KYRON45
Hero
In a medieval society you wouldn’t have any savings. You basically get paid for your work in food.
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
D&D (2024) Heroes of the Borderlands
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Good point. Coin should be with the merchants and the lords, under lock and key most of the time and under guard.
Remathilis
Legend
Oh come on man, a product designed for new players, many of whom have never played D&D, should go easy on sticky moral quandaries. There are topics the game should always be careful when dealing with: genocide, racism, slavery, sexual assault, and violence against children being top among them. Those topics require a level of sensitivity and care that quite frankly isn't possible in a mass-produced game box sold on Target and Walmart shelves. New DMs don't know about session 0, lines and veils, and other tools needed to keep players comfortable and safe at the table.
You want to include that stuff? Be my guest. You want to create products that feature it? Good for you. Make FATAL 5e for all I care. But this is a new player's (most likely a child or teenager) first exposure to TTRPGs. Let's not drop them in the deep end before they know how to swim.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
It’s quite disturbing that you believe there are groups it won’t be a big problem for.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Thorny moral issues are not a big problem for every group. Some people like an opportunity to wrestle with difficult questions, and being interested in exploring that is not disturbing, and I resent the implication.
However, @Remathilis is, I think, correct: it is not a good fit for a starter adventure.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
This is a product aimed at 12 year olds and completely new players.
But it's fine, because there was absolutely no reason for the goblinoid children to be present in the original adventure (other than the insensitivity of the author). As has been pointed out many times, the living arrangements of the humanoids in the original module made no sense whatsoever (why do they live in racially segregated but adjacent caves? Why are there no guards on the complex itself? Why do the not react when their next door neighbours are murdered? Where is their food supply? Where is their water supply? How do they deal with their waste? Why don't they build better defences? Where do their weapons come from?). Once you fix that the children are gone, so there is no reason for this to not be a starter adventure.
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GreyLord
Legend
Sorry, it's been awhile, I've been busy.
Creatures of Chaos.
It's actually more of an older idea, inspired by things that D&D originally were inspired from.
LotR was just one inspiration, but Cthulu,, Moorcock, and others also had an equally heavy inspiration (and threatened lawsuits as well!). Conan and Howard were other inspirations (as well as a whole slew of others that actually got mentioned from time to time and...well...if you look hard enough you may even find a LIST!!)
In these ideas there are different powers of the universe you could say. Many creatures and monsters do not have the freewill that men have, or do not possess. In some of the universes there are two major forces at work, that of Law and Chaos (more of a Moorcock idea), and in this one even fewer have the power to change what force they work for or, at times who they are champions for. It's an eternal war.
In other universes, those of Lovecraft, for example, the things that you fight are things of the unknown. These are monsters undescribable, many that can drive a man mad.
However, for Orcs, we have to look to Tolkien who probably got the term from the Latin for...wait for it...wait for it...
Hell.
Yep...that's right. The word Orcus is Hell. Though that is a more MODERN term (stemming from more the late 800s onwards...orginally it would have been more congruous with Pluto and the underworld...so in that idea could also refer to the grave).
However, I expect it was more in relation to Tolkien's works. Tolkien makes no qualms that Orcs are Monsters. There are several ideas of their origins that some say he put forth. It goes from the idea that these were originally elves that were corrupted so badly by evil that they became the creatures of evil. Others say they were literally spawned from spawning pits (and this idea is seen in the LotR movies).
Tolkien was writing this sort of a history of England and the West in a way (if I recall the tales right) and in that way also connected them with Goblins...but Goblins ALSO have a separate annotation in relation to D&D.
In D&D Orcs and Goblins are also somewhat related. Goblinoid races as we call them, and this harkens directly to the Fairy Tales of England and the British Isles. Goblins were sort of a general term for any evil or mischievous spirits. You don't want to mess with the goblin (or monster in modern times) under your bed.
These are NOT creatures you negotiate with, and in general, your average person would not want to deal with them.
That's why you hire the adventurers in the first place.
This was no mystery to most early players as to that Goblins and Orcs were evil, as we were literate and had read, or at least knew, about most of this stuff already.
This is one reason why Gygax at times probably said that it was okay for Paladins to kill Goblins and other creatures like that indiscriminately. These creatures were irredeemable as per the old fairytales and would more likely destroy and kill as that was their nature.
This is NOT a great mystery and shouldn't confuse anyone. At least I would not think it should. I am surprised that people are NOT familiar with these things today. Perhaps it's the generation gap?
Things that were obvious to us when I was young are no longer things that are known or understood.
However, it wasn't so long ago that things went bump in the night (probably less than 150 years ago that we had electricity, and less time that everywhere had electricity). Goblins were among those things referred to as monsters (and we still have creatures that people talk about when they can't explain something and we can even find some of them in the MM as well, such as the Yeti, the Bigfoot or Sasquatch, the Mothman, Ghosts and Vampires, Goblins and Ghouls...etc.).
The Monster Manual is literally an encyclopedia of many of the Monsters that we see go bump in the Night. Goblins (and thus other goblinoids like Orcs) may have lost the mystique of the fairy tales they came from of old, but we still consider things like Zombies, Ghouls, the Undead, and many other things in the MM as Monsters to be feared and found in Horror films...and many of them we still would not play as being able to reason with. Most Zombie movies have people who try to talk to the Zombies either eaten or ending up a one themselves!
HOWEVER, Keep on the Borderlands did NOT come OUT with the original set.
The ideas of it are obvious in the intent though. Caves of Chaos should be obvious. You have a bunch of different monsters just hanging out with each other. Why would they do this? What purpose does it have (of course, the purpose is to give you a bunch of monsters with treasure to loot...but we mean something else).
In this, you see a common theme that some people today mock because they cannot understand. Different monsters and creatures came together for a singular purpose either under the control of an individual, or something greater. In this it could be seen as they were together as the forces of Chaos to destroy that order of the other races and people of the land. They were literally the forces of Chaos come to destroy them all.
This was not an idea that was lost in AD&D either, though I imagine many never really understood or were introduced to it (as you can see by the humanization of many of these creatures in the D&D novels and other locations as the 80s progressed).
In AD&D it references these types of forces and how they may align together, or at least hints at it with alignment languages and other things similar to this. It was far more diverse in it's approach than originally though, as alignment languages.
It should NOT be a mystery how these were nightmare creatures (and an still be viewed that way, if played the way they are in many fairy tales, or heck, just played how they are portrayed in the Lord of the Rings they would still be really nightmarish to the normal average person...this is WHY they need that help from the outside. There are monsters and things you cannot deal with, even the village itself as the monsters are to immense to deal with themselves).
However, as time has gone on, the game has evolved and merely seeing them as these MONSTERS from the fairytales and stories of old have died down greatly. When our adventurers hear of Zombies in the graveyard, most groups today don't have their adventurers thinking something dark and dreary is amiss that could destroy their souls....better just take the loot and run...
Nope, now it's more heroic fantasy than Sword and Sorcery.
And so, talking to them is just as adequete as going to kill them all as a playstyle. It's a good way to play. Paladins may fall in these types of games if they acted as Gygax and others of old had them be. Paladins have a code to uphold, as do others.
It depends on your playstyle though. One of the big types of playstyles in the past wasn't actually killing these "Nightmare" creatures either. That's not what got you another level. It was more to steal the loot and get the heck away, if you didn't have to deal with them...even better!
There are many different types of playstyles and even I have not seen them all (and I've been playing since the 70s myself!!).
GreyLord
Legend
Just because you do not UNDERSTAND the forces of Chaos and how it could be perceived, does not mean there was no reason.
Are you trying to toss a personal insult or slander at someone??
The original makers of D&D? The original writers of the Module??
I actually agree, with MODERN DAY understandings and HOW MODERN DAY players play the game, there are too many instances where such things may be a bad idea to include...you are trying to apply MODERN DAY GAME PLAY to things that were written before that playstyle was even regularly used, and definately probably not recognized as a way people were playing at the time it was written!
Those Goblin children were probably likely to see you as food or have their basic instincts to kill you with many of the games that went on. This is why even some of the creators of the game justified Paladins and the like killing these monsters.
Today, I absolutely agree with your idea and thoughts on this, but one problem I've seen in this thread is trying to ascribe more modern gamestyles on the early game itself.
I have no problem with people being more sensitive to cultural and other aspects of the world today and incorporating into their play, but that does not give them an EXCUSE to be discriminatory in other ways towards other playstyles and cultures that understood creatures and monsters in a very different manner.
It also doesn't excuse trying to insult writers who had a very different culture and understanding than you do for brownie points.
Just because you don't UNDERSTAND the legends and fairytales that have Goblins (and thus goblinoid creatures) as the things of darkness and hell, doesn't mean you get to tell others who HAD those stories told to them that their culture and their stories are BAD/WRONG, especially if it was in the past when some of them were probably already quite progressive in some areas that you may not realize.
If I have said anything in this thread it was to show that there are different playstyles, but that one predominate playstyle at the beginning was obviously different than the one many use today.
Abraham Lincoln was actually pretty discriminatory towards certain types of people if you look at things he did in comparison to what we would consider discriminatory and racist today. HOWEVER...we also know that he was a product of his time, and for his TIME he was quite progressive.
Today, I absolutely agree with you with the current module being written (or...rewritten as one would put it). I don't know how it's going to turn out (I'm not privy to it), but on the topic of Goblin Children, that's something I might not want to put into the module or even touch upon as it would be like putting a hot poker in a straw pile and hoping for the best.
Same with any goblinoid creature. Heck, you could have a full non-human party today with Tieflings and Dragonborn and Orcs and such...I imagine they would deal with such things far differently than a party of Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and Gnomes would have in the past.
The audiences of today have many different types of players and gamestyles. Many of them would not be conducive to a module where you have the moral quandaries that would present themselves with monster children.
And if goblin or orc children are troublesome, what would people do with literal Demonic children (lets say...imps) or Mindflayer spawn?
For a beginner adventure meant to introduce people to the game...probably even less of a good idea to have in it today.
Of course, with WotC's recent track record...even with that sensibility...I'm not sure what to expect.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
This is completely and utterly nonsense. There is no such unifying concept.
For example in REH, most of the enemies killed by Conan are human. He can do that without being a terrible person because they are doing bad things, not because they are “creatures of chaos”.
In Moorcock chaos is a philosophy no worse than law. It is not a synonym for “too evil to live”. Both law and chaos are necessary, both are bad when taken to extremes. It’s a prime example of blue and orange morality.
Even in Lovecraft the aliens in At the Mountains of Madness are just like humans, despite their appearance. They vivisect new species because that’s what humans do.
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Paul Farquhar
Legend
No, it’s not an insult to point out that someone had a fairly narrow upbringing. It’s not their fault after all.
It was the 1970s, not the Middle Ages! I was there, I remember them (although I didn’t read the adventure in question until the early 80s). Most people did not believe that there were people who were so irredeemably evil that it was okay to kill their children!
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