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Category Archives: Character Race

Twenty Quirks of Dwarven Culture Relevant To Whatever Your Players Are Doing Right Now

January 9, 2012 7:28 pm / 3 Comments / Chris
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Stuart says:
20 Quirks of Dwarven Culture Relevant To Whatever Your Players Are Doing Right Now

I don’t know what your players are doing right now, although I suspect they are eating cheetos or drinking or texting someone while you read my blog. Instead of trying to be universal, I decided to come up with twenty situational quirks, most of which are cultural. There are no numbers on these because they are all 100 percent guaranteed to be equally true.

Dwarves lose *all* their hair if they stay aboveground on sunny days for more than a week.

It takes over a decade to regrow all their hair.

Eighty percent of dwarves are loudly and violently lactose intolerant to the fine cheeses served at most human and halfling courts.

Dwarven women do not have beards, but during the courtship season (autumn) married women are required to wear fake beards. These are usually made from their husband’s beard hair.

If you sneeze near a dwarf, he must say an annoyingly long prayer for the wellbeing of his ancestors, who could have been startled by the sound.

Dwarves are expected to get tattoos of their accomplishments, family tree and a map on the back of any lands they have been to beyond their home.

Dwarves have naturally fresh breath. To one another.

Dwarves are forbidden by ancient custom to eat anything that walks on two legs or less unless they killed it themselves. However, if they kill anything with less than four legs, they must eat at least a small piece of it. This means there are few wars between dwarves.

Every year on this day, dwarves by custom must give away all pay, prizes, gifts, loot or other windfall they receive. They must give it to someone who is not related, not a neighbor or business partner or somesuch and who has nothing. Halflings call this day ‘dress like a destitute’ day.

On any day except the above, a dwarf must accept any tangible gift offered him if it seems harmless. Even a cursed item must be accepted and overcome.

Unless attacked, dwarves do not acknowledge the presence of their above-ground cousins the anti-dwarves (or whatever you want to call them). They are not being rude. They involuntarily do not see them.

Dwarves refuse to help lift anything taller folk are also lifting.

Dwarves are shy when it comes to interracial sex, but frequently fall in love with taller folk.

You cannot get a dwarf to pay the regular price. They always insist on paying more as a sign of pride.

A dwarf will not, however, give you even the smallest discount.

Dwarves have perfect pitch, but only on their own musical scale.

Dwarven villages will provide free hospitality to strangers who can wrestle and best their strongest ox.

Dwarven culture is athiest, but they have gods. These gods are symbolic, but are spoken of as if real. There are no temples, but plenty of god-related booster clubs.

No stranger is allowed to turn down a duel challenge when in dwarven territory.

Their drinking contests are not to see who can drink the most before passing out but to see who can lift the heaviest object after an equal amount of drink.

One hand is for weaponry, the other for wiping. No one is quite sure which (even dwarves) so it varies by individual on occasion.

Dwarves are bad at counting lines of text.

You can make a request here.

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Posted in: campaign window dressing, character race, legacy D&D / Tagged: bring it, dwarves

Rethinking Elves 3 – Elves as an infection

July 14, 2011 7:22 am / 6 Comments / Chris
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Elves aren’t born. Not as elves, but as humans. They turn into elves when a true elf puts a spore in them. Spores are organs that grow in the back of their throats, much like tonsils. When they get too large, say grape or walnut sized, the true elf needs to spit them out.
The spores have legs and for about a week they can move up to half a mile away before they die. They crawl down the throats of unsuspecting humans and implant themselves in the stomach. Over the course of the next eighteen months, an elf will grow in their torso and abdomen. This elf will copy the host’s features, memories and personality. The host will start to lose those qualities, grow sick, lose appetite and hair. When the elf copy is ready, it will literally molt the human body off itself.
The resulting elf is not the same person (or spirit) but a copy of its memories and personality (depending of course on the metaphysics you use for your campaign). They are shorter because they can’t grow to full height (always wondered why, didn’t you?).
Elves do live forever, barring accident or misadvanture, but they can’y hold more memories than a human. After a few hundred years, an elf will probably not remember that she was ever human. The fragments of that life that remain will eventually fade and might be interpreted as dreams. Elves as a whole are ignorant of their origins.
This is why they are so keen on composing songs and writing books, to preserve what they can. Their rich culture is an amalgam of millennia worth of human culture, as remembered and recorded by elves and then read and reinterpreted by elves who don’t remember it anymore. The errors in interpretation trend toward the prevailing elven culture of the region and over time, it all skews into a very idiosyncratic synthesized culture that could easily be mistaken for something borne of its own.
What about these true elves that spread spores? They are the real elves. The ones we know are really sort of half. The DM should decide how they should look. They could resemble the gray aliens, or the ur-elf to out-elf all elves, or they could be some sort of yuggoth in the bottom of a well. Best not to reveal them if you don’t have to.
You can also play with this for other fairie species in addition to or in place of elves. Dryads or nymphs could come from the fruit of a certain tree, or sprites and pixies could be spore-infected halflings or gnomes.
With apologies to vampires, Alien, Chtorr and any other sci-fi or fantasy creature or trope this closely resembles.

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Posted in: campaign window dressing, character race, legacy D&D / Tagged: elves, rethinking

Elves Don’t Sleep

March 5, 2011 7:45 pm / 4 Comments / Chris
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This is just window dressing, but I think elves don’t sleep.

I was listening to a discussion over on the Roll for Initiative Podcast about whether AD&D ever said that they don’t. Clearly elves are immune to sleep spells in the old school editions, but actually needing sleep? While they were discussing it, someone IM’ed them and told them it was an option 2e rule from an elf handbook.

I am all in favor of elves never sleeping. To elves, sleep is a close cousin to death. they only sleep when sick or injured. Elves only have beds in their hospitals (or wherever they heal).

Elves don’t need bedrooms, even for lovemaking. They go to the woods or something. Having sex on a bed is, for an elf, akin to having sex in a coffin or on a gurney. Which is to say, some very few of them really love it, but most of them wouldn’t be into it.

So elves can handle the entire night’s watch, unless they need to rememorize spells. Maybe there should be some chance they will be distracted by visions or something. Otherwise, every party will have an elf. Ideas are welcome.

Me? I like anything that alienates elves from humans.

Half elves? Eh, don’t even get me started. I don’t think there are any.

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Posted in: campaign window dressing, character race, humor, legacy D&D / Tagged: elves

Best of the Creeping Doom Part 2

December 31, 2010 1:48 pm / 1 Comment / Chris
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When I started this little project, it was meant only to entertain me. It seems to have entertained a few others. I certainly didn’t expect any sort of audience and I never would have guessed that my most popular articles would be about clerics and halflings.

Let me tell you about the Old School....

The most popular post by a wide margin has been my review of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role Playing boxed set. There has been constant interest in that review since I wrote it. I take it as a sign of interest in what OSR and especially what James Raggi is doing that people are still getting here via googling his game. Looking back at it now, it’s really not a very good review. It was rushed and I’ll admit there was a desire to be one of the first reviews out there. Looking at the boxed set now, I’m still impressed. The “princess box” will be my ruleset of choice when I next DM.

While the LotFP review is still the most looked-at and most googled post, the biggest one-day post was my piece on hobb -er halflings. I wanted to make the hobbits into the nightmare that some people see immigrants to be. In this case, they do take over wherever they settle and the thought of legions of halflings with spears or pikes amuses me to no end. This was a throwaway piece when I started writing it, but in the campaign world in my head, they might be one of the most important features.

Another popular post was a simple idea: mages will become liches after a certain age or level. This seemed to be popular with the folks who hang out at reddit’s rpg community. I’m far from done with mages.

I rarely play clerics, but I seem to have posted more about clerics and their gods than any other subject and as a topic, they are the most popular. The most popular post in this series concerned a goddess of despair that is empowered by the harm her followers do.

Before I wrap up this meta talk, I want to recommend two sites to you that I am sure I do not need to. If you are reading this, you are surely reading them. If not, you should be. First is Ancient Vaults and Eldritch Secrets. Bat puts out a new item, spell, monster or whatnot every day. Holidays and blizzard days too. Each entry is a quality piece and begins with a short setup with a recurring cast of characters. The man has a work ethic and he’s done this enough to get really good at it. You’re my role model, Bat. Now when are you going to publish?

The other site, Swords and Dorkery also needs no introduction. Mike’s presence here as a recurring commenter gave me the first notions that there was anyone visiting this site more than once and for that I must thank him.  He participates more actively in the blogging community and has gathered some of his best materials into downloadable files.

To wrap up the navel gazing…

So far, the blog is still dong what I wanted it to do: get me to sit, stretch my imagination and write RPG material for later use. That some people have found it worth reading and perhaps used something in their games is very gratifying. I hope I can keep my personal goal in mind and not get distracted by the number of readers or page views I get. This next year, I hope to post more often, even when extremely busy as I have been this fall.

I wish everyone a great 2011 and I hope we all get in as much gaming as you want.

Happy New Year!

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Posted in: character race, commentary, house rules, legacy D&D, product recommendations / Tagged: clerics, gods, halflings, lotfp wf rpg, meta, reddit

Rethinking Halflings 2

October 27, 2010 4:51 am / 1 Comment / Chris
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Yesterday I sketched out a vision of Hobbits/Halflings that I’m working on for an upcoming campaign. I’d kick around a few example communities since everyone seems pretty into the idea. (For you tl;dr types, there’s a normal shire,  a troop of zombie hunters and a family of halfling illuminati.)

There are three key ideas in yesterday’s post:

Halflings are very conformist (lawful), in the way Japanese culture can be conformist but maybe more intense than that.

They reproduce quickly and are experts at cultivating the land. They survive largely because their numbers are so great.

Halfling communities are defined by charters, documents that spell out in great detail how that community will be run. It governs both overall goals and everyday matters.

With that in mind, for those of you who like longer pieces, here are a few halfling communities you can drop in your game.

Wormgrunters of Baronswood Shire

Forty years past, the Baron’s Wood was a game forest reserved for the Donhellee Clan. When the Baron and his men were away at war, two halfling families formerly of Dunwill moved into the forest.

Today, the Baronswood Shire is home to twenty thousand halflings and their livestock, cats, dogs and worms. The residents call themselves “wormgrunters” after their expertise in vermiculture. The shire exports their best worms to other halfling settlements and sells the leftovers to the local humans. Their crop rotation, irrigation and waste management plans are all support this industry. It is rumored that they have managed to grow worms large enough to swallow a fully grown human.

Wormgrunters have lived in peace with their human neighbors since the treaty of Donhelleeton was signed in the year 22 AS (after settling).  This treaty ended a bloody ten-year struggle between the local human population (2,400) and the newly settled ‘grunters. Over 1,500 acres of the Donhellee’s private wood were sold to the halflings in exchange for a semi-annual payment of crops and an agreement to cap the ‘grunter population at eight hundred. The treaty was amended three times, exchanging more land and higher population limits for more frequent payments of food and stronger wine to a dwindling but content human population. There are now three hundred humans spread across Donhellee. Many families left, despite the benefits of this agreement, because the birth rate suddenly dropped. Some humans claimed the halfling wines were to blame. Others said halfling witches had cursed them. In actuality, halflings give off small amounts of pheromones that somehow block fertilization in other races (another reason why there are no half-halflings).

The Wormgrunter’s charter establishes an elected mayoralty which is passed in turn between the heads of eight families (no one would be so rude as to not vote for the candidate whose turn it is). Marriages are in four, eight, twelve and twenty year terms, renewable by both parties provided the required number of children are birthed during the fourth and/or eleventh month of designated years during the contract. Property is owned by the family and dwellings are rotated every two years. Sewer maintenance duties are rotated between age groups on a monthly basis.

If the community can be said to have one problem, it is pipeweed. The youngest generation is not smoking enough of it to maintain a trade balance with the Leafroller’s of Southhill. There is no known reason for the decrease in smoking, and in fact pouches of the leaf bear labels touting the benefits of a relaxed mind and increased appetite that comes from a good pipe. Since there is no charter or treaty that requires pipeweed consumption, the mayor is at a loss and has considered consulting an oracle or human wizard.

The Wormgrunters trace their heritage to the Beatlewranglers of the southern continent and have sent out their own settlers four times. Two settlements are successful, one died in route to the eastern shore and one headed north has disappeared.

Stakers

The Stakers are a small community of halflings living in the mountains bordering between Nordland and Sudland. Their charter is only a few years old, having been passed by a vote less than three years ago under the leadership of the late Borro Macehand. The Stakers are a lost caravan of Wormgrunters, who left the comfortable life in Barronswood ten years ago heading north toward Nordland.

The caravan was stuck in a snowstorm when a pack of ghouls fell upon them. After a week of terror, Borro and the surviving forty settlers managed to escape on improvised sleds. Having lost their families and their charter, Borro and his sister Brandy wrote a new charter with destruction of the undead its ultimate goal. Borro Macehand was pulled to pieces by a pack of wights. His sister, Brandy Wightburner is the Mother-General.

The Staker Charter emphasizes combat readiness, mobility, scientific study of the undead, rapid procreation and a decentralized command, allowing groups to escape and re-establish the charter when necessary. While the charter is written, it is also memorized by all children just in case.

The first milestone in the charter is the establishment of a base of operations, such as a fortress. Since the number of undead in the area has been growing steadily, the Stakers had better hurry.

Walkers

Walkers are a secretive halfling group, more like a conspiracy than a settlement. They live in “regular” halfling communities, having infiltrated posing as distant cousins or settlers from related communities. They live as normal halflings, often quite successful and admired, but all the time they are working under the charter of the Walkers. Walkers have their own language, writing, rituals, and secret handshakes. Some dabble in the occult or go off on adventures to gain arcane artifacts or knowledge.

Most Walkers have a simple role, such as skimming funds out of municipal budgets, sabotaging certain crops in crucial years or quietly disposing of particular citizens. A smart Walker might rise to a position of importance, such as vice-mayor, charter-holder or even chancellor of a region (multiple communities). They receive instructions from merchants who speak in code, or in innocuous-looking letters from distant kin.

It is a rare elder who knows anything about the Walkers. Those that do have a hard time convincing anyone they are a real threat. If Walkers do live in the community, they will try to make the suspicious halfling paranoid, until he is committed or is driven out. Occasionally, a Walker will not be able to take the pressure that comes from having any sort of secret from the community, and working at cross-purposes takes its toll. If they begin spilling Walker secrets, they are usually found hanging from a tree or at the bottom of a well, clearly a poor, mad soul.

The Walker’s ultimate goal and the identity of its leadership should be decided by the DM. Goals should be nasty and long-term (but perhaps near key milestones or close to fruition) and should involve terrible consequences for halfling and human alike. One suggested short-term goal is the collapse of the pipe-weed market.

There. I hope this inspired someone. If you like this series, check out the hit job I did on elves last month.

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Posted in: character race, content / Tagged: halflings, rethinking

Rethinking Hobb– er, Halflings

October 26, 2010 4:54 am / 5 Comments / Chris
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Let’s mess with Hobbiton.

Halflings, as the big folk call them, are the army ants of the humanoid world. Once they’ve established a settlement in your county, you’d might as well pack up and head west. There is no force on the planet that will transform the landscape quite like they do.

A band of halflings leaves a settlement because the charts say it it time (see below). They find a nice spot of land and drop their backpacks. Trees are cleared, earth is tilled, vegetables are planted. Beer is brewed. Tunnels are constructed, the entrances to which are well-concealed. They don’t make a lot of noise and their celebrations are deliberately low-key affairs (for now).

Babies are made. Halflings have a gestation period of about four months and mature to adulthood by age 8. A band of twelve halflings can be a village of 24-30 adults and almost 200 children within eight years and that’s when the genders are evenly split and no cousins come join them (which they inevitably do). Within a decade or two, that nice wood by the lake is now a plantation growing pipeweed, vegetables, cotton, barley, juniper and any other cash crop you care to mention.

Halflings are incredibly industrious farmers. They can get the most out of any arable land. On average, their harvests are 25% more bountiful than human harvests of similar land in similar conditions. They live to work and then they live to eat. When not farming, they pick and store every berry, mushroom, nut and edible plant within ten miles. This is all stored, eaten or sent on carts to faraway towns, where halfling merchants trade preserved fruits, dried vegetables, baked goods, their reknowned wines and beers for tools and weapons (they are mediocre to lousy metalsmiths and craftsmen). Those settlements which are not vegetarian have excellent hunters and fishermen among them.

Charters

Halfling society is very regimented and conformist. The main unit of community is the settlement. Each settlement has a charter, which is a volumes-long set of rules and charts detailing every detail of the settlement’s plan. There are rules for what names may be given, what ales may be brewed and what colors are worn in a given year. There are particular seasons for love and for childbearing (having a child out of season is somewhat embarrassing and stigmatizing, but it happens). Charters vary between settlements, but those in a particular region of the campaign world tend to be very similar. Halflings may disagree, sometimes vehemently, about the worthiness of another settlement’s charter, but compared to the way other races run their affairs, most halflings would conclude that even the worst, most stifling and cruel halfling charter is better than none.

In one common line of charters, couples are wed for eight years at a time, after which they move to another marriage until they are past childbearing age and may marry whomever they want. Some halfling communities follow a matriarchal charter that allows for faster reproduction and ties important families to the queen through a polyandrous husband/hostage system. There even some little-known settlements where charters direct the settlement in the ways of infiltration and takeover of other settlements, the worship of dark powers or other nefarious ends.

Warfare

Most charters call for two months out of ever year to be spent drilling in techniques of warfare. Halfling tactics are similar to those of army ants. They overpower with sheer numbers of fanatical warriors armed with short spears, swords and shields. Even human calvary units have been known to fall back a the sight of a halfling legion.

Adventurer halflings are almost always outcasts, either before or because of their adventuring. They are just not supposed to break ranks! Any halfling adventurer will suffer reaction rolls as if they were five points lower in charisma when they meet normal halflings (aside from traders and merchants in human cities). Halfling adventurers are often very resentful and lonely, and many seek relationships and companionship with larger folk.

Halflings are almost always lawful in alignment. Adventurer halflings can be of any alignment. All halfling adults can cook, read, write, farm and judge the arability of land. Many can also hunt and fish.

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Posted in: character race, content / Tagged: halflings, rethinking

Rethinking Elves

August 31, 2010 12:19 am / 2 Comments / Chris
Bjork
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I was thinking about this, from the LotFP Weird Fantasy:

Once the epitome of enlightenment and responsibility, elfin civilization has fallen before the expansive nature of Man. Where once the Elf nations ruled the forests, the plains and the mountains, their now-small numbers live in secret enclaves, possessing great power but utterly impotent in matters of projecting it.

Bjork

Bjork. Photo by deep_schismic cc-by 2.0

There’s going to be some elves that don’t accept this at all. After all, being impotent in matters of projecting power is not the same as giving up without a fight. What can we do with that to make elves more interesting?

The essential qualities that fantasy elves have almost universally: Beauty, Magic and Agelessness. Add impotence to that and you’ve got some interesting options. Let’s assume you don’t have a western continent for them to sail to.

Elfin survivalists would recognize the need to repopulate in the face of ever-growing numbers of humans. That faction might capture and study human’s reproductive cycles. They might perform experiments on their own kind. They might go out on a pilgrimage to find a human fertility goddess to take them in. They might try to breed with humans to create half-elves that can breed true with one another. Or make a pact with a demon or devil (no spider-queens, please).

Perhaps they aren’t even full elves themselves. Perhaps they were always half-elves and their original stock died out/is in hibernation on their crashed space ship awaiting rescue/are their mortal enemies. Maybe their original stock are neanderthalish elves.

What if they can reproduce, but their cycles are much slower or they just aren’t in the mood often enough? They’ll need aphrodisiacs, potency vitamins, maybe some Barry White albums. They might need a chamber where time is sped up. Maybe they are bored with their own beautiful perfection and need imperfections such as scars or broken noses to catch each other’s eye.

What if they don’t understand some aspect of their reproduction that they never noticed before (since it happens so infrequently)? What if outside temperature during gestation determined gender? What if the entire race was blessed with a birth control spell or worshipped an idol that was radioactive? What if elfin magic swords gave off sperm-killing cell-phone radiation?

And what if they did manage to get preggers again? What would happen to an elf nation that had a one million percent jump in annual birth rate? They probably have no idea how to educate or care for their young. They might have long ago forgotten how to pass along any sort of knowledge whatsoever and need to apprentice their children to human mages.

What if they are stuck at a fixed number of elf spirits that reincarnate into baby elves? Where could they find more spirits? What if other spirits started incarnating in the baby elves? What if elf spirits are reincarnating into dwarves, halflings or meercats? Maybe they need to go out and kill dwarves, halflings and meercats to free up those spirits during the semi-annual fertility festival.

What if all this was happening at once in different parts of your campaign world?

I might just find elves interesting again.

More later this week.

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Posted in: character race, content / Tagged: bjork, elves, lotfp wf rpg, meercats, population, races, rethinking, sex
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