Alzrius
The EN World kitten
The next book in the series is one that exemplifies a debate that's sprung up here: is D&D a toolkit used to design campaign worlds, or does it come with its own implicit world with all of the inherent assumptions and preexisting determinations therein?
The answer, of course, is both.
Even as far back as Original Dungeons & Dragons, the game has simultaneously presented itself as being a set of tools by which you could create your own setting, while also presenting itself as something that could be used for a campaign out of the proverbial box (the map from Outdoor Survival not included). In fact, I think a lot of debates over what D&D is and should be - as well as the philosophies that went into revising the game for each edition - can be defined as nodding in one direction or the other.
While it sounds like a complete cop-out to say, I've come to appreciate both. For me, the apex of the "toolkit" approach was in 3E in general, though I'm of the belief that it only reached its perfect form with Distant Horizons Games's Eclipse: The Codex Persona, a d20 book that not only eschews character classes altogether in favor of point-buy character (and race) generation/progression, but also presents ways to alter each listed ability by introducing a weakness in exchange for either increased power or a price discount. Of course, that requires the GM to proactively determine what's available and if/how abilities are altered (since otherwise you're letting players use the functional equivalent of every d20 book ever made; the system is that flexible), but that's what the checklist on page 197 is for.
By contrast, I likewise find a seductive beauty in what's implied when choices are restricted. While a blank sheet of paper certainly presents freedom, for me it quickly results in analysis paralysis, whereas only having certain avenues of options stimulates my imagination. If elves can't become druids, and can only become NPC clerics, I want to know why. I want to know what effect that has on how elven society and culture would develop, and how it would impact their relatonships with their neighbors. I want to know what prompted the game designer(s) to come to that decision, and how that reasoning informed related decisions. I want to know how it potentially impacts PCs when visiting elven settlements. There are so many questions, and they draw me inexorably into the implications they present.
Which, on that note, brings us to PHBR10 The Complete Book of Humanoids.
I loved, and still love, this book for what it presented. Over two dozen "monstrous" races given PC stats! The possibilities that this opened up sent me on a whirlwind when I first read it. While AD&D 2E technically had variant monsters from the very beginning in MC1 Monstrous Compendium Volume One, these were along the lines of "for every fifty goblins present, there'll be one goblin chieftan who has 1+1 Hit Die and has the THAC0 of an orc" or thereabouts. Here, you could actually advance the monsters with PC class levels!
Insofar as I know, this wasn't really something that you could do in AD&D 1E. I'm sure there were options and exceptions out there (probably in the pages of Dragon magazine), but all I can remember is the section in the 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide where Gygax said that, while some players might want to play a monster, they were either powergamers or looking to role-play something wildly different, and that the DM shouldn't worry, because the former would find that playing a monster sucked because they couldn't really advance beyond their MM entry and the latter would soon get bored of the experience and play something else.
Does anyone besides me remember "The Bandits of Bunglewood"? Written by Chris Perkins in Dungeon #51, it involved a group of dwarven farmers who were being menaced, but who all insisted to the PCs that the threat was something different, with one saying it was lycanthropes, one saying it was ghosts, etc. It turned out to be a couple of kobolds who'd been trained by a human fighter, and now had fighter levels of their own. The dwarves were just too ashamed of losing to kobolds to be able to admit it. Boom, just like that, the possibility of humanoids with character classes practically writes the adventure by itself. Don't even get me started on how much I love Lisa Smedman's "To Bite the Moon" from Dungeon #48, where the PCs are turned into gnolls.
Lest this sound like a paean to more options, I'll restate that it was the restrictions that made these beautiful to me. Firbolgs could only be fighters or shamans, for example (or fighter/shamans). What does it say about them that there are no firbolg thieves? How does that inform our vision of larceny in their culture? Centaurs can be druids, but only up to 14th level; that's the rank of Great Druid. How does it inform the centaur view of druidism that they can't become a Grand Druid (15th level) or a hierophant (16th+ level)? Questions like these fascinated me as a kid, and they continue to now, because they tease the vision of a campaign world that can only be read between the lines.
A few other notes on this book: the kits for the shaman and the witch doctor play a big role here, to the point where the tables of restricted classes and level limits present them right after cleric and druid, as though these were alternate classes. I have a vague recollection of digging out The Complete Priest's Handbook and The Complete Wizard's Handbook to see how their shaman and witch doctor kits compared to the ones here; I seem to recall that they were surprisingly consistent, but I confess I was too lazy to follow up on it now. As it is, I remember that witch doctors seemed better than shamans, since shamans were limited to divine spells only, whereas witch doctors got arcane and divine spells both (though I think they were limited to lower spell levels as a compensatory mechanism, but don't quote me on that).
Of course, there'd eventually be a Shaman sourcebook all its own, but that was a completely different one (technically brought over from Mayfair Games, for that matter). Besides, the shaman wouldn't give us Alvin and the Chipmunks the way that the witch doctor would, so there you go.
And if you think that's bad, be glad I didn't mention how the term "wemic" (which I've always pronounced "wee-mick"), along with their leonine forms, always made me sing "ah-wemic-way ah-wemic-way ah-wemic-way ah-wemic-way, in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the wemic sleeps tonight..."
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
The answer, of course, is both.
Even as far back as Original Dungeons & Dragons, the game has simultaneously presented itself as being a set of tools by which you could create your own setting, while also presenting itself as something that could be used for a campaign out of the proverbial box (the map from Outdoor Survival not included). In fact, I think a lot of debates over what D&D is and should be - as well as the philosophies that went into revising the game for each edition - can be defined as nodding in one direction or the other.
While it sounds like a complete cop-out to say, I've come to appreciate both. For me, the apex of the "toolkit" approach was in 3E in general, though I'm of the belief that it only reached its perfect form with Distant Horizons Games's Eclipse: The Codex Persona, a d20 book that not only eschews character classes altogether in favor of point-buy character (and race) generation/progression, but also presents ways to alter each listed ability by introducing a weakness in exchange for either increased power or a price discount. Of course, that requires the GM to proactively determine what's available and if/how abilities are altered (since otherwise you're letting players use the functional equivalent of every d20 book ever made; the system is that flexible), but that's what the checklist on page 197 is for.
By contrast, I likewise find a seductive beauty in what's implied when choices are restricted. While a blank sheet of paper certainly presents freedom, for me it quickly results in analysis paralysis, whereas only having certain avenues of options stimulates my imagination. If elves can't become druids, and can only become NPC clerics, I want to know why. I want to know what effect that has on how elven society and culture would develop, and how it would impact their relatonships with their neighbors. I want to know what prompted the game designer(s) to come to that decision, and how that reasoning informed related decisions. I want to know how it potentially impacts PCs when visiting elven settlements. There are so many questions, and they draw me inexorably into the implications they present.
Which, on that note, brings us to PHBR10 The Complete Book of Humanoids.
I loved, and still love, this book for what it presented. Over two dozen "monstrous" races given PC stats! The possibilities that this opened up sent me on a whirlwind when I first read it. While AD&D 2E technically had variant monsters from the very beginning in MC1 Monstrous Compendium Volume One, these were along the lines of "for every fifty goblins present, there'll be one goblin chieftan who has 1+1 Hit Die and has the THAC0 of an orc" or thereabouts. Here, you could actually advance the monsters with PC class levels!
Insofar as I know, this wasn't really something that you could do in AD&D 1E. I'm sure there were options and exceptions out there (probably in the pages of Dragon magazine), but all I can remember is the section in the 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide where Gygax said that, while some players might want to play a monster, they were either powergamers or looking to role-play something wildly different, and that the DM shouldn't worry, because the former would find that playing a monster sucked because they couldn't really advance beyond their MM entry and the latter would soon get bored of the experience and play something else.
Does anyone besides me remember "The Bandits of Bunglewood"? Written by Chris Perkins in Dungeon #51, it involved a group of dwarven farmers who were being menaced, but who all insisted to the PCs that the threat was something different, with one saying it was lycanthropes, one saying it was ghosts, etc. It turned out to be a couple of kobolds who'd been trained by a human fighter, and now had fighter levels of their own. The dwarves were just too ashamed of losing to kobolds to be able to admit it. Boom, just like that, the possibility of humanoids with character classes practically writes the adventure by itself. Don't even get me started on how much I love Lisa Smedman's "To Bite the Moon" from Dungeon #48, where the PCs are turned into gnolls.
Lest this sound like a paean to more options, I'll restate that it was the restrictions that made these beautiful to me. Firbolgs could only be fighters or shamans, for example (or fighter/shamans). What does it say about them that there are no firbolg thieves? How does that inform our vision of larceny in their culture? Centaurs can be druids, but only up to 14th level; that's the rank of Great Druid. How does it inform the centaur view of druidism that they can't become a Grand Druid (15th level) or a hierophant (16th+ level)? Questions like these fascinated me as a kid, and they continue to now, because they tease the vision of a campaign world that can only be read between the lines.
A few other notes on this book: the kits for the shaman and the witch doctor play a big role here, to the point where the tables of restricted classes and level limits present them right after cleric and druid, as though these were alternate classes. I have a vague recollection of digging out The Complete Priest's Handbook and The Complete Wizard's Handbook to see how their shaman and witch doctor kits compared to the ones here; I seem to recall that they were surprisingly consistent, but I confess I was too lazy to follow up on it now. As it is, I remember that witch doctors seemed better than shamans, since shamans were limited to divine spells only, whereas witch doctors got arcane and divine spells both (though I think they were limited to lower spell levels as a compensatory mechanism, but don't quote me on that).
Of course, there'd eventually be a Shaman sourcebook all its own, but that was a completely different one (technically brought over from Mayfair Games, for that matter). Besides, the shaman wouldn't give us Alvin and the Chipmunks the way that the witch doctor would, so there you go.
And if you think that's bad, be glad I didn't mention how the term "wemic" (which I've always pronounced "wee-mick"), along with their leonine forms, always made me sing "ah-wemic-way ah-wemic-way ah-wemic-way ah-wemic-way, in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the wemic sleeps tonight..."
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
Last edited:
