Humanoid Monsters of Nonesuch
Posted by Joshua on May 21, 2009
Here’s a sketch of the various humanoid monsters common to the Land of Nonesuch. The goal is to make them, not unique, but distinctive and recognizable…if they’re mooks, they’re not generic interchangeable mooks. On the other hand, I want to avoid the “in this world, Orcs are descended from flightless birds, and are the proud descendants of an ancient and cosmopolitan culture, more like feathery elves” that I’m sometimes prone to. I want them to be reminiscent of common fantasy and folklore, if slightly skew. Some of these have already made an appearance in the kids’ game.
- Orcs – magically evolved pigs (totally swiped from Grognardia’s Dwimmermount). Evil, comically greedy, quarrelsome, and easy to trick. The Three Stooges of humanoid monsters.
- Kobolds – magically evolved dogs. Neutral, generally traders and merchants in the dungeon economy (Rat on a Stick, anyone?), some actually live peacefully in some surface cities. Something along the lines of Nessie from Too Many Curses or the kobolds from Suikoden.
- Hobgoblins – mischievous house-sprites. I know that I just got done saying I didn’t want this to be another “well, in my world” setting, but folklore trumps Tolkien and D&D here. Good, although tricksy. Puck is a hobgoblin.
- Redcaps – these replace the D&D militaristic, organized, larger-sized goblin troopers. Evil, sadistic buggers who dye their caps in human blood. Iron boots, iron pikes, and faster than anybody can run away.
- Goblins - I’m really torn here. On the one hand, I have this vision of them as these nasty, deformed little mushroom men out of Goya that use human corpses for compost. On the other hand, I’m also attracted to the Labyrinth version of goblins (also one of the sources for the feel of this setting), with each one a unique Henson-esque critter. I could combine the two, I suppose, or have them both be true in different parts of the setting. Or I could split them into two different kinds of monsters and call one of them goblins and the other… I could call them wirry-cows, I suppose, which would be good folklore but be unintentionally silly to my players. Ooh. Bogeys would be a great name for the mushroom-type.
- Bugbears – more the creepy bear in the woods sort than a generic bogeyman. Definitely not an oversized Hobgoblin war-leader out of Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance.
- Trolls and Trollwives. These guys. The males are big and hairy, with huge noses and ears; the females are slight and beautiful. Trolls are one of the PC races in the setting, though you have to roll really well to qualify.
- Ogres and Giants – Haven’t really given a lot of thought to them yet. Probably straight out of the Book of Wierd.
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The Land of Nonesuch
Posted by Joshua on May 21, 2009
I’ve been working a bit on the setting for my game with the kids, which is also my backup game for the Bumblers, possibly a play-by-forum game in the future if I get my act together, and finally an example setting for the system (tentatively titled The Majyc System). So it needs a name, and possibly a hook. I’m a little leery of the “elevator-pitch” approach to game settings; too often they end up sounding like something out of They Fight Crime: “He’s an all-American white trash shaman haunted by an iconic dead American confidante She’s a beautiful antique-collecting femme fatale from a secret island of warrior women. They fight crime!“ On the other hand, there’s certainly something to be said for being able to succinctly state what the game is about, and give the players an expectation of the tone and kind of adventures they’ll be playing. And bog-standard dungeon bash doesn’t sound all that thrilling, even if you’re confident that playing it will be a blast.
For now, I’m calling it the Land of Nonesuch, and working on the premise that (unknown to the current crop of characters) they’re inhabiting a land described in a book of odd and somewhat macabre fairy tales called The Land of Nonesuch, by the mysterious George Jester. Both the book and the author appear both in our world, and in the land the book describes. My overall plan, if something so vague and inchoate can actually be called such, is that this setting will let me scratch several itches that I’ve had for quite a while now: running a game in a setting inspired by The Book of Weird, and by the Oz books; getting some use from various cast-off pieces of prior settings (such as the settings of the games with the Three Paladinos, and the one-shot To Rescue the Sun) and swiped from other people’s settings (like Thool, or Dwimmermount); to do some bottom-up setting design, where I haven’t worked out a whole map of the setting and a thousand years of history before I begin; and finally, putting that all together, to do some gaming where I haven’t systemetized everything and there’s not a way that magic or religion works, and I’m not pinging the players with info-dumps. Naturally, I have ideas on things I want to see in the setting, and spring on the characters, but I want to be much more encouraging of letting the players make up crazy stuff too, and just rolling with it. I want to recapture, at least for some of the time, some of the much more free-wheeling GMing I did in my youth, where a lot of stuff was decided on the basis of either “Yeah, that sounds good!” or “roll a die, high is good.”