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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Matt Black" data-source="post: 4014662" data-attributes="member: 5477">I brought up this quote from Worlds and Monsters in another thread, but I wanted to start its own because I think this point deserves some thought. We all know that the implied setting for 4th ed. D&D assumes that civilization is restricted to small 'points of light' in a largely untamed wilderness. That sounds great to me. It will make the world seemed much larger and more mysterious, and in fact is truer to the perspective of a person living before the modern era.But now, according to W&M, even in these small regions of civilization humans are no longer the dominant race. The world is not only wild, but also quite alien. Humans are a small fraction of the many races (species?) in a big fantasy melting pot. The reason? Apparently humans are more boring than non-humans.There's an extremely good reason why humans are most often the dominant race in fantasy worlds: A familiar baseline is critical.It's necessary to have a viewpoint from which a world's fantasy elements are actually fantastical. If everyone in a fantasy world has pointy ears or horns or scales, then humans become equally out of place for not having these things, and in the end nothing is particularly exotic at all. You have a fantasy hodge-podge with no place to ground your perspective.Stories about humans ARE interesting, because they're stories about ourselves. They're even more interesting if you carefully introduce weird and wonderful elements into otherwise familiar settings. Mummies ruling an Egyptian-esque culture? Cool! Lizardman mummies ruling an Egyptian-esque culture of dwarves? Um... not cool anymore.I think that WoTC has gone in the wrong direction here. There's no need to insist that humans are the dominant race, but explicitly stating the opposite is a poor move.</blockquote>

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