We don’t need so many reptilian races

One of many oddities of D&D is that it has a bazillion reptilian races. As with goblinoids and orcs, I think it makes the most sense to treat all these chike/gatorfolk, kobolds, lizardfolk, serpentfolk/naga/ophiduan/inphidian, lernaeati/dorvae/manalishi, troglodytes/xulgath, dinosaurfolk, etc as members of the same monster family. For example, the reptilian races could be distinguished by categories like subrace, caste, size, tribe, degree of anthropomorphism, etc a la Warhammer Fantasy lizardmen.

Way back I briefly recapped the saurian race from Slavelords of Cydonia, which had several castes representing different reptile varieties like gators, chameleons, and turtles. I said back then that it made sense too, but this moment I wanted to add something else.

The reptilian races should be explicitly linked with dragons, dragonborn/dragonkin/dragonspawn, and so forth. In D&D-inspired media, this is already seen to a degree like the “dragonewt” race.

Furthermore, I think this family should (vaguely) include what amphibian races exist. A herptilefolk family? I alluded to this a while back when I discussed the Ogdoad of Ancient Egypt, a paired set of primordial deities in the forms of snakes and frogs. (Which are the parents of basilisks. Patterns are fun!)

In a future post I intend to explain about how I would define dragons based on comparative mythology rather than the idiosyncratic D&D norms.

Monster evolution

A fascinating concept I encountered in some Japanese GameLit was monster evolution. The idea is that D&D monsters "evolve" (or more accurately metamorphose) into other monsters with increasing CR. This works similar to evolution in collectible monster games like Pokémon or Digimon. I suppose that technically this is metamorphosis, as evolution is a distinct scientific term.

The evolution is not necessarily a linear progression, but might branch into multiple different paths. The evolution might move in reverse, with higher CR monsters reverting to the form of lower CR monsters for whatever reason. Monsters might appear more or less humanoid as they evolve.

Evolution might form part of a life cycle a la metamorphosis, or it might be an independent indication of CR. Monsters might metamorphose into lower CR monsters as part of their life cycle, such as the tenebrous worm metamorphosing into the lower CR gloomwing.

GameLit seems to have plenty of examples. In That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, goblins evolve into hobgoblins, ogres evolve into ogre mages, and orcs evolve into high orcs. In Overlord, skeleton mages evolve into elder liches evolve into overlords. In The Rising of the Shield Hero, some animals evolve into cute monster girls.

There are examples in mythology of dragons coming into existence this way: Fafnir the dwarf became a dragon due to cursed treasure, a koi fish who spent a century trying to jump the Dragon's Gate waterfall became a dragon, and the Korean imugi became a dragon after a fallen star granted their wish.

I enjoy the opportunities opened by the concept of monster evolution, as much or even more than that opened by spontaneous generation. I hope to be able to detail some more ideas in the future.

Elemental humanoids

So a weird aspect of pre-5e D&D editions is that the taxonomy of elementals was pretty nonsensical. Azer, genies, salamanders, etc were not typed as elementals despite originating from the elemental planes. So this led to a number of attempts by third party products to introduce elemental humanoid equivalents.

The Slayer's Guide to Elementals introduced CR6 "higher elementals," described as "the sentient denizens of the Elemental planes, quite capable of building a civilization hidden from regular planar pathways." These included the gnomides of earth, royal salamanders of fire, sylphs of air, and undines of water.

Monster Encyclopaedia I introduced CR8 "emergents," described as "Not all elemental life is quite so simple – just as oozes and slimes give way to higher forms such as elves or humans, so too do primitive elemental forms lead to the rise of the higher elemental entities called emergents."

Legends & Lairs: Elemental Lore introduced CR11 "noble elementals," described as "Whereas normal elementals are the everyday inhabitants of the elemental planes, noble elementals consider themselves the more civilized elite." They held court on a demiplane at the center of the elemental planes called "Nexus."

Tome of Horrors 4 introduced CR20+ "elemental lords," described as "For every type of elemental, there is a ruler, a huge elemental of massive size and strength that holds dominion over its own kind. These rulers are often worshiped by elementals and some are even worshiped by cults on the Material Plane." The fire lord was Inder, the water lord was Lypso, the earth lord was Onyst, and the air lord was Susir.

In 4e, the elemental type was changed to an "origin" that could apply to beasts, humanoids, and so forth. In 5e, the nuance from 4e was discarded and all these elemental beasts and elemental humanoids are now simply typed as elementals. Hence, the emergent/higher/noble/lord elementals are no longer distinguished from azer, genies, salamanders, etc.

For example, I incorporated the royal salamanders in my post on salamanders. The gnomides could likewise be reflavored as earth-centric azer. I'd like to explore elemental humanoid races in future posts.

Why are giants distinct from humanoids?

One of the problems encountered by D&D is that it shoves a bunch of monsters from unrelated world mythologies and expects them to play nice. Giants are a perfect example. D&D arbitrarily limits creatures of the giant type to giant humanoids, ignoring the diversity of giants in myth. Furthermore, there isn't an actual distinction between giants and humanoids besides giants being humanoids of at least "large" size in the game rules. Why are they not a humanoid (giant) tag?

In mythology, giants were distinguished by having fairly clear origins. Norse giants were the children of Ymir and ranged from humanoids, to multi-headed humanoids, to giant animals like Fenris, Jormungand and Sleipnir. There wasn't a clear distinction between giants and half-giants, either. Greek giants were the children of Gaia, and similarly included non-humanoid monsters like Typhon and Leon. The Fomorians, who might have been giants but it's difficult to tell, had only vague origins in the wilderness. And so on.

D&D's giants don't have a clear reason to be giants. Even Trudvang has a better distinction by making them into elemental beings leftover from the creation of the world. (Which I am totally using, by the way.) So my idea for giving them a distinct origin, which justifies being their own type, is to treat them as the children of the primordial titans or primal creation or whatever the equivalent is and that is why they have an elemental affiliation too. Humanoids are either their degenerate descendants (a la Warcraft), created from weaker stock or such (e.g. in Sumerian myth humanity was made from the blood of Tiamat).

Filler monsters and races, or, making demikind more colorful?

Game bestiaries commonly suffer from filler. Filler monsters exist to pad out the book and most of them never get used. There are loads and loads of humanoids, making the fantasy world seem crowded with a village of yet another unique race dotting the land every few miles. Many monsters are also redundant, such as the countless varieties of catfolk, ratfolk, birdfolk, and other beastfolk. Most undead are just a variation of other undead, such as a half-dozen different types of ghosts who drowned or burned, and do not really deserve separate statblocks. Ideally, things like beastfolk and undead should be constructed using a toolkit.

Filler monsters are particularly prevalent in Pathfinder. Rather than providing options to customize existing monsters, the Pathfinder Bestiaries add loads and loads of monsters that exist to fulfill niche concepts that could have been adequately covered by variants of the existing monsters. Rather than making the chromatic and metallic dragons more diverse through additional options, we got loads and loads of wholly separate families of dragons like "imperial", "forest", "void", "occult", etc. Rather than making the existing demons and devils more diverse, we got loads and loads of wholly new families of fiend to fulfill random niche concepts like "hindu", "japanese", "fear demon", etc.

There are fairly simple historical reasons for this. Earlier editions of the game lacked CR or class levels for monsters, so the designers filled out the challenge ladder by inventing new monsters. Furthermore, monsters were not subject to customization and the writers were OCD, so whenever a new idea was needed they made up a whole new monster for it rather than a variant. The game also conflates race with culture and decided to split races into sub-races with different outlooks rather than have one race with different cultures. Again, earlier editions condensed race into class, and only later editions separated the two. The label of "demi-human" to the other PC races speaks volumes.

This leads to another problem: humans are the only race with ethnic diversity. Other races too often feel like funny looking humans. Too often whole races are pigeonholed into a single monolithic culture. Humans feel redundant when fantasy races steal all of their cultural uniqueness. Every member of the party acts exactly the same regardless of their race or implied culture.

With the monsters it is simple to condense them into families which include representatives at every CR, whether due to class levels or other monster building choices. The Fantasycraft game has a novel mechanic for scaling the same monsters at all levels. With the races we have our work cut out for us. We need to make fantasy races more culturally diverse within a single race without resorting to making up sub-races (or maybe separate racial and cultural traits into distinct packages), and we need to make fantasy races psychologically distinct from humans to justify them not being human or else devise some kind of explanation why everyone has human psychology.

With regard to demikind all having the same psychology, I have entertained the idea that they are all distantly descended from fey who became mortal or something. Alternately, maybe humans are distinguished by their mental flexibility compared to other demikind (that and their bizarre cross-species fecundity) and that explains why non-human cultures separated by great distances in time and space have changed little since their original division.

Critique of demikind

"Demikind" is a term for humans and near-human races in D&D, like elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings. The core races, basically. "Demihuman" was the term prior to 3rd edition, and remains the case in OSR. I have seen a few major criticisms of the core races:

• Race is cosmetic. "Everyone plays their character the same way regardless of race. They all speak the same language (common), they all share the same morals and beliefs, they all eat the same food and they usually share the same motives."
• Humans are boring. Humans "contribute nothing to the game-world." They are "the race that doesn’t really have anything particularly strange or unique about it; the one that doesn’t really seem to have a niche or anything they’re particularly good at."
• Cultures are monolithic. "When you pick a race in D&D, you’re also getting a pre-packaged culture with that choice. This happens because all races in D&D that are not human have a single monoculture that is assumed to be true and consistent across both space and time."

Relevant links:

• http://dungeonsmaster.com/2010/02/one-race/
• https://comicsverse.com/stop-putting-humans-in-rpgs/
• https://mthrisho.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/cultural-depth/
• http://obsidianadventures.com/dailyencounter/?p=2154
• https://raceindnd.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/nerd-nite-presentation-november-18th-2008/
• https://cartographyofdreams.wordpress.com/category/fantasy-races/
• http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Dissertations/Spring2010/c_ritter_050410.pdf
• http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumansAreWhite
• https://www.elidupree.com/blog/how-to-make-your-fantasy-setting-less-racist
• http://keepontheheathlands.com/2017/07/06/presentation-tropes-monster-races-fantasy-games/
• http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-platonic-dwarf.html
• https://mikemonaco.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/other-races-in-dd/
• http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.com/2014/10/everyone-hates-halflings.html
• http://nagorascorner.blogspot.com/2012/05/ad-races-elves.html
• http://unfrozencavemandicechucker.blogspot.de/2012/11/monstrous-taxonomy-demi-humans_13.html
• http://halflingsluck.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-limits-of-fading-folk.html
• http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2012/03/where-are-halflings.html
• http://mythlands-erce.blogspot.com/search/label/humanoids
• https://fluerdemal.wordpress.com/tag/humanoids/
• https://mikemonaco.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/other-races-in-dd-part-two-some-crunch/
• http://mythlands-erce.blogspot.com/2016/05/giving-humanoids-raison-detre.html
• http://starwarsdakota.blogspot.com/2011/09/tuesday-tangent-humanoids.html
• http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/03/creating-another-bandwagon.html
• https://screamingstoryteller.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-sankarjin-furry-race.html

Of Beastmen and Beastfolk

World mythology and fantasy gaming is full of creatures and races that may be described as "beastmen" or "beastfolk." Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of beast people: 1) chimerical hybrids of human and animal, and 2) anthropomorphic versions of animals.

Chimerical hybrids of man and animal are commonplace in mythology and fantasy gaming. Centaurs, harpies, satyrs, minotaurs, mermaids and so forth are just a few examples. The famous examples in fantasy gaming of "beastmen" would be the Broo in RuneQuest and the Beastmen in Warhammer.

Anthropomorphic animals, or "furries" in the most reductionist term, seem to be a more recent invention with a loose precursor in the animal-headed deities of some ancient religions. There is actually a continuum of anthropomorphism, ranging from catgirls to animal-headed humans to "beastfolk."

In future posts I will explore how to world build beastmen and beastfolk in fantasy campaigns...

Racial hierarchies

Fantasy gaming has a fairly detailed racial hierarchy, but for this post I will break it down into its most simple. Humanoid races may be grouped by varying criteria, usually by how human-like or pretty they are.

Evil, savage humanoids

My cosmology removes Good and Evil in favor of Chaos, Cosmos, Discord and Order. Of those, cosmos is the only allegiance which is not inimical to life as we know it. The evil, savage humanoids in the MM are re-imagined as agents of Chaos.

My setting uses a single pantheon for the entire world rather than race specific pantheons. Humans and demihumans worship the gods (Cosmos), humanoids worship the demons (Chaos). What makes the monstrous humanoids psychologically distinct from humans and demihumans is that they are predisposed by nature/nurture towards serving Chaos. This means that their driving goals are to tear down civilization, pollute nature, and generally cause mayhem and suffering. Their reason for doing this is fairly rational: in hell your status is determined by how evil you are (by comparison, humans are nice to other humans out of a combination of empathy and desire to go to heaven). Since committing atrocities against their own tribe is counterproductive, humanoids generally commit atrocities against outsiders.

What exactly does it mean to be inclined by nature and nurture to serve Chaos? It does not mean they lack free will or have it limited, despite what the MM may say. One of the conceits of my setting is that corruption, the currency of hell, may only be accumulated if the actor is free-willed and knowingly causes harm. (BTW, I am using the corruption mechanic from Mongoose's Book of Hell.) Humans and demihumans all have a conscience and an id. The conscience is a voice in their head that tells them to do the right thing, while the id tells them to pursue self-gratification regardless of the consequences. Humanoids are born with an inverted conscience which urges them to serve Chaos, cause unnecessary suffering, and ultimately destroy reality. This cheats the prerequisite for free will and does not absolve them of responsibility for their actions. Where a human born in a deeply misogynistic, racist culture will turn out completely different if raised in an egalitarian culture, a humanoid raised in human society will constantly struggle with their inverted conscience.

What makes humanoids biologically distinct from humans and demihumans is that they don't really have any kind of childhood. They are generally "born" as adults (or miniature adults) with sufficient knowledge to survive. This saves energy which would otherwise be spend on raising and educating children. In many cases they do not actively reproduce, but generate spontaneously in response to certain stimuli.

Fantastical humanoids

Much like the distinction between beasts and monstrosities, the distinction between humanoids and monstrosities is arbitrary. I suspect this may be due to poor editing but I cannot be sure.

Merfolk are labeled humanoids despite having a tail in place of legs, when the description for the humanoid type specifies humanoids are bipedal. Centaurs are labeled monstrosities rather than humanoids because they are quadrupedal and/or large size, despite being neither unnatural nor malevolent. Yetis are labeled monstrosities rather than giants because... I cannot think of any logic behind that.

Maybe we should have a tag like "Honorary Humanoid: As a PC, you are susceptible to magics and effects that are stipulated for "humanoids" even though, as a species, you are not." Maybe?

The problem of evil

In my campaign setting I replaced "Evil" with "Chaos" a la Warhammer, but it is essentially the same. (Discord and Order are also the nominally evil cosmological factions, but that's largely because of their extreme mindset in trying to benevolently end suffering.) When evil is a cosmological constant, it raises a number of questions. Why is there evil? Who defines it? Why would anyone knowingly serve it if that means eternal damnation? How are so-called evil societies able to function?