Reinventing fantasy cliches

[haakon1]

Alternative humanoids

If hobgoblins and other goblinoids are lawful by nature, and as capabable individually as a human, why are they always on the fringes of society as "savage humanoids?" The more I've thought about this, the more I'm bothered by the implication, because it's merely a cliched Tolkien rip-off rather than something that makes sense (yes, verisimilitude is one of my favorite words in the English language, why do you ask?) It's almost my default position now, to assume that goblins and hobgoblins are civilized creatures, and are playable races. They tend to rule vast, expanionist empires with rigid caste system that includes all non-hobgoblin, non-military personal as lesser citizens if not outright slaves. Kinda a combination of the Roman Empire in its heyday with Nazi Germany or the Soviets in feel.

Anyway, there's a single, specific "cliche buster" that I'm fond of.

Wait, the idea of goblinoids having vast, expansionist empires with the totalitarian goal of enslaving/killing all other races is NOT Tolkienesque (one of my favorite words)? I'm thinking the differences are you have uniforms, ranks that non-goblinoids can recognize, and a Dark Lord who's a goblinoid himself -- but the goal of world domination by massive armies is the same as in Tolkien. (I'm not convinced that the goblins/orcs of Tolkien's world were chaotic, but I'm not convinced they were lawful either -- I suspect Urek-hai were LE and generic goblins were CE or NE.)

To me, the D&D default Gygaxian (another good word!) vision of goblinoids is as savage tribes on the fringes of civilization, as you say.

But I don't think either is a "cliche", so much as an inherent feature of the default world (Greyhawk) and I guess its successors (FR and "points of light").

Anyhow, I think of the default Gygaxian "savage tribes on the fringes of civilization" and I think of:
-- Dark Ages barbarian tribes bearing down on Rome
-- Northmen ravaging the coast of early medieval Europe
-- Native American tribes facing settlers from 1620-1880 or so.
What's interesting about all of them is that we remember the fighting, but not the trading and other interactions. Making them more than just a military threat is different and perhaps a little bit interesting, though of course the game is primarily combat oriented.

In the case of the goblin tribe in the Caves of Chaos, I was thinking like "Boot Hill" (which I used to run, about the US Wild West circa 1870s) that a deal to end a war where the tribesmen keep on losing more people but causing the settlers expensive trouble, where the tribesmen get to keep their own place and be left alone, and where the tribesmen get a little food (a cow a week) to compensate them for giving up some raiding was a pretty familiar idea . . . from tribal treaties in the US. I don't think I'll take the analogy any further, but it's an interesting start.

I still don't know what the goblins have to trade . . . they'd be interested in food, weapons, and slaves, but they would have little to offer. I just read an "Economist" article about business on Indian reservations, and there's basically very little of it. So, maybe this leads to a idea about tension with the goblins . . . they want to buy more food, but what can they trade with? Orc ears from hunting for bounty and starts a war? Back to raiding the humans on the sly? Some new bad thing from caves? Goblins looking for work at the Keep or as caravan guards or scouts? Then there's the Wild West stuff about bad Indian Agents ripping off the aid for the tribes and starting trouble . . .

BTW, "The Sunless Citadel" had an interesting hint at a world where goblins trade, with the mention of them selling the healing apples, but 50 gp (far below market value) being all the local humans could bring themselves to pay a goblin . . .

 

[DrunkonDuty]

So many things to reply to! Will probably do a few posts...

Haakon1 wrote:
My goblin merchant trades between the Keep on the Borderlands and the goblins of the Caves of Chaos.

LOL, just goes to show there's no such thing as a unique idea! And I thought I was being so original.

As to what the Goblins trade: mine have a whole swathe of goods to choose from. I'm slightly Obsessive - Compulsive when I world design and I've included trade goods for all the different tribal areas. The merchants trade (barter, no coin) stuff from area to area, effectively providing a transport service. They are also the most technologically advanced of the races in the races in the Borderlands. They make the best bronze and brass tools and weapons.

WHich segues nicely into why these Humanoids are on the fringes of civilisation: they don't have iron and that makes a difference when it comes to wars with the Humies who do have iron. Over all the Borderlands are just poorer than the Human Kingdoms it borders. (This also lets me use that old western cliche of trading weapons to the natives.)

Hobo: I like your Hobgoblin Empire. Yes it's shadows of Tolkien, but as has been pointed out there's nothing new under the sun, everything is just variations to make things different (and hopefully interesting to our players.) But familiar enough to understand without a course in the Hobgoblin Empire's pseudo-history.

Providing detail is one way to give a new spin to an old cliche. What I did with my Gobbo traders was to answer the questions that were provoked. There are no right or wrong answers. If the answer provokes a new question (and they usually do) answer it to. Carry on until you have enough detail to satifsy yourself.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Racial Determinism bugs me. As I implied above, having all members of a fantasy race being simple extensions of some Platonic Ideal is just not my idea of realistic. (I like the word verisimilitude too.) It's also dull.

I frequently harp on about giving the NPCs believeable motivations and then roleplaying them appropriately. It's a good way to freshen up the old cliches. Why are the Orcs on the warpath? Because they are EVIL(bwah-hah-hah-hah) or because some humans have invaded their hunting grounds and killed off all the game and they're now starving? Both are cliches.

Tangent: The second one is of course taken (roughly) from history and thus (roughly) factual, but when used in literature it becomes a cliche. End Tangent.

But one gives you real role play possibility. One gives you bad melodrama. Don't get me wrong: I like a bit of bad melodrama, it's fun. Just not all the time.

Drow and Racial Determinism.
Above some one decried how Drow are always protrayed as bondage fiends with a spider fetish. (A beautiful summation may I say.) Others have mentioned Drizzt as the cliched anti-cliche. Oh so true.

What to do about them?

I've read arguments on this board that Drow are kept in line by a possessive and interfering demon-goddess and that explains why they are what they are. And it's a perfectly valid in-game reason for why the Drow are what they are. But its just a variation on "because they're Drow" and it lacks something for me. Yes, there should be reasons why a Drow is an evil bugger. And some of these reasons are presumably bigger than that individual Drow. You can dream up personal, cultural, historical and "the biased point of view of others" type explanations. Or you can simplify it with "Lolth keeps 'em in line." Which one has better story telling potential? (Well either really, depends on your preferred story. But in keeping with the thread's theme and my own personal preferences I'm going with the first.)

Set, I think you have hit the nail on the head. All these sub-sets of races (and I think I speak truth when I say the Elf is the biggest victim of this) encourage players and designers to think in terms of racial determinism. Making Drow just mean Elves is fine for me. It of course provokes the question "what made them mean?" but that's fine, I can then come up with any number of reasons thereby giving a bit of depth to any Drow NPCs I may have.

And if you can break away from the stereo type evil Drow I reckon you would be most of the way to breaking away from angsty, outcast, must redeem my people from the thrall of the evil demon-goddess anti-cliche.

Mmm, Eurocentric next I think.

 

[Kmart Kommando]

In my game, besides the Nazi elves, the nation of hobgoblins is the 300 of the setting.
A demonic-corrupted squad of hobgoblins may one day cross paths with my party. Oh man, that's going to be a fun battle.
The drow they're encountering now in the jungles of Xen'drik, pretty much just like a tribe of spear-wielding savages, no need for the 'evil drow bwahahhaa!' persona. But the players are used to the standard spider-loving drow.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Eurocentric Campaign Worlds

I'll admit to being guilty of mostly using/creating Eurocentric game worlds. Heck, my maps inevitably have cold lands to the north, which is a bit odd when you realise I'm Australian. I tend to borrow heavily from history for my campaign worlds and I'm just better acquainted with European history and non-European history from a European POV. And I frequently use published material either as a base or as a major part of my campaign worlds. That's the why of it.

What to do about it? Well obviously, create a setting that isn't. Which means me reading more history books. (No problem there!) But it's an awful lot of work.

There's just bringing in more non-European elements into an existing setting. I'm not up to date with everything happening in Living Greyhawk but there is a lot more info. nowadays about non-European based cultures. The Touv are (IIRC) Aztec. There's more Baklunish (ie: Middle Eastern) setting info. than there used to be as well. And by treating them as more than just enemies there's so much more potential.

I've recently bought some Al-Qadim adventures (PDFs), they're great. A really nice change from the standard flavour setting. And the Kara-tur stuff was really very good too. It's a shame they don't sell well enough to encourage making more. I guess when most of the market is culturally European then it shouldn't be a surprise if that's what sells.

OK, I made a big assumption there about most role-players being from a European culture. It's just my personal experience and I'd love to be proven wrong.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

and I just keep on talking....

The Chosen One. Ooh, mystic.

In games I've never had this problem. They're group experiences and the whole group takes part. The spot light moves around. Once or twice over the years I've had players come to me with an idea to play a Chosen One but I've turned them down. Just don't like the idea of making everyone else at the table second banana to one player. So no CHosen Ones. I also don't like having NPC ones as I do like the PCs to be the heroes. If there is a Chosen One it will be some way off; something that may or may not impact on the game later.

In literature it's different. It's easier for a reader to identify with one character rather than a whole bunch of them. It's also easier for a writer to use one character as the driving force of the narrative. Combined in a fantasy setting, with the addition of an actual and active Fate, you have Chosen Ones. In a western you get the same thing in that there's only one man (and usually it is a man) for the job of driving off the banditos/indians/sod-busters/whatever. It's just that there's no mystic element so no-one is Chosen, he does it by virtue of being a Man and standing up for himself/others/doing what needs to be done/whatever.

One way to avoid Chosen Ones (I love this as a plural) is to avoid bringing up the big anthropomorphications: Fate, the Gods, that lot. The Chosen One may merely be hearing voices. Or of course they may actually be Chosen but the Gods are hidden (because without Faith where's the point?) and everyone thinks the Chosen One is just a nut job.

Oooh just had a thought. Might just be me but I always tend to think of 'The Chosen One' as referring to a good guy. But isn't the BBEG, sitting in his/her castle of black basalt and trying to bring darkness and misery to the world every bit as Chosen as the Young Woman/Man who, with a fraction of the resources and experience, will inevitably thwart them? An Evil Chosen One could give an interesting spin on the whole "refusing the call" bit too.

burnt out, will have to come back to this later.
cheers all.

 

[doghead]

general - cliches

A really interesting thread. Commonly accepted genre tropes and conventions(or cliches for simplicity) are useful in RPG's. The make it easier for everyone to get on the same page. The more that something differs from the commonly understood, then the more explaining is needed to get everyone up to speed to play. That said, cliches can also make things a bit dull. But this aspect tends, in my experience, to depend on the handling and execution

In many ways, it comes down to the smaller details. Welcome to the Halmea (one of my favourite Story Hours), the elves are pretty much conventional dnd elves. They are an ancient society, they love nature and are good with magic. But a number of small background details have been changed, or developed, that make them seem new and interesting.

Someone mentioned that with all the cliche reversal going on, its making the original cliches seem almost fresh again - a really nasty drow, or a genuinely decent and honourable paladin. I thikn that there is an element of truth in that. Which is, I think, a good example of how dynamic genre's are.

I don't think that I have done anything particularly interesting in the way of cliche busting. I do like to play with conventions. But generally it is only in small ways. Exploring around the edges is another approach - we have all seen the half-orc barbarian, but generally we don't see much in the way of half orc society. So I decided to run a game in which all the PC's were members of a small half orc village.

doghead
aka thotd

 

[Set]

All these sub-sets of races (and I think I speak truth when I say the Elf is the biggest victim of this) encourage players and designers to think in terms of racial determinism. Making Drow just mean Elves is fine for me.

In Raymond Feists Midkemia books, there's one scene in the middle where some people are visiting the elven forest, which is all Lothlorien-lite and full of beautiful ageless graceful people living in trees, and a dark elf wanders into the forest, steps up to the elven queen and 'returns.' They welcome him, and bang, he's an elf. The whole 'dark' thing was just a cultural choice, and he chose to walk away from that and go back to being a plain old elf, and I kinda liked that.

The Briton 'barbarian chief' learns to use iron weapons and hangs around with the Romans for awhile and becomes Romanized. The kid of the explorers gets orphaned in the jungle and raised by apes and becomes Tarzan. No racial adjustments necessary.

Some elves are cranky and live underground, other elves are snooty and live in mountains, other elves are a bit standoffish and live in the deeper parts of the forest, and yet other elves have gotten so blase about living near humans that they are responsible for the couple thousand half-elves running around...

Where the sub-races *really* become an issue, is when they assign cultural-specific traits as 'racial' traits. Elves aren't *born* with a familiarity with bows and swords, and if it's an Aerenal Elf from Eberron, it might be scimitars, and if it's a deep woods elf who isn't big on the metalworking, it might be spears and bows, etc, etc. Dwarves aren't *born* hating goblinoids, and a city-dwelling dwarf, raised by merchant parents in a human city, might have never *seen* a goblinoid, let alone spent years studying how to best bonk them with a warhammer.

All of these cultural specific things, IMO, should not be racial traits, but *options,* that could be swapped out. Sort of like a free 'Regional Feat,' a la the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, with a few specific variants. 'Jungle Dwarves' from Chult might not know bupkiss about stonecunning or craft (metalworking), but might have other 'racial' familiarities, such as with Survival or Climb or Knowledge (nature).

It would ultimately be as easy as adding a single sentence to the PHB saying 'asterisked racial traits are not inborn, but may vary with region, culture, etc.' and then asterisking certain 'racial' abilities. The PHB wouldn't have to list these sorts of optional variants, that's a setting-specific thing, and could be detailed in whatever setting books come out.

 

[Desdichado]

I don't think a highly organized (and successful, and civilized!) hobgoblin empire is represented anywhere in Tolkien or in most D&D settings I've seen either. Eberron kinda sorta did it with Darguun, but even then it's a squalid, pitiful kinda place that's way behind the "modern" nations of Khorvaire, not a vibrant, powerful culture that's clearly on the rise. Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but I'm talking about portraying goblinoid culture in a way that I've never really seen. Usually, their squalid chumps who occasionally boil up in some kind of revolt and need to be kept back down, or more lately orcs and goblins are kinda given a "noble savage" vibe. I'm not thinking of doing either; I'm having them be more like a foreign and unusal—yet powerful and arguably at least as civilized as the "good" nations. I think of it more as Sassanid Persia, or the Ottoman empires in their heyday in terms of their relationship with the rest of the "Eurocentric" world, blended with a bit of Nazi Germany for flavor.

Speaking of Eurocentric; plenty of fantasy is non-Eurocentric, but it doesn't seem to be very successful at capturing the market, with the exception of some Japanese or Chinese flavored stuff here and there that does OK. That's not surprising, since the majority of the audience comes from a European or European-derived culture, though. My main concession to that as something to modify is to look more at Western interpretations of the Arabian Nights type stories from the 19th century. But frankly, a lot of the early Sword & Sorcery authors did exactly that too; most Conan stories could be seen as fantasy Arabian Nights stories.

 

[Ydars]

I know what you are going for Hobo; kind of like what Palladium did with Wolfen (upright bipedal wolf-men) where they basically had a civilisation that was a massive threat to humans because they were just so damn ............organised.