Continuing my extrapolation and twisting of original material to create a new chassis to run old school modules I'm jotting down some notes about so-called "demi"-humans.
This was originally meant to be part of the "alignment" post. Likewise my post about elves (forthcoming) was supposed to go on the end of this one, but I started to ramble...
Previous posts in this series:
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Image courtesy The Internet
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DEMI-HUMANS
What is a Demi-Human?
Dungeons & Dragons has always
taken a Tolkien-esque approach to "demi-humans" and "humanoids":
dwarves [sic] and elves are treated as "races" rather than the magical
spirits that appear in our myths and folklore. This treatment is
extended to orcs, goblins, gnomes etc. The clue is in the terminology
used: they are human-like or human derived, or variations (or
corruptions) of humans.
Folding that back on
itself, what if they became "in world" what they are outside the
fiction: projections of human ideals? These are spirits rendered flesh:
they exist because of our stories and folklore, and our belief in tales
of ancient kingdoms in forgotten mountains or slender gender-fluid
aliens materialising in dark forests.
They do not have economies and cultures and taxonomies, they are archetypes.
Demi-Humans and Alignment
When I first started to think about alignment again, may brain did this:
- Law vs Chaos
- Clerics vs Magic-Users
- Dwarfs vs Elves
As with other binary pairs, there are (multiple and interesting) exceptions, but I like this set up as a foundation.
