• Registered: 2013-08-08
  • Posts: 285

Topic: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

Posted this on my blog and at Google+.  Feel free to respond wherever it's most convenient for you.

What can we use instead of the boring old humanoids when running LotFP campaigns?  These lists should be especially helpful if you're using a random encounter chart and "goblin" or "bugbear" comes up.

Short Humanoids (goblins, dwarves, halflings, kobolds, etc.):

Pygmies
Children (think Lord of the Flies)
Crawling People
Legless Folk (they move using their hands and tiny stumps instead of legs)
Little People
Babyskins (something that has crawled into the flesh of stolen babies)
Animated Dolls
Walking Animals (rats, cats, dogs, goats, sheep, etc., walking on two legs)
Highly Intelligent Monkeys/Apes

Medium-sized humanoids (orcs, gnolls, bugbears, etc.):

Vikings
Visigoths
Exotic or Foreign "Savages"
Cannibals
Cultists
Druids
Wild Men
Lost Tribe
Bandits
Mutants (using The Metamorphica)
Animated Manikins
Feral People
Aigipan Libys
Arimaspoi
Blemmyes
Skiapodes
Kynokephaloi
Gorgades
Hippopodes
Makhlyes
Nuloi
Panotioi
Amazons
Artabtatitae (four-legged)
Astomi (mouthless)
Walking Animals (deer, pigs, wolves, etc., walking on two legs)
Highly Intelligent Apes/Gorillas

Large humanoids (giants, ogres, trolls):

Gegenees
Walking Animals (bears, elephants, camels, horses, cows, bulls, etc.)
(I think I'd be willing to use a single giant, ogre and troll once in a campaign, but most large creatures will probably be monstrosities.  It would be difficult for any large creature to exist in great numbers during the Early Modern Era, right?  Although an adventure inspired by Roald Dahl's BFG could be fun...)

Any other ideas?

(The blog includes links to some of the more obscure things on the list: http://thegruenextdoor.blogspot.com/201 … -meh.html)

Crunk Posby's Website

  • Registered: 2011-06-29
  • Posts: 194

Re: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

Crunk Posby wrote:

(I think I'd be willing to use a single giant, ogre and troll once in a campaign, but most large creatures will probably be monstrosities.  It would be difficult for any large creature to exist in great numbers during the Early Modern Era, right?

I don't know, it's possible!... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollhunter

  • Registered: 2013-08-08
  • Posts: 285

Re: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

Lord Inar wrote:
Crunk Posby wrote:

(I think I'd be willing to use a single giant, ogre and troll once in a campaign, but most large creatures will probably be monstrosities.  It would be difficult for any large creature to exist in great numbers during the Early Modern Era, right?

I don't know, it's possible!... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollhunter

Well played - that's a great flick!

Crunk Posby's Website

  • Registered: 2013-12-16
  • Posts: 6

Re: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

Most of those things aren't any less boring.
Pygmies? Vikings? Visigoths? Canibals? Wild Men? Feral People?

So basically just humans that you have personal and potentially racist warped ideas about. But, sure... humans of nationalities/tribes that are not your own tend not to like your tribe. And arrows and spear thrusts are easier to exchange than words in a language you don't know. So, yes, I guess they work. But how is that any less boring?

Druids? Just humans with a different religion. Big deal.
Bandits?... Okay, so that's an easy go to. You may as well include mercenaries too.

Given this list of things you think would be less boring, I think maybe you just don't know how to do Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears well...

You got two routes you can go with them. Either you go the Elf, Dwarf, Halfling route-- basically they are just humans, but universal a bit different than normal. Elves are basically humans but less hardy, more civilized, more magical... so Orcs? basically humans but far more hardy, less civilized and have their own sort of weird totem-spirit magic. Like peoples who live in deep dark caves or out there in the blizzard-swept tundras and no one knows about them besides that they are big, mysterious and horribly violent.

Or you could go the other route-- make them way more magical. Instead of being easily dispatched small people, goblins can go back to their origins and be things of nightmares-- completely magical beings who can enter anywhere, disappear into the shadows, can and will slit your throat in the middle of the night, play chaotic tricks on you in the forest causing you to become lost forever, will kidnap children and transform them into monsters... generally seem to exist solely to spread chaos and destruction and cast the land into darkness.... and even if you kill one? The body vanishes and the same exact one appears again within a week.

Basically you can make them far rarer and much more interesting when encountered. No reason a goblin ought not to give you just as much reason to shudder as an evil elf.

  • Null
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  • Registered: 2014-01-13
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Re: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

Great points, though it's worth remembering that any premodern person is extremely 'racist' by our standards. Medieval people rarely left a few miles of their village, and even a wandering mercenary might barely cross a few countries. So yes, I think pygmies, Visigoths, Vikings, Cathayans, Maoris, and even Aztecs and Incas are 'monsters'. Look at those horrid parodies of humanity and the way they dress! A person from a vastly different culture would be as 'alien' to a premodern person as an extraterrestrial would seem today.

Of course, they think the same about you.

  • Registered: 2013-08-08
  • Posts: 285

Re: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

Null says exactly what I was thinking.

I think you have some cool ideas on how to make the traditional races more interesting, Muneshige, but I'm looking at trying to play LotFP in a more realistic setting, as encouraged by the system.  I could see using those races once in an adventure built around them (much like I plan to do with Zzarchov's Gnomes of Levnic), but I have no interest in having them a regular part of the campaign world.

That said, I wouldn't want anything on my list to show up repeatedly or just take the place of the things I'm trying to keep out and, as you say, become boring.  That's why I'd like a big list of more "mundane" or realistic human-based ideas so that any one of them pops up rarely.

Crunk Posby's Website

  • Registered: 2013-12-16
  • Posts: 6

Re: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

But, I think maybe the point was missed that these concepts have really been degraded quite a bit by the way D&D has unfortunately utilized them.

I mean, goblins were every bit as dangerous as any dwarf or elf before Tolkien got his hands on them. They were powerful evil fairies that you didn't want to cross. They certainly were not tiny, ugly, easily dispatched peoples who had no good, so you needn't feel anything about it.

Orcs are basically exaggerated versions of how the English and French saw the Vikings, the Romans saw the Germanic tribes and the Huns, the Chinese saw the Mongols, the American settlers saw the Native Americans and the English Colonists saw the Zulu. I guess we could take it one step further in retrospect and add "how homo sapiens saw the neanderthals". The degree to which they are exaggerated and how much of those various cultures traits they take on the traits of those various cultures has always varied from writer to writer.

The thing is that if you take the Orcs and replace them with those things they are an exaggerated form of... well.. you'll end up with something less outlandish. I don't know that using less exaggerated forms will be any less boring, you see. Except perhaps that they will stop being the go-to bad guys.

Hobgoblins have always been an oddity because no one quite knows what to do with them. Some of them make them very much like Orcs, a popular trend I have seen dating back to the 80s has been to make them very Eastern-- give them Chinese or Japanese elements. Basically they are totally civilized, one cannot deny that, but their ways are so brutal and cruel that they represent a different flavor of "other tribe" than the Orc.

I guess there are always a couple ways to go with them... you can make them all insanely more monstrous to make them more interesting. Or, conversely, if your Dwarfs and Halflings and Elves are all mixed in among your people and no one even bats an eyebrow at these different flavors of human any more... it is entirely possible to just make Orcs and Hobgoblin two more of these totally indistinct flavors of human running around your towns and then open up the frontier to something far more terrifying than simply humans with slightly different shaped ears and eyes and teeth that are just more or less attractive than your every day human.

  • Registered: 2013-09-13
  • Posts: 56

Re: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

muneshige wrote:

goblins were every bit as dangerous as any dwarf or elf before Tolkien got his hands on them. They were powerful evil fairies that you didn't want to cross.

That's what I like about Legend.

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  • Registered: 2014-01-13
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Re: Goblins, Orcs and Bugbears - oh meh.

Good thoughts, all!

If you wanted to go the *other* way, drow, Melniboneans, and Vampire: the Masquerade vampires are ways a barbarian might see a civilized culture--weak, effeminate, cruel, and cowardly, but with strong 'arts' that might prove dangerous. Think of the way medieval knights would see the Byzantine Empire--bunch of noncy fellows who eat with utensils and practice diplomacy. Or how they'd react to modern Americans or Europeans--fat, lazy, and easy to kill, until their policemen or soldiers arrive with projectile magic wands that blow *through* armor!

Interestingly, in one of the original little brown books, Gary Gygax referred to using Turk miniatures for orcs, so there is some precedent for this.