A Take on Half-Orcs

[Haven't been working on the wiki the last couple of weeks, but that's how these things go. Just a word for artists ~ there is a lot of room for realistic, non-barbarian pics of half-orcs that no one feels the need to create, and for good depictions of half-orcs overall. It is a very overlooked subject.  I'm still not happy with the image I've found ~ and what is it with making every non-human race with elvish ears?]

Half-Orcs

Born of an orc father and either a human or a dwarvish mother, the appellation “half-orc” is that of an outsider. Orc women cannot be impregnated in like fashion, and no other race is sexually compatible with orcs. The resultant offspring retain a mutation that causes the half-orc variant to become dominant, so that if a half-orc that breeds with either a human, dwarf or orc, the half-orc strain will remain dominant and emerge in the progeny.

Among themselves, they are known more commonly as “Cumani” (human-orc) or “Dworkin” (dwarvish-orc). These peoples live side by side in a region called Cumana, located north of the Black Sea.

The Cumani are related directly to the human Pechenegs, who were annihilated and ceased cohesion as a people in the 12th century, the Cumans originated somewhere in the lands north of of Lake Balkhash in Turkestan. They began to move westward after the 800s CE, displacing the Khazars, Pechenegs and Oghuz Turks along the valleys of the Volga and the Don rivers. They raided the Kiyevans, Hungary and the Byzantine Empire in the 11th century. For a time, the Cumans occupied a vast realm stretching from the lower Dnieper to the Urals, but with the arrival of the Mongols this power was obliterated and the Cumans briefly scattered. They lived as a conquered people under the Mongols for two centuries, when they successfully regained control of their present-day lands, the Kingdom of Cumana, between 1420 and 1441. Thereafter the Cumani have fought often with Russians, Ottomans and Kiyevans to retain their homeland, with considerable success.

The Dworkin originated in the south lands of modern Mugodstan, where they still exist in some numbers. In height and physique they resemble other half-orcs, but they do have many dwarvish habits and physical characteristics, in the shape of their hands and facial features, without the typical orcish nose that is common among Cumani. The Dworkin were driven westward by the Mongols, in a series of short-lived migrations between the 1190s until 1230. They joined with the Cumani at that time, and were likewise conquered and forced to submit under the Mongol Batu Khan in 1238-39. Most Dworkin today dwell in the Het of Donbass in eastern Cumana.

Appearance

Cumani half-orcs have a strong muscular appearance with loose skin that creates a series of folds on their necks, upper arms and bellies, a feature that many will keep hidden when not among their own people, as other civilized humans often find the appearance to be disconcerting, even ugly. Cumani have raised gorilla-like nostrils and jutting lower jaws, usually with lower incisors that can be seen when the half-orc’s mouth is closed.

Dworkin half-orcs are deep set eyes and flat, wide noses, and stiff-haired beards that grow like spines. They lack the loose skin around their necks but it is still pronounced upon their upper arms, bellies and upper thighs.

All half-orcs males average between 5 ft. 3 in. and 8 in. in height, much shorter than their orc forebears. Females tend to be 3 to 4 inches shorter than the males. They possess considerable musculature, however, and are usually stronger and healthier than humans. They weigh between 140 and 180 lbs.

Most have straight, oily hair that ranges from sooty and jet black to bluish black. Common eye colors are turquoise and hazel … but considered most attractive among their people are pink eyes with either green or grey flecks, or pale pink, sometimes verging on nearly white.

Advantages

The most benefit to player characters is the bonus received from a +1 strength and +1 constitution, though a -2 charisma is also applied. They also possess infravision, being able to see in the dark with relative clarity.

Half-orc have a limited range of classes available to them, with training as assassins, clerics, fighters, and thieves.

See Also,
Aging
Bestiary
Character Race Options
Player Characters
Tribes of Cumana

Human Race

I've been exploring a rework of my character background generation system, and that has led me to the above picture.  This is based off this image ... but while a make-up company can be comfortable telling women that they have "espresso" and "walnut" colored skin, I'm not for my game world, so I've done the best I can to produce my own names.  This has meant having to use "cocoa," "mocha" and "chocolate," but I dare anyone to come up with better options.

The only reputable way to talk about skin color on the internet is in the realm of make-up, which is why the only consistent database that's available is one that features women's skin.  Skin color is one of those things that I'm beginning to think of as the "dark hole" of the internet.  We have all the information available that is available to humans, unless that information is politically charged.  As another example, just try to find a definition about "being healthy" that isn't fully based on telling you how to achieve it.  What actual health is, what it looks like, the firm, fixed definition of this thing, simply doesn't exist.

For my purposes, when I tell a player that the character they've just met is from, oh, Senegal ~ or if the player is from such place ~ as a writer I'd like clear, unambiguous language that helps define what that character looks like.  I don't give a shit about racism or the way that racists/anti-racists have decided to co-opt the language to fight their war.  All colors look "good" to me ... but I don't really care about attaching a moral evaluation to the issue.  When I say, that fellow's from Lebanon, I'd like the players ~ who have never been to Lebanon, and who may not be able to accurately separate a Lebanese from a Saudi or a Persian in their minds ~ to have something to go on.  In this quest, the internet is not much of a help.

Which brings me to the bigger thing.  My background generator presumes that as a player character, you don't get a choice about your skin color.  I have the color I have because I happened to have been born to Russian-German stock in Western Canada.  I didn't get a choice about it.  I recognize that for many D&D players, "choice" is the wet dream to which they desperately cling to give their game any value, but frankly I think this self-aggrandizing game valuation strategy is repulsively masturbatory.  And let me be clear about that.  My feelings about ANY person who makes the argument that role-playing is about "living your fantasy" fall into the category of unrestrained contempt.  If fantasy is your object, please explore it in the bedroom or with your hand.  I'm not interested in enabling your fantasy.

The company is, however.  In those dark days when it looked like the company was going to choke and go under, they were grasping for whatever straws they could grab, and the enabling fantasy shift stick was one that came pretty easily to hand.  In my opinion, it has soiled ... well, everything that sort of fanplay usually soils.

I haven't yet had the player who shit a brick because I told him his character was dark in color when he was hoping for KKK white.  I imagine that I have had a player or two online who simply ignored me and believed what they wanted.  This is the real racism that we don't talk about with role-playing.  Not the elves, the dwarves and the half-orcs, but when was the last time your player described a human player character as cinnamon-skinned or molasses?

How much easier is it if your game world is Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, where everyone can be more easily white?  After all, there's no stigma attached to that bottom third of the map, is there?

Here I was just saying I don't care about racism.

One of the benefits of growing up a social leper is that it's easy to identify with the social leprosy that is attached to so many others.  Fundamentally, however, I'm interested in providing depth and distinction to my game world, to give it as tactile and as gritty a feel as I can provide.  There isn't a colour on the above chart that I wouldn't play proudly.

But then, saying that, someone is bound to boil out of their den to scream at me about cultural appropriation or some other such shit, which is a whole different post about a whole different kind of inventing social leprosy.  Whereas I think I've already made my point on this subject.

Solving the Half-elf Problem

This will be short. But I want to present it, as I'm writing the overall document for the wiki, as my particular take on how to solve the endless problems of "racism" that arise in the way D&D was conceived. It seems funny to protect ourselves against accusations about fictional species, but ... it's the world we're living in.

Half-elves, then, are born of either a human mother and elvish father, or the reverse. These offspring are most likely to dwell in the culture possessed by their mother (as determined by their place of birth). Elves are not able to breed with other humanoids beyond humans. Contrary to popular belief, there are no sustained half-elven cultures; this is because the mother’s race will prove to be dominant after the first generation, so that the offspring of a half-elf will be either human or elf, with mere peripheral characteristics of the human or elven grandfather.

In the case of two half-elves, where one has an elven mother and the other a human mother, the offspring’s grandmother’s race, through the matrilineal line, will establish itself as the child’s birth race. For example, half-elf Gareth (human father, elven mother) has offspring with half-elf Miri (elven father, human mother); in such a case, the offspring would be human.

Both humans and elves will almost always embrace the offspring as a member of their own natural race. As well, racist abuse of half-elves is rare, since both humans and elves know the consequences will ultimately restore a trueblood offspring in due course. This is true even if the half-elf breeds with yet another race (which is possible). The mother of that race, or the half-elf’s mother (if the half-elf is the female), will always prove to be the dominant race of the offspring.

Why go to this effort? One, I don't want to deal with half-race societies, at least not those between two races that are both player character options. I have a different solution for half-orcs, that I'll be posting on the wiki sometime before the end of the weekend, I'm supposed to be doing some work on burglary (thief sage) for oft-commenting reader Ozymandias, who is taking advantage of my offer to write specific posts on specific subjects for the wiki. All the content about Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and two posts about the Bronze Age came about because Vlad asked me to do the same.

It never hurts to ask. I'm open to suggestions from those named on that post, or anyone who wants to make a $12 donation through Patreon or the button on the sidebar. If you don't know my game world and take on things, I suggest you speak with me through the comments field or by email, alexiss1@telus.net, before donating.

Tieflings & Gnomes

"... 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 confess, until reading this recent post by JB, I didn't know what a tiefling actually was.  It post dates me.  My first direct encounter was probably this so-so video from 2008, which spoke of the "upcoming" 4th edition.  Just goes to show what a blip on the radar 4e was.

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). 

A 15-inch tall cherubic gnome in a pointed red hat, such as depicted here, was far too precious for D&D adventurers ... yet this was the "real deal," whereas Gygax's version was made of whole cloth, i.e., a complete unfounded fabrication.  It doesn't surprise me that the appeal of gnomes waned; players were not overly interested in yet one more short character class, between the halfling and the dwarf, particularly with the cultural consciousness of the little creature out there, small enough to hide under a leaf and searched in forests by children still young enough to believe in Santa Claus.

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.

Racism

This is a risky post to write.  I will start by saying that I don't consider myself a racist.  Yet I came of age in the 1970s, when much of the cultural dialogue about racism held that everyone ~ due to the unfortunate osmosis of culture and media ~ was, to some extent, racist whether they liked it or not.  It was bred into us, hammered into us and preached into us.  However much a white liberal might identify as non-racist, this does not rid us of a dialogue that reaches into our mind as we interact with others of another race.  I will be forever trapped by these thoughts, "Express yourself kindly, speak softly and considerately ... and do all that can be done to assure this person that you, in no way, am treating them differently from anyone else."

Thoughts I would never have speaking with a white person.  Aye, there's the rub.  I've been inculcated with that pollutant; I can only assure myself that I would never support a racist agenda, that I would not deny an individual their rights based on their race and I would not hesitate to lend my support to someone on the basis of race.  We fight racism by being conscious of it; but it is not a fight we win.

To a lesser degree, I can make the exact same argument about culture.  I'm Canadian. I have belief systems and ideals that are regulated by that culture and that were installed in me as a child.  The pollutant of nationalism is rife in my mind also ... though not to the degree of racism.  For many, the two are conveniently intertwined; but as I fight one, I fight the other.  Come live in Canada, come work here.  I welcome you.

For me, race and culture have become pariahs in the global identity because of those who would exploit them for power or for gain.  There are two ways of exploiting either: a) create fear, attack them, gather others who hate them, encourage violence and sell the products that hatred craves; b) create fear, defend them, gather others who will defend them, encourage violence and the products that solidarity craves.

A Russian, living in a Russian neighborhood, spreads fear that others hate Russians, so that Russians must stick together, encouraging us all to believe only Russians, to think like Russians, to have faith in Russians ~ and to believe that everyone who is not a Russian is an enemy.

I grew up hearing that.  I've heard gays talk that way, I've heard union workers talk that way, I've heard Canadians talk that way ... and I've heard a lot of people in the media talk that way.  It is just as racist and nationalist to rabidly defend a thing as it is to rabidly hate a thing.

Okay.  D&D.

Part of the appeal of free-form character systems is that the player is not driven to BE a thing.  Classes ~ and particularly "races as classes" ~ encourage us to buy into a product that we should rightly feel has that familiar pollutant we've encountered before.  Those who sell that product can only see the convenience of it: "See?  Being an elf gives you limitations; and limitations give you boundaries.  You know where you're coming from; it's easier to build a 'character' from that."

It's easier to build a cardboard character from that.  I, me, this writer, am not a collection of limitations and my pushing those limitations.  I have things I believe that are not related to what I do, where I came from, what I am, or what I want to be.  Those things were collected over time and ~ to be truthful ~ a great many of them were gained in the face of being told, "You can't do that" and "Oh, you're just trying to get attention."  Those are the watch-phrases of anyone who has boundaries and pushes boundaries.  We're told what to believe; and we're told that if we try to believe something else, we're either lying to others or lying to ourselves.

I don't want to encourage my players to see "fighter" or any class as a limitation or as something to transcend.  I'll take my own case: I'm a writer.  That is not a limitation.  As an identity, it is what I say it is.  My writing is what I want it to be.  If I want it to be something else tomorrow, that is not "pushing a boundary."  Every kind of writer I could ever want to be is well within the field of what I am.

Were I a soldier, and self-identified as a soldier, I feel pretty much that I'd describe it the same way.  I've known a lot of soldiers and I never hear any of them speak of the life or the mindset as a limitation.  I feel that most people who appreciate and obtain an identity in their profession can identify the same way.  A profession is not a limit.  It is a freedom to act.

A race, on the other hand, IS a limit.  I can be any sort of white man I want, sure ... but what does that mean, "Be a white man?"  White man isn't a profession.  It is a color.  It's a surface template.  It's not a process, it's not an ideology.  It's an obsession with a particular abstract effort at sorting me from others.  It means no more to me than the sort of hair follicles I have, the size of my pores or the width of my eyeball.  When I look at the back of my hand, the only thing that's interesting about it is the number of scars and cuts that accumulated over decades of cooking and heavy labor ... things I did.  I don't give a damn about the hands themselves ... except that it's convenient for writing that I still have all my fingers and that I've learned to ignore my arthritis.

We think of character classes as limits because we habitually slot what we do into the same category as what we are or where we're from.  That's a mistake of our upbringing.  We were abused by people with professions long, long before we began to understand anything about those professions.  The teacher, the doctor, the police officer, the sports star, the performer ... these were all fronts to us as children, just things people decided to be.  We saw them as surfaces, just like the color of my skin and the flag I saluted when I sang its anthem.  Many of us still see them as surfaces, when we're pulled over, when we see our hero do a car commercial, when the doctor is arrested and pushed into a squad car.  We have a terrible, awful habit of seeing everyone except ourselves as surfaces, just as though the soldier is a different race than we are or that the feminist is from a different country.  That's easy for us; that doesn't challenge what we think or what we believe; we don't want to see deeper.  Hell, most of us don't even want to BE deeper.

But a profession is not a race.  It is not a nationality.  Being a druid, a bard, a ranger or an illusionist is an opportunity, not a limitation.  I can appreciate how a lot of people can't see that, given their limitations as people.  It seems obvious to me.

Age

There are going to be a few of my long-time readers who won't like that last post at all, who shake their heads wondering why I write these screeds when they serve so little purpose.  Not that the disagree with me. It's only that, why bother stirring that kettle?  The beer on top was perfectly good until I spoiled it with precipitate.

Very well, letting the beer settle again . . .

I was asked yesterday how I handled the age limit on elves and other non-humans in comparison to humans, where it came to learning skills, and I answered rather flatly - perhaps too flatly - that I didn't use them.  And that I haven't had a player that missed them.

There are several problems, I note, with running characters of old age - particularly extreme old age, say of 1,500 years or more.  At present, I am coming to grips with the fact that the 30-year-old 'me' seems to have been pretty stupid, even as that 'me' was so clear about how stupid was the 18-year-old 'me.'  No doubt, at 70, I'm going to look back and just know that I was such a moron when I was 50.

This is how it goes.  Can you imagine what it must be like to be 350 and look back on those first hundred years?  No, in fact, none of us can.

Most of the time, when someone older than 150 is depicted in a film, they are shown to be terribly emo. Not that long ago I saw Byzantium, which is about a 200-year-old girl who is so hopelessly bored with life she can't think of anything to do with all that time.  I suppose this must be conceived from the minds of writers who are themselves terribly bored at 46 (the age of Moira Buffini when she wrote Byzantium, presuming she wrote it a year before the film came out).  For some of my generation, I know, the years spread out in front like a great, long badly-lit hall, ending in darkness, with a carpet that should have been replaced a generation ago.  Part of this feeling comes from recognizing that the body has passed 'starting' to break down - it actually is corrupted, now, and that corruption is getting worse.  This makes one feel there's little point in taking up anything new, since a) it's going to be made difficult by the present cruddy body, and b) there isn't time to get good at it before total crud sets in.

I admit, I recognize those sentiments.  There are other aspects of the film, too, that undermine the hopefulness of the characters, but then I said most of the time that this is the depiction.  The future is boredom.

Tolkein's elves are horrifying.  They sit and sit and wait and occupy themselves with unaccountable tasks - singing, I suppose, or other art forms that are only obliquely addressed.  Over 1,000 years, it doesn't seem like much of a life.  Why they don't develop the technology and skills mankind invented within 800 years after the re-education of Western Europe is never explained.  If we are going to talk about skills, it doesn't take 800 years to learn to use a sword better - it doesn't even take 800 years to replace the sword entirely with gunpowder, cannon and rifles - but the elves seem uncommonly maudlin, unambitious creatures.  We're better off without them, really.

I would like to think that Heinlein had the idea better handled with his Lazarus Long, who doesn't truly become tired of living life until he's past 2,000.  But then, he was 66 when Time Enough for Love was published, and he'd written the character the first time in 1941, so he'd had time to consider the relative issues.  Lazarus never takes over the universe, despite all his skills, but then part of Heinlein's theme behind Lazarus reflects upon Yeats, that the centre does not hold and that all that we build ultimately becomes flaky. Heinlein, born in 1907, seeing the WWI, WWII and the Cold War had ever reason to believe that America was going the way of the toilet, a theme he stuck to all his life.  He would not approve of me - my manners are far too poor to suit him.

I don't accept his argument that things don't get better, because I am ultimately a progressive.  Every very bad part of the 20th century was in fact better than the 19th, when mass murder was so common that millions who died in Russia, Africa, India, China and so on don't even have the benefit of labels to describe their tombs like 'the Holocaust.'  We'll never know for sure how many coolies the British Empire worked to death, or how many Africans died on plantations the world wide, or how many native warriors with spears and animal skin shields were mown down by rifles and machine guns.  As awful as it is now, it is better.  And as awful as it gets in the future - and I'm convinced it will - whatever the total destructions wrought by climate, nuclear winter or the zombie plague, unless every last one of us die, then things will be better when society is rebuilt on the ruins of that mighty history lesson.  One has to take the long view.

The elves could, the reader must understand.  The elves would have time to take the very long view, which would mean they'd be all the more evil for not making the effort to settle the hash of the present in the way that only they could.  But they don't.  They are Emerson's worst nightmare.  They sit and do nothing.

To retain the history I wanted for an Earth-like world, I had to impose the same age on all player character races that humans had.  Having one player character who, in the 17th century, could remember the vikings or the end of the Roman Empire sounds all very fun and fanciful, but the players weren't going to be up to that role-play.  They just weren't.  There are those reading me now who will think, "I could," but no you couldn't. You have trouble conceiving that you're a 75-year-old man, or 90, and if you don't believe me pack yourself up and spend a couple of weeks working in an urban titty bar, where the clientele and the staff are mostly all 25.  See how long you last before you just hate these people.

Of course, the reader may be 25.  In which case, I have no advice for you.  I promise that you cannot have any idea what it is like to be 75, at all.  You just haven't lived long enough.  Sorry.  Them's the breaks.  I hope you get the chance, though.  We should all have the chance.

My point is that anyone who was more than several hundred years old would look back on our lives, our problems, our approach to solving those problems and so on with nothing but disdain.  God, how could you not?  Time offers perspective, and perspective makes all this shit we worry about day-by-day look absolutely ridiculous.

Suppose I could live another 400 years, and suppose that I were living in a culture where that was practically a guarantee - like this one.  Would I worry about how well my book was doing today?  Would I worry that any of you understood my perspective?  God no.  I have plenty of time.  I'll figure out the book that will convince you eventually.  And in the meantime, I'm not going to sit about doing nothing.  I think I could work my way up through medical school if I had, say, three or four decades to get used to it.  And then work as a doctor somewhere awful for fifty, sixty years, until I got bored of that and decided to try my hand at politics.  Or engineering.  Or farming for a century or so.  Raise five or six families from five or six wives, etcetera, etcetera.  And meanwhile, work on this endless silly problem of people being what they are.  I'm sure, given four centuries, I could figure it out.  The solution might have to be drastic.  That's an understood possibility.

No player running a 653-year-old elf is going to approach the world with the disdain or contempt that the world probably deserves . . . and who would want to?  What would be the point of that?  We wouldn't do it in the right way, anyhow, since none of us are going to live to that age.  Who knows, maybe we would become the pathetic, do-nothing elves that Tolkein proposed.  Maybe Buddhism in the extreme is inevitable. In which case, why would a nirvana-seeking elf ever adventure?

No, better to keep the players running ages they can at least meet in ordinary life.  They still can't do 61 very well, but at least they can pretend being 61 is like it is in the movies.

The World Of Race

I had meant to continue on with the general description of peoples and places, but having run out of direction previously, it seemed good to post what I had and then pick up the subject again today.  Since, too, people have given me a direction, namely the migration of elves from the 'new' world to the 'old' world ... or the reverse, from the elven perspective.  Just to keep things clear, for the remainder of the post the "New World" will be the Americas; the "Old World" will be the Eurasian-African continent.

Just as humans likely evolved in one part of the world, then migrated outwards, so too have elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, goblins and a variety of other races in my world.  They have all started in one specific place of origin and spread outwards, eventually competing for lands where their migration pattern interceded with the migrations of others.

For example, I have said previously that dwarves existed in the mountain knot of the Altai Mountains about 11,000 BCE.  I also have said that the gnomes arose from the Svirfneblin, who dwelt under the Scandinavian mountains at approximately the same time.  And Wednesday I said the Elves had arrived in Scandinavia about 3,000 years later.  By that time, humans had long expanded out of Africa into the rest of the Old World ... into the Middle East 125,000 years ago, and - with many disputed dates - had expanded into the Indian subcontinent, Indochina, Southern China and Europe over the next 50,000 years.

But while I say that these other cultures, dwarves, gnomes and elves, existed as cultures at those times above, that is to say the time when they had become evolved hunter/gatherers & farmers (albeit in a different sense), comparative to human neolithic cultures.  Just as there were human paleolithic cultures, there were also dwarven and elven examples (gnomes precluded, as the svirfneblin developed below ground).  As well, there were numerous other violent proto-humanoid cultures, cave-orcs, cave-gobs, cave-ogres and so on, who rose in various mountain ranges, boreal forests and deserts (before they became full deserts) alongside a considerable array of intelligent, but technologically stilted minor cultures, such as the faeries, dragons, naga, kenku, lizard men, rakshasa, yeti and so on.  Where you can postulate the rise of considerably different humanoid races - and you choose not to adopt the ever-present convenience of every race arising from a single biological source - you're left with an incredible hodgepodge of migrations pushing outwards and being pushed back on hundreds of fronts that real humans in the real world never experienced.

Thus, there was no prehistoric expansion of humans into the forests of Russia or Siberia, and therefore no human progression into the New World, and therefore no native American Indian cultures, no Aztecs, Mayans or Incas - not human, at least - nor any human Polynesian expansion into Australia or the Pacific Islands, so all those lands are held and civilized by races that - in some cases - haven't been discovered yet.

Where I looked at the world map, to decide where the elves would naturally arise, the best most logical place - it seemed to me - was the great deciduous forest of the Eastern United States.  Lightly inhabited in the 17th century, it struck me as particularly fanciful to imagine a powerful "native" culture of Elves dwelling in those lands, so that yes, of course, the Hurons and the Iroquois exist ... only they are magic using, far more civilized cultures made of elven peoples, who keep the French, English and other Europeans firmly compressed against the eastern seaboard.  There have been violent wars, yes, with the Narragansett and the Seminoles, but those peoples have managed to hold their own to some degree, and now they keep a tenuous peace with human cultures who know better than to believe the wilderness upon the mountains is theres for the taking.  Thus, there could never be any 'America' in the sense that Americans comprehend (no 'Canada' either, but somehow that doesn't bother me as much as an impossible America would bother Americans), because in fact the native cultures "won" those early power struggles ... even if the natives were another race.

I far preferred the meso-American cultures to be anything but elf, however, as I like the idea of a Spanish Main and because it helps keep a more consistent historical balance for actual human history in Europe.  Thus, the Mayans, the Olmecs, the Aztecs and the Incas were various reptile-humanoid cultures, rising in the jungles of Mexico through South America, less magically developed and therefore less able to resist Spanish incursions.  Still, I wouldn't want the Incas to fall like their human counterparts did, so there are still anti-Spanish areas, where there still IS an Incan culture and an ongoing battle line between what the Spanish can maintain and what they still wish to consume.  All that, I believe, would make a number of interesting bloody adventures for a party that wanted to pursue a genocidal campaign (or help lizard/snake creatures fight back the Europeans, whatever floats a boat).

Too, I've already described numerous non-human peoples in Africa, who certainly could not have been there when humans began expanding 125,000 years ago - not if I still want a European, Indian or Chinese world.  It must therefore be presumed that these races are new, that they have arisen since humans, probably from small pockets where humans never penetrated, or from the vast Congolese jungle - which I see inhabited mainly by an Edgar Rice Burroughs like culture of Kenku.  I have always loved those budgie-like humanoids, who after 40 million years of evolution managed to keep their feathers while losing the ability to fly in exchange for stronger, bulkier legs and bodies, the strength to wield weapons and a natural environment that provided for access to tin, copper, iron and zinc (modern Congo/Zaire), producing a reasonably advanced race of humanoids to exploit that jungle.  The Kenku, of course, defeated those human tribes that we know, probably violently and heaping up great mounds of bodies, etcetera, typical scenes of history, perhaps around the time of the ancient Hittites.  That was only 3,500 years ago.

The jackalwere of the Kanem Empire I described in my world might have been only a few small tribes around Lake Chad at that time, who experienced a sudden rush of expansion, possible inbreeding with some other tribe ... or even finding themselves possessed of a kind of lycanthropy, which re-engineered their biological make-up around 500 AD, resulting in the decimation of human tribes who had settled along the Sub-Sahara, but whom had never become particularly advanced.  Only the Mali, whose power was improved by the existence of Tombouctou - which historically had a highly advanced culture only because the Niger Swamp in southern Mali was a natural source for papyrus, just as the Nile Delta had been - could withstand the expansion of the jackalwere Kanem-Bornu empire.  For all I've decided, the Bornu could be another race of humanoids, wererats, who exist as a sub-strata of the jackalwere society, like the Helots did to the Spartans.  Only the party daring to enter into that environment would know for sure.

So the field is wide open.  I like the idea of rakshasa being small, obscure pockets in the highlands of Nepal, Kashmir or Tibet, perhaps the true source of Buddhism, predating Siddhartha by a thousand years.  The naga might have the same relationship with Hinduism, dwelling upon various obscure islands in the East Indies, from the Andamans in the Bay of Bengal all the way to New Guinea.  Perhaps a cult-society of Ki-rin live in the mountain fastnesses above the source of the Mekong River; perhaps there are Githzerai in monasteries in the Tien Shan mountains between Kirghizia and Tibet, or perhaps Githyanki on the deserts of east Kazakhstan or Sinkiang.  I see a great Norker kingdom in place of Yakutsk; flind pirates encircling the Sea of Okhotsk; a Urukai orc empire of the Amur River, or hobgoblins in the forests of Irkutsk.  Vast, lightly occupied areas nevertheless closed to human investigation, where armies of tens of thousands may occasionally be drawn together to make war on China, or great navies that raid the coast of Hokkaido.

Everything fits together like a puzzle; and each part of the puzzle is neatly supported by the actual earth comparison, so long as it's viewed through the simple lens that these people are not 'people,' they're elves, they're tabaxi, they're gnolls or bug bears.  Then there's no need to build a complete history from scratch ... one can tweak and adjust and fit the actual history to the peculiarities of the race in question, giving a basis for depth and motivation where one's imagination might otherwise fall short.  Of course there's room for creativity - everything above has been creative.  But there's also room for a crutch or two to the mental faculties.

Better face it - there's too much here to invent.  A little help is always appreciated.

Racism

Last week I began working on the last of my personal stats tables, charisma, something that I've put off doing for a year or so.  It is intended to be a background generator, my philosophy being that there are certain things an individual doesn't get to determine about themselves - build, health, family, social class and biology ... the latter including, of course, the color of one's eyes, hair and skin.

My first thought was to put together something simple, a table that would be rolled upon at random, but quickly my sense for the real got in the way.  You cannot simple create a universal table for an individual's hair color, since the likelihood of that hair being blonde or black varies considerably with whether that person is, say, Egyptian or Icelandic.

This is not something D&D remotely touches upon - not in any book I've read, though the Dragon Magazine might years ago have had something on it (that I missed).  Human racial characteristics are taboo.  In most 'worlds,' the Polars might be Vikings and the Equatorials might be Bantu, but specific distinctions for populations are not designated.  When you talk about 'race' in D&D, you are talking about elves, dwarves and halflings, NOT Samoyads, Berbers and Polynesians.

But unfortunately for me, I run the Earth and I cannot simply ignore said designations, if I want to retain the world's cultural and political identity.  If you get off the boat in Vietnam, you will not be met by a group of blue-eyed, red-haired villagers.  It would not be Vietnam, and if not, what is the point?

These days, it is practically racist to even use the terms Caucasoid, Mongoloid or Negroid ... the evidence to show that melanin levels are a product of environment has destroyed the 'scientific racism' that was a subject for discussion in schools even in my lifetime.  And I take no issue with that; the less divided we are, the better.  My concerns only reach as far as producing a random table that has any chance of telling a player what his or her color statistics are (eyes, hair, skin) at the moment of birth.

I have a table, based on data gathered for my trade tables, that indicates randomly where a character is born, this table being dependent upon where a character starts in my campaign world.  If the character joins the game when the party is in India, he or she is very likely to be Asian; if the character joins when the party is in Gibraltar, he or she would probably be Spanish or Moroccan.

But unless I want to create a table for every point on earth, I'm stumped.  How easy it would be to assign characteristics according to geography ... but it isn't just a question of saying that people from Switzerland all have this hair color and this eye color.  Most people may not travel more than seven miles from their place of birth, but genetically we're not that homogenous.  After all, people from the exact same parents might have differing hair and eye color, my sister and I for example.

The obvious answer - one that many a gentle reader is thinking right now - would be to ditch the table and let players simply choose their own characteristics.  Same old saw, it's a game, it's fantasy, blah blah blah.  I think I have to call that the most tired argument in the D&D community.  I swear, 'personal fantasy' is a euphemism for players wanting to prop up their own withered egos, bewailing that in real life they are such social lepers that they need this game to be fantasy if only that they can feel like real men or desirable women - something they just can't have otherwise.  As if my world needs to be a fictional therapy for losers who can't bear being Mr. Pink in this scenario.  I'm not your enabler, I'm your DM.

Fact is, I'd like a series of tables that make it clear to the player that when they put the little 8 under their charisma, the ultimate throwaway stat, that they KNOW they have an 8 charisma, complete with mottled, sickly looking skin, buck-teeth, stuttering and body odor.  I don't give a crap that its also a description of the actual player sitting at the table - if you want to be a stud or a babe, sacrifice that 17 dexterity and put it under charisma instead.  You might stumble when you walk, but you'll look super-hot doing it.

So yes, I'm adamant about having the dice pick out your hair color.  And since I don't want to make up a thousand tables, I'm somewhat stuck with some very racist generalizations - racist because now it's racist to say that there are 'races.'  I feel I will probably produce very simple tables, with very few possible results for each region, to compensate for the many regions that I could draw up tables for.  As a guideline for how many, I'll throw up the table below, a German map from the 19th century.  Try not to be offended.

This sort of thing - being told their general appearance - doesn't bother my party at all.  They're used to being from a multiplicity of regions, since they've wandered around from Russia to Iran to Eastern Europe.  Members of the party are Egyptian, Greek, Finnish, Persian and Russian.  The girl who used to play a Chinese cleric moved away about a year ago.

Naturally there's the matter of non-human races.  Because the origins for elves, dwarves and halflings are fairly homogenous, for those races I could create one single table.  But I'll probably think of reasons to goof that, too.

UPDATE:

I should have included that this is the table I'm upgrading.

I've made up this map for the general distribution of humanoids in my world.  It only includes those areas that I have designed:

An Ordinary Word About Non-humans

Well, I managed to get the thing off the ground, and it looks like it just might work out.

But I also think that from time to time I’ll have to make an effort to still produce an ordinary blog entry, or else I might lose everyone not actually running in the campaign.

It would be difficult at this time for any such entry to not mention the current events, or to avoid making comments about. Yes, we might all overdose if this becomes the only topic of conversation, but I can’t resist making a few comments.

I was talking to my daughter about a few circumstances of the campaign, expressing my surprise that out of five characters, four chose to be humans. I can’t remember how long its been since humans outnumbered demi-humans in a party…but my daughter simply shrugged her shoulders and said, “That’s a 3rd edition thing.”

She has had experience with 3rd edition that I haven’t had, since I’ve never played it and she did, all through high school. Apparently, 3rd punished the crap out of non-human players in some effort to balance the game, so that it became impractical to play elves and dwarves. Now, I know nothing about it, that’s just what I’m told.

I more or less came to the conclusion years ago that elves, dwarves and so on had benefits which Gygax chose to balance by allowing humans unlimited levels and denying these to demi-humans. It was obvious early on that this was going to create a great deal of discontent—although I had little experience with it, as my campaigns tended to create players who would struggle hard to get to be tenth or eleventh level, then lose interest. That might have been because it usually took three years of steady running to get to be name level—mine is not an easy world. But I liked that every session was not about experience and my players seemed to appreciate each level all the more for having to actually earn them.

But getting back to the human/demi-human thing. Part of what I did to balance out the game was simply to apply a part of my world towards the difficulties of being a dwarf or a gnome in a predominantly human world. Since virtually every government in civilized Europe or Asia was monopolized by humans, who vastly outnumbered demi-humans, an elven character could expect to be treated with mistrust, antipathy or outright hatred, depending on what part of the world they were. After all, a human, two dwarves and an elf enter the Islamic court in Damascus…which do you think the Sultan will be inclined to lend an ear to?

This never stopped my players from choosing to play elves or dwarves. My offline campaign has only four humans among the twelve principal characters and henchmen (run by five players), and despite the occasional racist reactions they receive, they’re generally happy to be the race they are. After all, parties tend to be insular from the world itself; they learn to trust each other, not NPCs, so that a pervasive us-vs.-them attitude reflects in every action and interaction they take.

I haven’t ever played out a scene where a group of bigoted humans abused or harassed a player on account of their race. Rather, I have most of my humans take a fairly sullen and passive stance. “We don’t bother ‘dem, and dey don’t bother us” is the general rule.

But lately I have instituted the format where humans have slightly more hit points, which has seemed to work. As a result, I have relaxed, somewhat, the discord I once employed.

As I said, I can’t guess what 3rd edition did. I’ve looked through the 3rd edition books, but not at the character descriptions, as a few paragraphs of each seemed to give them an unnaturally high amount of power at a low level. And I can’t recall ever reading anything about demi-humans. So I suppose I shall have to find a source and see.

One last word about the blog itself. I recognize that the prevailing attitude will be that posting into the campaign as a kibitzer will seem inappropriate and annoying. I feel myself that the occasional interjection couldn’t hurt—and that if it actually was inappropriate, it could be deleted as necessary. But these players too are exposing themselves and their playing methods to the general public, and it wouldn’t hurt to give them a word or two of praise when it’s deserved. You are, after all, their peers…and I’m sure they’d like your insight on what they’ve done or how it might affect your own playing styles in the future.

All I ask is that you don’t tell them to do this, or that. Everything else ought to be out and on the table.

Godsmen

It is hard as a DM to get out of my own head and out of my own culture when I am running a session. Last year I was running an extensive campaign through eastern Persia, and no matter how hard I tried nor how my thought I gave to it, I could not make the people nor the environment seem appropriately Persian, either to my party or to myself. The party might differ: they did not like the extensive aridness or deserts, nor the perpetual struggle against that environment…so to some degree they might feel that they really did eat a little grit while adventuring there. Comments about hating the desert came up often.

But I personally felt I could not capture the “romance”…exotic animals, treasures, women, tribal conflicts and so on. I am, sadly, too westernized and too twentieth-century; it is hard to get into the headspace of a truly Moslem person.

That, I think, is a great difficulty in D&D. If it is hard for me to find the romance, having actual examples to point to and pictures I can produce for the party to see as they are moving through various habitats, how difficult is it to produce a truly unique perspective from the point of view of another race.

Yesterday I described Gnomes at length, hoping to create something of a motivation for that race and how they could be expected to act as NPCs. I see them as a nostalgic people, the one kingdom somewhat embittered or saddened by the violence of the world, the other insanely driven to destroy all who might threaten them. The former somewhat similar to those Jews who went passively into the ovens rather than fight, the latter similar to the state of Israel as it is today.

We have only the examples of the real world on which to draw…it’s not likely that I could invent a fully new cultural history, as it is the real world’s cultural history that’s likely to influence me. The best I could do would be to make myself aware of as many different possible cultures as possible. Which is what makes an historian.

When it came to making a background for dwarves, I found myself with two potential habitable (unoccupied) places in my world…neither of which would suit what most people would prefer. Dwarves, I think, would be put in Europe by most DMs…but Europe and European history is inconveniently occupied with Men. I was forced by my own premise to put the Dwarves far, far from Europe. I have no Dwarven kingdoms in Europe at all.

Both are in Asia.

The Paleolithic development of Dwarves somewhat reflects that of Gnomes. Dwarves, too, have a “deep” race living in the bowels of the earth (Duergar); they, too, came into existence with the end of the last Ice Age. Unlike gnomes, however, Dwarves did not “scatter.” They remained in tight-knit social organizations and very mountain-oriented…at least in their early history.

In the period of 11,000 to 6,000 B.C., Dwarves were clustered in the mountain knot of the Altai, at the northern end of the Tien Shan. This a region which would later be known in human history as “the birthplace of the Turkic peoples.” It is up to you to decide if that means the Turks who moved westward in the last half of the first millennium A.D. possessed in part Dwarvish blood…that has been the subject of much dispute.

The first Dwarvish migrations were modest in extent…a general drift eastward along the Western and Eastern Sayan mountain ranges. Several tribes, circa 3500-2500 B.C., reached the Khingan Mountains in northern China.

The first developed culture of Dwarves, however, began in the so-called Khakass Hollow (the Minusinsk Depression), a rich-soiled basin where the Abakan and Yenisey join, notable for a large number of lakes (including some which are saltwater), sparse hillocks and high grain production. The outflow passes through a deep gorge in the Yeniseysk Mountains before descending to the lower Yenisey basin to the north.

In this basin the Dwarves developed a culture—called “Khath”—to rival Egypt or Mesopotamia, circa 4,100 B.C. It would thrive for more than 2,500 years, passing through fourteen dynasties, delving deep into the mountain ranges on every side, trading with lands as far away as China, India or the Elves of Anduin.

It was this last association that steadily diminished after 1900 B.C. There were three races who would migrate south and east from the vast Tunguskan plateau of what we call Evenki: bugbears, hobgoblins and norkers. These races appeared quite suddenly after 2,000 B.C. and expanded quickly in numbers and ferocity. During the next three centuries, various benign Elven cultures along the Lena River were shattered by marauding norkers; bugbears swarmed up into the Eastern Sayan mountains and many of the Dwarven communities there ceased to exist by the late 18th century B.C.; Khath found itself sieged by tens of thousands of hobgoblins…for century after century war against the invaders would consume all the history of the period.

The end would come in the year 1114 B.C. with the Battle of Yaxjasso Knob; the cream of the Khath army was destroyed by twenty times their number. Khath was invaded, cities burned and great towers destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Dwarves were put to the blade. Tuvath, further up the valley of the Yenisey, would fall the following winter. As the spring of 1113 progressed, all cohesion was lost; remnants of the civilization fought for their homes and family; some would succeed and create enclaves of long-lasting resistance. Some would disappear forever.

A substantial number would move steadily westward and south into the foothills of the Altai, eventually finding peace in the valley of the Irtysh. They would found Croftshelm in 868 B.C., which would become the point whereby the Dwarves would re-establish their culture. Rothering (in Roth) would be founded in 601 B.C.

It was also during this period (which came to be called “the Mourning”) that great leaps in religious identity and knowledge were made. Prior to this period dwarves had paid little attention to spiritual matters…after this period their peoples would be led by great Patriarchs. They called the kingdom Altslok, meaning “Godsmen.”

The Patriarchal Awakening of the next age, from 100 B.C. to 300 A.D., coinciding with early wars against the Chinese of the Han Dynasty, would lead to a return of the Dwarves into their former eastern lands. Much of the warlike spirit of the hobgoblins had diminished; they had grown soft and disorganized. After several campaigns into the Kuz Basin (Kuznetsk) and over the Khakassian Range, the Altslok kingdom reconquered Khath (162 B.C.) and Tuvath (67 A.D.). These lands have remained part of Altslok since that time, and have many times withstood assaults by various races.

I love dwarves. They have to be my favorite…which is why I’m probably more detailed about them than with Elves. I haven’t yet gone into the rise of the Kingdom of Hoth, but that can wait. This is enough to digest for now.