Wildspace and the astral

It turns out that the 5e rendition of Spelljammer will discard crystal spheres and replace the phlogiston with the astral sea. I'm not surprised and this is similar to my own past musings on how to streamline the convoluted nature of space travel in D&D. Initially I was skeptical of this change because astral space has such different planar properties, like timelessness, but ultimately the most I can do is make minor quibbles. I think this change was a net improvement, even if it wasn't perfect. The naval aesthetics of wildspace and astral travel are already a big reason to condense them. It even makes sense in an etymological sense: astral literally means "of, connected with, or resembling the stars." Why wouldn't stars be a part of the astral plane?

Monsters as invasive species and spawns of chaos

Something I've never really liked in fantasy bestiaries is the trend to give monsters pseudo-naturalistic ecologies. These are monsters, not animals: even in the game rules they're labeled "monstrosities" or something.

So, to that end, I prefer to give my monsters decidedly unnatural ecologies. For example:

• Monstrosities are creations of Chaos that blight the world. Whether they wander out of the Chaos Wastes, are brought into being by the rituals of cults, summoned by the creation chambers of living dungeons, or spawned by mysterious wandering progenitors, they are blights that despoil and bring ruin to any ecology they enter. Naturally, they're despised by druids and you can always count on them to aid you in any fight against these things.
• Hydras don't reproduce on their own: new hydras are created by fighting hydras (hence the "hydra effect"). Whenever a hydra's head is cut off, it doesn't die: it tries to flee as best it can. The head may even sprout legs, wings, fins or other appendages that it retains as it grows into a new hydra, thereby explaining the diversity of hydras. Each generation is smaller than the last until heads simply die after being severed, suggesting that an original Hydra exists somewhere.
• Basilisks and cockatrices are all sterile and created by alchemists, a process apparently involving multiple oddities such as a yolkless egg laid by a rooster being incubated by a toad or snake. 
• Thessalhydras don't hybridize through sexual intercourse with other monsters. Rather, they eat other monsters and severed heads will grow into hybrids of whatever the last monster eaten was.
• Chimeras don't have consistent anatomy. Their anatomy constantly shifts, so that the arrangement of heads and appendages is different from day to day. Even the animal components can change over time, adding or removing heads and appendages. As a result, the monsters are in constant pain and quite temperamental.

And so on and so forth. I'm sure I've said this in other posts but it's been years so I'm saying it again.

Orcs as demon-corpses

So the etymology of orc is a bit complicated. Originally it appears in Beowulf as orcneas, meaning "demon-corpse." Tolkien used it as inspiration for his orcs, and C.S. Lewis anglicized it to orkny/orknies. As I've mentioned in prior posts, they're named after Orcus, the Greco-Roman demon of oaths. Although the "oath" part has long since been forgotten, both in the depictions of orcs themselves and the depiction of Orcus in fantasy fiction.

Some authors and bloggers have used this etymology as a springboard for reimagining orcs as demon corpses created by Orcus. Both because of its perceived novelty, and because it avoids bizarre moral questions like "what do we do with the baby orcs?" Perhaps these orknies are created by necromancers from spawning pools, perhaps summoned by devil's forgemasters in corpse shells, perhaps they are transformed from demikind through foul applications of alchemy... the possibilities are endless.

Links

• https://flintlocksandwitchery.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-orc-renaissance.html
• http://swordsandstitchery.blogspot.com/2020/04/blood-for-bacon-another-ecology-of-orc.html
• https://daegames.blogspot.com/2018/05/dungeons-delvers-where-do-baby-gnolls.html
• https://daegames.blogspot.com/2021/05/inherently-evil-races-arent-bad-game.html
• http://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2020/04/orcneas.html
• https://dailyadventureprompts.tumblr.com/post/637422331142307840/monsters-reimagined-orcus-the-dead-god-patron
• https://ingmaralbizu.com/about-orcs-and-our-fascination-with-barbarism/

"Reinventing Fantasy Races" by Luke Maciak

 Some years ago I stumbled upon a blog series titled "Reinventing Fantasy Races" by Luke Maciak that I found a useful source of inspiration for my own writings. Since his website is suffering database issues as of the last two years or so, I was forced to use Wayback Machine to read his articles. The archive may be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210205155615/http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/tag/reinventing-fantasy-races/

There may be some missing images, outdated comments, or other errors. Thankfully the archive has multiple copies from different times so it should be easy to find everything with a little cross-checking. Other websites aren't so lucky... 

Non-rapey orcs?

So something that bugs certain people about half-orcs is the overuse of rape as their backstory and the subsequent characterization of orcs (and/or goblins) as all being violent misogynistic rapists. So I have a suggestion for making orcs less rapey without sacrificing their horror potential. What follows is a mix of influences, including Warhammer 40,000, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, 13th Age, Alien, and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. 

Orcs are goblinoids (as per older editions of D&D) and the various goblinoid monsters are all instars or castes of a single species. They reproduce asexually by means of spawning pits and underground fungus wombs. They may reproduce in a quasi-sexual fashion by parasitic means too. One option is throwing victims into the spawning pits, where they are dissolved alive. Another is to lay eggs in a host with their teeth. The resulting offspring will inherit traits from the host, and this is how we get half-orcs. Goblinoids otherwise have no concept of gender or sexuality: humans and other demikind are seen as slaves and food, nothing more. Which is still plenty horrifying.

This raises a number of questions: What does it mean for goblinoids to be parasites, especially if half-orcs can become adventurers? What does this reinforce about the themes of the setting? Do the goblinoids inherit species traits or those of specific individuals?  Do they hunt down specific targets for the purpose of eugenics? How strict are civilizations about security, given that a bite can impregnate a person with larvae? Etc...

In a future post I'll discuss a treatment of orcs as demons that possess corpses.