theme for a fantasy campaign

[whswhs]

In thinking over possible campaigns for my next cycle, I realized, first, that I definitely wanted to include a straight historical fantasy options, and second, that I had never done an original fantasy setting with the kind of multiracial world that's been standard in fantasy games since the fantasy supplement to Chainmail. My multiracial fantasy settings were Glorantha (from the second edition of RuneQuest) and Middle-Earth (from the novels). So I started thinking about creating my own.

The sticking point, for me, was a variant on Chekhov's gun ("If there is a gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, it must be fired by the end of Act Three"): If I'm going to have multiple races in a setting, the campaign ought to be about the existence of multiple races in some way. That is, the theme of the campaign ought to be one that can be explored best through the presence of such races. What would be a theme that would require that?

I got to an answer yesterday, by an indirect route, after puzzling over it for a while. I was thinking, actually, about the presence of Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings. In a way he really doesn't fit, as has often been remarked: He's not part of any of the Free Peoples, even though he looks like one of the Big Folk; he's not of any use to dealing with the One Ring; he won't even leave his bit of land in the Old Forest. What's he doing there? Well, what Tom is is the most visible example of something that's all through Middle-Earth: spirits of the land, in a very pagan sense, almost like Roman ideas about lares and penates, or Japanese kami. Middle-Earth is what it is, in part, because it's still pervaded with spirits; and Tom himself is in a way the spirit of the whole of Middle-Earth.

But what that kind of spirits are is personifications of the local microecology and microclimate. Every stream has its nymph, like Goldberry; every mountain has its brooding presence, like Caradhras.

So what we're looking at, I think, is a sense of ecological diversity as a value in itself. I had already worked out that the different races would be attached to different terrain types (in the GURPS sense), as to a degree they are in Tolkien: elves to forest and jungle, men to plains, trolls to mountains and arctic lands, and so on. This is a key difference from the real world, where one species has occupied all the various climate types to different degrees. Each species would have its own particular supernatural gifts, and its own affiliation with the spirits of its particular terrain type. But also, survival for each species would involve some measure of trade with the other species. This is especially to be seen with dwarves, whose habitat is underground, and whose food is going to come largely from providing stones and metals to surface races in trade—but all the species will work like that.

And that suggests that the big threats are going to be members of each race who are trying to establish themselves as monocultures, dominating the other races. The diversity of races will itself be a value to be preserved against whichever race's fanatics are trying to damage it.

Of course, the different races' fanaticisms will take different forms. A power-crazed elf, a power-crazed troll, and a power-crazed man will come up with very different schemes.

I think maybe I can do something with this.

Bill Stoddard