Transhuman fantasy?

[Desdichado]

A lot folks (myself included) who are more into sword & sorcery rather than high fantasy, like humanocentric campaigns. I've seen their virtues preached many times, and while I don't remember specifically getting in on that action, I dislike elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, etc. Basically all the Tolkienesque races that make up the D&D smorgasbord.

However, over the last few years, I think I've been drifting towards a human and transhuman fantasy setting. A fantasy world with really only humans, but some of them have undergone changes due to magic, curses, tampering with bloodlines, or even just plain having been bred as the perfect slaves. I think I first got there trying to justify, and then modify and make my own some of the other more "obscure" races and bring them to a place of primacy in place of the standard D&D races.

So, in my setting now, I've got vucari: savage bestial transhumans who xenophobically protect their wild sanctuaries... but who might wander about as mercenaries too. Their skill in tracking and scouting are usually without equal. I've also got hellspawn; those born as changelings, with some bizarre otherworldly features. Some of them even breed true, and a form of them called the hamazin once ruled an empire to the north called Baal Hamazi. It fell to internal conflict, environmental disaster, and an uprising of the enslaved human populace, but many hamazi still wander the world, either as members of successor statelets grasping at the echoes of greatness, or as expatriates, fleeing the chaos and conflict of their homeland. I've also got the seafaring jann, who claim to have afrit blood in their veins. A mutinous (or perhaps simply lost) ship of them arrived on the isles in the Qizmiri Ocean, and took over, expanding their population and their power base. The Qizmir Empire is a vibrant, growing power, but there is a sense amongst the jann that they are still looking over their shoulders for their mother empire nation to find them and force them back into their homeland. Some say that their obsession with shoring up their strength is to make sure that they cannot be forcibly removed by the numberless armies of their distant motherland.

These three are obviously based on originally shifter, tiefling and fire genasi templates. I've got a few others waiting in the wings, but other than those three transhuman races, I'm trying to make sure that various populations of regular old humans still dominate the land numerically and politically.

Anyway, has anyone else ever tried anything like that? I know conceptually it's a bit farther afield than many folks would like, but the more I develop this stuff, the more I like it.

 

[Achan hiArusa]

A long time ago I joked about making a 2nd Edition game that was all half-races: Half-elf, Half-ogre, Half-elf, Mul, Half-Satyr, Half-dryad, the various types of Half-dragons, Mongrelmen, Spirit Folk, etc. I had done some work on it, but haven't done anything since.

 

[Krensky]

I've seen it done twice in literature, in very different ways.

John Ringo's Council Wars is sort of fantasy by way of transhuman civil war.

David Weber's War God series is somewhat stock fantasy, but the history is that all of the intelligent races are offshoots of humans. Dwarves and Hradani are natural splits, Elves and Sothoii Coursers were created, Halflings are believed to been made by magical polution during thee last great war. The Hrandi were also mucked around with and cursed by the forces of insufficent light during said war. The gods also change people into something other and more when they make a champion.

 

[the Jester]

I played in a kind of "transelven" game once.

The races were all reskinned as elf subraces. Halflings were like Wolfriders, elves were like grey elves, humans were like high elves... er.... I think dwarves were a lot like Two-Edge, from Elfquest.

It was really fun! I enjoyed my "halfling" ranger Felwin. He was cool to play. Unfortunately, the game only went about 5 or 6 sessions before the dm kinda petered out on it.

 

[Umbran]

However, over the last few years, I think I've been drifting towards a human and transhuman fantasy setting.

I am not sure how what you describe fits "transhuman", as I understand the term. Transhuman isn't just new body forms - it is what you get when technology (or magic, I suppose) gets rid of those pesky things like hunger, aging, disease, and unwanted death. Transhumanism's about what happens as human resources and abilities surpass what we now consider our basic constraints.

Which is not to say what you're describing isn't cool - the races you've mentioned so far sound like a very imaginative reskinning that could fire up some players.

 

[Desdichado]

Yeah, I think it fits. It's the concept of humanity evolving into something else. The idea of not neeting to eat, or not aging, or not dying isn't part of transhumanism necessarily, nor was it even part of what the guy who coined the phrase even meant either. Although it is wishful thinking associated with some of the transhumanist armchair speculation crowd in sci-fi circles and whatnot.

Incidentally, the guy who coined the phrase was named FM-2012. Makes him sound like a member of Front 242 or something.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Hobo, I personally enjoy this sort of thing, but I haven't done a lot of it. Re-reading some of the ERB materials (Barsoom books, Venus books, etc.) really makes this seem attractive. Actually, it makes psionics and planetary romance materials seem attractive too.

ASIDE: I am somewhat disappointed that an argument about terminology has appeared so soon in an "idea sharing" type thread. I mean, Hobo defined how he was using the term very well, with examples. AFAICT, this thread is about sharing ideas -- which is the best thing EN World offers. I hope that it doesn't continue down this road.


RC

 

[Umbran]

Yeah, I think it fits. It's the concept of humanity evolving into something else. The idea of not neeting to eat, or not aging, or not dying isn't part of transhumanism necessarily, nor was it even part of what the guy who coined the phrase even meant either. Although it is wishful thinking associated with some of the transhumanist armchair speculation crowd in sci-fi circles and whatnot.

Incidentally, the guy who coined the phrase was named FM-2012. Makes him sound like a member of Front 242 or something.

It was FM-2030. He was concerned with evolutionary change in humans the transhuman was the transitory human, the middle state between here and there. And, seeing as he was a philosopher and not a biologist or technologist of any stripe, he wasn't personally busy producing transhumans - he was just as "armchair" as anyone else.

In any case, whether he coined it or not, that was back in 1966, and the word has gone well beyond his original thought.

The World Transhumanist Association defines it this way:

1. The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
2. The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Hey, isn't this a family friendly message board? Let's have none of this transvestite fantasy--

Oh. Wait. Transhuman?

Carry on then.

 

[Dire Bare]

David Weber's War God series is somewhat stock fantasy, but the history is that all of the intelligent races are offshoots of humans. Dwarves and Hradani are natural splits, Elves and Sothoii Coursers were created, Halflings are believed to been made by magical polution during thee last great war. The Hrandi were also mucked around with and cursed by the forces of insufficent light during said war. The gods also change people into something other and more when they make a champion.

This is how I tend to use the standard "demihuman" races in my campaigns. In literature, elves, dwarves, halflings and such are really just forced stereotypes of certain aspects of human culture anyway (usually), so I tend to think of these races as offshoots of humanity or parallel human races, like the Neanderthals in the real world.

Of course, the myths and culture of a race, such as the elves, might claim they are not related to humanity. And, in truth, this bit of evolutionary background doesn't come into play hardly ever. But it makes more sense to my scientific mind.