Role-Playing Humanoids
Players who decide to create humanoid characters should have good role-playing as their ultimate goal. Avoid choosing a humanoid character type by its benefits, hindrances, or how powerful it can become. Strange humanoid beliefs, uncivilized habits, the reactions of others, and the clash of human and humanoid cultures are a few of the many hooks upon which a humanoid personality can be hung. Humanoids are best viewed as unusual personas through which character and story development can take place.
This chapter gives suggestions to help players create humanoid characters that are well-rounded and fun to play, with an eye toward keeping any "unfair" advantages in check. Further, some of these suggestions can be used by the Dungeon Master to restore campaign balance if a character gets off track.
The number of humanoid races given in this book require that suggestions be of a general nature. It is up to the players and the DM to make them work in the context of a particular race of humanoids in a particular campaign setting. Examples are provided, but space limitations make covering every possible combination impossible.
Life as a Humanoid
For the majority of humanoids, life is lived in a clan or tribe. These tribes are made up of loosely-related families which are led by chiefs. The chiefs are normally the strongest and most able fighters of the group, though some tribes turn to elders and thinkers for leadership. Life in the tribes is hard. The wilderness does not give up sustenance easily, and tribesmen must constantly work to survive. This work could be hunting, gathering, fishing, craftworking, scavenging, mining, farming, raiding, plundering, or some combination of these, depending on the tribal race, alignment, and nature.
In most cases, a humanoid tribe will be less civilized, less advanced, and less established than its human or demihuman counterpart.
Lawful tribes prefer stability and order. They organize themselves in all endeavors, setting up rules to cover all aspects of life and society. For these tribes to function, there must be an obvious and unchanging chain of leadership. In lawful evil tribes, there are severe laws and harsh punishments. These are not established to provide justice, but to preserve the stability of the tribe.
Good tribes cherish life. They are more concerned with finding ways to make their tribes prosper than in competing for social positions (at least in openly hostile ways). Life is more positive among these tribes, though not necessarily easier.
On the evil side, might makes right and fear keeps the masses in line. Change is still sudden and frequent, but it tends to be violent and deadly in nature. Many evil humanoids are nomads, though some do set up semi-permanent settlements when they find a location that fills their survival needs and greedy habits. Once settled, they quickly deplete the location of the resources that attracted them. They treat the land and its bounties as they treat each other — with little respect and as something to be exploited. When a region no longer suits their needs (due to their own overindulgences and uncaring practices), these humanoids move on in search of new spoils and plunder.
Chaotics share a frivolous or capricious nature. Change is often welcome, or and even sought out on a daily basis. Few activities are organized beyond the minimum level necessary to accomplish a given task. Some chaotic cultures seem to find even this level of organization difficult; disagreements and in-fighting often result.
On the good side, chaotics like to manage their own affairs. They may bow to a single leader, but prefer to do as they please so long as they stay within broad behavioral guidelines. Even though they love independence and despise rules, many chaotic and good humanoids come to love nature and respect its bounties. Many form such close ties with their environments as to become caretakers of a sort. Nature may be used, but never abused.
In a chaotic evil tribe, life is even more of a struggle. Not only must tribe members battle the elements, nature and other tribes, they often fight among themselves for positions of leadership and the pick of loot. Life is cheap among them, for killing is usually the easiest method of advancement up a tribe's social and political ladder. This may also be true in other evil and neutral communities, but such violence is usually less random.
Tribal Life
All humanoid tribes share a fear of the supernatural, and anything they do not understand falls into this category. This results in superstitions which fill their days and nights, and dictate the way in which they conduct their lives. Superstitions serve to reinforce the opinion that humanoids are primitive savages, though few humans get to know them well enough to see their beliefs in practice.
Tribal life starts in ernest when humanoid children are old enough to understand and participate in the world around them. Most humanoids relegate different roles and tasks to males and females, and children are immediately immersed in the social order so that they grow to know and embrace it. They receive instruction, usually in informal settings, learning what they need to survive and prosper by observing, participating, and some training. The level of training depends on the nature, disposition and societal level of the race in question. During their early years, children spend most of their time with females and shamans. Here they learn the legends and beliefs of their tribe, as well as many of the social rules they will need in tribal life. Children begin to work as soon as they are able, at first helping with whatever domestic activities the tribe engages in and eventually moving on to their life's work.
When they near maturity, humanoids apprentice themselves to adults in order to learn the trades of the tribe. This apprenticeship can be formal, as in the case of orcs, or extremely informal where younger tribe members learn through observation and proximity as opposed to specific instruction. In cases where there is even a hint of formality, tribal shamans, witch doctors, and chiefs assign children to specific trades (hunting, raiding, mining, fighting, etc.). They make their decisions based upon their observations of the children, the needs of the tribe, the social rank of a child's parents, and by reading the signs and omens associated with a particular child.
From an early age, a humanoid's role in the tribe is set. Most prefer this arrangement, for it gives them a function and purpose. A select few desire to find their own path, and these inevitably are weeded out through violence, cast out by decree, or leave of their own accord to make their own lives. These are the outcasts, the hermits, and the adventurers. The few that find their way into human society are the ones we are most concerned with.
Social and Racial Disadvantages
Humanoids start out with disadvantages in non-humanoid societies. All but the most enlightened civilizations consider humanoids to be monsters. Centuries of competition, violence and warfare has made humans and humanoids natural enemies, striving for the same resources. Truth became legends, and legends bred fears that haunt both sides, filling their heads with truths, half-truths, and lies. But humans are more numerous, more advanced, more established. They are winning the battle of dominion over the world. For better or for worse, though there are still vast stretches of untamed wilderness, it has become a human world.
For this reason, humanoids find themselves at a disadvantage. When they leave their tribes to find their own path in the world, it inevitably crosses into human civilization. Humanoids are strangers to human civilization (or even demihuman, for that matter). They know it only as something out of tribal legends, or from the scary stories told around the evening fire, or from the skirmishes their tribe may have had with a town or village in the past. They do not know the customs. They do not know the social etiquette. They probably do not understand many of the "advanced" conveniences that dominate civilized life.
It is up to players and DMs to work together to stress a humanoid's unfamiliarity with civilization. In the same way as a DIM describes newly-discovered magical items by their appearance without giving away any details, so too must a DM describe the items and practices of civilization. From a humanoid's point of view — clothing, armor, weapons, tools, utensils everything is strange, wondrous, frightening, and unknown. The trappings which players normally take for granted should become new and mysterious to humanoid characters.
For example, Breeka the aarakocra enters a human town for the first time. What are the strange wooden caves that humans go in and out of? Why do those humans shake hands? Or press their lips together? Or give shiny objects to one another? And why is that human yelling because Breeka ate the pig in front of his wooden cave? Breeka, who has never before encountered a human town, finds herself surrounded by unusual trappings and strange practices which she will have to spend time getting to understand. While players can role-play a lack of understanding concerning human social customs, it is up to the DM to keep in mind that the most obvious thing to a human or demihuman is probably a mystery to the humanoid, and to describe encounter scenes accordingly.
Beyond the social disadvantages which humanoids face when dealing with communities beyond their own, there are also racial discriminations to deal with. Because most humans and demihumans see humanoids as little more than monsters, there will be extreme prejudices directed at them. Humanoids will be watched almost constantly when they enter a human community — if they are allowed to enter at all. Many towns and cities will have laws forbidding the entry of humanoids. They will be stopped at the gates, turned away, or even attacked. Humans fear that a humanoid has come to scout out the community for attack, or seeks to cause some other type of trouble. They believe that humanoids eat humans (and some do), and who wants a monster walking on the streets of town?
Many inns have rules against serving humanoids. Shops refuse to deal with them. Local authorities stay close, watching for the least sign of trouble. They have no qualms about arresting and locking up humanoids that so much as look at a human the wrong way — and banishment or confinement are the nicest things they might do to them. Mobs form quickly in the presence of humanoids, ready to take torch and pitchfork to a monster in order to protect their loved ones. Again, it is up to the DM to enforce this disadvantage. Even the most powerful humanoid PC will be hard-pressed to find a place to rest or buy sup- plies in a hate-filled, fearful town. If a human- oid is allowed to operate as any normal PC as far as NPCs are concerned, then a great role- playing challenge is lost.
Another problem facing humanoids in human communities deals with the fact that things are built in human dimensions. Doors and rooms are made to accommodate human heights and widths. Chairs and beds are made to hold human weights. Even most transportation modes, such as horses and wagons, cannot sustain large-sized humanoids. This is not a problem for the man-sized humanoids, but tiny-, small-, and large-sized humanoids must learn to live in a human-sized world.
Comments