Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

[Michael Hopcroft]

I wonder what people would do differently in a FH campaign where there were only humans. No elves. No Dwarves. No Orcs. No Dragons 9except possibly animalistic ones about as smart as a typical dinosaur). No Undead. The only sapient beings in the entire world that are neither divine or infernal belong to the species of Homo Sapiens. And while the Big Supernatural Entities, good or evil, may occasionally send agents into the world (very occasionally), the reins of the world, and all the potentials for good and evil, are in human hands.

 

There wouldn't be any "cannon fodder" beings whose sole purpose is to die on the swords of PCs. That role would be taken by human "mooks". The would be no "race" so inherently evil that it's essentially Continual Open Season on them. Magic could still exist, and magic itself might not be all that different. But the campaign is obviously different.

 

The question is: how would you run this campaign differently from the standard?

[Escafarc]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I haven't used non-humans for 20+ years now. You have to make sure that your campaign world is detailed enough so that the players have options for backgrounds. I've found that the players tend to come up with more original personalities.

[Ragnarok]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Depending on whether you're talking about high-level or low-level fantasy, just going on humans is very feasible.

 

I think the key would be to spice up different human cultures in such a way that playing humans from different areas seems almost like another "race" entirely. Maybe desert-dwelling humans have evolved to have faster blood clotting to preserve moisture (as in the Dune universe.) Maybe forest-dwelling humans have developed some sort of immunity from an herbal poison, etc. Maybe some groups are matriarchal, rather than the traditional patriarchal. Either way, humanity is so diverse that you shouldn't have a problem developing unique cultures. And of course there's always discrepencies in civilization levels. A large barbarian tribe might feel a lot like orcs to a quasi-Roman level civilization. They essentially play the same role; a looming frontier threat.

 

Personally, I like to make "mundane" animals much more of a threat in such campaigns. Make animals such as bears, wolves, or lions twice as large and thrice as fierce, and your campaign just got way more interesting. Camping outdoors becomes more tense as a result, and it's possible to have a meaningful and enjoyable encounter with just an animal that way. Doesn't quite replace humanoids, but it helps. I really like the idea of dragons with regular animal-level intelligence by the way. I did that once and I think it worked.

 

Hope this helps.

[tkdguy]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I did that a long time ago, although it didn't go too well with my players. My campaign was based on 17th-century Europe, with a few Asian influences (think swashbucklers meet Shaolin monks). No magic either, which didn't sit well with the players either.

 

But if I did another "humans only" campaign, I'd make it a Wuxia campaign, as described in Ninja HERO. I think my players would enjoy that a little more.

 

Edit: A sword & sorcery campaign would also work. I'd include Serpent Men, but strictly as monsters.

[Old Man]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Exactly. All-human campaigns have already been done in S&S, low fantasy, and swashbuckling. It's actually not that hard since there is a wide range of real and imaginary human cultures to steal from.

 

Much harder would be a campaign with no humans in it, because stereotypical elves and dwarves don't really come with much variation. A standard problem with most fantasy campaigns, actually.

[Markdoc]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I wonder what people would do differently in a FH campaign where there were only humans. No elves. No Dwarves. No Orcs. No Dragons 9except possibly animalistic ones about as smart as a typical dinosaur). No Undead. The only sapient beings in the entire world that are neither divine or infernal belong to the species of Homo Sapiens. And while the Big Supernatural Entities' date=' good or evil, may occasionally send agents into the world ([i']very[/i] occasionally), the reins of the world, and all the potentials for good and evil, are in human hands.

 

There wouldn't be any "cannon fodder" beings whose sole purpose is to die on the swords of PCs. That role would be taken by human "mooks". The would be no "race" so inherently evil that it's essentially Continual Open Season on them. Magic could still exist, and magic itself might not be all that different. But the campaign is obviously different.

 

The question is: how would you run this campaign differently from the standard?

 

I have run campaigns pretty much exactly like this for nearly 20 years (with the exception that there are still undead - they're not a race, but constructs, so they fill a role similar to traps in many cases). What's different? Not that much, actually. Sure, PCs don't go round killing sentients "because they're evil". The gods don't turn up in person, provide divine intervention or the like, but their temples still intrigue, scheme or wage holy war on each other.

The players still have plenty of enemies, plenty of causes and plenty of reasons to fight. It's just that now their enemies are not colour-coded for their convenience.

One of the first things you notice about other sentient races when you run a game without them is how utterly unnecessary they are and how little they actually add to the gaming experience. Essentially, "other races" in game are simply "other cultures". They're typically not even very different from human cultures: the Antarctica-based human culture Vondy was working up is far more alien than most of the cultures of other races I have seen.

 

cheers, Mark

[casualplayer]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

My two favorite, non-homebrewed worlds to run in are 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings. Both humanocentric but with distinct cultures and societies within the human race. It's not such a stretch and doesn't constrain storytelling at all.

 

And then on the other end of the spectrum you get things like Rifts, Talislanta, Gamma World and Arduin, where you are lucky if any of the players share a race let alone play a human. Harkins back to Basic D&D and choosing Dwarf or Elf as your class.

[Guest steamteck]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

No Dragons 9except possibly animalistic ones about as smart as a typical dinosaur).

 

That's how I do it. I can't seem to run a talking dragon and take it seriously. They may be smarter than a dinosaur but they don't interact on a human level.

[Cancer]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I think you could pull this off very easily. While the presence of nonhuman races adds flavor, you can add at least as much by with a theory or multiple sources of magic, a cosmology/origin story, or an overarching political situation. Takes work at the outset to figure out what's going on, why, what you think the PCs are going to do in the world, what end states are likely to come about in the absence/presence of PC intervention, and so on. But, I'm the kind of guy who likes that stuff.

[Manic Typist]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Takes work at the outset to figure out what's going on' date=' why, what you think the PCs are going to do in the world, what end states are likely to come about in the absence/presence of PC intervention, and so on. But, I'm the kind of guy who likes that stuff.[/quote']

 

...isn't that what you do anyway? At least an outline? It's what I like no matter what flavors are in there.

[Markdoc]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I think you could pull this off very easily. While the presence of nonhuman races adds flavor' date=' you can add at least as much by with a theory or multiple sources of magic, a cosmology/origin story, or an overarching political situation. Takes work at the outset to figure out what's going on, why, what you think the PCs are going to do in the world, what end states are likely to come about in the absence/presence of PC intervention, and so on. But, I'm the kind of guy who likes that stuff.[/quote']

 

Right. That's where my current FH game is: I introduced the players to the world, and to magic (two different kinds). Then I introduced the bad guys who do a different, more powerful, kind of magic: one associated with demons. Then we did a lot of stuff to establish that the bad guys really are bad, and then (much later) we introduce a 4th groups - who help the players and generally show some good guy credentials. Theeeeeen .... we reveal that not only do they use bad-guy magic but they claim to have invented it. But they're fighting the bad guys! And they show no tendency to doing bad stuff, consorting with demons, etc.

 

Until last night's game, when the players dig up some old founding myths of the good-guy cult where a demon or "evil one" features prominently. Well , maybe it's a demon - but maybe it's just a powerful being from another dimension. Maybe it's actually just a myth invented by the cult. Now the players are starting to join the dots and say "Waitaminit. We've never actually seen a demon. We don't actually know anything at all about the bad-guy cult and their "demons". Are we maybe getting two different sides of the same story here? And why does this cult myth sound like the church founding stories we all grew up with? Is this whole thing simply a political fight? "

 

Adding dwarves isn't going to add anything to this story. And to be fair, having dwarves in the game world would not necessarily detract from it either: it's simply irrelevant.

 

cheers, Mark

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Could someone hit Markdoc with their repstick for me?

[Guest steamteck]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I've run a pretty human centric campaign for 20 plus years. There's highlander style immortals but that's just human mutants. I have vampires but they are once humans. I have werewolves but they're just a few in the woods with a very primitive tribal culture. There are some intelligent monsters like deep ones or Djinn but all the civilization and cultures you interact with are human.

 

No elves, dwarves etc.. Exotic human cultures are much more fun.

[Karmakaze]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I don't think there's any problem with human only games. Just because D&D was a Tolkein homage doesn't mean every setting needs to be.

 

Much harder would be a campaign with no humans in it' date=' because stereotypical elves and dwarves don't really come with much variation. A standard problem with most fantasy campaigns, actually.[/quote']

 

It's the same in most genres. See "All planets have one culture and one climate" as seen in Space Opera.

 

I've seen a fantasy campaign done as all anthropomorphs, which is technically a no human campaign

[Old Man]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

That's how I do it. I can't seem to run a talking dragon and take it seriously. They may be smarter than a dinosaur but they don't interact on a human level.

 

Pick up His Majesty's Dragon by N. Novik if you want to see it done in a novel.

[Curufea]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

It's already well proven that humans are very capable at being bigoted and racist towards themselves, you don't actually need the biological definition of other races to exist in a fantasy setting to have exactly the same kind of game. There is even historical precedence - for example, just rename Rorke's Drift as "High Elves versus Orcs", World War 1 as "The Battle of the Five Armies".

[Ragnarok]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I'm not an expert on the event, but I'm pretty sure neither Rorke's Drift nor World War I were a direct result of racism. The tendency to depict Rorke's Drift in a racist way after the fact, perhaps. World War I was mostly just a result of hyper-inflated patriotism, with more ethnic rather than racial divisions.

 

Perhaps I misunderstand what you meant.

[Old Man]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

The ultimate cause of World War I seems to have been a kind of runaway nationalism, especially on the part of the Germans. There were some racist overtones as well. The parallels between the runups to WWI and WWII are actually pretty striking.

[Curufea]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Ah sorry - should have been two separate paragraphs there. The examples are not of racism, but of humans behaving in ways that could easily be done with fantasy races.

[Steve]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

You can also take humans and add on environmental packages to show things like desert adaptation, arctic adaptation, etc. This really expands the variety for a single race.

[Ragnarok]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Ah sorry - should have been two separate paragraphs there. The examples are not of racism' date=' but of humans behaving in ways that could easily be done with fantasy races.[/quote']

 

Ah, gotcha. I'm with you there.

[Spence]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Some of my best campaigns ever were human only, (Qualifier: PC's were human only). Everything else tended to fall into NPC encounters/Monsters.

 

A great fantasy game was one with all human PC's. The only traditional non-human stock the ran into were goblin raiders and an encounter with a dwarfish war-party hunting said goblins.

 

It allowed us to re-inject the exotic mystery of non-humans cultures, rather than the normal humans of a different flavor they all seem to have become.

[kahuna's bro]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Could someone hit Markdoc with their repstick for me?

 

consider it done sir

[Shadowsoul]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

I must say that I am a fan of non-human races. Though I've long since become bored with the Tolkienesque standard races.

 

Here is my rather rambling opinion of this debate.

 

I'd agree that any standard fantasy race can be turned into or replaced by a human culture. That is because they are reflections of humanity and are often based on real cultures to begin with. Tolkienesque elves are humans writ large. Tolkien's original conception of dwarves was a cross between Nordic legend and Medieval European conceptions of Jewish populations as outsiders to 'normal' society.

 

Sometimes human cultures can be more exotic to each other than the local non-humans. The Tsurani, an East-Asian/Chinese style empire, who invade the standard fantasy realm of Midkemia through a world gate are far more baffling and horrifying to the native humans than the elves and dwarves that also live in this setting. Mental landscapes are more interesting and fulfilling to play with than physical ones. Who cares about pointy ears anyway?

 

Non-humans are most interesting when you approach their creation with this argument in mind. When you consciously try to create something alien to all human societies e.g. Lovecraft's Elder Things. Of course the end result can be unplayable. Furries and shifters are actually a half decent solution to this problem. They are clearly part human but can also be assigned characteristics distinct from those of any historical human culture, (though they often end up as equivalents of one culture or another). You can take a race of cat people or fish people and assign them characteristics based on your belief about that animal, then you can build their society from there. But the result may feel flat and unsatisfying to some.

 

Incidentally my only 'humans only', (for the PCs), campaign was based on Early Modern Europe and the PCs were as diverse a group as you could hope to meet. The different nationalities of Eurasia were and are so foreign to each other that it was easy to create interesting and distinctive characters.

 

So no, you don't need anything other than humans in your campaign. But on the other hand non-human races are fun and RPing should be fun. I think they function best if you create your own so that you can give players a new roleplaying challenge. You can't fall back on stereotypes that aren't there.

 

But if you are happy with just humans then more power to you. I'd say that the question then becomes, will you simply recreate historical civilisations or will you create marvelous new tribes and nations the like of which the world has never seen? Most sensible fantasy settings use the first approach with some tweaks and additions along the way. But the second method has its potential.

 

This is fantasy after all. Where are the Vikings who conquered the Han empire or the pygmies whose religion conquered the world or the punk rock tribalists that lurk in a seething subterranean jungle?

[Old Man]

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

 

Yes this is fantasy after all, but I have to rain on your parade and point out that in most cases, lowering the learning curve for your fantasy milieu is a good thing. Which is why the Tolkien/Warcraft/Warhammer/D&D races have become the standard. It is much easier to play a Wood Elf than it is to play a Q'Rhullion Warsinger and the complexities of its tripartite soul.