D&D General Should D&D feature fearsome critters and other Americana?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Do you mean American American, or stuff cooked up by all the immigrants & refugees that showed up starting from around the 1600s?

I think native stuff is challenging because non-native DMs and writers are bringing their outsider mindset to it and it's easy to get very wrong. (See Oriental Adventures and many of the early World of Darkness titles.)

In contrast, anyone getting really mad about Paul Bunyan-style giants not being handled properly needs to touch grass.

That said, stuff like Coyote and Crow is great and well worth supporting. My family is descended from some of the earliest English settlers in North America and I don't feel qualified to write sensitively about Native mythology. If there was a Coyote and Crow-style 5E or OSR supplement written by people who were qualified to write about that stuff appropriately, I would 100% be a buyer.

 

[bedir than]

As a European medieval fantasy simulator, D&D isn't great. The TSR settings, especially, show an American mindset about population densities and modern attitudes have peeked through -- or been completely dominant -- in the game since its inception. And the region around the City of Greyhawk looks suspiciously like the region around Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, plus or minus a dragon. Which is great, to be clear: I'm not interested in playing Dung Heaps and Dysentery, and I don't think many other people are, either.

But should D&D go all the way and embrace this idea of American fantasy? Should it feature monsters from tall tales like fearsome critters, actual North American myths and legends, cryptids like Bigfoot? Should it draw from distinctly American fantasy works like the Oz novels (the Harry Potter novels of their day)?

Would your players enjoy dealing with lake monsters while keeping watch to prevent getting attacked by a hidebehind? Or would that be an unwelcome flavor in your fantasy?

Some of these would be great familiars, others would be fun wild shapes.
A few would be terrifying

 

[Malmuria]

I think what you risk is taking dnd as a medieval fantasy simulator and turning it too explicitly into a settler-colonial simulator. As you mention it's implicit in the game already--adventurers killing things and taking stuff--but the fantasy medieval gloss makes it more palatable (perhaps).

d&d is anti-medieval

You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…

www.blogofholding.com

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think what you risk is taking dnd as a medieval fantasy simulator and turning it too explicitly into a settler-colonial simulator. As you mention it's implicit in the game already--adventurers killing things and taking stuff--but the fantasy medieval gloss makes it more palatable (perhaps).

d&d is anti-medieval

You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…

www.blogofholding.com

Yeah, that's definitely a danger. I would strongly advise against people doing what I think a lot of DMs do once and then realize is a horrible mistake, and make any of the standard D&D peoples into stand-ins for Native Americans. Even if it's well-meant, it's a recipe for disaster.

Better to have it be D&D-standard cosmopolitan. There can be city elves and dwarves who live outside of the encroaching urban society, etc.

While there are obviously plenty of Westerns that deal disastrously with native cultures, there are plenty of them that ignore them entirely. While that kind of erasure is problematic as hell in a nominally historical set piece, in a fantasy world, it doesn't have to be. Farmers and ranchers spread out in wide rings around urban hubs can be the steady state of a fantasy world for centuries or millennia, and not something that represents a new colonial order.

 

[aco175]

I would likely not have a use for a book like this. Most of the animals and monsters could just be reskinned other monsters and be fine. It should stay away from not-Indians to avoid a Cowboys and Indians feel, although a Manifest Destiny campaign that deals with gnolls could be fun.

 

[Tonguez]

I'm sure I remember the Hodag, Wendigo and Thunderbird having appeared in DnD already and of course theres Coatl, Jackelope and Loup-Garou.

Personally I'd love to have more American folklore appear, I've used a giant lumberjack with a blue bison, enjoyed Northern Crown and Oz is a great setting.

Don't get me wrong, I love hidebehinds and ax handle hounds, but... as a statted D&D monster? What do you do with them?

Hidebehinds could easily be a form of Displacer beast, big dark panther, give it a a bonus action to Hide in Plain Sight.

 

[TravDoc42]

In regards to Indigenous traditions, there is a certain figure from Algonquin faiths that is often portrayed as a antler wearing cannibal cryptid. In the real tradition, there's a strong taboo against saying the name (it starts with a W), which is why I'm not saying it either. However, it has appeared, name and all, in several TTRPGs, and in 3.5 edition. Stuff like that should be handled with care, I'd say.

 

[bedir than]

Don't get me wrong, I love hidebehinds and ax handle hounds, but... as a statted D&D monster? What do you do with them?

What do you do with axebeaks and hell hounds?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

In regards to Indigenous traditions, there is a certain figure from Algonquin faiths that is often portrayed as a antler wearing cannibal cryptid. In the real tradition, there's a strong taboo against saying the name (it starts with a W), which is why I'm not saying it either. However, it has appeared, name and all, in several TTRPGs, and in 3.5 edition. Stuff like that should be handled with care, I'd say.

A great example of how outsiders with no obvious ill intent can completely trample over another existing culture when they feed native beliefs into the pop culture machinery. I don't think anyone at TSR, White Wolf or Marvel Comics meant anything by it, but it is what it is.

 

[schneeland]

I think my personal image of D&D is, at this point, pretty heavily tied to the faux medieval/early Renaissance style and the eclectic collection of beasts derived from both European mythology and Japanese toys. So I think I would probably bounce off newly added creatures with an American background.
However, I feel this could easily be addressed by shifting the timeline a bit and moving into the 17th century, maybe early 18th century. And then you have witch hunts, but also cryptids. It would obviously impact game design a bit and be a bit more reminiscent of Warhammer Fantasy, but I think it could still work within a D&D framework, too.