The Second-coming of Snow: A Blog Resurrection, Part 2 - "Stop being Racist!"

I like to think of myself as a fairly social person, but nothing makes me feel more removed from the human race like when I try to explain to someone what I’m doing with my Thursday night. 


“I can’t meet up, sorry; I’m DM’ing a game tonight.”


*blank stare*


“I’m a dungeon master for a tabletop game.”


*confusion displayed in rapid blinking*


“Ok, hmm…you know 'Lord of the Rings’?"


“Like, with the elves and dwarves and the stuff? The hobbits?”


“Yep.”


“Oh…realllly?”


The conversation goes on from there to a familiar place most of you might have been. It is that exchange which got me thinking about my next topic: the races that define our world. Think about your favorite race in tabletop. What is it? Say it out loud…


You chose that over all. And if you muttered the words of a race outside of the core, you’re ballsy…or you know, just being you. You’re bound to get some stares, particularly from those eagerly ready to defend the Human race as perfection. 


In my most recent campaign, I introduced a new race called “The Goro”— a four-armed thuggish, mass of meat with servitude demeanors (and a direct homage to the Prince in Mortal Kombat). I needed to create a race that made up a reformed prison population, set forth into a city-kingdom to reshape their lives. Because of this specific purpose, I chose to go with something original/ made-up. My reservations were that existent races, as players might see it, pack too much history. Hmm, should I have defaulted to Orcs? Would it be expected? If I made them Gnomes, would it provide more shock value or evoke laughter? If I made them human, would I simply be stirring in the flavor story of the week into a big batch of vanilla? 


I would like to think that the blank slate of a race left open the door for what my players might think could happen with this race. Moreover, I love the idea that each of my players filled in what the Goro’s actually looked like for themselves. 


Using race with intentionality is a prospect I’m truly in support of. Yes, when I think about Dwarves and Elves, I feel a sense of nostalgia for a game I’m still participating in. They are hallmarks. They are older than I am in real life and have a legacy even outside the game. Take for example, the Ivy league colleges: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc. Did you know that when the Assistant and Associate Deans of the academic colleges get together, they actually refer to themselves as ‘The Gathering of the Dwarves and the Elves”? Seriously. When I was working at Princeton, I learned this and was simply giddy to know they used the jargon. Still, when I’m creating a story/ campaign, I feel ultimately stifled by the core line of races; and thus, I have a fond place in my heart for looking into unconventional races. 


There are people who actually get paid to invent races for the worlds we play in and create, and in honor of those lucky bastards with the best jobs on Earth, I decided to seek them out to share some of their race cases with my readers. I contacted the following game writers/ designers and asked them simply two questions: "What’s your favorite race that you’ve created?”, and “What’s you’re favorite race that someone else has created?"


James Wyatt, writer of Oriental Adventures, designer for Eberron Campaign Setting, and co-author of Book of Exalted Deeds, to name a few, had this to share with me:




"The vanara, from Oriental Adventures, are my favorite racial creation. I'm proud of the way I was able to integrate Indian and Southeast Asian history, folklore, and myth into that book, in addition to all the things from China and Japan that you'd expect to see.”

He continues, “It's hard to name a favorite [race created by someone else], but I have a soft spot for both changelings and warforged (both of which I *helped* create), because of my use of them in my Eberron novels. When it comes to making a character for a game, though, it's usually human, elf, or dwarf. Classics!”


I was certainly hoping one of the game designers would pick a race with an animalistic aesthetic. I feel like these are some of the most underutilized in the bunch. What are your thoughts on adventures of the monkey, toad, feline, and insect kind? No, I’m not talking about being in Wild Shape…


Ed Greenwood, the father of Forgotten Realms, may have not given me much in content; but he certainly surprised me. He couldn’t identify a favorite race of his own creation; though, his non-selfie selection is among one of the oldest races to exist and yet unknown to those unfamiliar with the Hollywood canon. 

"Beholders, I think...because there's still an aura of mystery about them, and the idea of so many supra-geniuses and what they might make of their lives intrigues me,”notes Greenwood.


Wow, an aberration race as a favorite! This side-line tackle makes me smile. A race more than ten years older than I am (I’m 27), having graced the pages of so much fantasy literature STILL intrigues a man that has long been cognitive of the game’s possibilities. 


Finally, Stephen Radney-Macfarland, a Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Designer at Paizo Publishing and co-developer of 4e  D&D, shared this with me:


"My favorite race that I have created? That's a hard one. I've done a number of them somewhat recently, including all the sample races for the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Race Guide race builder (and those entry's races in Pathfinder's Bestiary 4). Of those races I think my favorite is the wyrwood--a race of living constructs, which are a basically wizard's experiment gone rogue--Pinocchio without the heart. I will admit they can be a challenge to play, both on the player's and the GM's side, but they have great story potential.”


If you haven’t read the Pathfinder’s Bestiary 4, stop reading this and go check it out. No, wait, finish this; then go read it. The homage to horror icons is brilliant. The wormwood is another example of the unconventional as favorable. When I’ve heard players wanting to be constructs as player characters, I’ve always heard them talk about the build in a bulky way. Seldom have I ever considered a Small construct to be the go-to thought, let alone an option. Perhaps I’ll play this race in a game soon and write a review of what I thought.


He continues, "As for my favorite race I have not created, 

that race is actually not in a game supplement at all (or at least not that I know of) but I would love to stat them up. That would be Jeff Vandermeer's gray caps. Fungus creatures that inhabit--or more like haunt--his novels. I talked to Jeff about writing them up when I worked on D&D, and he liked the idea, but I never got around to it. There are some IP hoops to jump through. But that is not the only problem. To be honest the race is so strange, I feel like I would have to spend weeks brainstorming and asking Jeff stupid questions before I could even approach a first draft of these critters. They are extremely cool and creepy, and advise anyone who loves weird races to check out Jeff's work. All that said, they have appeared in a number of my home games.”


Boom! Stephen drives home the validity I needed in this interviewing adventure. Sometimes, races so intriguing just need the breath of game incorporation. 
I’m going to drop the mic there and simply ask, what’s your go to race? Classic or avant garde? How would you/ have you incorporated them on the table?

The Second-coming of Snow: A Blog Resurrection, Part 1 (The Story of a Deeply Complex Departure)

Last year, I launched my first campaign and became self-inaugrated into the amalgam of amateur dungeon masters. "Hi, my name is Snow. I am a Dungeon Master. I do dungeon mastering.” I could go into what that all meant, with anyone who cared to ask; and my-my, what an earful they might get about what I think I do -- creation, manage, co-exist, structure; oh, and have fun with friends around collections of food/ leftovers. Yet, I decided to do something I’ve longed to do for some years: start a blog. I transferred the energy I had with running a campaign into a complimentary project. So, with that said, would anyone like to guess where my blog went once the campaign started to fizzle? 


The correlation, whether I realized it during the writing freeze or afterward, is a stark one. I didn’t, by the game’s end, feel like an accomplished DM. My flow of topics for the blog, my willingness to write, vanished. Recently, I’ve been granted True Seeing, and I’ve noticed some hidden pathways in my adventure as a blogger. I start this two-part resurrection with an epiphany. If no one else reads, if no one else plays, you’re still a blogger, and you’re still a dungeon master.


Now, I know what some of your are thinking: Umm, without a group, no, you’re actually not a dungeon master. At to that argument, I offer this refutation and a modification to an old movie saying. "If you build it", you are an architect; regardless if "they will come". Towards the end of my final campaign days, I solicited feedback from my players about what they thought about me as a DM, what they thought about the game, and asked them to share some advice for me going forward. Some replied. Some flat-out ignored it. While I would be lying if I said this didn’t shut me down, I would also be remised if I didn’t acknowledge that the silence left room for some much needed introspection. To get my act together as a DM, I needed to have one night of simply doing what I felt was natural. Rather than end the campaign I had been running for 5 months, I created a one shot for the group; but set it up as if the game could continue. In just that game, I validated for myself two points which I knew were true all along: failure with a group happens, and trying too hard as a DM is a fallacy. 


I’ll relate this to my profession. In a teachers’ meeting, a faculty member talks about how students just aren’t engaged with learning, how they have an unhealthy relationship with the education. Straight up, they’re lazy. We’ve been saying this for decades, and we find news ways to say it, new scapegoats to point fingers at; and yet, we never own up to the reality that we may just not be effective at what we do. In the future, I hope I am not a DM who claims to know what I’m doing based on the fact that I’ve been doing it for years. I’ve read so many posts online from DM’s who refuse to shake up their system or cater to their audience. To each their own. May I never abide by the rules of ritual. 


To end this rant, I leave this advice for DM’s, especially new DM’s out there: Try less, Fail to allow failure to continue, and Shake it up. Yay, now I have officially completed my prestige class as Motivational Hippie.