D&D General Greyhawk Humanocentricism?

[Micah Sweet]

Nope. Dragonborn are a widespread minority in the main area my game is set. They're much more common in Yuxia, far to the west, where dragons live. Whether this is a direct connection or not hsa never been examined (and I see no reason to have a firm answer regardless.)


Nothing to do with any game I would like to see run. It is a criticism of the dull uniformity and inflexibility of FAR too many D&D settings. ENWorld's Zeitgeist and Baker's Eberron are beautiful examples of what you can do when you reject merely doing things for staid conformity and instead actively pursue creative stuff. Other options that have not been taken, to the best of my knowledge, but which could be extremely interesting:

1. Greco-Roman sword-and-sandal setting. Tieflings could be re-interpreted as resurrected people marked by Hades, the dimanes (a play on the actual dii manes, the immortal dead). Dragonborn have several plausible mythic counterparts, such as the Spartoi ("sown ones", nothing to do with Sparta) that a couple different Greek heroes produced by sowing dragons' teeth, or as children of drakaina, the she-drakes who mythically sired lineages of kings or entire peoples through unions with heroes (e.g. the Scythians were held, in some myths, to be the offspring of Herakles and a drakaina), or as descendants of an Athens-like city because of figures like Erichthonios, who is often depicted as having a reptilian lower half.
2. Science-fantasy. This one's got a bazillion precedents. If we go far-future, just a reptilian race is extremely common in science fiction. If we go modern-fantasy, the "reptilian conspiracy" provides one angle, but for a kinder one, they could be the result of genetic manipulation. Tieflings fit naturally as the descendants of spirit-altered individuals or as a race that had contact with humanity in the distant past, leading to the myths about devils and demons. Etc.
3. Wuxia. TONS of stuff you can do here, there's so many East Asian or Southeast Asian myths and tropes you can draw on I couldn't even begin. Just off the top of my head, oni cover tieflings pretty much perfectly, and Journey to the West has a near-unending stream of animal-people, dragons that have or can assume human form (most benevolent, but some are antagonists!)

Instead, what do we get? The same damn tropes regurgitated over and over, flattened and flanderized from Tolkien without any real thought into what they actually do or are like. Hence why I take stuff about elves and dwarves to task. Elves and dwarves should be really weird. They aren't. In most cases, they're in exactly the same sorts of positions as humans, in exactly the same proportions, with no meaningful difference other than the occasional offhand comment about remembering a friend who's been dead for two centuries or meeting someone's great-granddaughter and commenting that they have their great-grandfather's eyes.

I don't see why this bothers you so much. You're apparently fine with making your own stuff, and listed a couple examples that lean more toward your preference. Are you just mad that you're not in the majority on this? Again, I can relate.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm pretty sure any debates about this point would butt up against the mods policies on politics and religion, so I'll leave this with "...in your subjective opinion." And move on.

Narrative often touches on these issues. Hard to avoid it really.

 

[MGibster]

Delete - posted in wrong thread

 

[Micah Sweet]

Disaster!

Errors happen. I’m going to have to fix this.
View attachment 382046

Is that a Slaan?

 

[MGibster]

Is that a Slaan?

It's a weird toad miniature I bought in Colorado. No idea what line it is from as it was printed at the store. I'm going to delete that post because I put it in the wrong place.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So what is the standard of "humanocentric" that is being applied here? Because some seem to think Faerûn counts, and to me that seems pretty laughable. It is a total Mos Eisley kitchen sink setting, with crazy amount of species and them being very prominent.

My current setting Artra is much less humanocentric than my previous one was,* but compared to most D&D settings it still doesn't have that many different intelligent species, though I think it has a lot.** And many of them are quite prominent, and there are constant interaction as well as some mixed societies. But I like to have more manageable amount of species, as I want them to actually feel different, and more you have harder that becomes to manage and they just start to blend together and lose meaning. For similar reasons I also like to have at least some humans around in the party. It is easier to portray the "aliens" when there are humans for contrast.

* Which had the sort of Arthurian vibe with non-humans as rare and mystical.

** Ten-ish that would at least in theory be playable.

 

[Hussar]

Heh. Am I the only one who remembers the Reptiliads minis series in the 80’s? Wanting scaly characters in DnD has been around a long time.

One of the very first DnD novels has a lizard folk protagonist. Quag Keep may be a terrible novel but ten year old me fell in love with the idea of lizard folk in the game.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Example of a non-humanocentric campaign:

My wife ran a (sadly short lived) campaign in a setting based on the Jataka Tales. The Jataka Tales are Buddhist fables in which all(?) the characters are animals.

So for the setting that meant the only available player species were the animal ones. Vanara, ratfolk, nagaji, lizardfolk, tengu, catfolk, yada yadda yada. We also adopted Meepo (kobold), got him a job at our local pub.

The main villains of the setting were elves. They lived underground, were weird necromancers, and were upset that these "beast folk" had come and colonised their lands. Lands they abandoned more than a century ago to go live underground. The beast folk had no idea they were even there and simply moved into (as far as they knew) unihabited lands.

So very not humanocentric. Oh, obviously we did have typical human social constructs. Like a city. Business/trade. Government was democratic, in another break from the traditional fantasy mold. There were festivals, the Banana Festival featured heavily in one plot line.

No conclusion here, just an example.

 

[Voadam]

Example of a non-humanocentric campaign:

My wife ran a (sadly short lived) campaign in a setting based on the Jataka Tales. The Jataka Tales are Buddhist fables in which all(?) the characters are animals.

So for the setting that meant the only available player species were the animal ones. Vanara, ratfolk, nagaji, lizardfolk, tengu, catfolk, yada yadda yada. We also adopted Meepo (kobold), got him a job at our local pub.

The main villains of the setting were elves. They lived underground, were weird necromancers, and were upset that these "beast folk" had come and colonised their lands. Lands they abandoned more than a century ago to go live underground. The beast folk had no idea they were even there and simply moved into (as far as they knew) unihabited lands.

So very not humanocentric. Oh, obviously we did have typical human social constructs. Like a city. Business/trade. Government was democratic, in another break from the traditional fantasy mold. There were festivals, the Banana Festival featured heavily in one plot line.

No conclusion here, just an example.

In my Wildwood campaign the starting village was the Dover (german sheperd people) one. The other two villages were the elven one and the goblin one. So all my NPCs were dog people, Goblins, Elves, and a Treant later on.

Wildwood is Part of the Oathbound d20 setting and is like 2e Ravenloft in grabbing people from other worlds so players could be from a lot of different races and worlds.

The only humans were PCs who chose human as their race. Some chose things like lizard men and tiger men and robot construct.

 

[Demetrios1453]

So what is the standard of "humanocentric" that is being applied here? Because some seem to think Faerûn counts, and to me that seems pretty laughable. It is a total Mos Eisley kitchen sink setting, with crazy amount of species and them being very prominent.

Nope, the Forgotten Realms are still pretty humanocentric. While it does have a very varied population by sentient species types, the vast majority of states, nations, and other political entities are human led, with above majority human populations.

Here are the human percentages in each region, straight out of the 3e FRCS (which, admittedly, was a century or so back, but there's been no indication that the proportions have changed - the same regions run by humans are still run by humans in the present with few exceptions):

Anuaroch: 77% human

Chultan Peninsula:
Chult: 60% human
Samarach: not listed, but human dominated
Thindol: not listed, mix of humans and yuan-ti
Tashalar 94% human

Cold Lands:
Damara: 87% human
Narfell: 99% human
Vaasa 60% human

Cormyr: 85% human

Dalelands: 80% human

Dragon Coast: 92% human

Hordelands: 85% human

Island Kingdoms:
Evermeet: 0% human
Lantan: not listed - mix of humans and gnomes
Moonshae Isles: 89% human
Nelanther: 20% human
Nimbral: not listed, but human dominated.

Lake of Steam: 90% human

Lands of Intrigue:
Amn: 83% human
Calimshan: 94% human
Tethyr: 76% human

Moonsea: 69% human

The North:
High Forest: 3% human
Savage Frontier: 55% human
Silver Marches: 40% human
Sword Coast North: 65% human
Waterdeep: 64% human

Old Empires:
Chessenta: 82% human
Mulhorand: 99% human
Murghom: not listed, but human dominated
Semphar: not listed, but human dominated
Unther: 94% human

Sembia: 96% human

Shining South:
Dambrath: not listed, human majority with a small half-drow ruling class
Durpar: not listed, human dominated
Estagund: not listed, human dominated
Great Rift: 0% human
Halruaa: 90% human
Luiren: 4% human
Shaar: 60% human
Var the Golden: not listed, human dominated.
Veldorn: not listed, but as the self-proclaimed "Land of Monsters", probably low human population

Unapproachable East:
Aglarond: 64% human
Great Dale: 99% human
Impiltur: 90% human
Rashemen: 99% human
Thay: 62% human
Thesk: 85% human

Underdark: Unknown (admittedly, probably low human population)

The Vast: 78% human

Vilhon Reach:
Chondath: 96% human
Sespech: 96% human
Turmish: 78% human

Western Heartlands: 78% human


So... yes, the Forgotten Reams are humanocentric. There are very, very few places that they aren't the dominant population, and those exceptions are mostly like Evermeet, the Great Rift, and Luiren which are designated homelands to other species (elf, dwarf, and halfling respectively).