Humans in RPG's - a paradox

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What I find, sadly, is that most GM's just play non-humans as humans with rubber prosthetics.

As a side note, I play into this with the Majestic Wilderlands. The only nominally alien race are the elves. All the other mortal type races (dwarves, halflings, lizardmen, centaurs, etc) are created from human stock by the demons during the brief age they ruled the earth at the dawn of time. This includes animal-human chimeras.

I develop this idea and put some thought into what the mutations were and how they effected the pysche of the individuals who are of these races.

For example the Orcs are also magically mutated human who not only had their physical makeup altered but also had their baseline psychology shift to make them a better servitor race for the demons. The mildest orcs would be considered to be pushy, rude, and bad tempered by the average person. The average orc are downright abusive and their extreme on the other end would be considered sadistic by human standard. The main reason they can hold together as a culture is that their submission to dominant leaders has been also rest to an extreme by the demons. So orcs can rise to be chief or king and still keep society going even though it would be consider brutal by human standard.

The "races like halflings, dwarves, gnomes, etc that are part of the traditional alliance with human and elves are that way because they were the first transformed by the demon and only their physical characteristics were altered. That didn't work out as well as the demons hoped so they started on animal-human chimeras, psychological manipulation, and some very extreme manipulations like the dopplegangers.

Elves
Basically a cousin race to humans so not totally alien. But their immortality dominates their psychology and cultures making it very different than baseline humans. I took a page from Tolkien's conception of his elves in that, elves don't ever die. Sure you can "kill" an elf, their body collapses, and their spirit leaves. But after a period of time (decades, centuries, or millenia) the spirit will be reborn into a new body. Basically the world of the Majestic Wilderlands acts as a soul jar for the elven race.
 
Well if you like that, I also did something similar for a science fiction setting I been working. So it is a trope among various science fiction setting that there are dozens of inhabitable worlds along with aliens races relatable to humans.

So rather than fight this, I embraced but in a way consistent with a harder sci-fi background.

Humanity expanded to the stars only to find ... Earth. For hundreds of light years in all direction dozens of world have been terraformed to earth like conditions and have earth based ecologies. But not Earth of modern times, but rather Earth of 65 million years ago. The consensus that 65 million years ago, shortly before the asteroid strike that brought the Mesozoic Era to a close, a technological civilization of dinosaurians arose on Earth, expanded to the stars and terraformed every place they reached.

On some world the descendents of the dinosaurs still roam. On other worlds, they also went extinct and other orders like mammals, became the dominant species. More than a few worlds the terraforming didn't take and returned to their former condition leaving only ruins, husks, and bones of what once lived there. One a handful of worlds, the dominant specie achieve sentience. Two of them reached space, one a dinosaurian civilization, not the ancients, a century ahead of Earth, and the other a mammalian species, a century behind.

Sometimes with the right inspiration it is possible to take the more cheesy tropes and turn them into something more solid with the right tweak. The Third Imperium did this with an Ancient race plucking humans from Earth of 300,000 years ago and planting them throughout the local area of the galaxy.
 
Well if you like that, I also did something similar for a science fiction setting I been working. So it is a trope among various science fiction setting that there are dozens of inhabitable worlds along with aliens races relatable to humans.

So rather than fight this, I embraced but in a way consistent with a harder sci-fi background.

Humanity expanded to the stars only to find ... Earth. For hundreds of light years in all direction dozens of world have been terraformed to earth like conditions and have earth based ecologies. But not Earth of modern times, but rather Earth of 65 million years ago. The consensus that 65 million years ago, shortly before the asteroid strike that brought the Mesozoic Era to a close, a technological civilization of dinosaurians arose on Earth, expanded to the stars and terraformed every place they reached.

You're right: this IS highly entertaining. But that's often what "cool!" is--taking a trope and pushing it to its logical, consistent extreme. Kinda like the Tippyverse setting theory.

In the same fantasy setting I referenced last post, the GM defined a precursor race of "Men" who built and mastered planar gates as the foundation for their civilization and technology... both a form of transport and energy sources.

Imagine the effect of harpooning another 4th+ -dimensional "sphere" and dragging it into physical contact with your own; the forces involved were immense and resulted in the gate materials being virtually indestructible, the tapping of a gate a source of incredible magical energy, and the transgression of a gate (e.g. passing part of one gate through another) an enormous, glass-crater-producing fireball....

Note as well per this thread that the plotline relied on precursor men (also responsible for creating dragons), immigration of intermediate other races, and then the eventual arrival of "mundane man" who were handled with kid gloves thanks to their apparent similarities with the precursors. So there was a solid anthropological grounding for how other races would be understood physically and culturally.

--Khanwulf
 
Kinda like the Tippyverse setting theory.

A side note on the tippyverse idea. I talked about this before but I think it bears repeating. Sometime a supernatural element like magic or super powers will have some serious implications for a setting. What many forget that the implications don't happen at once. There is a lag time between when it was first used or discovered to when it fully exploited.

It could be debated how long that is for specific ideas like Vancian Magic or comic book style super powers. But there is a time period and there is no reason why a campaign can't be set during this time period or why a rule book can be focused on this time period.
 
I have designed two SF games without Humans. One is a game where the Silmarillion is the Holy Book, and the past history is explained in terms of the Silmarillion. The successor species, under the leadership of the Temple, have been mining the lost technology of the Eldar - rescuing it from advancing glaciers on the Eldar's world - who left them long long ago to go somewhere, and have just recently left their stellar system and are dealing with the peoples of another system. There are a species called Humans in the game, but who have long prehensile tails and nictitating eye membranes, and they live in trees, so they are obviously mistaken! The other is set in the far, far FAR future, like Dune, and every species is successor species to humans, but none of them are provably so, and all of them think of themselves as the true Humans, while the others are some odd side-branches.
 
I completely agree. I almost always play "human" in most games - for the exact opposite reason. I want to, hopefully, experience the setting's assumptions about non-humans through the eyes of whatever human character I'm playing. It's like the thrill of discovery, rather than me butting heads with the GM on what they think Elves or Dwarves are supposed to be vs. my own PC concept. What I find, sadly, is that most GM's just play non-humans as humans with rubber prosthetics.

This is where all the typical D&D-style fantasy tropes have emerged, quite different from their mythological and literary roots.

Some things that this thread is *really* indicating to me is the importance of hitting the sweet spot between narrative assumptions and mechanical realities. Which brings me to the question of "assumed" social mechanics-as-balance (which I'm going to make another thread for).
I think the issue;
For the 'humans' of the setting those non-humans are normal to them. The 'alien' issues is from Peter, Paul, Mary, John, and Bubba sitting around the gaming table. It's as CRK likes to say purely OOC tripe. Paul is really, really trying to get the other players to 'see' the alien nature of of his Spurkletinklesaur Flingker-User. There is no 'alien'-ness.
 
To be honest, I'm one of those rare younger D&D players who actually prefers playing as a Human.

When I do play a non-human, it's usually either Half-Elf or Elf.
 
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