D&D 5E Greyhawk, and race options for Oerth PCs

[Dire Bare]

In my campaign intro document, I have fewer than a dozen house rules. Those include no evil characters, play someone who wants to be part of a group, don't play chaotic stupid and a list of allowable races. There's also links to a ton of other information and history for the world. Along with more doco and history than even I can keep track of. There's a lot of history to the campaign world.

This is cool! If your campaign strays from a by-the-numbers standard D&D game, having a campaign "players' guide" is a great idea!

But no, I don't explain why I don't allow dragonborn or kenku or whatever race of the week comes up. They simply aren't part of my vision for my campaign world.

This, I think, is the heart of our disagreement. Or perhaps rather, our differing perspectives.

Without trying to stereotype your style as a DM, I'm seeing your perspective at one end of a spectrum . . . . your campaign world is a personal, almost literary creation, perhaps quite detailed. Your players are guests in your world, and perhaps can contribute to it's development during the game, but are not the primary developers of it, you are.

Dragonborn don't exist in your world, just as they don't exist in Tolkien's Middle-Earth. Should Tolkien have added half-dragon folk to Middle-Earth at the request of some of his readers? Of course not! (unless, he totally thought the idea sounded cool and got to work adding them in!) If I'm a DM running an "Adventures in Middle-Earth" game and wish to retain fidelity to Tolkien's vision, should I allow dragonborn in my table's version of Middle-Earth? I could . . . but I don't think too many folks would find it odd if I did not.

This style of campaign fits well with the "DM as God" style of play (don't mean that as a bad thing) . . . where the DM has sole (or primary) control over all aspects of the game and players can either play by the DM's rules or find another game more suited to their tastes.

I'm sitting at the other end of the spectrum (or at least, that's how I'm seeing it) . . . . I might spend hours of my personal time creating an elaborate campaign world for my players, but I don't see it's purpose as my own artistic creation, but rather as a canvas to collaboratively tell a story with my friends around the gaming table. I want them to have almost as much input into my world as I do, I want them to surprise me and help me take the game and story in directions I could not have predicted.

There are no dragonborn in my world . . . . yet. I just never got around to adding them in, didn't get excited about them. But I have a player who read about the race in the PHB and is really excited about playing one. I've got no idea how I want to incorporate dragonborn into my world, but I'm going to say "yes" to the player and we're going to figure it out together.

Which style is the "right" or "better" style? Neither, of course. Although, I certainly have my preference and try to avoid games that treat the campaign setting as the personal domain of the DM.

If I allow dragonborn, what's next? Kenku? Tabaxi? Loxodons? Shard Minds? Could I find a place in my world for warborn? I suppose I could. None has ever been around since the beginning of the campaign decades ago, but if nothing else there's always a shipwreck from a far off land or a rift to another plane of existence. But I would want a race of sentient constructs to be the start of or the result of an earth shaking event, not just a race of the week.

What's next? It sounds like you fear allowing one exotic race will just lead your campaign world down a slippery slope towards armageddon!

 

[Dire Bare]

I bought the Midgard setting, Drow don't really exist apparently there's a few left as they got eaten by a ghoul imperium.

One of my favorite settings, Mystara, has a similar situation. There are no dark-skinned drow in Mystara, but there are pale-skinned underdark-dwelling shadow elves!

The shadow elves fill the same niche as drow, and if I was running a Mystara game and one of my players wanted to play a drow elf, I would certainly point them towards playing a shadow elf instead. However, if they were really excited about playing a drow . . . I'd probably allow it. I'm creative enough that I could work with the player and find a way to make it work within the context of the setting.

In fact, something I noticed on the cover of a classic Mystara supplement, "The Elves of Alfheim", is a dark-skinned elf performing some sort of magical ritual! Probably an artist who didn't get the memo that drow don't exist in Mystara (much like some authors wrote orcs into various Dragonlance products, when there are no orcs in Dragonlance)! Perhaps drow don't exist as a race (or subrace) in Mystara . . . . but perhaps the elves of Mystara suffer a rare form of reverse-albinism and the occasional jet-black skinned elf is born! These "drow" are feared, seen as evil aberrations, and rumored to hold great magical power . . . . .

 

[Zardnaar]

One of my favorite settings, Mystara, has a similar situation. There are no dark-skinned drow in Mystara, but there are pale-skinned underdark-dwelling shadow elves!

The shadow elves fill the same niche as drow, and if I was running a Mystara game and one of my players wanted to play a drow elf, I would certainly point them towards playing a shadow elf instead. However, if they were really excited about playing a drow . . . I'd probably allow it. I'm creative enough that I could work with the player and find a way to make it work within the context of the setting.

In fact, something I noticed on the cover of a classic Mystara supplement, "The Elves of Alfheim", is a dark-skinned elf performing some sort of magical ritual! Probably an artist who didn't get the memo that drow don't exist in Mystara (much like some authors wrote orcs into various Dragonlance products, when there are no orcs in Dragonlance)! Perhaps drow don't exist as a race (or subrace) in Mystara . . . . but perhaps the elves of Mystara suffer a rare form of reverse-albinism and the occasional jet-black skinned elf is born! These "drow" are feared, seen as evil aberrations, and rumored to hold great magical power . . . . .

Yeah Shadow Elves are the Drow replacement.

You could use the Drow mechanically just make them pale skinned. Shadow Elves not as kill on sight either. Outside Alfheim anyways.

 

[Hussar]

I guess a lot of it comes down to how important setting is to the DM. @Oofta, it sounds like you've been using a single setting for a long time and have put a lot of work into it. Fair enough.

To me, settings are entirely disposable. I rarely reuse a setting and a given setting lasts lasts for a single campaign. Just in 5e, we've played: Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Primeval Thule, Waterdeep, The Sword Coast and now Greyhawk (note, 2 DM's, and alternating weeks for campaigns). Six different campaigns, 5.5 different settings. When my Greyhawk campaign wraps up, I think I'll be going homebrew for a campaign I've got rumbling around in the back of my head.

The thought of playing year after year in the same setting just never occurs to me. Which makes the argument about setting fidelity somewhat strange to me. If a setting is only as long as the campaign, and the character class/race can be fit in that setting without requiring a major rewrite of the setting (such as a class/race that completely contradicts the point of the setting - the aforementioned war forged in a nature survival game) then I pretty much always default to allowing it.

 

[Oofta]

@Dire Bare, @Hussar I just want to repeat that there is no one true way. I run my campaign for reasons that make sense to me, but it's certainly not the only way.

If I had to summarize why I restrict races it's two-fold.

• I know how the existing races work and fit together. It varies by region but there's logic and history to my reasoning. I also want a sustainable population of any given race.
• This is a world where monsters exist. It's logical that people are afraid and suspicious of the unknown. A tiefling might be one of a kind, but in a land where monsters exist I don't want to deal with the level of fear and animosity they should encounter. It wouldn't be fair to a player.

---

Longer version:
Take the example elves and dwarves. There is no inherent racial animosity there but depending on tribe and region it varies from distrust bordering on hatred to grudging respectful indifference to cooperation and collaboration. Some of it based on events outside of the control of the PCs, others as a direct result of what the PCs did.

So a more specific scenario. From a nearly-forgotten campaign I had a faction of evil dwarves from way, way back when. Had some minor influence on campaign back then, nothing serious. Because of things happening in years of yore they were clanless so they eventually hooked up with the Big Bad. As part of a back story I developed (again off-screen) the dwarves invaded a neighboring elven kingdom and killed the king.

This left the elven kingdom incredibly insular, especially because the queen went a bit crazy. When a player wanted to play a high elf PC, one of my recommendations was to come from that kingdom. It gave them a reason to be adventurers and some interesting RP opportunities.

So there was a lot of animosity there. Dwarves that crossed a certain river were likely to be attacked on sight, everyone else was driven off in no uncertain terms. Even elves were treated with suspicion and called traitor or deserter.

Eventually in the campaign before last the PCs had an elf expatriate from the kingdom that wanted to get to the bottom of this and bring peace to the land. When they had an opportunity, they confronted the queen only to find that she was an imposter Drow and that the real queen was imprisoned and dying ... and so on. There's still a lot of tension between the elves and dwarves, but it's not likely to break into outright war for now.

I think I can tell a much deeper story if the players want it with this kind of world. But that doesn't work as well if suddenly there's a large enough population of [insert race X here] to maintain the race if I suddenly have to just plonk them down somewhere. I also have no idea what their homeland would be like, relations with other groups and so on.

Most of the background stuff I come up with is just my way of dealing with (very) minor insomnia. If I'm having a hard time sleeping I try to envision what's going on in the world, or how a region got to where it is. It's rarely something I make up on the fly, it's not arbitrary.