could understand. Many of these were lost when the tribes were pushed south by the descent of the giants, to the anger and sorrow of the tribes, but some are still passed down in families within the Republic.

Orcs revere their ancestors, instead of gods. Having killed their creators they have never sought to replace them, although in the Republic they pay lip service to the Church. The traditional practices of the tribes touch on druidism or forms of arcane practice, and are suppressed by the church. Some continue the old ways in secret, while others have abandoned their communities for the ways of the Church, usually finding positions as enforcers.

I mention the orcs specifically because having written this, I rewrote the existing orc race profile, swapping out their -2 Intelligence hit for disadvantage on Wisdom saves (is this balanced? I DON'T KNOW! I've literally never used these rules before!) and giving them a survival-based feature as well.

The 'descent of the giants' mentioned here as causing the orcs to migrate into the Republic's territory is actually lifted from the canon write-up for giants, whose culture is in decline from the days when they lived in cloud palaces. On Aiaos, the giants inherited the titanic civilisation of Ostoria, but the cloud cities have degraded, periodically dropping populations of giants which force settled populations to move.

I've also done some work on the humans, because I don't just want them to be the 'default', so their deal is that they are socially and theologically adaptable, with a plasticity of belief that suits the plasticity of divinity. In other words, they are especially good at moulding a group of gods into a unified identity that suits them. They are also the ideas people, and have a destabilising influence on the orderly social structures around them. In addition, they don't have a great civilisation or ancient social order, but sometimes they pretend that they did in order to feel more important among races like the elves. The nearest thing they actually had was an emergent kingdom that went all snake-worship and turned into the Yuan-ti, which most of the humans in the Republic were refugees from anywhere from ten to no generations back.

Eightfold

It's been a while since I posted on this blog, but since I'm designing a new game setting and people seem interested, I thought I might expand a little.

Not incidentally inspired by streaming games including Critical Role, High Rollers and the Oxventure Guild, and thanks to moving to a larger house with space for a proper table, I'm going to have a shot at running a D&D 5e game in my own, homebrewed setting. This setting is the Sacred Republic, a major power in a smallish fantasy world, which I'll talk about as a whole in another post. I kicked off with a few basic notes: That the tech level was roughly at the Renaissance, rather than the pan-mediaevalism of the 'stock' setting; that the Republic was controlled by a powerful church; and that wizards were outlawed.

The Sacred Republic (and neighbours)

These three factors all fed into each other of course. Why is the tech level higher than in most fantasy worlds? Because there isn't as much magic. Why isn't there as much magic? Because the church has outlawed wizardry. That just left the question of why wizardry was outlawed, and so it came to be that there was a period in history when the wizards ran the whole show, before the Church overthrew them. From this, I developed the history and geography of the area, before moving on to the world and a planar system - because you have to have a planar system - and a rough approximation of the balance of trade between the provinces of the Republic, because if Catan teaches us anything it's that you can't call it world-building if you don't know who's buying sheep.

Since the church is important, of course there had to be gods. In this area, matters were greatly complicated by the influence of James Holloway's Patron Deities podcast, which has made me think even more than usual about how gods and religion work. The provinces of the Republic are mostly on a European model, because while that is a bit old hat, it's also what I know and what I can write without falling back on nothin' but stereotypes. Still, I've tried to make a bit more use of the concept, so the PCs' home province is your standard Anglo-German business, but moving out they'll encounter less familiar cultures. The real trick will be making sure that the specifically non-human cultures are actually non-human, rather than just... non-European.

Those non-human cultures?

Well, because I like to challenge myself, the Halflings of Yethera (the name of the continent; the world is called Aiaos,) are originally a travelling culture, so they mustn't be too egregiously cod-Roma.

The orcs and goliaths in this world had a somewhat less advanced culture in the north, before they were pushed out by encroaching giants, and now mostly form an immigrant workforce in the Republic.

The 'beast kingdoms' to the east are where the various animal-like humanoids live. Well, apart from the Tortles, who are another nomadic race and travel in massive, mobile fortresses, driven by subterranean lizards on treadmills.

And to the south we have the Drow, who are a major mercantile and occasionally military power bloc to the south, who control trade in and out of the Great Delta by means of a massive, fuck-off chain stretched across the mouth of the bay. There are some aspects of Constantinople/Istanbul in there of course, but so far I haven't gone into detail because I want to do something unique. I'm aware that I've kind of put the black-skinned elves in what looks like North Africa; in my defence this is actually in the shadow of the crown - the highest point on what is in fact a dome-shaped world - and it thus in shade for about half the day; I just have a limited range of coast shapes in my mind.

Finally, there are the Yuan-ti. Now, they're a particularly touchy case, because Yuan-ti are canonically humans corrupted by dark, sacrificial rites, so that has to be handled with care so you don't end up with a Peter Jackson kind of situation.

And the elves are Euro as fuck, because elves are the definition of racial privilege. Specifically, High Elves are the city builders, having been the rulers of the culture before the culture before this one, while the Wood Elves are the preservers of the wilderness and thus latterly leaning towards eco-terrorism.

There are also dwarfs and gnomes, but I haven't gone into much detail on them yet, and dragonborn in the archipelago of Ladonia, who trade with the coastal province.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 21 - I can show you the world...

Prompt: Favourite gaming setting

Don't be fooled. These daft looking buggers will quack you up (although... I
don't know what's going on with that shield.)

So, my knee jerk response to this one is Warhammer 40,000, which I do adore in all its overblown, grandiose, Gothic-punk, sometimes-ironically macho glory, although as an observer from outside the wargame I am aware that the setting has undergone some changes I don't care for, like the implication that the Emperor gained his powers (aside from immortality) from a pact with the Dark Gods of whom he is the antithesis. Aside from this making little sense cosmologically, from a narrative standpoint it harms the purpose of the Emperor, which it always seemed to me was to illustrate that in the grim darkness of the far future, even a godlike, entirely benevolent superbeing can't do shit in the long run to make the universe less crappy. That just be how it is.

Also available in webcomic form.

This being the case, I'm going to go with Glorantha, which I love simply for its absolute commitment to a realistic anthropology (allowing for the proven, indeed unquestioned existence of gods, spirits, magic and anthropomorphic ducks.) In the computer game, King of Dragon Pass, the only road to victory is to immerse yourself so much in Orlanthi culture that you can make the most Orlanthi decisions, rather than necessarily the most rational from a real world perspective. Moreover, when undertaking Heroquests it was necessary to memorise the story of your quest, then adjust for the existence of Chaos and any other variations, again by being totally Orlanthi about your decisions.

Anyway, I have no doubt that once more James Holloway is doing a better job of selling Glorantha* than I am. Again, it's one of his focus areas.

It's odd, given that one of the things I like about 40K is its vastness, that what makes Glorantha more appealing to me is the limits to its scope; that what lies beyond your borders is a total mystery, which means that your focus is on the here and now. You might look to the horizon, but ultimately that won't get the pigs in.

-

So, what about writing settings, because when push comes to shove, I'm a writer and a world-builder. Another friend of mine is currently working up a world-building project on his blog, so you can check that out, but it's made me think about my own process and my own flaws in setting writing (short version - way too much detail, leaving no space for the PCs to inhabit.) We were talking on G+ recently about gods and godly 'domains', which is a kind of D&D concept, I guess, but not an uninteresting one, and about how magic affects society, but I think more importantly from a writing perspective, how much information is needed to sell the setting.

Consensus on that one seemed to be about 1500 words, preferably with something to break up the text like an image or timeline; enough to give a taster of the world without overloading your poor readers. I suspect that it might also be advisable to write this before fleshing out the details, at least in draft format, as for a game setting the appearance is arguably more important than the finer points, which are ultimately something for the players to find out, change and possible even define in play. Fate Core is very specific about this, and part of the game prep process is sitting down with your players to a) determine what kind of game you all want to play, b) generate characters, and c) define certain fixed points in the world. In play, it is possible to invoke aspects for effect to change the world on the fly; it's all part of heroing.

Also an intriguing setting in its own right, with
its fusion of  magic and science.

While rarely enshrined in the mechanics, this is something of an assumption with RPGs in general; that your PCs are free agents and can change the world. It's not going to be easy to rig the ballots, assassinate the king, or overthrow the deerocracy in favour of a system of government founded on the altogether more rational basis of strange women lying in ponds, but you could do it. If you were so inclined, you could walk straight past the tavern and camp in the woods, or mug the old storyteller and steal his stuff. In some cases this would be a total dick move, but consider - for example - The Ashes of Valkana. No spoilers, but if you've seen that through to the end you'll know that the party would have been entirely justified in telling one particular Quest Giver where to shove his giant, rotating exclamation mark, even if it would require the GM to wing it while they became fugitives from justice.

This is why 40K RPGs tend to favour a local setting. You're never going to overthrow the Adeptus Terra, the sheer scope of such an enterprise boggles the mind and would test the most robust of mechanics, involving as it would millions of ships the size of city blocks and a number of people that the brain can not comfortably encompass acting across a substantial percentage of the galaxy. You probably could do it, with a lot of effort and a highly narrative system, and it would be a very long shot, but manipulating planetary or even sector politics is a much more achievable goal, which makes it fun to try, while the difficulty of moving such a calcified system makes it potentially rewarding even if you fail, so long as you fail interestingly (cf. small victories in CoC.)

I'm out for the next couple of days, so I'll be back on Monday with a round-up of the next few topics. That will be 'perfect gaming environment', 'perfect game for me' and 'favourite house rule'. In the meantime, check out the hashtag for posts by folks who get at their keyboards during the weekend.

* Not that I've watched today's vid yet, so more fool me if he's talking about Puppetland.