A to Z Blogging Challenge: A is for Abstruse
OK, OK, so I'm a sucker and really I just want to increase my followers so I can be higher in the listing on Cyclopeatron's OSR blog rankings. But this seemed like a fun exercise and might help me stay a bit more dilligent in my blogging.
I've mentioned before that my preference in old school roleplaying games is to have very humanocentric campaigns. These days I find myself straying from using demihumans as I think it tends to deminish the allure of these beings. For me, creatures like elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc should be mysterious and beyond human ken. An encounter with these beings should be ansomething, well fantastic. In my worlds, demihumans, their culture, and their very mindset is abstruse
to the human mind. Think about it, in the real world, we humans can barely comprehend the mindset of someone with a different political affiliation, let alone someone from another culture. Now imagine encountering beings with not only a different culture, a different appearance, a different lifespan, a different metabolism, a different way of viewing the world (perhaps more than just metaphorically - they may quite literally physically view it differently). Playing these beings as haughty humans with pointy ears and a love of the great outdoors, or short and stout men with a predeliction for avarice and a thirst for ale really just doesn't cut it with me. So to solve that, I'm taking away the availability as a starting race. Some folks don't like that method and that's OK. But think about the way these demihumans are in your worlds. Why wouldn't elves and dwarves have shrigged off human incursions to become the dominant beings on their worlds?
I've mentioned before that my preference in old school roleplaying games is to have very humanocentric campaigns. These days I find myself straying from using demihumans as I think it tends to deminish the allure of these beings. For me, creatures like elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc should be mysterious and beyond human ken. An encounter with these beings should be ansomething, well fantastic. In my worlds, demihumans, their culture, and their very mindset is abstruse
to the human mind. Think about it, in the real world, we humans can barely comprehend the mindset of someone with a different political affiliation, let alone someone from another culture. Now imagine encountering beings with not only a different culture, a different appearance, a different lifespan, a different metabolism, a different way of viewing the world (perhaps more than just metaphorically - they may quite literally physically view it differently). Playing these beings as haughty humans with pointy ears and a love of the great outdoors, or short and stout men with a predeliction for avarice and a thirst for ale really just doesn't cut it with me. So to solve that, I'm taking away the availability as a starting race. Some folks don't like that method and that's OK. But think about the way these demihumans are in your worlds. Why wouldn't elves and dwarves have shrigged off human incursions to become the dominant beings on their worlds?
I think this is probably the best approach to have "alien" demihumans. Now, a case could be made that demihumans would be pretty darn human-like in psychology given their close resemblance to humans in a variety of ways, however, the extreme longevity and (at least in the case of dwarves) fairly different environments would produce some unusual quirks to say the least.
ReplyDeleteHey, at least you're on there. I have 32 followers, and I still don't rate a slot.
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