Worlds without Human Dominance

[Rechan]

Cool, Clavis. Question for you:

How do your players take it? I mean, do they play into the racial stereotypes/cultures you've set down, or do they go for more traditional stereotypes/cultures of their race, despite the setting?

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

You know what I'm sick of? Human centric worlds where all the humans are the same, or even able to work together. I know the Terry pratchett thing - when you have Dwarves and Trolls, hating a human with a different accent is harder - but really. I think it wastes a lot of roleplaying potential to have 'Human' cultures and 'Elf' cultures - especially when there's different Elf cultures but not human ones!

Well, the Discworld also have different cultures that hate each other - see the Ankh-Morpork versus Klatch war in "Jingo".

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

Well, the Discworld also have different cultures that hate each other - see the Ankh-Morpork versus Klatch war in "Jingo".

Plus if you read into the history of the Sto Lat plains the older watchmen are always mentioning there was certainly a history of everyone going at each other.

Heck, there's even a growing rivalry between the dwarves of Ankh-Morpork and the dwarves of Everywhere Else.

 

[Rechan]

I think most worlds have human countries that don't like eachother. That's how you get wars.

 

[Clavis]

Cool, Clavis. Question for you:

How do your players take it? I mean, do they play into the racial stereotypes/cultures you've set down, or do they go for more traditional stereotypes/cultures of their race, despite the setting?

So far, I've had no problem getting players to embrace and play their cultures. I don't force the issue. Instead, I give the players lists of 10 things the average member of their culture believes, but also tell them that their PCs could be rebels who don't believe those things. The campaign is set in and around a cultural crossroads area, so there's going to be a certain amount of cross-influence.

The players seem to like playing Elves for the feeling of living almost without boundaries of any kind, except the need to do everything beautifully. My Halflings have a Redneck-like culture, which players have so far loved to play up. Nobody has played a Dwarf yet, but that's simply because they won't work with a party that includes Elves. Once the players met their first Dwarven NPCs (with their outrageous Germanic accents, superior armor, and black-and-white morality) they started clamoring to get to play them.

Then again, my Demi-human cultures are take-offs on traditional concepts of these races. Medieval Elves were tricky, amoral and lusty, totally unlike Tolkien's conception of near-angels. My Dwarves are inspired by Wagner's Nibelungs. Tolkien intended his Hobbits as an ode to English country life, so I made my Halflings like over-the-top American Rednecks and Hillbillies.

 

[Robert Ranting]

The Diamond Throne campaign setting of Arcana Evolved is decidedly non-human centric. In the 10,000 year history of the setting, humans have seldom been ruled by their own kind, and when they have, war, famine and magical cataclysms are the norm. Currently the known world is divided up between three major races, the noble Hu-Charad Giants, the malevolent Harrid, and the Dragons of the Squamous Horde. While humans are still one of the most numerous of the eleven PC races, they wield very little political power in the major nations. The Dragons see them as useful servants, the Giants see them as children in need of guidance, and the Harrid see them as a convenient source of cheap labor. Oh, and of course, most monsters think they are delicious.

I emulated this theme in my first homebrew campaign world for AE, making the Giants into a steamtech-powered hegemony convinced that humanity was dangerously ignorant and should be controlled. Beyond the Hegemony, a vast wilderness area was ruled by the Litorians (lion-men), who considered humans to be little more than talking monkeys, and the air and sky were controlled by the Trade Principalities of the Faen (gnomes/halflings). Humans weren't even the most numerous race, because a magical accident had uplifted all the world's brown rats into the Nezumi, who bred much faster.

Still, the humans of Thraevin had surprising diversity. On the surface, there appeared to be two types of humans, city-folk who had become part of the Giant Hegemony, and the tribals who attempted to keep the "old ways" alive. Yet, the tribes of humans each had a distinct culture and language. While they shared some similarities (notably totem animal worship) I tried where possible to underline the differences in their core value systems, their manner of speach, dress, and accents. Not being terribly clever, I repurposed real-world cultural stereotypes for this, but my players seemed to appreciate the variety in the NPCs they interacted with.

Robert "Giants Rule: Because Humans Have Proven They Can't Do It Themselves" Ranting

 

[Lwaxy]

In my epic campaign, humans are only predominant on two of the 13 worlds, and one of those is an alternate earth. Two worlds doesn't have them at all. And they have the same myths of creation and the same variety of gods as everyone else. We've never played it differently.

 

[Jack7]

Well, in my setting there is a human world (ours), and a non-human (Eldeven) world that has almost no humans in it.

The humans that do live in it exist in the equivalent of the British Isles though there are only about a few hundred of them at most (counting part human offspring). They are mostly descendents of the survivor's of Arthur's Court (Kamelod) though only a few of them are aware of this, most of the original survivors having died off. And no human player characters exist in the other world. Just as there are no non-human player characters in our world, except on those occasions when various characters visit each other's world(s).

These two worlds interact from time to time, in secret, but humans have no direct influence on the other world, although because of recent events human religious ideas are having an effect upon the other world.

So when playing the other world human culture has very limited impact, and the same is true vice versa, our world.

Though both worlds have an interest in the other.

This keeps either set of cultures (for with the Humans you have Romans and Vikings and Europeans and Barbarians and Syrians and Persians and Arabs and Christians and Jews and Muslims and Pagans - and with the Eldevens you have Sidelh, Lorahn, Jukarn, Fyel, Avafal, and the Adharma [Giants] and their various cultures, governments, and religions and so forth) from overwhelming the other, and yet they do interact in different ways.

I of course didn't have to invent any human cultures, religions, societies, or religions, merely research them for the time period involved.

For the Eldevens I had to create a different culture, government, society, religious view etc. for each race, ethnic group, or however it was that they arranged or differentiated themselves.`

As for what the players do. They play in a party that is entirely human, or one that is entirely non-human.

Though if things continue as they went last time then it may end up that a sort of hybrid team develops.

 

[cmbarona]

My campaign takes place in a sprawling magical metropolis, and I also do the racial pigeon-hole deal. Each of the PHB1 races has their own residential district with its own cultural style.

In the case of humans, they tend to be good at establishing and running governments (a task which other races generally disdain), and their culture is loosely modeled on the ancient Roman.

I'm not quite sure how to handle future races since we haven't got back to my campaign in a while, but in general I'm thinking most of them can be explained as wild (shifters), distant (goliaths), rare (devas), or foreign (drow), etc.

I also don't have to worry about different creation myths since my setting is monotheistic.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

My twist on the usual human dominance was also Arcana Evolved influenced. I did a 3E/AE mixed campaign where humans were apparently the dominant political and cultural force (albeit in different political entities and different cultures). However, as the game progressed, the players learned that humans were only dominant on those levels. There was a lot of fantastical happenings that tended to pull races in different directions. As the characters grew more powerful (two separate campaigns), they were pulled into more and more of those happenings.

For example, the elves were a nomadic race that studied the stars to foretell the future of where they would be needed next, and would migrate to the next location a few, mere centuries before they were needed. Elven adventurers are encouraged in elven society, because the elves want contact with other beings that can help. But such adventurers don't tend to get very far into the heart of elven culture. So the elves are very powerful in their niche--knowing where you need to be with the full force of your culture is useful--but don't tend to have long lasting empires.

The players enjoyed this, because it mapped more or less to how the typical fantasy world goes, but had some twists underneath that were fun to discover. When they found out that the faen (from AE) were time travelling fey, however, it got a little strange.