Thoughts on Humanoids and a great link to some cannibal elves

Over at Monsters and Manuals

Kind of reminds me of the Old Race of my game world – essentially what I envisioned the Githyanki as being like (the Githzerai became something else and really evolved into two different groups). I’ll have to see about writing them up in proper 1E fashion because at this point all I have is them statted out in my homebrew engine. Technically sort of human, or at least the progenitor race to humanity, or an offshoot of the family tree that still survives much to the horror of those in the know – they kind of exist out there on the fringes of time and space in their eternal war against the Ichneuman Vorre.

Both “human races” evolved (in game/world design) in response to my evolution of Illithids (those Ichneumon Vorre) into something else when I left AD&D behind. I really didn’t want to have any clearly identifiable AD&D creatures in “my game” so pre-OGL out went most of the things I couldn’t have used in any case. Mind Flayers, Slaadi, Beholders, Colored and Metallic Dragons…

Giants and Trolls had already undergone a revision – instead of the AD&D versions I came up with my own, more Tolkienian spin on them – plus an utter revamping of the humanoids in general. Talk about an utter lack of Gygaxian Naturalism! I can’t remember what the count was, but at one time counted up the total number of evil or neutral humanoid races in the “big three” (MM, FF, MM2) and it was closer to 100 than it was to 50 if I recall correctly. I decided that there was no way that this could be the case in any sort of ecology that made sense. So I kept Goblins, turned Hobgoblins into elite “Redcaps” (but otherwise the same size) and Bugbears became “Black Goblins” that were genetic mules of large size that occurred semi-regularly. I also had goblins primary reproduction being egg-laying ala Harn’s humanoids but kept the ability to cross-mate as being a particularly nasty hold-over from the race that they were originally either created from or just simply as a terror tactic that was designed into them.

I suppose I should start posting some game stuff here at some point rather than just rambling about gaming in general…

D.

An observation on my observations…

I was mentally reviewing my last couple of posts and realized a key piece of information that I’ve sort of pushed out of my mind when it comes to how I think about AD&D…

So I had the personal experience of playing and DMing in two pretty healthy groups that ran for many years. SD is still running his group and I’m still running mine (my 14-year old just started playing) – but I also spent a significant time on “the other side of the counter”. I worked in and then was even graced with the title of manager for the local comic and gaming shop in that time frame right around high school graduation (anybody else remember Blackhawk distributors before they burned down?) and a few years later I spent time in management (and even a bit of purchasing from TSR and GW) for a small local chain of game stores that went out of business a few years ago.

The last ten years have been consumed by the return to college and graduate school, but that is an entirely different story.

Plus, for a large part of my 20’s, I was part of a big gaming club in the town I lived – mostly played Battletech, Warhammer 40K, and Microarmor there, but there was some RPGing as well. One of the most formative session of my campaign world occurred there quite by accident during a sit-down game.

The point being is that I spent hours of each day for decent portion of the late 80’s and the 90’s talking to gamers about gaming and about wat they played, and why, and listening to the war-stories (and sharing mine), and for a fair portion of it with the express purpose of trying to figure out what was popular and what people would want to buy.

So I’m probably doing myself a disservice ignoring that part of my “travels” through RPG-land.

D.