Druids are not Hippies!

[Anabstercorian]

People would be much more likely to think something like "the gods are punishing us for our hubris" than to think "nature is fragile and precious, we must work to protect it from humanity".

Who do you think does the punishing? THE DRUIDS. With the green fire!

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Well, that's neither here nor there. My big problem with it is that the idea of conservation and preservation is about 6 minutes old in the real world and while I don't suually have a problem with modern viewpoints invading my fantasy games (I mean -- watch HBO's Rome and tell me you'd want your PCs acting that way with LG alignments), this one is just *so* obviously modern that it gets under my skin. Especially since a Druid is essentially a Nature Wizard who is as likely to bend it to his will as he is to serve it.

Look up New Forest, planted in the late 1000s for hunting and the foresting laws put into place by William the Conquerer. While he was conserving hunting as opposed to nature the result is still conservation.

*EDIT* While I am pretty much against the Tree Hugging Druid concept myself there was indeed a Hippie Druid (magically imported from San Fransisco California in the 1960s) in one of my earliest AD&D games called Gloria Goldblat (AKA Shiney Moonbeams) not a serious game at all mind you...

The Auld Grump

 

[joeandsteve]

Druids arent treehuggers, ELF druids are.

 

[Cutty Sark]

I don't know - my very favorite druid, and the best-played druid I've encountered, is Nwm from Sepulchrave's story hour. Here, from the very beginnings of Lady Despina's Virtue:

Nwm (NOOM). A 14th level human Druid whose prized item is his self- made "staff of the woodlands" capped with an "orb of storms" rescued from a blue dragon's possession. Nwm is apparently sardonic and skeptical, but secretly idealistic in a "peace, man" kind of way. A guy called Dave plays him as a cross between Timothy Leary and Oscar Wilde.

Nwm eventually does some things that are both very hippie and very druid - lots of meditation and a vow of poverty, for example.

 

[Shemeska]

I suspect ancient peoples recognized that deforestation and erosion were bad things, but they didn't worry too much about it because there were relatively few of them and lots of land for them to expand into if they overused their current territory.

Easter Island.

They either didn't recognize it as a problem or didn't care in that particular case.

 

[Shemeska]

Let’s not forget that many scholars believe that druids performed human as well as animal sacrifices to appease the gods. Doesn’t sound like hippies to me.

I'd pay money to see a 'tree hugger hippie' archetype character put into the wild with a group of historical Roman-era Druids. I'd give them a day before sacrifice time.

I personally wouldn't use either the 'tree hugger hippie' or 'eco terrorist' archetypes in my own games. The first because it's silly and wouldn't make sense in the context of the game, and the second because it's bloody offensive to me IRL working in biotech.

I also haven't run into druids much in my own games because they're largely restricted to the Prime Material, while most of my campaigns have taken place on the planes. On infinite planes you don't have much need for druids outside of finding them as servants of specific nature gods. I'd probably have those vary greatly from one another by specific deity, or region of a specific prime material sphere they came from.

 

[jdrakeh]

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[Reynard]

Druids arent treehuggers, ELF druids are.

On a kind of serious note regarding this, while I don't like the idea of the elf druid per se (unless they are 'wild elves') I do think elves make good candidates for D&D eco-naut types. Not so much because they have gods tat tell them to like the plants and flowers, or even because they have kinship with fey and other magical forest creatures. Rather, elves are so long lived, and individual elf can actually see the impact his village (as well as simple climate) has on the wilderness and would be acutely aware of the balance between civilization (you can't make magical elven bread without fields) and nature. Besdies, the elf recognition of natural beauty would occur on a wholly different level than that of humans' (which might be better described as awe) -- I mean, when you can actually watch a river change course and carve into the earth, you would see it very differently.

 

[Agback]

Conservation makes sense to modern sensibilites because there is so little nature left. In a world with a more medieval or ancient ratio of man to nature the effort to conserve would hardly seem worthwhile with so much left unexplored and untamed.

To a great extent human use fo the landscape in (say) Europe has become much more productive since Mediaeval times because it became more intensive, not more extensive. True, the Cistercians are famous for having (grown extremely wealthy by having) brought unexploited land into use on a considerable scale. But on the other hand there is a landscape historian in Britain who makes a case (I'm not entirely convinced, but I'm not an agricultural economist, so I'm not really qualified to judge) that all or nearly all the land in use in England in 1930 was in use at teh time of Domesday Book (1078, IIRC).

Sure, there were forests in mediaeval England, but they were planted to grow timber, regularly logged, and fenced to keep the deer in, and pigs were masted in them. There were woods, but they were coppiced to grow wood for fuel and charcoal….

Things were no doubt different in other parts of Europe, for example in Prussia and Poland where the Deutschritters and other nobles brought in immigrant peasants to clear the forests in vast migrations that lasted two centuries. And there is nothing to say that a fantasy setting need be like England, France, or Italy rather than like, say, Lithuania. Just don't leap the the conclusion that mediaeval settings were covered in wilderness. It ain't necessarily so.

 

[Agback]

Don't underestimate the ability of even primative civilizations to damage or destroy the enviroment.

There is a good recent book about this sort of thing: Collapse, by Jared Diamond (professor of Geography at UCLA, IIRC). It's not as masterly as his Guns, Germs, and Steel, but more relevant to this issue.

In the more specialised area of the effect of ['pre' civilised] hunter-gatherers on the environment in Australila, there is Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters.

Brief summary: even stone-age populations, hunter-gatherers and primitive horticulturalists, can destroy a landscape in surprisingly short time.