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Post by Porphyre on Jan 21, 2015 16:30:24 GMT -6
But the elves in Elfquest are not really expys of existing human cultures. They have pore correspondances with animal species (wolfs , eagles) or natural habitats (deserts).
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Post by tkdco2 on Jan 21, 2015 17:09:54 GMT -6
Has anyone used Picts as the basis for a demihuman culture?
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Post by Porphyre on Jan 22, 2015 7:28:16 GMT -6
The other way around. I would rather use B/X templates for non-humans to play some ethnicities in a "humans only" setting. Elves are the Ancient (Atlants, Melnibonean, Hyperboreans, etc): ancient , swindling culture of warring nobility dabbling in the powers of the occult, Halflings would be the "primitive" pre-indoeuropéan races (thing RE Howard picts, Arthur Machen's "little people"): stealthy diminutive folks, more resilient than strong. (besides, apart from the howardian version , or some late XIXth-early XXth century romantic imagery, I'm not certain we have a clear idea of what pictish culture really was apart from: "wore blue body paintings; scared the shirt out of latin authors". Hack! Specialist can't even agree wether they were celtic peuple or not)
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Post by tkdco2 on Jan 24, 2015 1:55:49 GMT -6
In Medieval Scandinavia, anyone could be a troll. But calling someone that could get you killed. link
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Post by tetramorph on Jan 24, 2015 20:51:25 GMT -6
Who coined "Demi-human"?
When? Where?
I guess I just don't like the term.
I still prefer fay or fell.
Really, does anyone know?
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Post by Scott Anderson on Jan 25, 2015 21:51:41 GMT -6
Demihuman leaves me hollow too. I like to say Demi-Men or "the commoner races."
Men are Britons with Roman lineage; there are Mamaluks too. Dwarfs are Scots (with or without the accent) Hobbits are 19th c. English & Welsh Gnomes are of the Low Countries, some from Spain & some native Elves are Normans and Franks. There are also Prussian Dwarves and Black Forest Elves.
Giants are scandis.
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Post by geoffrey on Jan 25, 2015 22:46:00 GMT -6
Who coined "Demi-human"? When? Where? I know for a fact (since I just double-checked) that Gary Gygax used it in the 1978 AD&D Players Handbook. I don't know if it appears in an earlier work.
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Post by waysoftheearth on Jan 25, 2015 22:46:06 GMT -6
I don't know who coined the term or exactly where/when it first appeared, but to me "demi-human" is an AD&D-era ism.
"Demi-human" also appears in Moldvay's and Mentzer's Basic D&D, but not in Holmes.
OD&D has language like "man-types" and "player-types".
edit:
The earliest appearance of "demi" (pertaining to demi-human) I found in The Strategic Review/The Dragon was in The Dragon #29 (September 1979), in an article by EGG entitled THE HALF-OGRE, SMITING HIM HIP AND THIGH.
"The character races in AD&D were selected with care. They give variety of approach, but any player selecting a non-human (part- or demi-human) character does not have any real advantage."
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Post by Scott Anderson on Jan 25, 2015 23:29:22 GMT -6
On this topic sort of... I really dislike half elves and half orcs. I don't know why. I prefer to say they are orc-blooded or elf-blooded Men.
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Torreny
Level 4 Theurgist
Is this thing on?
Posts: 171
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Post by Torreny on Jan 26, 2015 5:36:52 GMT -6
For my part, what constitutes the elves are the "grey folk", which are more-or-less soulless outsiders as broadcloth-cloak, stark naked, Roman caricatures of the pagans outside the wall, also lots of running around covered in mud. Dwarfs were the worst parts of dwarfs from the Norse stories, and after I found it, they're also the dwarfs from Oglaf (very nsfw). Gnomes are the same thing, just one lives in the forest, and the other in the hills. And haflings are just Homer's pygmies, straight up.
Goblin/Hoblin/Gobbling/Bugbear/Bogge/etc. never meant any specific variety of nasty.
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Post by gallowglacht on Jan 26, 2015 7:47:09 GMT -6
Has anyone used Picts as the basis for a demihuman culture? Ever since Madmartigan called Willow a Pech, I have treated Halflings as Picts. (As Pechs are sometimes identified with mythologised Picts) That's why they still hit as hard as big folk.
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 26, 2015 9:31:47 GMT -6
I don't know who coined the term or exactly where/when it first appeared, but to me "demi-human" is an AD&D-era ism. "Demi-human" also appears in Moldvay's and Mentzer's Basic D&D, but not in Holmes. OD&D has language like "man-types" and "player-types". Correct, no use of the term demi-human in the first edition Holmes Basic rulebook, first published in mid-77. Holmes uses "men-types" (in the entries for Vampire and Spectre) or "humanoid" ("any human/humanoid figure they touch" in the entry for Ghouls) or "non-human" (in the Sample Dungeon, "humans and non-humans from all over the globe meet here"), but nothing just for elves/dwarves/halflings. This suggests that Holmes hadn't seen the term demi-human before. The first print of B2 does use Demi-Humans, but that's from early 1980, several years after the AD&D books. Some proto-AD&D-isms first appear in Swords & Spells (like the term "0-level" for normal humans) in 1976, but I checked & didn't see any uses of demi-human. The Monster Manual and some of the early modules would be other places to check to narrow it down.
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Post by Starbeard on Jan 29, 2015 4:41:33 GMT -6
I like this point very much. I try to make my fantasy races as varied as human races for that reason. Rather than giving elves a certain culture, I will try to come up with a specific culture or atmosphere for each individual group of elves the party comes across, as they encounter them. I will draw directly from human cultures or entirely self-fabricated cultures, but in general I try to focus on mythologies: instead of making a family of gnomes Finnish-like, I will try to make them like haltija. That much being said, I do still make use of human cultures a lot, although I generally try to make sure that I do so in ways I've personally never seen before. For example, while there's a petty human kingdom in my Outdoor Survival campaign map that's betrays a fairly straight-forward dependence on parts of Anglo-Saxon England, the hobbit tribes who live in the low hills and plains to the east are quite a hodge-podge: they are all semi-nomadic polyandrist societies with a highly complex caste system, speaking various dialects of a descendant language of the world's Latinesque 'high speech' but make use of only very simple writing on standing stones, and fight mainly on horseback using a military structure that I had originally envisioned as a combination of Carolingian and Mongol models. They are animistic and the men cannot cut their hair until they've killed a wild boar, or shave until they've killed someone in battle. What's interesting to me is how fantasy races have taken on the tropes of actual racist (using the term neutrally) ideas, with dwarves being "german" or "Jewish" or elves being "french" or from "india etc. To Tolkien, the elves/dwarves/orcs were a codification and classification of the different ways in which the anglo-Saxons viewed the single "race" of folk-tale creature. The mythology never came down to a single "elf". In some stories they were fair and tall, in others short and craftsman like, in others, dark and dangerous. They are personifications of a myriad of different ideas of the single mythic elf to the anglo-saxon story teller. This is what Tolkien means when he says he was attempting to preserve and recreate English mythology. So, I like Geoffrey's thought. But it still isn't quite what I think is complete. Afterall, the pre-christian Scandinavians also had an idea about what an elf was. If elves are pre-christian Scandinavians, what then are the actual pre-christian scandinavians? Tolkien considered the question of elves greatly: native to pre-christian Scandinavia, but not human. They are not "fremd" or the "other" or "foreigners", vikings and angles and the Saxons had other words for those (normally a sorcerous Muslim). Demi-humans are part of a culture, but apart from it. To have dwarves simply be short bearded scots, begs the question, why not just role-play a scot? Is that perhaps what people do? They aren't playing elves and dwarves, but English patricians and Scottish Highlanders?
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