D&D General Identity of Monsters Post-Alignment (+)

[doctorbadwolf]

So, firstly, lets not retread old ground. The game is changing, lets talk about how to use classic intelligent monsters in a game where they have no assumed alignment, and no racial monocultures. Please do not try to rehash the argument happening in another thread.

If you've been doing so for years, share your stories! If you have ideas or questions about specific monsters and what can set them apart from eachother without having monocultures or assumed moral natures, ask!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So, to start things off, I have never had assumed morality or monocultures for any living race of creatures, and even stuff like Outsiders are a bit more nuanced than the core books present them as.

One of my favorites is bugbears.

In my Eberron, there is a culture of bugbears that hasn't been part of the larger goblinoid culture since a bit before the fall of the old empire, as they had split off and formed a druidic cult in the swamplands now known as the Shadow Marches. They live arboreal lives, building "nests" in the great trees and only descending from the trees to hunt and trade. They tend to hunt as ambush predators, waiting in total stillness for prey to pass under them, and then soundlessly drop on them, breaking their spine, or if needed striking critical areas at the moment of impact with a weapon. They can field skilled archers as well, using greatbows (homebrew) to devastating effect due to their strength and long armspan. They have a close relationship with the animal spirits of the area, but especially with the gha'thla'vo, or giant flying ferret.

Thier physicality informs every culture I make that includes them, as do traits like catlike sleepiness, their origin as ambush predators, and what a player brings to playing one, but no culture is a monolith.

 

[jmartkdr2]

My sea-halflings come to mind:

A group of halfling pirates find out their favorite haven is going to be destroyed by the Imperial Navy, so they pack up all their favorite stuff form said haven and load it on to recently stolen giant ships to go find a new place to rest. But as they sail the giant-sized warships, they quickly learn that having a mobile haven is actually way better, and start building a society where everyone is at sea, all the time.

This includes switching to jewelry as a way of storing wealth (much more compact than coins), lots of public education (to keep kids out of the way), a strong sense of respecting privacy, and a very deeply ingrained discipline (form living on ships).

They eventually switch form piracy to shipping, since the halfling ships are the only one who don't get attacked by the very experience sea halfling pirates.

I also had savanna halflings who built their homes on elephants and used ostriches for outriders, and dog-sled-based tundra/taiga halflings.

 

[Sacrosanct]

years ago, I wrote a couple of adventures where the PCs play the monsters. Sick and tired of humans and demi-humans always raiding their lands and killing them, they put aside many of the "traditional" behavior of monstrous humanoids as described in various monster manuals. They formed truces, worked with diplomacy, and worked for the betterment of their communities using a pragmatic approach. While they still often resorted to violence to achieve their goals (like every other human species), they didn't act inherently evil and backstabbyish with each other. Mostly out of necessity, but they pretty much became like every other intelligent humanoid species.

 

[Blue Orange]

There was actually an official (setting-agnostic) module for 2nd ed called Reverse Dungeon where you play the monsters and there's a group of invading adventurers you have to repel.

3rd ed had rules for statting out all the monsters as PCs in one of the sourcebooks, complete with level adjustments--they were very big on monsters and PCs using the same rules.

As to the larger question, one of the things to think about is that you effectively have tens to hundreds of intelligent species on this world, and they are going to be fighting over territory and resources. Even if bugbears aren't 'evil', they might well enter conflict with humans for that reason.

Of course, there's no need to assume groups will ally with their closest relatives. If anything you might see alliances between very different groups that aren't in the same ecological niche--fire giants aren't likely to fight humans over the inside of a volcano, but they might fight salamanders over it. You might see humans cutting deals with frost giants to drive off some pesky white dragons in exchange for the cold version of the fireball spell or something similar.

You also have to answer why the higher-level monsters haven't conquered the world--why isn't the world overrun with dragons? My best guess is some variation of larger monsters having to eat a lot, such that the world can only support so many dragons, but in a fantasy world you are free to invent more supernatural causes.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Good stuff!

The halflings and "forest" gnomes of my Islands world* have a culture of coastal nomadic pearl divers and fisherfolk, with their cousins who settled down in towns being notable as very friendly and hospitable anarcho-socialists, who have been known to murder every last member of a raiding party and bury them in their fields.

In another part of the world, there is a culture of small folk who train goats as mounts, live in mountainous foothills studded with copses of woods, and ride into battle with lances and shortbows and illusions and raven scouts who've been bred to be able to communicate even with big folk. Some deeply secret religious infraction caused them to sweep into the neighboring Empire of Capet a hundred years ago, wrecking every force that tried to stop them like an avenging tide, murder the sorcerer-regent who was corrupting the child Emperor and turning the empire toward blood magic and ruin, and leave as quickly as they came. The next year they came back as they had before, for trade, as if nothing had happened.

Lastly, there is a culture in that same world that exists across much of the world, that trains from an extreme young age in sword and bow, riding of various mounts, athletics, stealth, and the crafts of fortifications and how to subvert them, and follow a set of deities who patronise those who fight against tyranny and oppression. They are related to the anarcho-socialists mentioned before, and have more halflings than any other ancestry, but there are members of most races amongst them. They have a secret language of handsigns based on ogham staves, and are the source of a lot of legends about small beings who will murder you if you ask for their help but don't pay their price, and the like, even though they aren't as brutal as their legends suggest.

 

[dave2008]

To me the obvious elephant in the room is orcs. I grew up with the Hobbit and to a lesser degree LotR. Tolkien's goblins/orcs were not universally evil, but often did evil things because they were compelled to by a greater evil. I guess WoW and others have more ambiguous orcs now, but I've always given them a fluid alignment.

 

[Blue]

I fit under the "have been doing this for years". A couple of examples from one campaign I'm running.

• Drow are a created race that, while a bit lazy and hedonistic, are not cruel or separated from the other races at all.
• On the continent the player are on, the Forest Gnomes still have their wonderful sense of community and wonder. They just are (more) xenophobic, practice blood sacrifice (painlessly even when to the death, for breaking laws and rules), and are considering waging war against the PC's country before they can establish a firm foothold on this continent after the PC have threatened how powerful their armies are.
• Giants back on the mainland are much like you'd expect, as written into one player's backstory. The Frost Giants on this continent seem to be a civilization almost settled as the PC's country. The party has come across farmers, political issues, and all the rest.

In previous campaigns I've really played up shades of grey. In one I had seven tribes of steppes-dwelling orcs, each with their own beliefs and oen ending up through party actions firm allies of humanity. A whole separate set of sea-going slaver orcs. Multiple demi-planes of elves with Blue/Orange morality, plus it was one of them that drove the humans off their original plane in a war. A monster empire that ends up being super metropolitan and accepting. Socialist hobgoblins that didn't bother with money but made sure everyone was taken care of (for the good of the hobgoblin race). Chaotic meritocratic kobold, each trying to out-do each other bigger and bigger like a feeding frenzy of entrepreneurs.

 

[Dioltach]

I've been running a series of adventures that go the other way: all the PCs are halflings, and everyone else is, if not evil, at least very nasty. (I've been trying to recreate the feeling from fairy tales of "small plucky adventureres against the big bad world". So far it's worked quite well.)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

To me the obvious elephant in the room is orcs. I grew up with the Hobbit and to a lesser degree LotR. Tolkien's goblins/orcs were not universally evil, but often did evil things because they were compelled to by a greater evil. I guess WoW and others have more ambiguous orcs now, but I've always given them a fluid alignment.

Orcs are a very interesting case in Middle Earth, for sure.

What kinds of cultural notes have you used for them? What, if anything, stands them apart when they are part of a multi-racial culture?


One thing that I use with goblinoids is that they are all much more social than most humanoids. Bugbears have trouble sleeping alone, Goblins experience something like agoraphobia without other creatures around them, and Hobgoblins are just more confident and thus competent when their peers are around them.

Kobolds are similar, and indeed will eventually enter a sort of emotional funk if they can't sense the presence of other kobolds especially, though the presence of other humanoids that they are familiar with can work, as well. But most kobolds tend to define themselves are part of a group, rather than as individuals as such. In a sense, part of Kobold psychology is that the organism is the family, whereas a human sees themself individually as the organism, if that makes sense.

Now, just like you can have anti-social humans, there are exceptions, and varying degrees to which an individual fits the mold, etc, but generally, in my games the folk mentioned stand out for these traits even within mixed cultures.