Josh's "Green Porn" setting project

[Username17]

I think Gith is a good fit, especially if you were going to do an AoW style situation. You have a faction that basically is humans who were here a long time ago and were under the control of Mind Flayers, or some other setting-specific big bad. And the new flock of humans coming in from overseas with airships and shit shows up and they don't even recognize these people as being the same as they are.

Anyway, on Leks, it is a lot harder to justify that sort of thing when you're sapient. Basically, there has to be some sort of biological reason to keep doing it or rational people would stop. That to me sounds like the race needs a radically different environment to breed than it does to live. Meaning that to do the whole mating thing, they actually do need to go back to the same geographical feature over and over again so the males can fight it out and get it on with the available females. To me, that absolutely screams Kuo-Toa. They have pools f water with special salination properties that they need to breed in, and they are otherwise land dwelling people. So when it's time for the females to go lay eggs in the ponds, the males can all go to the pond and fight it out over who gets to spray sperm all over them. Even in the face of being totally rational, speaking individuals, this behavior would totally persist given that biological constraint.

You can also have the Catgirls from Final Fantasy Tactics. Where the sex ratio is nothing like 1:1, and the number of males is only like 1 in 10 or even less. If you're going Serengeti on us, I would suggest lion people. In FFT, the males are rare and valuable, so they are kept at home while the women run around hunting and adventuring. Like Lions, except that there really aren't any solitary males moping about trying to knock off a pack leader and assume the title of harem master.

-Username17

[Eikre]

Well that's the whole thing about "rationality". I mean I know we do this anthrocentrisim thing to make it more morally palatable to deal with eating cows and not holding cops who shoot dogs culpable for killing a member of some dude's family, but really, intelligence is a continuum... Sorry, what I'm getting at here is that everyone with a biological impulse is probably instinctual to some extent, including us. It's not a fate we escape just by considering things that are somewhat more complex than what the average housecat can grasp. What we consider sapience and enlightenment is probably best described as the capacity to self-analyze why it is that you act so fucking weird all the time.

So really any of these races can be just as intelligent and self-considerate as you or I but still go through great lengths in cultural buy-in and theological justification or whatever to justify the shit they do that is strictly useless or harmful to their self-interests from our perspective, and I feel this way because you and I probably do that ourselves. Where you have Bugbears deciding that babies are assholes and dying to have the exclusive right to make them is stupid, or a pair of gith that think this whole intergender warfare thing is from top to bottom a counterproductive travesty, you get... adventurers. Although it would be nice if everyone in your group didn't just decide to go shopping for stats and end up playing a social pariah who acts in every way like any human would.

Actually the lek thing is even pretty easy to empathize with, it's just a big party where you have this place you think is really "cool" so you go there dressed up real sharp and hope you get to bang someone. And if you don't then you have no life. People don't just cut that shit out because they notice what an ephemeral pursuit it is.

Goes both ways, though. "What the hell does 'incest' mean? Okay, yeah, sex between these two people, still not understanding why that's even a thing that you need a word for. What, you mean it's a pejorative? You guys are so fucking weird."

[Josh_Kablack]

It's not about sex being involuntarily, but about it being painful.

Yup. And that makes in violent. And in our culture violence-to-get-sex is fine, we call that "Action Movies", while violence-as-sex is still taboo, the best term we have for that is "BDSM fetish", and we have a lot of worse terms.

With the morning light, it's seeming a little more palatable to maybe include a version of traumatic insemination in the game - but it still seems likely a better idea to assign in to a monster type or a fantasy livestock species than a PC race.

[Username17]

Actually the lek thing is even pretty easy to empathize with, it's just a big party where you have this place you think is really "cool" so you go there dressed up real sharp and hope you get to bang someone. And if you don't then you have no life. People don't just cut that shit out because they notice what an ephemeral pursuit it is.

No. It's not. While a sapient species would probably dress it up that way and thus it would look to outsiders like some expensive but ultimately unexceptional mating customs, it's really not. The Lek is a mandatory thing. If there are small numbers of you in the distant South in Frostling territory, you still have to do it. It is not a set of mating customs that is culturally adapted to the constraints of your lands and civilization, it is one of the constraints of your reproduction.

And that's why it has to be something that is a locational requirement for reproduction. Salmonesque instinctual locational homing just doesn't cut it for creatures that can build boats and make choices. So obvious choice would be requirements of some kind of pool to breed in. Whether it be a pool of water, lava, magic, or acid. It's a simple biological constraint that clearly drives the rational voluntary decision to have everyone go to the same place to reproduce.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

I assume certain species could just create new "breeding pools" when new environs don't suffice.

Just because the salamanders of the volcano Caustic Caldera move south to another volcano doesn't mean they've lost all urge to reproduce, or innately drawn back to motherland by their genes.
Animals must be running on specific non-genetic, learned clues as to where and when they dump their duty and such things could be replicated, to reshape an environment to something that matches the home they've known while growing up.

[Eikre]

No. It's not. While a sapient species would probably dress it up that way and thus it would look to outsiders like some expensive but ultimately unexceptional mating customs, it's really not. The Lek is a mandatory thing. If there are small numbers of you in the distant South in Frostling territory, you still have to do it. It is not a set of mating customs that is culturally adapted to the constraints of your lands and civilization, it is one of the constraints of your reproduction.

I concede on this severity, I do understate the importance by framing it as I do. I maintain, though, that this can still be a psychological feature. You can't ejaculate with the same ease that you move your arm, an erotic buildup is necessary. You may want to just deposit your genetic material and get on with your life, and there are circumstances under which you, as a sentient creature, would benefit having the decision to do so, but it's infeasible. And fertility specialists will continue stocking their bathrooms with dirty magazines if they want your sperm in a cup and not a syringe.

A lek is pretty involved, granted. It's not just imagining big titties while you jerk your gherkin (or amphibious analogue), it's a very inconvenient and involved production. This doesn't mean that strutting one's froggy stuff can't be the necessary male prelude to arousal, or that the demonstration can't be the vital psychological reassurance that keeps the females from getting agitated and suspending ovulation or miscarrying. I mean, humans crack under the silliest conditions, like not talking to another human or seeing natural sunlight for an extended period of time. How do either of those things really matter to my personal health if I'm keeping busy and taking vitamin D supplements? I don't know but if someone trapped me in a bunker for a couple months I'd probably self-mutilate, so I don't find the strange needs of a scaled-up frog beyond the realm of possibility.

I do not disagree that having a concrete, biological imperative would not make for fine, compelling fiction. I just think, for me, things like this are more interesting if you swing them father up on the familiar-alien axis, and I think xenopsychology is a fine way to do that.

[Prak]

Actually the lek thing is even pretty easy to empathize with, it's just a big party where you have this place you think is really "cool" so you go there dressed up real sharp and hope you get to bang someone. And if you don't then you have no life. People don't just cut that shit out because they notice what an ephemeral pursuit it is.

No. It's not. While a sapient species would probably dress it up that way and thus it would look to outsiders like some expensive but ultimately unexceptional mating customs, it's really not. The Lek is a mandatory thing. If there are small numbers of you in the distant South in Frostling territory, you still have to do it. It is not a set of mating customs that is culturally adapted to the constraints of your lands and civilization, it is one of the constraints of your reproduction.

And that's why it has to be something that is a locational requirement for reproduction. Salmonesque instinctual locational homing just doesn't cut it for creatures that can build boats and make choices. So obvious choice would be requirements of some kind of pool to breed in. Whether it be a pool of water, lava, magic, or acid. It's a simple biological constraint that clearly drives the rational voluntary decision to have everyone go to the same place to reproduce.

-Username17

To continue my idea of trolling elf fanboys by making the pointy-eared ones crazy bower birds (on my misunderstanding of Lek reproduction)....

Once every ten years, elves must travel to Ehlonnah's Grotto, a vast basin of humid, wet climate where grow the New-Borns' Tears trees. New-Borns' Tear is a fruit, steeped in a special magical radiation, when ripe it is a deep blue colour, speckled with lighter pale blue dots, so that it appears as the night sky. When a male and female elf eat this fruit (and they must share the fruit of the same tree), they become fertile for one night. Elf males have taken to arriving at the Grotto one week before full ripeness, to find one of these special trees, claim it, and begin building a bower of reeds and leaves suspended from it's canopy. The males will jealously guard their tree and bower, for it's their best hope for attracting a mate.

The bower has become very important culturally, even though it has little to do with the actual reproduction, and on the night that the females arrive, a great celebration is held, with each male trying to prove his bower best, the most beautiful, the best built (though they do occasionally fall, often when people are inside), and the most outlandish. The use of a previous year's bower is thoroughly unimpressive, as the elven culture wishes to see constant innovation, while a premade bower is not only frowned upon, but seen as a grave insult to the gods (who provide the basin and the bower materials therein) and to the woman, as it is a baldfaced ploy for not a night with one special female, but any female. Planning your bower ahead of time is perfectly ok, of course.

[Josh_Kablack]

To continue my idea of trolling elf fanboys

As much as that notion generally appeals to me, and as awesomely hillarious as your elven bower suggestion is, this is just not happening here.

The only way "elves" are even showing up in this system is if Frank explains his objection to naming the Aphid-analogues Dryads in a convincing way. There is already a significant overlap between the Aphid-people and traditional D&D pseudo-Tolkien elves (tree hugging, lengthy racial recollection), but there are also a couple of big differences "female only, always pregnant and milked by kobolds" aspect. I'm thinking a name other than "elf" highlights the differences and makes them more unique.

A lek is pretty involved, granted....., it's a very inconvenient and involved production.

That turn of phrase makes me wonder if the leks of a sentient species might look something like This

[JonSetanta]

Dwarf smithing is now a mating ritual, presenting the finest wrought riches to ones prospective mate. Mining shifts from hobby to an activity of sexual potence and necessity for quality offerings.

Mind blown.

[Username17]

The only way "elves" are even showing up in this system is if Frank explains his objection to naming the Aphid-analogues Dryads in a convincing way.

Several reasons. The most compelling of course is that from a game mechanical standpoint, elves are quite playable and people have expectations of wanting to be them. Bur also because one of the main purposes of including aphid lifecycles at all is because you want to use their multiple versions across different generations, what with the parthenogenic generations, the sexual, egg laying setups, and so on. This sort of radical variation in life cycle across generations pretty much demands a race with a pile of subtypes - like Elves or Goblins or Giants. Sure, you could do some sort of thing where they varied between Dryads, Nymphs, and Ents across generations, but that's really unnecessary when there is already an available "Elf" that has fifteen different flavors to choose from.

So you have one portion that makes seeds that Kobolds take under ground and keep warm in their warrens during the winter. And also take them across the continent to plant in new places. But you also have elves that reproduce sexually and ones that give birth to live young without sex. That could include at least 3 flavors of elf, which is probably what your players want out of a D&D game.

-Username17

[Prak]

why are you opposed to putting elves in otherwise, Josh? Just out of curiosity.

[Josh_Kablack]

Dwarf smithing is now a mating ritual, presenting the finest wrought riches to ones prospective mate. Mining shifts from hobby to an activity of sexual potence and necessity for quality offerings.

Mind blown.

Something similar is already a theory of behaviour in early human society.

But I'm shying away from including dwarves, for similar reasons that I'm shying away from elves.

why are you opposed to putting elves in otherwise, Josh? Just out of curiosity.

They are overused as a PC race and I'm worried that player preconceptions of elves may overshadow that setting specific tweaks.

Frank makes a decent case, but his post there makes it apparent that we have some difference of vision on how this race is gonna fit into the setting.

So let me be clear about my vision.


EDIT: Spoilering just in case any of my players reads this. If you're likely to be in my game, please skip the spoilered section.

Over 99% of the time, the female only, parthogenic versions are the only ones in existence. The alternative freaky bigendered types only appear as a portent of a setting-wide recurrent catastrophic event yet-to-be-decided. So when the the magic goes away, or the return of the horrors approaches, or the cosmic rays signal the approach of Nemesis the mutant bi-gendered generation appears, and they lay eggs that can survive the scouring of the world (just like aphids lay eggs to survive the winter).
Next, they get a form of ancestral memory, which has reall strong recall going back 2 generations but suffers from replicative fading beyond that - meaning that members of the race may have actual memories of the Eldest Mother hatching from a great egg, but they are hazy and mythic (like how Cain and Abel's wives come outta nowhere) but nobody has any recall of freaks like this ever happening before.

This makes it a method for portentious omens with a neat real world paralell, as when the bigendered generation start appearing, you get reactions like this:

You look pale and gaze
And put on fear and cast yourself in wonder
To see the strange impatience of the heavens.
But if you would consider the true cause
Why all these fires, why all these gliding ghosts,
Why birds and beasts from quality and kind,
Why old men, fools, and children calculate,
Why all these things change from their ordinance,
Their natures, and preformed faculties
To monstrous quality, why, you shall find
That heaven hath infused them with these spirits
To make them instruments of fear and warning
Unto some monstrous state.

And is this is a homebrew setting and not a published work, I can keep the whole periodic cataclysm, limits of racial memory and species adaption to the periodic cataclysm as a secret for the players to unravel in game. If "Dryads" or if only the female version of the "Elves" is playable, then that can all be a big in-game reveal - they can find lost tablets of the Gith that explain the exodus to the astral, the crazy human Doctor Moreau can claim to have created a male dryad in his menagerie of experimental horrors, a Red Dragon that escaped the Yanki pact can give a warning that "when the race splits, next the world splits", then the bigender freaks can show up in mid campaign as an unintelligible portent and other puzzle pieces can be assembled in time for the PCs to fight this recurrence of the cataclysm - by hiding their civilization in cairns of elemental earth, by advancing airships into starjammers or by stabbing the god of death behind it all right in the face - whatever.

None of that works as an in-game-reveal if the list of playable races includes the bigendered subtypes and gives it all away before the game even starts. So I really don't need elven subtypes.

Now the "Players expect to be able to play elves" carries real weight. But I'm thinking that this race is different enough from other elves in D&D that I don't want to call it elves, and contribute more to the "these elves are different" meme.

[Red_Rob]

And is this is a homebrew setting and not a published work, I can keep the whole periodic cataclysm, limits of racial memory and species adaption to the periodic cataclysm as a secret for the players to unravel in game.

Unless, y'know, they happen to check this thread

[Josh_Kablack]

I think the odds of that happening are low enough for me to be safe here. But just in case, I've added spoiler tags, so at least none of them read it by accident.

[Grek]

Dragons having a Komodo Dragon style system is pretty handy as DM, since you can easily just declare that there are now dragons here, without worrying about there being a breeding population of dragons at any point. Do that for sure. You could even have a justification why various dragons are different colours, if you do the "outside conditions determine child morphology" alligator thing with their eggs and their resulting colour/breathe weapon.

Also, you should make it extremely unambiguous as to whether "milking the dryad" involves a bucket and dryad tits, or sap and some sort of maple tree tapping setup. And, even then, the whole "all-female sentient race that is used as livestock and is naturally evolved to be livestock" thing still seems rather fishy to me.

If I were you, I'd just go with having dryad's evolutionary strategy be that they produce fruit, wood, flowers, rope or whatever and then give that to whoever they want in exchange for protection and assistance with planting baby dryads. And they can pick the gnolls, or the kobolds, or whoever as being the people they choose to work with. They can still even do the whole symbiosis with the kobolds thing, but as equal partners, and not as farm animals.

[Josh_Kablack]

Also, you should make it extremely unambiguous as to whether "milking the dryad" involves a bucket and dryad tits, or sap and some sort of maple tree tapping setup. And, even then, the whole "all-female sentient race that is used as livestock and is naturally evolved to be livestock" thing still seems rather fishy to me.

Nope.

It's insect=y:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Reproduction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Symbioses

And yes, that makes it well outside of our current cultural human norms.

[Prak]

Also, you should make it extremely unambiguous as to whether "milking the dryad" involves a bucket and dryad tits, or sap and some sort of maple tree tapping setup. And, even then, the whole "all-female sentient race that is used as livestock and is naturally evolved to be livestock" thing still seems rather fishy to me.

Bucket, yes. Tits, no. Sap, yes. Maple Tree Tapping set up, no.

It... I'll tell you when you're older.

[Josh_Kablack]

So to summarize assignments so far:

• Humans = Humans
• Gnolls = Spotted Hyenas
• Goblinoids = Elephant Seals
• Dryads (or Elves) = Aphids
• Kobolds = Mole Rats
• Crocodillians (Lizardfolk) = Seahorses -possibly with a bit of penguin mixed in (as cool as icthyocentaurippos are, they are not a standard D&D race and therefore cut from this project)
• Kuo-Toa = Frogs / Lek based (note to self: make culture non-fatalistic to run against usual portrayal)
• Pixies = Parasitoid Wasps. (although I may yet flip and go neogi here)
• Changeling / Doppleganger = Snails (unless anyone has other suggestions)
• ??? = Anglerfish / Blood Fluke (or should I just edit this out here?)

That's 9, maybe 10 playable races, with the possible eventual addition of the Gith to the playable list and just maybe lion-like cat people added (Lamia? Sphinx?) A range of 9 to 12 playable races seems to be in the target range for enough variety while still keeping things tight enough for players to keep track of.



Moving on notable non-playable races and reproductive methods currently are:

Gith = Black Widow / Praying Mantis. (these may become playable in a later "supplement', but as the vanished elder race are not initially playable in the first arc/campaign)

Chormatic Dragons = Komodo Dragon - with a bit of alligator mixed in.

TBA Monsterous Monster type = Bedbugs / Traumatic Insemination.

Random Livestock / prey species: Antelope / Willdebeast / Elephant herd mammal standard.

Some type of lake monsters = Atlantic Salmon, with myths about the reutrn of the big ones from sea, but all three distinct male morphologies within the species.

[Josh_Kablack]

Musing on parasitoid lifecycle and culture

So the big deal is that the males and females mate and then the females lay eggs in a host and the eggs hatch and the larva eat the host from the inside out.

In the real world, this leads to some truly freaky interactions between species (the mind control of the Emerald Cockroach Wasp, mutualism where plants exude chemicals which mix with caterpillar saliva in order to attract a particular species of parasitic wasps, commercial use as biocontrol of "agricultural pests" by humans, etc).

But within the context of this setting, the issue is how can a race of intelligent parasitoids pass on a culture and form some type of society?

If I go with one larva per host (which seems to be the most common and creepy) then there is no interaction between the young and other young of the species. If any type of parental care or societal instruction happens it has to happen at the point where the larva first emerge from the host. And if parental care of societal instruction does not happen, then I need to invoke some flavor of "dude, it's magic" for the race to have a language or culture. Given existing Neogi and Fairy ability sets, I think "psychic powers" would maybe be okay for that, but I'd like to come up with something just a bit more plausible.

In the real world, parasitoid wasps tend to be active hunters, they stalk the prey that they paralyze to use as hosts for their young. However, in the real world, no parasitoids have evolved intelligence or anything we would recognize as culture. So I'm going to assume that the PC parasitoid race has evolutionarily recently (possibly only since the last catastrophe) hit on the strategy of herding instead of merely hunting. So instead of the females having to stalk and hunt their host animals, the society maintains herds of animals for this purpose. Success in such a task requires passing down of traditions, which is facilitated by language, which is facilitated by greater intelligence.

So we get a PC race of herdsman and also a "monster" version of the race - as the PC race is not all that far removed from their unintelligent savage, predatory evolutionary relatives who they have forced back into less hospitable biomes.

Furthermore, herdsman in a psuedo-Africeque setting lets me draw some loose parallels between the pixies/neogis relationship to their host species and the Masai cultural attitudes about cattle.

So as a rough sketch: we have a race of semi-nomadic herders, who believe that all of the "cattle" in the world were granted to them by the gods, status is determined by the size of one's herd, a dowry of "cattle" is a functional part of the mating rite, and the whole village/tribe shares in educating the early instars in the ways of herding after they emerge from their buried hosts. Furthermore they get to be culturally conflicted about fertilized females hunting down free range "cattle" for their eggs: on one hand that's a hardcore, back to nature act driven by internal urges and on the other hand it's what the savage "monkey" version of the race does as they can't control their base impulses.

It still seems like that could work with either Pixies herding rabbits or Neogi herding wildebeasts.

[JonSetanta]

Slaad (or some weaker variant therein) = Parasites

I seem to recall some Planescape race in 3e that was basically a medium PC slaad...

[Josh_Kablack]

While Red Slaad do seem to have the Parasitoid life cycle predefined, and Blue Slaad have a horrible misrepresentation of the role transduction has played in the evolution of some parasitoid wasps., that's the entire argument so far for including them as a PC race. I like the alien horror of the neogi or the cute-but-not-what-you-expect angle on pixies better here. Furthermore, with Kuo-Toa getting the Lek slot, I already have one Giant Frog race in the setting, and don't really thing I need to include another....unless you want to present a convincing case for why Slaad would fit better into this role and setting than neogi or pixies would

[JonSetanta]

....unless you want to present a convincing case for why Slaad would fit better into this role and setting than neogi or pixies would

Because Giant Frog




Also, virus are like magic of the biological world; I ain't gotta explain shit.

http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine ... arsupials/

[Josh_Kablack]

Okay, let's talk giant frog. But I'm going with Kuo-Toa, the other giant frog:

We have Kuo-Toa. And they get a frog-like life cycle, where they need to breed and lay eggs in water. This could be set up to happen either in tidal pools wth unique salination/mineral content/magic residue or it can be a purely seasonal thing that happens with the great rains. In either case the big contrast to the human perspective is that there is a special time and special place for mating - and the rest of the time it is not a consideration.

This also means that during the lek, mate attraction and mate selection is the only consideration, and the whole culture understands that. There's effectively a holy month, where commerce, industry and warfare are suspended as everyone of appropriate age and health makes a pilgrimage to the tide pools (or seeks out this year's deepest rain gullies) and engages in weeks long sing-and-dance offs to attract mates. The males probably start a week earlier to stake out their own underwater dance floor and the females probably stay a week later to lay the eggs in appropriate furrows.

Now again, this leaves us with a problem of cultural transmission. The young are eggs that presumably hatch into something like tadpoles and start out aquatic before transitioning to an ambhibious / land adulthood. Here the young all hatch at the same time, and interact with each other. But without direct parental care, how do adults pass on culture to the tadpoles?

For now, I'm thinking that the strain of the pilgrimage and lek exhausts and injures some of the adults, so that they are unable to make the return trek - perhaps even unable to support their weight on land. These individuals stay behind in the tidal pools / rain gullies and they then pass on knowledge to the hatched tadpoles. So this has less of a parent / child dynamic and more of a elder teacher / horde of students dynamic.

On a different note, the Holy Month/ Pilgrimage set up means that there are a couple of weeks when Kuo-Toa settlements are left nearly vacant and vulnerable to raids and razing by other species. The Kuo-Toa discourage this through traps, alliances with <insert other PC race here> and the occasional act of horrific vengeance to dissuade others. Usually this works pretty well, but the new-to-the-area race has the technological know how to bypass the standard traps, fragmented relations with the allied race, no respect for the needs of these savages and absolutely no idea of the vengeance that violating the holy month taboo can bring. So some of the humans have used the holy mating months of the last year or two to burn and salt Kuo-Toa settlements which were in the way of their Cavorite mining and Phantasy Fruit plantation endeavors, and word is now spreading through the Kuo-Toa that a great vengeance must be wrought.

[JonSetanta]

Then make Slaadi the toads, a drier venomous version of amphibian with a decent infusion of parasitic body horror. There's room for both... unless you're going the Power Rangers/Captain Planet route with races : no crossovers and "only one of each color".

[Josh_Kablack]

. There's room for both...".

Is there?

I mean that as an honest question.

How many races/cultures/reproductive methods can reasonably I expect my players to keep track of before it's too much and races start to blend together and confuse them? How many distinct races and cultures make sense in a setting? How many variations on the same reproductive scheme can I use without it feeling forced ? Can I safely include both frog-like and toad-like races without having to cut out the lizardfolk? What's the sweet spot for conceptual space here?

As much as I should have enough races for each player to be able to have choices and still play a different race from any other player, I should also have few enough races that players will sometimes choose to play the same race as another player without having to force the issue.