Fantasy settings that are improved by removing the humans

[OgreBattle]

I enjoyed Dragon Lance's ogres, dragons, elves, and dwarves (even the gully ones), but when I thought about the parts I disliked it was mainly when those races interact with the human groups.

With Faerun I've enjoyed the Dark Elf Trilogy and other Drizzt adventures, the war between the elves that sundered them, but I'm not really invested in the human characters.

There's also the tendency to make humans the 'blank slate' race that just happens to be found in every corner of the world, doing everything. The dwarves, elves, and orcs tend to have more specifically fleshed out civilizations in specific parts of the world.

Have any of you run a D&D (or similar game) where there's no humans? If so how'd it go.

[PhoneLobster]

One setting/game, unfortunately didn't get off the ground due to issues such as people having babies and otherwise dropping off the face of the earth for several years.

In the setting the ancient civilization was human. You know the one, the one with all the ruins and the magical super technology that leaves all the crazy artefacts behind. That one.

All the elves and other stuff are things the humans created to serve them in some way, or escaped experiments, or the mutant things that evolved in the (magically) radioactive ruins of the (magical) post apocalypse when the Humans and all their wizards wot did it destroyed themselves using kiloton Hubris bombs on each other and by in general not sufficiently avoiding playing god.

And so civilization has largely re-emerged, though not become as magically advanced, and there aren't any humans, it's all things like bullshit flavors of elf, an angry mermaid empire, some highly civilized yetis and weird pig dwarf mutants, and [insert stupid player created race here]. And the players inserted some weird races appropriately.

The plot line being largely "various fun and games surrounding the re-emergence of new large empires".

But as a side thing, one of the few "older" and smaller empires on the edge of the world was the legendary "Human Empire" that rumors suggested was called that what with it still having humans and all. But it was super secretive and only ever really seemed to involve interaction with warrior golem things and heavily armoured (and masked) "wizards", and there was much speculation from vampire elves and hawkmen and such about what humans looked like under the masks, how many limbs they have, and if there even ARE humans behind all the golems and disguises, or if it was a bunch of pretentious posturing from "just another" mutant non-human "new" people like themselves.

The big reveal was supposed to be that it was called "The Human Empire" because it was... the empire where "The Human" lives.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I've done such a thing a few times, and it's worked out pretty well. My favorite was one where the PCs considered themselves human, but discovered that everyone else called their people Ogres.

[Blade]

I've played in a setting, I think it was a homebrew/indie but I'm not sure, where humans was the warlike race. They were no more versatile than any other race (IIRC in game terms they were a kind of warrior race), but felt like they were and stereotyped all other races.

[deaddmwalking]

Most players find they have an inherent ability to empathize with humans, since most players are one. It requires less imagination to pretend to be a human in a fantasy world than it does to be an elf. But the 'demi-human' races are just rubber-forehead humans; they're also markedly easier to pretend to be, than, say, an Aboleth.

My experience with human cultures in D&D-land seems to be the opposite of yours. While all elves are 'x' and all dwarves are 'y', some humans are barbaric hunter-gatherers, while others live in desert cities and those are culturally distinct from the 'orient-pastiche' characters. Since human cultures in D&D-land often resemble real cultures in our world, they tend to have more variety - at least, culturally. You stick a descriptor in front of an existing race (say, sand dwarf) and people treat them just like any other dwarf, fake Scottish brogue and all - if you want to make them culturally distinct, you end up calling them something completely different.

I don't think I'd find any setting 'improved' by the removal of humans, but I would agree that having major parts of the setting where humans aren't 'dominant' would likely be an improvement.

[Cynic]

If you had a setting where humans never existed, what would you have to modify for that to happen? On the one hand, I see that the question poses a sort of hubris that the world would change without humans when there are a whole bunch of other intelligent races around. But on the other hand, I feel like there's an argument to be made that the absence of any of the intelligent races would cause the removal of something from the setting.

[maglag]

Megaman series are technically sci-fi, but they basically work like a fantasy setting, and over the different titles they've actually created a storyline where all humans are progressively replaced by robots and cyborgs until they become extinct. Not because the robots/cyborgs wiped them out (although some tried several times), but simply because humans were all "Wow, why should we keep those puny flesh bodies when we could get armcannons and built-in plasma sabers and rocket feet and shit, sign me up for mechanization!". The last "pure" human actually commits suicide out of boredom, leaving a planet fully populated by robots and cyborgs.

[silva]

Yep, but sci-fi has a traditional justification for this in transhumanism and self-improvement etc. that do not exist in fantasy.

[hyzmarca]

The basic fantasy races are just humans with hats.

Dwarves are short humans who like money and live underground.

Elves are short or tall humans who live a long time.

Orcs are ugly humans.

Gnomes are short humans with advanced technology.

Getting rid of baseline humans changes nothing, since all the humanoid/demihuman/monsterous humanoid races are basically humans with hats.

Now, it becomes interesting if you get rid of all the humanoid races altogether, and just have shit like dragons and giant talking spiders.

[maglag]

Yep, but sci-fi has a traditional justification for this in transhumanism and self-improvement etc. that do not exist in fantasy.

Lichdom.

Meditate until you Nirvana into a deva.

Twilight style vampires.

Eating golden apples/celestial peaches into godhood.

Hermit alchemy for immortality.

Heck, plain leveling up will turn a normal human into a super powerful entity.


"Transhumanism" has always been around in fantasy.

[silva]

You have a point. I stand corrected.

[Maxus]

Dragonmech was supposed to have dwarves be the dominant cultural/political/power force, but it pretty quickly went away from that with having the humans be #2 and the elves being the sort you don't mess with if you're not ready for a nasty fight that you might lose.

And then a lot of setting-specific stuff kept on being geared toward humans.

So yeah, that experiment didn't work very well.

[PhoneLobster]

Getting rid of baseline humans changes nothing, since all the humanoid/demihuman/monsterous humanoid races are basically humans with hats.

And that's why you totally can do it if you want to.

And as an aside actual "no hat" humans, as an actual potential PC race, even once (actual) hats are added for cultural flavor or something, remain routinely unpopular with pretty much every group of players I ever run for.

But stick some pointy ears on that shit and it's good to go. Apparently.

[Omegonthesane]

Getting rid of baseline humans changes nothing, since all the humanoid/demihuman/monsterous humanoid races are basically humans with hats.

And that's why you totally can do it if you want to.

And as an aside actual "no hat" humans, as an actual potential PC race, even once (actual) hats are added for cultural flavor or something, remain routinely unpopular with pretty much every group of players I ever run for.

But stick some pointy ears on that shit and it's good to go. Apparently.

Must just be your group - I tend to gravitate towards the most "no-hat" race I can find simply because, as I think I explained in an earlier post, it means the character's conceptual space goes entirely on what they do with none of it spent on what kind of cryptid they are.

[ckafrica]

Adrian Tchaikosky's shadow of the apt series does a good job of all races recognizable has human but have all have adopted insect-like traits. If that is a novelization of some guys TTRPG sessions, I don't know what is.

[erik]

I don't feel the need to remove humans, just provide races that aren't just different hats/ethnic stereotypes of humans.

Battle stations has a good spread of races at least with significant physical differences. Not a lot is said about cultures in the core book but that's fine for the type of game.
http://battlestations.info/aliens.html

[PhoneLobster]

If this is drifting more towards general race/culture mechanics and critiques of common deficiencies...

...then yeah sure, it's nice to do more than just "forehead alien" elves and dwarves who just as easily could be a mere human ethnicity.

But... just because that is an unimaginative stereotype doesn't automatically make everything about it bad all the time. Putting together the one off setting with "and every option on the race culture list other than human is entirely non-humanoid" is all very well and good. But you shouldn't do that with every setting every time and you shouldn't feel like it is a goal that you need to pursue with any single given setting for no reason.

Now the mechanical division between biology and culture and the issues that raises (especially with the crude traditional combination of those thing) can be something you might want to broadly address for multiple settings right in your core mechanics pretty much every time. The same with the issues surrounding racial stereotypes and individual variation. But neither of those mean it's necessarily bad for an end point culture/race in the setting to be "just some guys with pointy ears and a slightly different culture".

And PS, yes I entirely understand the personal preference to play Human characters, I have that preference myself, but pretty much every group of OTHER players I have ever run for is almost uniformly and 100% "anything but a human" in their preferences... and yet probably about half or more of them would balk if the only non-human choices were non-humanoid beetles and stuff.

[silva]

Ironically, games portraying different races tend to make them just humans with different hats, while games portraying different human cultures tend to make them much more alien/meaningfully different from each other.

Go figure.

[PhoneLobster]

Go figure.

As usual you are wrong, your "observation" is shallow, barely relevant, and it doesn't stand up to about two seconds of scrutiny.

2 seconds of scrutiny and reply you, as an ongoing waste of text, do NOT deserve?

"Drow"/"Wood Elves"/"Subterranean Dwarves" vs "Mildly Racist Human Only Arabian Nights Knock Off Culture Number 30".

Lack of creativity, adherence to "traditional" fantasy stereotypes, and complaints about fake Spock ears on pretty much human bodies does not make the standard boring "humanoid" cultures we traditionally see less "alien" (to fuck knows what context) than the standard boring "human" cultures we traditionally see.

[silva]

Well PhoneLobster, thats just a pattern Ive noticed in games Ive read or played.

Dont neet to get pissed off because of that, man. Go fuck your waifu or something and relax.

[violence in the media]

So, in our world, we have one D&D "race" and a bunch of different cultures. Is the problem with fantasy race cultures that humans are allowed to have different cultures, but dwarves found in Central Asia and South America are just assumed to have very similar cultural traits? If our world had somehow evolved elves and dwarves alongside humans, and they weren't rendered extinct by war or interbreeding, what would the cultural development look like?

Would we expect each of the race groups to have distinct cultures despite geographic proximity? e.g. Elves are from Athens, Dwarves are from Sparta, and the Humans in the region are from Crete?

That still makes them all generally Greek though, so maybe we would we expect cultures to develop independent of the racial demographics that compose them? e.g. Athens is Athens, it just happens that some of the tribes in it are elves, some are dwarves, and some are humans. Same goes with Sparta, Cydonia, all the other city-states, and out into the rest of the world?

In either case, where would someone's race fit into their concept of identity? If a person from our world might think of themselves as an American in relation to a European and as an Iowan in relation to a Texan--where would the designation of elf or dwarf fit into that hierarchy? Would we expect our hypothetical dwarf American to feel more inherent kinship to an elf American, or to a dwarf European? What level of societal development would be necessary for some individuals to identify as Roman or French before they identified as Elven? What would various ethnic enclaves be like? Would dwarf Chinatown be a different thing from elf Chinatown? Would Elf, Dwarf, and Human be a higher- or lower-level designation to White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander?

[PhoneLobster]

Is the problem with fantasy race cultures that humans are allowed to have different cultures, but dwarves found in Central Asia and South America are just assumed to have very similar cultural traits?

Yes. But in practice D&D style games often typically just make a NEW dwarf race/sub race for asia and another one for south america. But then THAT is still a problem.

Tying biological race with culture as a single option will always be a problem, but it is also one that has for some reason continued to be deeply embedded in D&D and most of it's clones.

It isn't entirely hard to remove that unfortunate association, my own homebrew rules set does it no problem. But the changes required compared to say, the way 3.x D&D does it, are kinda major foundations to the rules so it's quiet no so easily "patched" on.

What would the cultural development look like?

Who knows. But if you had some structure in your rules supporting the separation of biological options and cultural options then dwarf china town CAN be either the same as human china town, but there are also dwarfs there OR the Chinese culture can have separate sub cultures for the different biological ethnicities/species whatever they are, and sometimes the Chinese Dwarf subculture raises a Chinese Human or an Australian Elf and they get the cultural traits from the Chinese Dwarf Subculture and no one cares.

IF you lay the foundations for separation of biology and culture it adds plenty of potential diversity (and much less potentially insulting racial stereotype issues) that you can work with from there out.

SIMILARLY... RPGs, at a foundational level really also need to differentiate between biological/cultural stereotypes and biological AND cultural oddities/outliers/individuals.

PCs and major NPCs totally can and should be allowed to be special snowflakes at least compared to their shallow ethnic stereotypes. Orcs are biologicall strong and culturally pushed to brutish ignorance? Who cares tricksy bob the orc was born a weakling runt and his life as an outsider made him cunning and prepared him for the intellectually challenging role as a necromancer or something.

A differentiation between the broader stereotype and a more free selection of biological and cultural options for individuals that STILL get to put "Orc from Orc Land" on their sheets is another very significant improvement, with countless good implications ranging from greater support of interesting diverse character fluff, to flat out removal of needless mechanical class/race synergy limitations just because you dared to write "Wizard" next to "Orc".

D&D style table top RPGs should REALLY roll both separation of biology/cultural options and freedom to break those stereotypes for individuals into all modern projects. They won't, because blah blah legacy (translated mostly to can't be assed), but yeah, they SHOULD.

[silva]

Just to complement my previous point, most "fantasy races" Ive come across, be it on tabletop games, videogames or other medium, are represented in pretty shallow and/or very stereotypical ways - orcs are ugly brutish humans, elfs are pretty-faced tree-living humans, dwarves are stocky bearded stubborn humans, etc. While most works I see that present different factions/collective entities through variant cultures tend to make the distinction much more in-depth and meaningful. Examples of this: Sid Meier Alpha Centauri vs Age of Wonders, Glorantha vs D&D settings, Shadowrun vs D&D settings, etc.

TL;DR: when the differences between collective entities in the setting is organized on a cultural basis, it tends to be much more meaningful and in-depth, than when they are organized on a fantastic racial basis.

This shallowness dont seem to be present in the sci-fi genre, though. Perhaps due to sci-fi bigger worry about anthropology and sociology ?

So, in our world, we have one D&D "race" and a bunch of different cultures. Is the problem with fantasy race cultures that humans are allowed to have different cultures, but dwarves found in Central Asia and South America are just assumed to have very similar cultural traits? If our world had somehow evolved elves and dwarves alongside humans, and they weren't rendered extinct by war or interbreeding, what would the cultural development look like?

I like Shadowrun answer to this question. It treats the fantasy metatypes more or less like ethnic types we have today. Thus, the cultural borders would keep more or less like it is today, a product of a complex equation where ethnics factors in, but is just one variable among many.

[deaddmwalking]

When we talk about a real-world culture, we already have some exposure to it. If I talk about Liberia or Georgia (country), you might know very little about it, but you probably have some sense of what that means.

When I start talking about a fantasy culture, the only way to know anything about the Argonians versus the Mariemors is to start reading about what they represent. And if the culture even begins to approximate the complexity of a real culture, there's a lot of stuff to cover.

It's not that fantasy dwarves from different regions can't have distinct cultures, but it's still helpful to have a shortcut. When you say 'like standard dwarves, but with bushido', that probably communicates a fair bit about their culture based on assumptions people bring to the table that is a lot easier than explaining the culture in detail.

Since ideally you won't have to ready thousands of words just to decide on which race/culture you're interested in, it's easier to make a number of 'default' options that work the same way across multiple settings. But it's also good to develop cultures that are different from these defaults, probably with different languages. Just as most of us can't communicate effectively in Mandarin Chinese despite being human, there's really no reason that dwarves should be able to communicate with each other if they've been separated by geography for thousands of years - unless they had a well-developed language/culture with writing before they separated - but even then they'd have developed different words and expressions for new technologies and ideas.

Often understanding the nuance between the elves from the Northern forest and the Southern forest isn't worth the table-time and/or page count to meaningfully explore it. So you say 'elf' and when you have one from the North and one from the South, they can start claiming cultural practices 'in character'.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Have any of you run a D&D (or similar game) where there's no humans? If so how'd it go.

There's an RPG on steam called Breath of Death VII where humans have died out and society was rebuilt by the undead. That was kind of fun.

I think I saw somebody recruiting for a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon inspired play-by-post a couple years ago. Didn't see any reason it couldn't have worked.