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Aug. 15th, 2012 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI'm in a new D&D campaign that grew out of the old one. I've written a few times about my Dwarven bard, Kelin Rolfsson. The DM advanced the timeline five years, made us start new characters, and has been telling a story about how the world has changed, in part because of decisions our old party made.
The world of the last campaign had been a world of racial and economic tensions, a world of dangerous creatures and great unknown (but not uninhabited) vistas to explore, mysterious cultures to try to develop trade relationships and friendships with. But it was a world, essentially, at peace.
But some of my last party's actions had exploded the tenuous coexistence of the gnomes and the dwarves, leading to an all-out war of conquest by the gnomes and the war-forged battle engines they created. At present, led by their mighty war-forged and supported by their dwarven mine slaves, the gnomes are the most powerful race on the continent and are pushing for even greater conquest. The last dwarven kingdom is in exile. Human nations straddle free territory and occupied territory, and those free human nations that remain are forced to tread carefully or risk losing their access to metal and other goods they need. The elves find their commitment to isolationism in their forest fortresses tested by the new world order. It's really neat to see how the world has changed, and the feeling of 'continent at war' gives the whole adventure a powerfully grim feeling.
My new party is a small group of disaffected adventurers who longs for a return to the old balance of power. My comrades are a human thief escaped from gnomish occupied territory, a human druid cut off from his family when the elves of the Reach threw up their defensive posture, and probably a human cleric when our fourth player is finally available to play. I'm playing a half-orc paladin of Bahamut, Murook of Clan Torm from the swamps where small groups of swamp dwarves, humans, and half-orcs have for centuries managed to coexist despite widely different cultures.
I've given a lot of thought to how half-orc culture looks in this world, because orcishness is hugely racially fraught in D&D and I didn't want to just stumble around through that quagmire. I decided to reject completely the idea that half-orcs are the offspring of orcish hordes raping human women. I don't want to be anywhere near that. My half-orcs are an entirely separate species, not able to breed fruitfully with humans or orcs. They look like a cross between humans and orcs in their physical features, and presumably all three along with elves and dwarves and gnomes had a common proto-humanoid ancestor.
Culturally, half-orcs are beings of hybrid identity. They are a small population and they almost always live in communities that are mixed-race, like Murook's swamp habitat, so they tend to absorb memes from all of the surrounding cultures. There are ideals from human, dwarven, and orc culture that find their way, in some remixed form, into half-orc society. There is, for example, a tendency in half-orc culture to aspire to the [Rousseauian] primitivism of orc society as a pastoral ideal, and therefore Murook and his clan have forsworn the use of steel, and are suspicious of overly complicated technology. Murook's weapons are made of an alchemically hardened bone, and if he uses steel he mortifies himself with self-inflicted wounds as an atonement for the failure of his discipline. Contrariwise human ideas about hierarchy and leadership and social structure inform half-orc clan structure far more than orcish ideas.
All of these ideas are things I've put together in conversation with the DM, and I've really enjoyed the world building. On the other hand, my party had a long argument last night surrounding the fact that philosophically, one of the other players doesn't like world building as a player- he prefers to step into a world that the DM has created and explore it, and finds the idea of the players collaborating with the DM on world building as we go a little frustrating and alien. I think I mentioned before that we call the campaign world "Poof" because when we're improv-ing and telling stories, if we like something we make up we say "Poof" and with DM approval the detail becomes part of the world building. We ended up with swamp dwarves because one of the other players was riffing on dwarf culture and we decided we liked the detail he'd embellished.
I love playing in a campaign like this. I love the mixture of discovering storylines planted by the DM and inventing stories of our own. But I recognize the other player's preference as valid and wonder if we can participate in a campaign that's deferential to both play styles.
Weirdly, my greatest frustration with the campaign is the lack of random encounters. This is a DM preference- he prefers encounters that have some design backstopping them, he says. If he wants there to be something eventful on a trip, he will add it. In last night's session we took a 6 week journey toward elven territory that went entirely uneventfully, and just passed with a moment's mention, and that was frustrating to me because it felt like a 6 week journey is a great opportunity to discover the world and the creatures that are in it. Just having a single random encounter on the way would have made the journey a lot more memorable. I think the fear is that it can turn the game into an XP grind at a sacrifice of story.
The world of the last campaign had been a world of racial and economic tensions, a world of dangerous creatures and great unknown (but not uninhabited) vistas to explore, mysterious cultures to try to develop trade relationships and friendships with. But it was a world, essentially, at peace.
But some of my last party's actions had exploded the tenuous coexistence of the gnomes and the dwarves, leading to an all-out war of conquest by the gnomes and the war-forged battle engines they created. At present, led by their mighty war-forged and supported by their dwarven mine slaves, the gnomes are the most powerful race on the continent and are pushing for even greater conquest. The last dwarven kingdom is in exile. Human nations straddle free territory and occupied territory, and those free human nations that remain are forced to tread carefully or risk losing their access to metal and other goods they need. The elves find their commitment to isolationism in their forest fortresses tested by the new world order. It's really neat to see how the world has changed, and the feeling of 'continent at war' gives the whole adventure a powerfully grim feeling.
My new party is a small group of disaffected adventurers who longs for a return to the old balance of power. My comrades are a human thief escaped from gnomish occupied territory, a human druid cut off from his family when the elves of the Reach threw up their defensive posture, and probably a human cleric when our fourth player is finally available to play. I'm playing a half-orc paladin of Bahamut, Murook of Clan Torm from the swamps where small groups of swamp dwarves, humans, and half-orcs have for centuries managed to coexist despite widely different cultures.
I've given a lot of thought to how half-orc culture looks in this world, because orcishness is hugely racially fraught in D&D and I didn't want to just stumble around through that quagmire. I decided to reject completely the idea that half-orcs are the offspring of orcish hordes raping human women. I don't want to be anywhere near that. My half-orcs are an entirely separate species, not able to breed fruitfully with humans or orcs. They look like a cross between humans and orcs in their physical features, and presumably all three along with elves and dwarves and gnomes had a common proto-humanoid ancestor.
Culturally, half-orcs are beings of hybrid identity. They are a small population and they almost always live in communities that are mixed-race, like Murook's swamp habitat, so they tend to absorb memes from all of the surrounding cultures. There are ideals from human, dwarven, and orc culture that find their way, in some remixed form, into half-orc society. There is, for example, a tendency in half-orc culture to aspire to the [Rousseauian] primitivism of orc society as a pastoral ideal, and therefore Murook and his clan have forsworn the use of steel, and are suspicious of overly complicated technology. Murook's weapons are made of an alchemically hardened bone, and if he uses steel he mortifies himself with self-inflicted wounds as an atonement for the failure of his discipline. Contrariwise human ideas about hierarchy and leadership and social structure inform half-orc clan structure far more than orcish ideas.
All of these ideas are things I've put together in conversation with the DM, and I've really enjoyed the world building. On the other hand, my party had a long argument last night surrounding the fact that philosophically, one of the other players doesn't like world building as a player- he prefers to step into a world that the DM has created and explore it, and finds the idea of the players collaborating with the DM on world building as we go a little frustrating and alien. I think I mentioned before that we call the campaign world "Poof" because when we're improv-ing and telling stories, if we like something we make up we say "Poof" and with DM approval the detail becomes part of the world building. We ended up with swamp dwarves because one of the other players was riffing on dwarf culture and we decided we liked the detail he'd embellished.
I love playing in a campaign like this. I love the mixture of discovering storylines planted by the DM and inventing stories of our own. But I recognize the other player's preference as valid and wonder if we can participate in a campaign that's deferential to both play styles.
Weirdly, my greatest frustration with the campaign is the lack of random encounters. This is a DM preference- he prefers encounters that have some design backstopping them, he says. If he wants there to be something eventful on a trip, he will add it. In last night's session we took a 6 week journey toward elven territory that went entirely uneventfully, and just passed with a moment's mention, and that was frustrating to me because it felt like a 6 week journey is a great opportunity to discover the world and the creatures that are in it. Just having a single random encounter on the way would have made the journey a lot more memorable. I think the fear is that it can turn the game into an XP grind at a sacrifice of story.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-15 05:31 pm (UTC)On the rare occasion that I've run games, I usually eschew random encounters rolled from a table for long trips, but I do try to have stuff HAPPEN on long trips. Like what if your characters stop at an inn along the way, a roadside waystation? It can be simple as stopping there and chatting up a caravan and discovering that the chowder here really IS that bad. Or you encounter other travelers, or maybe a couple bandits jump you. It doesn't have to be rolled on the table (where you get some bizarre artifacts like a Gelatinous Cube appearing out of nowhere) but it feels like a real road trip. Six weeks, man! That's a month and a half, you should have an epic stupid road trip journey where you unexpectedly encounter the world's largest yarnball!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-15 06:22 pm (UTC)The region I'm designing for a game I'm running next month, I'm creating a couple of different random encounter tables for different sub-regions to avoid the Gelatinous Cube problem. If the encounter comes in the forest, they'll face one of the designated forest menaces. If it's by the mountains, it'll be a mountain monster.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-15 06:30 pm (UTC)