"... and so in writing this up for folks who want tieflings in their B/X game, I have to admit I really don't know how you'd use it. I mean, the idea that there are just small pockets of infernal-descended creatures hanging out in human towns (on the Prime Plane) is just so utterly ridiculous. It's a box of stupid."~ JB, B/X Blackrazor
I can't guess how the popularity of this box of stupid accumulated. Were I to guess, I would say the persons were looking for an excuse to act badly, to embrace the infernality of the tiefling's heritage as a justification for perpetrating acts of evil in a game that has become progressively less tolerant of many human traits in favor of pressing the company's desire to present a clean, virtuous game for parents to look upon and praise. For me, the tieflings existence should demonstrate the opposite, but ... well, its not like parents are looking closely.
From reading JB's description and eventual frame for the character class (or race as some might play it), I suppose there's a gothic connection. I don't have a people, no one understands me, I'm depressed because my mother was impregnated by a devil, I don't like to smile, I'm very emo, feel the force of my angst, please don't tell jokes around me because I'm a tiefling ... all that's needed are some hoodies, some skate shoes and some skinny fit jeans for the early 2000s to come alive.
But I'm a very old person with memories of a music scene before rap and grunge, so my opinions about self-harming and self-obsessed children trying to dramatize their lives doesn't really mean much. I'm too old to get it. Much too old.
If I step back from myself, I suppose the silliness of gnomes is just as obvious, particularly if we're talking the unfortunate depictions from the outrageously popular books by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet. While completely legitimate and accurate regarding the culture of the author, we knew in those early days that the books had to be firmly ignored if we were going to use the race in D&D. I remember we would sternly admonish a player who dared show up at a game with one of these books in hand (which appealed very strongly to teenage girls, my first wife Michelle included).
It doesn't help that the gnome is the sole original character race that does not have the Tolkein seal of approval. Yet I've never gotten rid of it; there's something about it that I still find appealing, washed free of the Rockwellian Huygen image shown. In my mind, the gnome has no anabaptist-styled cap, his face and the face of his woman are hardened and deepened by the bake-oven he's employing, he's taller, he's fought wars with the humans and on the whole, his people are smarter on average than humans are. He's a terror with a pole-ax, that compensates for the height of a taller human, yet he's willing to talk and agree to reasonable compromises, so long as his people's welfare is respected.
But I can make no such rationals for the tiefling. There are no "people," no proscribed reason why they should look similar and no moral grounds I can think of for why isolated, fearful 15th century xenophobes shouldn't kill them at first sight. We can tolerate a highly individualized personalities in the present, in a soft world rich with technology and opportunities for specialized skill-sets; but a crude, unenlightened, superstitious world full of free-lance brutality seems a ridiculous place for any group of obviously deformed beings who can't even point to their own kind for protection.
Box of Stupid indeed.
Not disagreeing, but I believe the first tieflings were a part of the Planescape set, and encompassed a broader spectrum of half-outsiders, essentially making them a playable cambion race. Tieflings were, much like half-elves defined by their lack of culture and similarities, but in the city of Sigil there just happened to be enough of them to form some solidarity. The beings who interacted with them were either accustomed to seeing them, or even stranger in their own right.
ReplyDeleteYep. Probably for the same group of people that only wanted to play Drow, but then wanted a new race to play basically the same way.
ReplyDeleteHow you describe it is pretty much the only way I've seen anyone play them. Oh, tortured souls! Bleh.
Trust me Jon, I know so little about tieflings it is frightening. Moreover, I don't know Planescape or Sigil, the meaning of "half-outsiders" or "cambion." This sort of community speak is a linguistic cant to me, dependent upon my reading, enacting with or caring about the endless parade of RPGs, splatbooks, modules and so on into which I have never invested myself.
ReplyDeleteThe one thing I see in your answer is the "half-elves defined by their lack of culture" ... eh?
If I'm half Russian and half German, do I have neither culture? If my friend is half-Japanese and half-American, are they "lacking" in culture? Exactly how is this different from being half-human and half-elf? I presume they were raised by parents, who could invest them in one culture or the other, if not both. Is there some romantic thread in RPGs where half-elves decide they had no influence from either parents culture so they can feel "Brave" against the vicious prejudice of two races who are bent on treating them as cast outs, like Mulatto children in the 1920s South?
Are you running your racial cultures to perpetrate this take on things? Are people writing modules that are declaring half-races (is that what you mean by "half-outsiders") as misegenistic? If so, how in the hell is that happening? Why is there no screaming outcry?
Why don't we just call them half-breeds and have done with it?
Per the Planescape descriptions, tieflings object to the term “half-breed.” Aggressively.
ReplyDeleteJon has it right: they race was originally created to be used with an outer-planar (boxed) campaign setting because, presumably, in a cosmopolitan extra-planar city (the fantasy equivalent of pre-Italy Venice or post-modern New York City) you’d have more mixing of Prime Plane types with “others.” There were the “good” equivalents of tieflings, too...but those half-people didn’t make it into 4E or 5E as a “core” PC race.
And while I can grok the concept for such a specific campaign setting, that’s not the default game setting for D&D (any edition). I’ve heard multiple reasons for their inclusion, including to get more “specific IP” into the game (which doesn’t really wash since tieflings are part of the 3E Open Gaming License and are thus “public access”).
I like tieflings, but I also like aasimar (hslf-celestials) and Planescape.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that tieflings became a *thing* and aasimar didn't tells you that everything you said about them is pretty spot-on.
Forgot to mention (regarding gnomes):
ReplyDeleteThere ARE gnomes in Tolkien, or rather, WERE: in the early Tolkien writings he distinguishes the "Noldor" group of elves as "Gnomes" and their language as "gnomish" (Noldor meaning "deep elf"). In his later writings, he ceases to call them gnomes, and in fact refers to them as "high elves" from whence, I presume, the D&D writers took the term.
[of course, D&D re-purposes all the Tolkien elves to its own purposes: grey, sea, wood, dark, etc. In Tolkien, the sea elves simply lived by the sea (and loved it); in D&D, they have gills. So it goes]
Apropos of this post: I love those Huygen books myself, and I was never much of a teenage girl.
; )
Yes you were, admit it.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine one of Tolkein's peers coming up to him and explaining at excessive length how his short rendition about noldor were NOTHING like the gnomes of northern European culture, blah blah blah ...
I have read the Silmarilion twice, the Hobbit several times and the Lord of the Rings once. I have a copy of his unfinished tales, but never read it. Tolkein's style channels Herodotus to the extreme with his histories, which I'm sure got a regular belly laugh from ol' Lewis ... not that a non-classicist would recognize it now. I might have stumbled across his reference to gnomes in the Silmarilion and forgotten it. Twice.
Appreciate the correction.
I couldn't stand the Huygen books, which I encountered pre-D&D, if such a thing can be imagined. Too clever-clever, like the original Borrowers (read those four books). I never could bear children's books that were so directed at explaining how humans were so myopic not to notice things just going missing.
I'd go on about this but I'm writing this half-blind. I seem to have misplaced my glasses.
Satan's rape babies coagulating in Sigil makes sense, having them as anything other than NPC flavour does indeed dip into the stupid box. I guess being the bastard of Juiblex makes for a wonderful snowflake. Sorta going back to the preposterous necessity for a million and one character options. My story will be the best ever.
ReplyDeleteThere’s one thing that seems to have been skipped: thieflijvgs are not half demon (those are the cambions). They are much diluted if you want. But then why not using a human? Would make a snowflake justification for a low charisma and one very high score elsewhere .
ReplyDeleteAlso
I’d add that the post “magic thinking” was quite entertaining
I've always seen Tom Bombadil as the origin of D&D gnomes - particularly gnomes-as-illusionists - even if he's never called such by Tolkien, and if the particulars are altered in the translation from books to game. Though I certainly have a soft spot for them (for some inexplicable reason), I don't have any compunctions about just folding them into dwarves, the way they were in Greyhawk.
ReplyDeleteSince my posts deconstructing 5e, and particularly with this month's round on posts about races and character classes, I find myself astounded that humans inventing a game that humans will play keep thinking that in order to have these characteristics or act in this particular way that I have to be an elf, a tiefling or something else. Don't humans have ALL these personality traits?
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to say it's not fun to play a dwarf or a halfling, BUT it seems to me that the only real reason to play those different races is because of the MECHANICAL benefits they offer. They don't offer a single temperament, disposition, nature, individuality, distinctiveness, spirit or dramatis personae that isn't already right there in the good old human race.
So what gives? What's the deal? Are people so bolluxed up they can't pretend to have sum and substance without the pretense of horns, hairy feet or silvery hair? Because it is pretense, pure self-deception on a massive scale, a desperate play-acting fabrication assuming qualities that can be assumed any time simply by assuming them. But then, that is the 'snowflake code,' isn't it? Be yourself by being ANYBODY except yourself. Because that awful little self that grew up in the suburbs, with sweet mom and dad, or under the tawdry common cloud of no mom or no dad, falls so short of being, well, special.
Okay. Pretense can be fun. But there really is nothing the tiefling adds that, as Mic B says, can't be gotten as a human.
For me the draw of tieflings is a sort of idea that they're a sign of a curse or corruption. Many tieflings are born in places where fiendish power once has influence in the material world. Sort of like outer stimuli causing changes in a developing child in-utero. Evil radiation? Witch or fiends curse? T"he sixth daughter of your sixth son, born in the sixth month, will bear the mark of your sins!"
ReplyDeleteThe other one is the tiefling being a deliberate creation, conceived through ritual and for a purpose, one they don't have to accept. They come with plot hooks baked into them.
Alexis said: "I don't mean to say it's not fun to play a dwarf or a halfling, BUT it seems to me that the only real reason to play those different races is because of the MECHANICAL benefits they offer. They don't offer a single temperament, disposition, nature, individuality, distinctiveness, spirit or dramatis personae that isn't already right there in the good old human race."
ReplyDeletePretty much, yes. It's all about the mechanics, for the most part.
However, the races do give players another tool (along with class, alignment, and in 5E background) on which to build a persona.
If everyone is human, they need to start cooking from scratch. With mechanically distinct races with predetermined character traits, they are cooking with Hamburger Helper.
It's a crutch for a lot of players.
I certainly don't mind the crutch. Is this a good crutch?
ReplyDeleteI think it's good, yes. It's especially useful for new players to get a feel for their character.
ReplyDeleteThe stereotypes and cliches give them something they can latch onto when they start, and then they can add/subtract from the baseline as they develop the character and develop as a player.