a linguistic anthropology of fantasy folk

The nice thing about fantasy races is that they give character creation choices with a good degree of granularity and comprehensibility and are a neat way to pull folkloric material into your game. The bad thing about them is that they mean that race science (that is, the false belief that races as understood by society correspond to biologically distinct types of human beings) is true in your fantasy world.

Honestly, the bad part is bad enough to completely sink the goodness of the good part.

This is another in my ongoing struggle to formulate different fantasy folk in a way that isn't race science, but emphasizing the ways that real people saw themselves and others, particularly before the race-scientific idea became prominent in the modern era.

The problem with making things nuanced is that also makes them complicated; race science is conceptually pretty straightforward, which makes it very game-able. Trying to embed fantasy folk in a realistically nuanced web of relationships with each other also buries the conceptual clarity of a player looking at the list of options and saying, "I'm going to play an elf, that means I live in the woods and don't particularly like dwarfs." One runs the risk of overloading the player with world-building, particularly if one chooses to foreground linguistic groups which are among the more salient in-universe distinctions between peoples.

I'm far from a solution to this, but my current idea is to use somewhat-transparent names for languages (or groups of languages) wherever possible, and doing as little "hard" worldbuilding as possible to keep things relatively setting-neutral, while still keeping things complex enough to stop collapsing into the fail state of race science. It's a tall order, let's see how I do.

When making a character, you must choose a people for them to belong to (or at least stem from). A people is defined by a language, a way of life and an alignment, all of which affect how they see themselves and the world.

To make this your own, you only have to identify the peoples in your setting, their languages, ways of life and alignments. You may choose to give every people a distinct ethnonym; I'm not doing this so as not to overload a player with unfamiliar names. Instead, I'm going to organize peoples by language family, grouping setting languages together into four groups (middling, rhuno-buggish, sylvene and foreigner), the first three of which correspond to actual language families. Each family contains a number of peoples with different ways of life and dramatically different outlooks on the world and their place in it.

alignments and way of life

Characters have to come from peoples, and those peoples have ways of life. Where is home for your people, and how do they see themselves?

• The boats or carts you travel from place to place, plying your trades and peddling your wares. Alignment: civil.
• Grand cities rising from the plain or shore. Alignment: civil.
• Ancient holds cut into the deep earth. Alignment: goodwright.
• Rough warrens in the clefts of hillsides. Alignment: goodwright.
• Sound houses of timber or stone. Alignment: civil.
• Beneath the open sky. Alignment: free.
• Under canopy of thick woods. Alignment: moonfolk.

Alignment describes how a people sees themselves and how they divide up the rest of the world. Some see themselves as worldly and do not share the alignment of their folk. Even those who share an alignment do not necessarily like each other or agree about where one another fit into the order of things.

Civil

A civilized fellow knows that without the nameless gods of heaven to teach mortals the arts of civilization, we would be naked heathens all. Elders who still name the gods of the earth may know no better, but the barbarian who call on demons from behind the sky and beneath the sea. A heaven-fearing fellow knows a 'worldly' one for what they really are: a scoffer not to be trusted.

Civil folk all see the peoples of cities and houses as civil (though they may war with one another just the same), woods-dwellers as elders and nomads under the open sky as barbarians. However, they differ on a few points:

• Boat and cart-folk have a dread of the barbarians of the deep earth but call the herders and traders of the hillsides elders.
• City people consider the half-settled lives of boats and carts or hillsides to be fit only for scoffers, but consider deep earth-delvers old-fashioned elders.
• Dwellers in stout houses see travelers by boat and cart and miners in deep earth both as elders, and raiders from the hillsides as barbarians.

Free

Freedom is especially treasured by those who live under the open sky, viewing the labors of settled peoples as a kind of thralldom. They honor their beloved dead and all the spirits of the air and earth that touch their lives, chanting their names and deeds for later generations. The 'worldly' fellow who scorns these gods is a lonesome one, a tiny fellow adrift without ancestor to guide their feet or shelter them from the cruel winds.

Those of cities, the deep earth and houses are seen as thralls, while those who range in boats and carts, from the hillsides, or in the deep woods are seen as half-thralls. A free neck does not bend to the yoke of a thrall, and a warrior certainly does not fear one.

Goodwright

Goodwrights have learned the secrets of craft from the earth itself. They celebrate the good earth with the work of skilled hands. Though a goodwright will take spoil from war, they detest nothing as much as a thief. And what is a 'worldly' creature who pays no mind to their mother earth but a thief of her gifts?

All outsiders are seen with a measure of suspicion, but wrights of the deep earth and of the hillsides revile one another as thieves nearly without exception. Hillside wrights will treat with most other outsiders, but those of the deep earth consider the folk of boats and carts or the woods as thieves as bad as hated hill-wrights.

Moonfolk

The day is for the sun, the night for the stars, but the moon wanders through day and night in its turnings. Moonfolk chase the balance of the moon, honoring the earth in all its seasons. Moonfolk cultivate the woods around them with a gardener's care and live from the game and fruits thereof.

The enemies of the moonfolk are the nightfolk who harry them from the deep earth and open sky, while city and house dwellers are dayfolk and useful allies against the nightfolk when they can be roused to it. Those of boats and carts or hillsides or 'worldly' folks who think themselves wiser than everyone are smallfolk and not worth serious consideration.

Worldly

The worldly are not many, and they are called lonesome, scoffer, smallfolk, thief or worse where they go. Nevertheless, a worldly fellow hates to suffer fools and sees no reason to give up the better parts of life to distant gods. They can't abide the small-mindedness of boat and cart travelers, the cruelty and hypocrisy of the cities, the incurious provincialism of the deep earth, the baseless boasting of hillside folk, the credulous superstition of house holders and open sky nomads both or the sanctimonious mysticism of the woods.

factoring ad&d classes: a modest proposal

This post is an attempt to sketch out a different way that the base book classes of AD&D 2e, an edition of the game I never directly experienced, could have been developed in another edition.

Obviously, now we have the benefit of three additional editions of official D&D and numerous offshoots and hacks widely available, so this isn't to say, "this is what 3e/4e/5e should have been" as much as, "this is another direction that could be explored," now that we've taken some probing steps in various directions.

So: classes in 2e AD&D were derived from the four types:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Cleric	Thief
Ranger	Illusionist	Druid	Bard
Paladin

Let me single out a feature that i rather like: only the four core classes are always available to players. From the DM's chair, I find this very appealing; it's a much lighter demand of a setting that it have fighters, mages, clerics (though clerics present some problems) and thieves than that it also have barbarians, bards, druids, monks, paladins, rangers and sorcerers (to say nothing of warlocks) as well. Bards, druids and monk are particularly egregious in terms of the amount of baggage that their inclusion brings. Although 4e and 5e took the step of distinguishing common and uncommon "races," they do not do the same for classes (which, for my money, do a lot more heavy lifting in terms of providing implied setting).

Another interesting thing about this grid is the idea that we could make the rows meaningful as well as the columns. for example, the Ranger and Druid do seem to have something in common, as do the Bard and Illusionist, suggesting:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Cleric	Thief
Ranger		Druid		Wilderness
	Illusionist		Bard	Trickery
Paladin

...hey, this looks a lot like:

Defender	Controller	Leader	Striker
Fighter		Warlord	Rogue, Ranger	Martial
	Wizard		Warlock	Arcane
Paladin		Cleric		Divine

I'll freely admit that this is a part of 4e's design that i genuinely do like. I think you could potentially communicate a lot of setting using a matrix like this, especially if your sources of power corresponded to diagetic factions. even the gaps in the table (though later books, of course, fill them) serve a purpose. It says something about what these sources of power are about that there would be no martial controller, arcane defender or divine striker, for example.

However, this tableau is of basically no use for restricting available classes, which was one of the things that the 2e one does so well. Furthermore, little enough is directly shared between classes of the same source of power that they feel, to me, a lot more like palette swaps on the same game math than genuinely distinct types of character. This is exacerbated by the insistence on filling in gaps in the source/class matrix

Returning to our spread of classes in 2e AD&D, let's use a different axis to split things. Instead of source of power, let's use (3 position) alignment:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Ranger, Paladin		Cleric		Lawful
Fighter	Mage	Druid	Bard, Thief	Neutral
*Berserk			*Assassin	Chaotic

Italicized classes are ones that we'd expect DM veto power on. I'm adding in a couple of thematic Chaotic classes, nothing to see here. there's a couple of things that i don't love about this. First, as in 4e there's no clear way to use this table to restrict available classes; the neutral classes don't correspond to the core classes (druids in particular probably should not be the core priest class). Second, i don't like the idea of the core classes being restricted to neutral alignment. i'd prefer something like this:

My proposal is to distinguish the alignment of druids and bards from 'neutrality' (probably replacing that with a better term). I'm merging paladins into rangers (as we don't necessarily need two distinct Lawful classes about defending the innocent), and making clerics no longer a core class but instead a Lawful-only specialty.

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage		Thief	any
Ranger		Cleric		Lawful
		Druid	Bard	Old Believer
Berserk			Assassin	Chaotic

This setup involves four alignments:

• Worldly - occupied with the here and now, uninterested in bigger questions or grand conflicts. most scoundrels.
  
• Lawful - follower of the nameless craft gods of the Heavens. most people, to some extent are Lawful.
  
• Old Believer - keeps the old ways in the secret names of the old gods of the Earth. back-country folk, to some extent, are Old Believers.
  
• Chaotic - traffics with the uncanny forces out of Deep Sea and Far Sky. most Chaotic characters will disguise their rites; wizards are always under great suspicion of being Chaos cultists.
  

This is better, in my book, but it can be further refined. Notice that there is no longer a core Priest class, and take the obvious step of collapsing that column with Wizard:

Warrior	Wizard	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Burglar	any
	Druid	Bard	Old Believer
Ranger	Cleric		Lawful
Berserk		Assassin	Chaotic

This is approaching what I'd really like to see. We understand fighter, mage and thief to always be on offer. The specialty classes are all bound up with a diagetic alignment (in this case a mostly religious meaning). Any type is available to any alignment, but that doesn't mean that every alignment has a specialty in every type. Indeed, in the first draft of this post I had a Necromancer Chaotic wizard specialty rather than Berserk. While that could work, it seemed better to me to place all wizards under the suspicion of being Chaos magicians by associating wizardry and Chaos.

Available talents ("nonweapon proficiencies" need rebranded) would be chosen by combining the Warrior, Wizard or Rogue list with the appropriate alignment list. Other distinctions (say, what a cleric can do that a lawful mage cannot) would be as noted in the specialty class.

If one wished to customize the array of classes offered to a given setting, identifying alignments and their associated specialties seems like a natural way to do this; for example, someone could remove the Old Faith and add in something home-brewed.

In my dream vision of this, the core classes each get a spread to themselves. Each aligned pair of specialty classes could then be presented in a single spread, one on each facing page. Nine classes in twelve pages.

one page rules and five-way alignment

From the chaos of whatever I'm working on at the moment, relatively complete one page player rules for a retrohack have fallen. It's difficult to make a complete account of one's influences, but the frame of the thing (and the one page format) owes a lot to Searchers of the Unknown, the starting equipment tables to Necropraxis, the encumberance and saving thows to Delta, the use of hit points for damage dealt to Akratic Wizardry and the 'length in feet' polearm rule to the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms. My innovations are mainly the the Guard/Agility defense system, canny/uncanny check mechanic, the (minimal) magic-working rules and the five alignment system.

The five alignments are something I've been messing with a fair amount in the context of traditional fantasy RPGs, and I've gone through several different incarnations of how I want to handle them. A year or so ago, I read Cuisine and Empire which, in its general treatment of the culinary ancient world, discussed a group of theories about the nature of the world it described as 'Cosmological Correspondences.' What I'm working towards with the alignments in here is in the vein of those theories, a way of dividing the world, society, the body and so forth into thematic groups:

	Weight	Star	Ring	Red	Bright
planet	Jupiter	Mercury	Saturn	Mars	Venus
direction	West	Center	North	South	East
season	Fruit	Winter	Grain	Autumn	Spring
tissue	Bone	Nerve	Viscera	Lean	Fat
color	White	Blue	Black	Red	Green
taste	Pungent	Sweet	Salty	Bitter	Sour

I intend to add spell, monster and treasure lists themed around these five alignments, probably one page each.