How would you describe these "hew-mons?"

[Lonely Tylenol]

I'm with BiggusGeekus!

I know at least one of my players would end up pretty bummed out, if all humans in the game were some sort of horrible plane hopping space Nazis.

That's why I'd go for the
leaders = bad
people = mislead or oblivious
setup...

I like Driddle's take on it much better. Having a happy ending where you kill the scapegoat who's been leading all the humans down the wrong path kind of undoes the point of having all the humans be so nasty in the first place. I mean, what Driddle's describing is pretty much human history in fantasy terms...the Aryans migrating into India, the Indo-European tribes colonizing Europe, the Europeans colonizing practically everywhere else... Humans are the aliens from Independance Day, moving from place to place, stripping it of its resources, and moving on.

The point of the game seems to be that human nature is inherantly exploitative. Even if they didn't come to the world with the notion of strip-mining the place and killing off all of its inhabitants, they breed quickly and need somewhere to put those people.

"Hi elves. Do you mind if we stick a little settlement in your woods?"
"Not at all humans. The trees are there for all to enjoy."
"That's great. We're going to have to cut a few down though, to build some houses. But don't worry, there's plenty left."
"Well, all right. However, we build our homes in the branches and roots of the living trees. We could show you how. We believe that in the long run it will bene..."
"That's great elves. You guys sure are at one with nature or something. Hmm... it looks like our settlement is going to have to be a bit bigger than we were expecting. And we need to make some room to farm things. Just a few more trees will have to come down. I notice that you're not making use of the forest's bounty very well. The humans down in the valley will pay good money for high-quality lumber."
"Well, you see, we only take the trees that have fallen and died on their own, so we do not disturb the..."
"Hey Lenny! Mark these ones for logging. The trees are much bigger here than over there. Oh, and elves, we're thinking that we might need just a bit more room since we're getting a few more settlers coming in from the valley. I hear they fished out the lake down there and they're trying to find some work here. Good thing too. We're going to need some lumberjacks."
"Say, didn't there used to be orcs living in the valley?"
"Those crazy bastards? They were stealing herd animals that we had rounded up and domesticated, and when we tried to scare them away they attacked us. So we organized an army and drove them back into the hills. Bunch of monsters, if you ask me. Good riddance."
"I see. I'm just going to have to go over here and talk to the other elves. Please don't mind us glaring in this direction and fingering our bows menacingly. It's just elvish custom."
"See ya later, elves."

Your setup sounds too much like the "it's just a few bad apples" scapegoating thing that's been kicking around the news media lately. Frankly, I think it would ruin the setting if it were just some evil leaders that could be removed to solve the problem. Life's more messy than that. And humans never needed evil leaders to get them to do reprehensible things without noticing how reprehensible they are.

 

[Driddle]

"Hi elves. ..."

Bwah-hah!
Not exactly the tone I had in mind, but, yeah, you captured the essence of a thousand years or so of expansion and "development."

 

[Torm]

I hope this post will be okay, because I'm NOT targeting any particular religion, but...

RELIGIOUS

The humans aren't a bad lot, altogether, and, in fact, when amongst their own, some might be considered Good - even Lawful Good. But they have this religious dictate that their god says they MUST go into these lands, and they are holy lands given unto them by that god, and obviously anyone who doesn't believe that must be removed or reeducated.

Allows for some "interesting" tactics by humans - killing adult males, but rounding up female and young elves, orcs, etc, for reeducation. Also allows for something I've never seen before - alignment adjustment based on racial relation - for example, a human could be a Lawful Good Paladin to other humans, but be treated and effected by spells as a Lawful Evil character by members of another species.

 

[Driddle]

... killing adult males, but rounding up female and young elves, orcs, etc, for reeducation. ...

I can't imagine humans resorting to that kind of behavior. ((roll eyes))

As it's been noted in this thread, some of these actions would seem to somewhat mirror events in our world. I s'pose we'd need to be careful to not stick our own racial stereotypes on the fantasy races. THAT would be a bad thing, and not at all my intent.

Thanks for the ideas and feedback, though.

 

[MaxKaladin]

An angle to all this that everyone seems to be forgetting is how these races are going to "deal with" the human problem. Many of the solutions they come up with could well be a case of becoming as bad as the people you're fighting.

 

[Dogbrain]

Weeds.

Humans are excellent weeds. We can live in a wide variety of environments, are very good at glomming up anything that is useful, reproduce with relative ease (compared to many other large mammals), and are rather good at countering obstacles.

Weeds aren't evil, they're just weedy. Weediness is a survival strategy. We're just unusual in that we're more of a K-selected (a relative few high-quality offspring) weed than an r-selected weed (toss out as many offspring as possible).

Ecologically, we are closest to the Orcs than to the other species. We're just better at working together than they are.

It is probably impossible to "educate" humans into being "responsible" in the hippie-eco-freak sense. Only one thing has ever consistently slowed down human population growth--female education. As women gain in status in a society, reproductive rates fall off. I'm not talking about so-called "matriarchical" societies. I refer to education and status of the "common" woman. This has been demonstrated over and over. Countries that concentrated on providing solid primary education to girls, regardless of social status, have ended up with low or even negative growth rates (not counting immigration). Countries that concentrated primarily or exclusively on higher education (which is almost always limited to high-status men and women) do not see a corresponding reduction in population growth rates.

Oppression does not result in long-term reduction in human population unless that oppression results in a lot of deaths by engineered famine, disease from bad infrastructure, or flat-out killing lots of people (by execution or wars). Thus, many attempts at "reforming" humans will fail. Conquer and enslave them? They breed even more, and now you have an enormous population of very bright and uppity slaves. Replace the "bad" leaders with "good" leaders and you'll have to keep repeating the job--and end up with very ill-tempered mobs that keep getting larger and larger. It is our nature to expand to fill all available space and then make other space "available".

Any "good" leaders installed who are the least bit benevolent will just end up giving you more humans. You've got to install monsters like Kim Il Sung or Pol Pot to really cut down on human population.

 

[Dogbrain]

One more thing: Agreements with "good" leaders will not stop human swarming. An example of this is the history of the USA. The US government enacted treaty after treaty limiting settlement. Each one was eventually broken. This was not by policy. The common folk simply ignored the government. Since the USA has a representative government, that meant that leaders who enacted treaties faced the threat of replacement if they didn't go along with the flow.

If a "good" government actively halted further spread, it would become "tyrannical"--indeed, if there were a lot of pressure by the commons, it would have to adopt draconian measures. If it simply let the neighbors kill all humans who got outside the borders, it would be seen as "neglectful"--and the locals would take matters into their own hands.

In the 1740s, New England conquered Quebec. Britain made them give it back. In the 1760s, Britain enacted a treaty guaranteeing the Old Northwest to the tribes who lived there. This fed revolutionary resentment. Men like George Washington even hired surveyors to illegally go north of the Ohio river and plat out land for later sale.

So long as a valuable resource belongs to "the other", some human will feel justified to take it by any means. This only stops if "the other" is strong enough to put a stop to the spread directly or if sufficient profit exists in permitting "the other" to keep control of that resource as to make forceful takeover not worth ones while.

Were saints as common as air, we would not have saints.

 

[Eltern]

Elven leader, speaking to human prisoner of war:

"I'd like to share a revelation during my time engaged with your people. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I guess it comes down to the tone of the campaign. My point was that in most groups I've played in, a plot like this would get to one or more of the players down. But they'd be the ones in the game for entertaining escapism. Not a rather depressing study of the shortcomings of the human race - as others have pointed out you can get plenty of that from news or history.

I think the ideas great and I'd love to play in it, just wouldn't run it for my current group without a redemption angle for the humans.


Anyway, steering well clear of reality: An interesting event could be what happens when one of the 'elder' races is pushed close to extinction. They'd get really desparate and might do something regretable:

Perhaps someone wakes up the dragons the races subdued in an earlier age... Possibly open a gate to the abyss and let fiendish armies in to butcher the humans? (they promised they'd go home when they finished!)

Could be used to put time pressure on the campaign. The PCs have X long to solve the problem before the world looks like the set to Reign of Fire.

 

[Dogbrain]

"I'd like to share a revelation during my time engaged with your people. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment

Ah, so elves are ignorant and delusional.