Nature Red
in Tooth and Claw
And now
it's time to populate the world, which might seem a little out of sequence
since I don't have a world map or anything. Life is funny that way.
That'll happen soon enough. But for today's exercise, I don't really need
any details about the terrain.
Today,
we're doing monsters. And probably some plants and slimes and stuff, but
mostly monsters.
Back in
ancient days of yore, I pretty much just assumed anything I wanted from the
Monster Manual (and later the Fiend Folio) could be found in my world wherever
I wanted it. Education about the basics of geography, climatology, and
ecology would come later, along with a more developed understanding of world
building in general.
Now I know
better, at least a little bit. My world-populating is done with a more
considered process. I start by answering several questions.
What
kind(s) of creatures exist?
A game set on modern earth with few or no supernatural elements has "only
real ones." A game set in a Star Wars-esque Space Opera universe
could have all kinds of strange beasties. For my purposes, we're somewhat
closer to the latter than the former. I don't necessarily want hundreds
of sentient species or thirty-seven varieties of "ork" but there's
more than just normal animals.
Why do the
species that exist exist?
Once again, on earth, this is pretty easy to answer. The Flying Spaghetti
Monster did it. But for my D&D style game world, there are more
complicated answers.
Normal creatures
Humans, horses, sheep, frogs, and whatnot (all the normal stuff) got there in
pretty much the "normal" way. Whether it's evolution,
intelligent design, or outright creation isn't completely important. The
point is, all these organisms were created through the union of Mother Earth
and Father Sun. They're the normal flora and fauna. In the absence
of all the stuff that makes the campaign world cool, they'd be all there is.
Fantastic
Beasts
The next category I know I'll have are "good" monsters. These
might not actually be "good" in the sense of being nice or not trying
to eat people, but they're more closely related to the world than the ones that
will follow. These will mostly be the creations of various gods.
Some may also have been created by powerful wizards.
Fantastic
Beasts are somewhere between the zone of "animals you should only kill if
you need to" and "monsters it's always a good idea to
kill." Of course, for much of human history this line was drawn
between "people and livestock in your village" and "Everything
else," so that's not a huge deal. But the point could matter if
there are demihumans who don't fit into the other categories. Orks (a
staple of fantasy genocide) will be Goblinkin (see below). Elves will be
Faeries (see below). But what about Centaurs? I'm not sure I'm
going to have Centaurs, but it could come up.
A better
example might be Gnolls, or perhaps Lizard Men. Goblinkin will all be
bad. It's in their nature. But Gnolls might just be
"barbaric." Slaughtering a Gnoll rading party would be
perfectly moral. Wiping out a Gnoll village would be more dubious.
Declaring war on the Gnoll race just because they exist would be pretty much
evil.
This gets
into the whole area of D&D's Alignment system, and whether Alignments are
external absolutes or internal guidelines. I'll come back to that later
if necessary. For now, I prefer to leave myself a note and otherwise
avoid the issue.
Right now,
I suspect the majority of Fantasitc Beasts will be wizardly creations: golems,
sorcerous hybrids, the ever-popular mimic, and so on. The picture of the
world that's building in my mind is a place of nearly Space-Romance level pulp
sci-fi wizardry rather than the more classic Tolkien-derrived high
fantasy. We'll see if that remains to be the case. Staying with
high fantasy was one of my goals, but goals get discarded all the time.
Faeries
The Fey Folk, all the demihumans and probably the Dragons, came to the world
from somewhere else. I haven't worked out where that is yet, but it'll
come to me. I do see one potentially tricky decision ahead. The
demihumans who had innate powers will almost certainly have to have lost them
in order to be playable characters. In the stories, it's all well and
good for the Faerie Lords to be able to reshape the world to their whims with
glamours and beguile men's minds, but in game that makes them way too
powerful/expensive to play alongside normal humans.
I have a
few ideas about how I'm going to deal with that when the time comes. If I
don't make this a D&D game, the problem may be more manageable. I
wrote up a fairly decent Sidhe Quality for a Buffy game that isn't too awfully
expensive. If I stick with D&D, I'll have to work out some kind of
schism between the PC demihumans and their more powerful counterparts.
That should be manageable.
The idea
that the "worldbound" Faeries have lost some of their power is one
I'll probably keep. It gives me a source of vastly powerful potential
threats, and makes the PC-level Faeries nicely angsty. There are also
potential plots involved in why they lost their power and how they might get it
back.
Goblinkin
In a way, the Goblinkin are dark mirrors of the Fey. In fact, I could end
up drawing on the Seelie/Unseelie dichotomy and saying the Elves and their kin
are the (sort of) good Faeries and the Goblins and their kin are the (Just
about universally) bad ones.
Continuing
with that line of thought, the Goblinkin are similar to the Faeries in that
they aren't native to the campaign world. They came here from elsewhere -
brought by the Darkness or Created by the Darkness. They're BAD,
always. There's no way to redeem the orks or civilize the goblins.
Evil is in their bones.
Which
brings up an interesting point where Half-orks are concerned. I'd love to
just skip them, but they're part of the project goals. So I'll take the
dodge that the "human" half of a Half-ork gives the "ork"
half the chance to be a free moral agent. Half-orks still probably have
violent inclinations and dark desires, but they can master them.
So then the
question is, why are the goblinkin always evil? Wouldn't it be more fun
to be morally ambiguous?
Well,
maybe. But there's plenty of moral ambiguity left as it is. Humans
can be good or evil, too. Having one thing you know it's okay to go hit
is... liberating. Goblinkin, as tools of the Darkness, are a constant
threat and symptom of the corruption of the world. They're meant to be
used in a few ways:
- Easy targets: Not every adventure, or even every campaign, needs to be
a deeply nuanced morality tale. While I'm not planning to have the
goblinkin live in caverns with 10x10 foot halls, guarding treasure chests full
of stuff they don't use, I do see them as useful for melodramatic adversaries
akin to zombie pirates, Imperial stormtroopers, and Nazis in other forms of
pulp-inspired gaming and literature.
- A campaign-spanning adversary: In Lord of the Rings, the conflict that
most people saw was humanity and its allies against the boundless hordes of orks.
The more important conflict was Frodo's purity and bravery against Sauron's
will and corruption, but that was more subtle, and not as fun for the other
PCs.
- A backdrop to other things: The goblinkin can be a constant, low-grade
threat. They've mostly been pushed out to the worst of the
wastelands. A goblin war is a possibility, but not a probability.
So humanity has moved on to other pursuits, and other conflicts. But the
threat of the goblin lands always lurks. If the relatively prosperous
human civilizations were to decline for some reason - say, an internal war -
the goblins might see their chance to strike again.
Dark
Faeries
Goblinkin may be a subset of Dark Faeries, but for the moment I'll keep them
separate. The main creature I see in the "Dark Fey" category
are the Drow Elves. (I might rename them "Sluagh" if I veer
away from D&D) They're Elves who betrayed their kin because the
Darkness could give them back some of the power they lost when they became
worldbound.
Drow are
almost trite these days. I hope I'll be able to put a new spin on them
and make them more interesting. Drow should be (to my mind) utterly
terrifying, seldom-seen, and as beautiful and terrible as a pit of vipers.
Fell Beasts
As the dark reflection of Fantastic Beasts, Fell Beasts are big, nasty monsters
beholden to the Darkness. This is sort of the same catch-all category as
Fantastic Beasts. If something doesn't fit well somewhere else, it goes
here. I can also imagine a few specific Fell Beasts, akin to the Kraken
of Greek Mythology or the Terrasque in D&D - terrible forces of nature,
rather than animals.
It could
also include smaller stuff, monsters that are too powerful to make the cut as
goblins, but too cool to leave out. I could also see this as a category
for demons, unless I decide to make demons and devils a separate category unto
themselves.
Undead
So at last we come to that which lives without life. The obvious route is
to make undead be servants of the Darkness, but I think I'm going to go a
different way. Back in the mythology segment, I killed off a bunch of
gods when their worshipers were all wiped out. But can a god really die?
What if,
instead, the dead gods lived on as the hollow shells of gods, and their power
stretched out from beyond the grave of the heavens and created a twisted
semblance of life? What if they're like a cancer that might be cut away
or burned into remission, but is never really cured?
When
someone dies outside the protection of the living gods, his spirit might not be
able to rest easily. He might rise as a wraith or a ghost, or even a
vampire. Improperly buried bodies might rise as ghouls, hungry for the
flesh of the living.
Cunning, or
foolish, magicians and insane or evil priests might learn to harness the forces
of these dead gods for unholy spells. They'd be able to raise zombies and
skeletons to serve as slaves and warriors. They might find a way to slip
between life and death as Liches.
And there'd
be a third major pole of power, opposed to the living gods because of jealous
hatred, and opposed to the Darkness out of cold-burning desire for
revenge. That's always nice to have.
Celestials
and Infernals
I haven't completely settled on a structure for the higher/lower planes
yet. Until I do, I'm not sure what the inhabitants of those planes will
be like. Demons might fall into the category of "Fell Beasts,"
and there might not be angels in the conventional sense at all. But it's
a possibility, so I'm leaving the option open.
So that
pretty much covers the broad classes of creatures. When I get ready to
fill in the blanks, I'll have a guide to follow. From here on out, I'll
be working on progressively more specific stuff. I think one more
"broad strokes" piece is in the offing, where I start trying to rough
out the basics of the ethnology of the world. Then, just about all the
bones will be in place and I'll have to start making specific decisions.
Things will
slow down then. My free time and attention span will stay the same, while
the amount of work involved in producing a finished piece will go up.
That's also
about the point where I have to really decide on mechanics to use, and I
honestly have no idea which way I'll go. It should be fun to find out,
though.