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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5082133" data-attributes="member: 80487">Howard's Conan strode a Hyborean Age in which the serpent folk were either extinct or so scarce and reclusive as to be unknown. He encountered a number of isolated aliens, most often individuals apparently unique on Earth -- but there were no nonhumans rubbing shoulders with men in the street or holding frontiers on the map.Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser met 'ghouls', 'gnomes', intelligent rats, the Sea King's folk, the aliens of the Bazaar of the Bizarre, sundry gods, and of course their own wizardly patrons.What's notable in D&D is how common and 'naturalized' nonhumans typically are, how little they are really unearthly. The Dwarves and Elves seem commoner even than those of Tolkien's fiction, and those in turn are not so removed as their prototypes in Norse myth.With Tolkien at least, I think the intent was to emphasize that he was dealing in a pre-mythical world; I see the same in Howard's use of names from myth and ancient history. Whatever the case, though, that is not necessarily the effect on readers -- especially readers under the influence of D&D.For that matter, Gygax and crew may not have had quite an "everything but the kitchen sink" mash-up in mind as the usual state of affairs. Quite accurately or not, the first supplement was presented as offering material from Gary's campaign and the second from Dave's -- a model of choosing what to include, what to change, and what to add from one's own imagination. In any case, all the classes and creatures and features were more clearly optional in that presentation.The AD&D books mixed most of that material pretty indiscriminately together, along with stuff from magazines and yet more new additions.I would offer that the frequency of this or that type among player-characters need not reflect demographics in the wider world. If, say, one PC out of 10 happens to be an elf, that does not mean there must be a hundred elves in a village with a population of a thousand. The appearance of an elf might in most places be unprecedented in living memory.</blockquote>

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