Heroes of Unlikely Places (Hopefully?)

[Kaodi]

The Heroes of the Feywild Speculation thread made me think that while we are in the business of thinking about future books, maybe we can still hold out hope for one that gives some love to those poor neglected humanoids whose time in the Sun seem to have passed with the onset of 4th Edition: the orc, the gnoll, the bugbear, the hobgoblin, the goblin, and the kobold (especially the kobold), and the like.

And, you know, someday a Heroes of the Depths as well.

Two books that will probably not happen any time soon though, eh?

 

[BobTheNob]

After something as obscure as heroes of shadow, the sky's the limit. Heroes of the privy?

(Stupid twi-hards and the marketing exec's that listen to em)

 

[Zaran]

Maybe call it Heroes of Forlorn Domains . Although I would rather they abandoned that naming scheme and went back to making PHBs

 

[OnlineDM]

I'll chime in as a voice of dissent. I'm just not a big fan of "monstrous" races for player characters. Yes, I know we have Tieflings and Gnomes and Minotaurs and such - and frankly, I'm not big fans of those races, either (Gnome bothers me less than Tiefling and Minotaur).

I'll grant that it depends on the player, of course; my long-running Friday night online game in the War of the Burning Sky campaign had three of the five original PCs as a Tiefling, Gnome and Minotaur. I think they mainly picked their races for their stat bonuses, though, and they've played their characters in fun ways.

Still, as a DM I have a hard time figuring out how to have it make sense that a party of monsters would fit in just fine doing work for the king, etc. One "weird" race in a party can fit in just fine; five of them would strain the bounds of my storytelling ability. We muddle through, though.

 

[Incenjucar]

There are about as many people who actively dislike monstrous characters being played by people who they will never meet, including developers, who are going to make it difficult to release such a book. Your best bet is to try to stir up a POLITE letter-writing campaign (NOT a poll) to the devs to respectfully request that they work atypical options into the game.

--

OnlineDM: If you ever have too much monster in your game, I'd be happy to help you reconcile them rather than having to refuse them.

 

[OnlineDM]

OnlineDM: If you ever have too much monster in your game, I'd be happy to help you reconcile them rather than having to refuse them.

I haven't refused any, nor do I intend to. As I said, we muddle through. Would I be happier as a DM if I didn't HAVE to muddle through because the racial choices available to players were more "civilized" and easier to incorporate into a "typical" campaign? Yes. But those options do exist, and I don't want to be a jerk DM and just say "no" so I make it work.

That said, there are sometimes story considerations that would make a race a non-starter. For instance, the player who was running the gnome in my War of the Burning Sky campaign recently had his gnome turn to the dark side and join the bad guys. In creating a replacement character, he first went with a half-orc - which is a problem because pretty much all of the half-orcs that the party has encountered so far have been bad guys.

That's not to say that a half-orc couldn't fit into this particular party, but since it would be a new character joining mid-stream, it strains the bounds of plausibility that the other PCs would just accept this half-orc who drops into their midst (especially since he's a rogue). So, I asked the player if his character concept could work as a different race, and he's agreed to change it.

If he was really passionate about playing a half-orc, I would have made it work. But he was flexible, so he's changing (probably to an elf, which is fine). Give and take between players and DMs is a good thing.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Still, as a DM I have a hard time figuring out how to have it make sense that a party of monsters would fit in just fine doing work for the king, etc. One "weird" race in a party can fit in just fine; five of them would strain the bounds of my storytelling ability. We muddle through, though.

let me say (as a fan of weird races) that I agree. Once to often I have started games by telliing my PCs tthings like,(and this is a real 4e hook I droped 10 mins into game one) "the orc scourge is on the move and the king of the fey has once again entered the land of man to advise the 5 lords of man and dwarf to rally. However they need a set of eyes out in the wilderness...the assemble 100 men to break into teams and head out to gage the orcs...of the 4 teams made of willing men you are the youngest...and you are?"

I got, A gnoll barbarain, a minitour cleric, tiefling wizard, wilden warden, a shardmind psion, and a half orc monk...



so when i asked if anyone heard my whole man and dwarf and fey thing and totaly thought that said GNOLL..or HALF ORC

but I rolled with it and made a diffrent story up about the wilderness on the north edge of the nether vale...

 

[Klaus]

Of all monster races, I think the most overdue are goblins/hobgoblins, if only for the fact that they play such a large role in Eberron.

That being said, you can certainly use half-orc stats for a hobgoblin, and halfling stats for a goblin.

 

[the Jester]

There are about as many people who actively dislike monstrous characters being played by people who they will never meet, including developers, who are going to make it difficult to release such a book. Your best bet is to try to stir up a POLITE letter-writing campaign (NOT a poll) to the devs to respectfully request that they work atypical options into the game.

I think the problem really boils down to expected sales- if there are a ton of people that straight off say "No thanks" to something like this, there's not much chance we'll see it.

Which is fine with me; I'm one of those "No thanks" people.

 

[ceiling90]

I dunno, I'm one of those atypical story tellers/writers... I'd love to have more atypical races for one simple reason:

You can then make any campaign setting you want.

You can have a "bizarro" world where the elves are crazy bloodthirsty hedonists that terrorize the noble goblin nations. The Humans are mysterious and dark omens to the hobgoblin empire of gold. And so forth.

Oddly enough, I like worlds where it's mostly human, or human controlled; and the last few games I played, I played mostly elves. But I can't help but love the idea of beast men based, or atypical racial based settings. I think it would be even more fun if Humans, Elves, Dwarves, all the very common player races are actually looked on with suspicion.

But it does cost money to publish that sort of thing, and if the money isn't actually there, there's no point in making it. Sounds like a good thing for reputable PP's to do...