Jack Daniel
dice-universe.blogspot.com
Note: This post is more about flavor than rules per se, but I'm still not sure whether it belongs here or under Legacy House Rules. Apologies if this is the wrong sub-forum.
__________________
When I first started playing back in high school, we used a loose kitbash of OD&D (5th version) and AD&D (2nd edition). Like many throughout the 80s and 90s, we might have thought that we were playing AD&D, but it was really just basic D&D with the extra races and sub-classes grafted on, and the bumped-up hit dice for rogues, priests, and warriors. All we had for a long while were the PHB; the DMG; and the Black Box, whence came all the stats we used for monsters. (The Monstrous Manual and its attendant Compendia were never carried by our local mall bookstore, so we made do with the Black Box, which thankfully included all the monsters from the old Basic Set and a fair smattering of Expert Set monsters.)
I remember reading through that old rulebook one day, mostly on breaks between my classes and occasionally, secretively, while I was in class and dutifully ignoring a geometry or history lecture. One thing that struck me as very odd, even back then, was the inclusion of a variety of weak goblinoids. What, I wondered, could possibly be the purpose for having kobolds, goblins, orcs, and hobgoblins all tossed into the game? In Lord of the Rings, after all, Goblins were Orcs and Orcs were Goblins (even though Tolkien is supposed to have later regretted and tried to extirpate his use of the word "goblin" in favor of his own coinage). And make no mistake: I did think of this weird new game in my hands almost entirely in terms of Tolkien. (Well, Tolkien and whatever CPRGs I had ever played on a Nintendo or Sega system, but that's tangential to my point.)
The point is, in Tolkien, there was only one Orcish race, versus the four "Free Peoples" of Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits. So, I was at something of a loss to understand why this game had four variations on the "bad guy" race that I was used to thinking of in singular terms. There were slight variations on hit dice, to be sure, ranging from kobolds' 1d4 to hobgoblins' 1d8+1, but that didn't seem meaningful enough to warrant distinct write-ups in the monster rules. A good sword blow from any one goblinoid or any one first level character would kill the other just as dead, right?
I perhaps intuited a certain symmetry that I was never fully conscious of. Good guys = halflings, dwarves, elves, humans. Bad guys = kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins. They kind of line up in terms of increasing size, don't they? In any case, I would certainly never have considered at the time that D&D might not be just a Tolkien knockoff, and that it might in fact owe much more of its flavor to pulp fantasy. That tension, that disconnect between the superficial Tolkien trappings and the underlying assumptions which reflect the works of Howard, Smith, Lovecraft, and so on, go far in explaining quite a bit that I just didn't get early on.
After all, swords & sorcery worlds are dark places full of many inexplicable things. Ape men, serpent men, beast men. Whence, I would imagine, we get D&D's ubiquitous 2-HD monsters, gnolls and lizardmen. (I also could never quite get a handle on gnolls. How in the world, my thinking went, does "gnome + troll = hyena man"?) So the question becomes, as I go about building worlds and game settings, how do I resolve this tension? How do I characterize the monstrous humanoids?
There's the kitchen-sink approach, which just assumes that "D&D is right," that's what's in the world, and I should use it as-is. Chaotic evil orcs living in caves, lawful evil hobgoblins building militaristic city-states, reptilian little kobolds living in dungeons and setting their traps and ambushes. The problem is, this stuff is all post hoc fluff that just doesn't resonate with me. It doesn't come from myth or legend or fairy tale, it doesn't come from any fantasy, high or pulp or otherwise. It's cranked out en masse to go along with the game rules.
There's the Tolkien approach, which presumes that all the shadowy, vile, fell beasts in the world are bent to the will of the Dark Lord. In Middle-Earth, there are Orcs, Half-Orcs, and Uruk-Hai; and Trolls and Olog-Hai; Wargs; Dragons and Balrogs; Barrow-Wights and Ringwraiths. The best knockoffs, like Dennis L. McKiernan's Mithgar, take a similarly anemic approach to the monster menagerie: goblin-folk consist of Rucks and Hloks (his Orcs and Uruks), and the Ogrus (which are Trolls), and also the undead Ghuls astride Helsteeds, and dark Vulgs (Wargs), and the Mandrak/Gargon (a fear-casting demon, Mithgar's answer to the Balrog). Ideal for a nice clean lineup of villains, exactly what you want out of a novelized fantasy world, but perhaps a bit sparse for a game. A game could use some more variety.
So I need to find a place in-between. The thing is, I really like the way Orcs are characterized in Tolkien. I want them to be unnatural creatures of shadow, not just D&D's hairy tusk-jawed cave-men. I want them to be capital-E Evil, not misunderstood savages! It's a matter of striking a balance between the tropes of epic fantasy and pulp fantasy. So, breaking down the monstrous humanoids from the old rules, here's what I have in mind for my next homebrew world.
Hit Die ... D&D Monster ... Use in Homebrew Game
½ ... Kobold ... Since "kobold" is just an old German word related to "goblin", and I'm trying to avoid too much redundancy, I'll use the kobold stats for a race of evil little nuisances called Imps. Namely, Forest Imps. Garland just hates them so much. These are "natural" monsters rather than "Created By Pure Evil" monsters, so they can fight underground or in sunlight at no penalty.
1-1 ... Goblin ... Basically, it's a weaker version of an Orc, right? So one could imagine that these are the "thieves" to the Orc's "fighter." That makes them the ideal stand-in for Tolkien's "Half-Orcs and Goblin-Men." Quite a far cry from the modern and D&D inspired image of the musclebound half-orc barbarian, the original Middle-Earth Half-Orcs were sly and cowardly, thugs and spies in the service of Saruman. In TSR D&D, a "normal human" tends to have less than one full hit die and an Orc has 1 HD, so it actually fits quite well that an evil creature, created by sorcery to be half-way between a Man and an Orc, would have 1-1 HD. Being the product of Shadow and Darkness, they strongly prefer dungeons to broad daylight, but don't actually suffer a penalty for fighting in the light of the sun.
1 ... Orc ... The standard first-level monster. Orc. Goblin. Whatever you call it, it's the rank-and-file soldier in the Armies of Ultimate, Monolithic EVIL. Created long ago when Dark Powers™ captured, broke, and mutilated some unfortunate Elves. While there are many different breeds of Orc (cf. Tolkien, you've got your smallish Misty Mountain Orcs, your big hulking Gundabad Orcs, your militant Mordor Orcs), they're all one race; the differences are cultural. In keeping with tradition, these guys suffer a -1 to attack rolls when fighting in sunlight.
1+1 ... Hobgoblin ... Previously, I had been in the habit of using bugbear stats to represent Uruk-Hai, but I've lately become convinced that Uruks aren't that much tougher than regular Orcs. So it actually stands to reason that the hobgoblin stats could be used for something like Uruks, tall Orc-kind hybridized with trace human blood (probably by selectively breeding Half-Orcs back with full Orcs) so that they can fight in sunlight, stand upright, wield heavy weapons, march for days without rest, and so on. Fascist hobogblin city-states? Not in my campaigns. These guys are the Fighting Uruk-Hai! They serve the White Hand! Or, at least, they serve in the armies of World's Evilest Wizards Who Worship the Big Bad Dark Lord.
2 ... Gnoll ... Like I said before, I don't get the hyena men thing. So I will doubtlessly use these guys as generic savage Beastmen. The question is, what route to take? Robert Jordan's Trollocs? Skeletor's servants from MotU? Mad Scientists' creations inhabiting the Island of Dr. Moreau? Nah. These guys just scream pulp fantasy. Take the stats for gnolls, but then re-imagine them as mongrel Beastmen, variously appearing as part ape, dog, cat, bear, hawk, serpent, in whatever hideous combination of man and animal you can think up. Then stick them in some distant, exotic jungle filled with ruins of lost Atlantean temples, worshiping some ancient and nameless horror as their god. So far removed from the whole Light vs. Shadow eternal battle of high fantasy that their motives are alien, unknowable, and mysterious.
2+1 ... Lizardmen ... These guys are actually pretty classic, but again, in a pulp fantasy sort of way. Stick them in a jungle or deep underground, but otherwise leave them be. (If they're underground, they can be kind of like Silurians! ...Or maybe Sleestaks.)
3 ... Thoul ... Ah, the thoul. Part troll, part hobgoblin, part ghoul, all pointless. Scraping the bottom of the monster barrel when they came up with this one, weren't they? But for some reason, I've always likened these creatures to Grendel of Beowulf fame. I can imagine one of these guys haunting the moors near King Hrothgar's mead-hall, rushing in and killing all of his soldiers in one night. Yeah... Grendels. Rare, maybe even unique (and of course utterly hideous) troll-ghoul hybrids.
3+1 ... Bugbear ... Well, "bugbear" is another word for "bogeyman," and bogeymen, like goblins and ogres, feature prominently in scary children's tales meant to frighten kids into behaving. But I digress. Since I can't imagine having an entire race of monstrous bogeymen, think I'll actually wind up using these stats for Ogres... but Ogres in the "Shrek" sense. About a head taller than humans (without actually being "giant-sized"), obviously much stronger than a normal man, brutish and often wicked but not necessarily evil. Haven't decided whether I'll keep the green skin and trumpet ears yet.
4+1 ... Ogre ... In older D&D, four hit dice is traditionally the fence between a "man-sized" monster and a giant. It was the demarcation used to determine whether halflings got their AC bonus against a large monster, for example, and it was roughly the cutoff point for the largest creatures affected by spells like sleep and charm person. For my next homebrew setting, the ogre stats are what I'll use for normal Trolls. Trolls are a funny thing in mythology, because sometimes they're dwarf-sized, sometimes they're giant-sized. It's understandable: looking back to the norse myth, there's quite a bit of confusion between trolls, dwarves, and dark elves, all variously described as the same creature, prone to be petrified by exposure to sunlight. Since that whole "turned to stone by the sun" thing is one consistent trait shared between mythical trolls, Tolkien's trolls, and those annoying trolls from "David the Gnome," that's my foundational concept. Trolls: big, brutish, ill-tempred, dim-witted, easily-fooled. "fell beasts," created from living stone by the Dark Lord in mockery of the Ents and returned to that very stone by sunlight. (Game mechanics: just take the ogre stats, add the petrification by daylight, bada-boom, you've got yourself some folklore Trolls.)
6+3 ... Troll ... By now, everybody knows that the rubber-skinned and regenerative troll who fears fire like a Frankenstein monster owes its origins to Poul Anderson story "Three Hearts and Three Lions." Great. That doesn't exactly jive with the greater body of myth and folklore out there. So what I want to do is take these stats and use them for uber-trolls. For Tolkien's Olog-Hai, the Great Trolls of Mordor, impervious to the sun so long as Sauron's will held sway over them. Basically, take your standard D&D troll, with its six-and-change hit dice. Take away its ability to regenerate, and thus, its well-known weakness to fire and acid. Instead, to represent its rock-like skin, drop its Armor Class down to 1. And instead of the ol' claw/claw/bite routine (typical of a voracious beast), give it only two attacks per round, lumbering slam attacks that deal 1d12/1d12 (or, if it happens to be armed with a giant maul, a single crushing blow for 1d20). Now you've got a fearsome tank of a beast, worthy of a difficult battle like the cave-troll encounter in the Fellowship of the Ring movie. Mission accomplished.
That's my monster lineup. Reskinned to have "fantasy novel/folklore" flavor instead of self-referential "D&D" flavor. Has anybody else ever felt the need to re-skin the standard, plain-vanilla array of D&D monstrous humanoids? I'd love to hear some other thoughts on the topic.
__________________
When I first started playing back in high school, we used a loose kitbash of OD&D (5th version) and AD&D (2nd edition). Like many throughout the 80s and 90s, we might have thought that we were playing AD&D, but it was really just basic D&D with the extra races and sub-classes grafted on, and the bumped-up hit dice for rogues, priests, and warriors. All we had for a long while were the PHB; the DMG; and the Black Box, whence came all the stats we used for monsters. (The Monstrous Manual and its attendant Compendia were never carried by our local mall bookstore, so we made do with the Black Box, which thankfully included all the monsters from the old Basic Set and a fair smattering of Expert Set monsters.)
I remember reading through that old rulebook one day, mostly on breaks between my classes and occasionally, secretively, while I was in class and dutifully ignoring a geometry or history lecture. One thing that struck me as very odd, even back then, was the inclusion of a variety of weak goblinoids. What, I wondered, could possibly be the purpose for having kobolds, goblins, orcs, and hobgoblins all tossed into the game? In Lord of the Rings, after all, Goblins were Orcs and Orcs were Goblins (even though Tolkien is supposed to have later regretted and tried to extirpate his use of the word "goblin" in favor of his own coinage). And make no mistake: I did think of this weird new game in my hands almost entirely in terms of Tolkien. (Well, Tolkien and whatever CPRGs I had ever played on a Nintendo or Sega system, but that's tangential to my point.)
The point is, in Tolkien, there was only one Orcish race, versus the four "Free Peoples" of Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits. So, I was at something of a loss to understand why this game had four variations on the "bad guy" race that I was used to thinking of in singular terms. There were slight variations on hit dice, to be sure, ranging from kobolds' 1d4 to hobgoblins' 1d8+1, but that didn't seem meaningful enough to warrant distinct write-ups in the monster rules. A good sword blow from any one goblinoid or any one first level character would kill the other just as dead, right?
I perhaps intuited a certain symmetry that I was never fully conscious of. Good guys = halflings, dwarves, elves, humans. Bad guys = kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins. They kind of line up in terms of increasing size, don't they? In any case, I would certainly never have considered at the time that D&D might not be just a Tolkien knockoff, and that it might in fact owe much more of its flavor to pulp fantasy. That tension, that disconnect between the superficial Tolkien trappings and the underlying assumptions which reflect the works of Howard, Smith, Lovecraft, and so on, go far in explaining quite a bit that I just didn't get early on.
After all, swords & sorcery worlds are dark places full of many inexplicable things. Ape men, serpent men, beast men. Whence, I would imagine, we get D&D's ubiquitous 2-HD monsters, gnolls and lizardmen. (I also could never quite get a handle on gnolls. How in the world, my thinking went, does "gnome + troll = hyena man"?) So the question becomes, as I go about building worlds and game settings, how do I resolve this tension? How do I characterize the monstrous humanoids?
There's the kitchen-sink approach, which just assumes that "D&D is right," that's what's in the world, and I should use it as-is. Chaotic evil orcs living in caves, lawful evil hobgoblins building militaristic city-states, reptilian little kobolds living in dungeons and setting their traps and ambushes. The problem is, this stuff is all post hoc fluff that just doesn't resonate with me. It doesn't come from myth or legend or fairy tale, it doesn't come from any fantasy, high or pulp or otherwise. It's cranked out en masse to go along with the game rules.
There's the Tolkien approach, which presumes that all the shadowy, vile, fell beasts in the world are bent to the will of the Dark Lord. In Middle-Earth, there are Orcs, Half-Orcs, and Uruk-Hai; and Trolls and Olog-Hai; Wargs; Dragons and Balrogs; Barrow-Wights and Ringwraiths. The best knockoffs, like Dennis L. McKiernan's Mithgar, take a similarly anemic approach to the monster menagerie: goblin-folk consist of Rucks and Hloks (his Orcs and Uruks), and the Ogrus (which are Trolls), and also the undead Ghuls astride Helsteeds, and dark Vulgs (Wargs), and the Mandrak/Gargon (a fear-casting demon, Mithgar's answer to the Balrog). Ideal for a nice clean lineup of villains, exactly what you want out of a novelized fantasy world, but perhaps a bit sparse for a game. A game could use some more variety.
So I need to find a place in-between. The thing is, I really like the way Orcs are characterized in Tolkien. I want them to be unnatural creatures of shadow, not just D&D's hairy tusk-jawed cave-men. I want them to be capital-E Evil, not misunderstood savages! It's a matter of striking a balance between the tropes of epic fantasy and pulp fantasy. So, breaking down the monstrous humanoids from the old rules, here's what I have in mind for my next homebrew world.
Hit Die ... D&D Monster ... Use in Homebrew Game
½ ... Kobold ... Since "kobold" is just an old German word related to "goblin", and I'm trying to avoid too much redundancy, I'll use the kobold stats for a race of evil little nuisances called Imps. Namely, Forest Imps. Garland just hates them so much. These are "natural" monsters rather than "Created By Pure Evil" monsters, so they can fight underground or in sunlight at no penalty.
1-1 ... Goblin ... Basically, it's a weaker version of an Orc, right? So one could imagine that these are the "thieves" to the Orc's "fighter." That makes them the ideal stand-in for Tolkien's "Half-Orcs and Goblin-Men." Quite a far cry from the modern and D&D inspired image of the musclebound half-orc barbarian, the original Middle-Earth Half-Orcs were sly and cowardly, thugs and spies in the service of Saruman. In TSR D&D, a "normal human" tends to have less than one full hit die and an Orc has 1 HD, so it actually fits quite well that an evil creature, created by sorcery to be half-way between a Man and an Orc, would have 1-1 HD. Being the product of Shadow and Darkness, they strongly prefer dungeons to broad daylight, but don't actually suffer a penalty for fighting in the light of the sun.
1 ... Orc ... The standard first-level monster. Orc. Goblin. Whatever you call it, it's the rank-and-file soldier in the Armies of Ultimate, Monolithic EVIL. Created long ago when Dark Powers™ captured, broke, and mutilated some unfortunate Elves. While there are many different breeds of Orc (cf. Tolkien, you've got your smallish Misty Mountain Orcs, your big hulking Gundabad Orcs, your militant Mordor Orcs), they're all one race; the differences are cultural. In keeping with tradition, these guys suffer a -1 to attack rolls when fighting in sunlight.
1+1 ... Hobgoblin ... Previously, I had been in the habit of using bugbear stats to represent Uruk-Hai, but I've lately become convinced that Uruks aren't that much tougher than regular Orcs. So it actually stands to reason that the hobgoblin stats could be used for something like Uruks, tall Orc-kind hybridized with trace human blood (probably by selectively breeding Half-Orcs back with full Orcs) so that they can fight in sunlight, stand upright, wield heavy weapons, march for days without rest, and so on. Fascist hobogblin city-states? Not in my campaigns. These guys are the Fighting Uruk-Hai! They serve the White Hand! Or, at least, they serve in the armies of World's Evilest Wizards Who Worship the Big Bad Dark Lord.
2 ... Gnoll ... Like I said before, I don't get the hyena men thing. So I will doubtlessly use these guys as generic savage Beastmen. The question is, what route to take? Robert Jordan's Trollocs? Skeletor's servants from MotU? Mad Scientists' creations inhabiting the Island of Dr. Moreau? Nah. These guys just scream pulp fantasy. Take the stats for gnolls, but then re-imagine them as mongrel Beastmen, variously appearing as part ape, dog, cat, bear, hawk, serpent, in whatever hideous combination of man and animal you can think up. Then stick them in some distant, exotic jungle filled with ruins of lost Atlantean temples, worshiping some ancient and nameless horror as their god. So far removed from the whole Light vs. Shadow eternal battle of high fantasy that their motives are alien, unknowable, and mysterious.
2+1 ... Lizardmen ... These guys are actually pretty classic, but again, in a pulp fantasy sort of way. Stick them in a jungle or deep underground, but otherwise leave them be. (If they're underground, they can be kind of like Silurians! ...Or maybe Sleestaks.)
3 ... Thoul ... Ah, the thoul. Part troll, part hobgoblin, part ghoul, all pointless. Scraping the bottom of the monster barrel when they came up with this one, weren't they? But for some reason, I've always likened these creatures to Grendel of Beowulf fame. I can imagine one of these guys haunting the moors near King Hrothgar's mead-hall, rushing in and killing all of his soldiers in one night. Yeah... Grendels. Rare, maybe even unique (and of course utterly hideous) troll-ghoul hybrids.
3+1 ... Bugbear ... Well, "bugbear" is another word for "bogeyman," and bogeymen, like goblins and ogres, feature prominently in scary children's tales meant to frighten kids into behaving. But I digress. Since I can't imagine having an entire race of monstrous bogeymen, think I'll actually wind up using these stats for Ogres... but Ogres in the "Shrek" sense. About a head taller than humans (without actually being "giant-sized"), obviously much stronger than a normal man, brutish and often wicked but not necessarily evil. Haven't decided whether I'll keep the green skin and trumpet ears yet.
4+1 ... Ogre ... In older D&D, four hit dice is traditionally the fence between a "man-sized" monster and a giant. It was the demarcation used to determine whether halflings got their AC bonus against a large monster, for example, and it was roughly the cutoff point for the largest creatures affected by spells like sleep and charm person. For my next homebrew setting, the ogre stats are what I'll use for normal Trolls. Trolls are a funny thing in mythology, because sometimes they're dwarf-sized, sometimes they're giant-sized. It's understandable: looking back to the norse myth, there's quite a bit of confusion between trolls, dwarves, and dark elves, all variously described as the same creature, prone to be petrified by exposure to sunlight. Since that whole "turned to stone by the sun" thing is one consistent trait shared between mythical trolls, Tolkien's trolls, and those annoying trolls from "David the Gnome," that's my foundational concept. Trolls: big, brutish, ill-tempred, dim-witted, easily-fooled. "fell beasts," created from living stone by the Dark Lord in mockery of the Ents and returned to that very stone by sunlight. (Game mechanics: just take the ogre stats, add the petrification by daylight, bada-boom, you've got yourself some folklore Trolls.)
6+3 ... Troll ... By now, everybody knows that the rubber-skinned and regenerative troll who fears fire like a Frankenstein monster owes its origins to Poul Anderson story "Three Hearts and Three Lions." Great. That doesn't exactly jive with the greater body of myth and folklore out there. So what I want to do is take these stats and use them for uber-trolls. For Tolkien's Olog-Hai, the Great Trolls of Mordor, impervious to the sun so long as Sauron's will held sway over them. Basically, take your standard D&D troll, with its six-and-change hit dice. Take away its ability to regenerate, and thus, its well-known weakness to fire and acid. Instead, to represent its rock-like skin, drop its Armor Class down to 1. And instead of the ol' claw/claw/bite routine (typical of a voracious beast), give it only two attacks per round, lumbering slam attacks that deal 1d12/1d12 (or, if it happens to be armed with a giant maul, a single crushing blow for 1d20). Now you've got a fearsome tank of a beast, worthy of a difficult battle like the cave-troll encounter in the Fellowship of the Ring movie. Mission accomplished.
That's my monster lineup. Reskinned to have "fantasy novel/folklore" flavor instead of self-referential "D&D" flavor. Has anybody else ever felt the need to re-skin the standard, plain-vanilla array of D&D monstrous humanoids? I'd love to hear some other thoughts on the topic.
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