D&D General Greyhawk Humanocentricism?

[DrunkonDuty]

My Greyhawk game still has the setting as being pretty humanocentric. But not as much as the official sources.

Since it's set post-Greyhawk Wars there's been a lot of displaced population. This has led to Greyhawk City becoming a real melting pot city. I've added suburbs outisde the city walls that are basically all new immigrants, and mostly non-human. It's implied that the Free City of Dyvers has had a similar experience. And Alhaster (part of my Greyhawk canon since the Age of Worms ap) has always had a large non-human population. Possibly a majority.

All of which is to say that (in my Greyhawk) there's always been a large non-human population that was just not being recognised by "official" sources such as Pluffet Smedger's gazzeteer. It's now much harder to ignore them or desribe them as only existing in the margins.

 

[Hussar]

See I guess my problem is that it’s not just Greyhawk. It’s every single location is predominantly human unless specified otherwise. So you have elf town and orc town and dwarf town but town baselines to human town and the idea of multicultural town seems to never really be a thing.

 

[MGibster]

Edit: Posted in wrong thread.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

We can get around the issue of "humanocentric" by not treating humans as one homogenous group. After all the cultural differences between Flannae and Oridian people is similar to the cultural difference between human and elf people. Perhaps bigger, since there are many human languages (Flan, Suloise, Ancient Baklunish, Old Oeridian, Common, Rhennee cant) but all elves speak the same language (or in practice don't, because of the emigration of the majority of the elven people).

 

[Xeviat]

My own setting is a little humanocentric. I go with a basic "humans used to rule an empire that spanned the world", think far reaching like Greece, Rome, Mongolia, or Ottomans. The empire fractured because of reasons and war, but remnants of it still exist, such as new cultures of humans that have gone in their own direction but still have imperial roots, or certain imperial things making it into widely far reaching cultures. I've focused my world building and the games I've ran in it around one particular human nation, think Holy Roman Empire rising from the ashes of the dark ages trying to reach out to their old borders and spread democracy and the good word!

But I have 19 other peoples, some native to the Spirit World (feywild+shadowfell+elemental chaos), others who have nations and dominant cultures of their own. Humans are only the focus because it makes for an easy starting off point, but they aren't the rulers of everything (just continental grasslandy type biomes; the elves have forests locked down, the dwarves have the mountains on lock, the orcs have the deserts, the valkyrie have the high plateau, and the tritons are masters of the sea.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

See I guess my problem is that it’s not just Greyhawk. It’s every single location is predominantly human unless specified otherwise. So you have elf town and orc town and dwarf town but town baselines to human town and the idea of multicultural town seems to never really be a thing.

Yeah, I agree. The lack of cosmopolitan centres strikes me as weird.

Every major trade centre we know about throughout history has been a cosmopolitan meeting place of many cultures. And people from those many cultures have settled in those trade centres. Makes sense that there'd be plenty of different peoples settling somewhere like Greyhawk City. (Or Dyvers. Stoopid Dyvers.) Heck Greyhawk's location is sooooo perfect as a trade hub it would be incredible to me if it didn't have a large multi-cultural population.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Nothing, but I personally would have a hard time finding such a civilization as relatable as a human one, because the altered physiology (and likely psychology as well) would make such a civilization very different from a human equivalent, or at least it should.

There should be differences, sure.

The same would be true with dwarves and elves, by the way. The only difference would be the prevalence of cultural guide posts for them in the literature; the cultures in question would as you say be quite different, and harder to relate to.

Uhhhh...no. Those would not, at all, be the only differences. If you think "living 2-3 times as long as a human at least" would literally have NO influence on anything else...I mean, I can't really respond to that. Like...just purely from the accumulation of wealth, population growth, concerns about medical care (a severe injury lasts centuries for an elf or dwarf!)...these things have major, wide-reaching effects on economics, infrastructure, language, and culture.

Think about it this way: Humans currently have the notion that someone who is 40-60 years older than the current generation is liable to hold attitudes now considered offensive, e.g. blatant racism/sexism. Now imagine if your grandparents weren't 60 years older, but 240 years older. We wouldn't be dealing with attitudes that were prevalent in 1965; we'd be dealing with attitudes that were prevalent in 1785, and that's just for dwarves, meaning, older than the current, proper United States of America (1789). That's not at all limited to literary stuff. It's vast, sweeping swathes of culture, and implies dramatically different ways of processing and relating to events. And if we look at elves, it's 700+ years--meaning people from almost 250 years before Shakespeare (1325 vs 1564).

In short, I don't see the "superficial" differences you're referencing as all that superficial, not if you're trying to take it seriously.

Except that by that standard, you are reducing things that should be taken seriously down to purely superficial nothing, while inflating the meaningful but not totally determinative stuff pretty massively, acting like they would totally transform society into something unrecognizable.

Near-immortality compared to human lifetimes is a huge, huge difference. Society would be nearly unrecognizable in several important ways, but these apparently don't matter and only apply to obscure literary references?

 

[Parmandur]

See I guess my problem is that it’s not just Greyhawk. It’s every single location is predominantly human unless specified otherwise. So you have elf town and orc town and dwarf town but town baselines to human town and the idea of multicultural town seems to never really be a thing.

The Dwarven, Elven, Gnomoah, etc. populations are not, generally, in towns, yes. In Greyhawk, theybare in scattered rural tribal communities in inaccessible ecosystems. Humans are the urbanized, Dwarves have isolated clan holds in the mountains, or Elves are in the deep forests. There are exceptions, though: the city of Highfolk is overwhelmingly Elvish.

 

[Fifinjir]

So just how Humanocentric is your game and with the resurgence of Greyhawk how do you think the ideal of a "particulary humanocentric" world as a design principle would go down with contemporary players?

I’ve kind of soured on big species lists, so my latest setting is very humanocentric. The species are as follows:

• Humans.
• Cavernborn, humans who are adapted to the Underdark equivalent.
• Elarin, natives to the same, they’re like a mix of dark elf and grey alien.
• Aetherials, basically like planar outsiders. Veilborn are the most commonly seen and are very much like D&D fiends.

I just don’t see a narrative role for anyone else at the moment.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

There are no ships of any size on the map (although it's scale is a bit screwy).

I just looked at the map and saw several ships.