As a haughty RuneQuest player in my youth, I looked on D&D with a certain disdain: chiefly for the incoherence of its bestiaries. I've since come to view that aspect of the game much more fondly, but I think there's still a problem. If you take the Monster Manual and the Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II and whatever their modern offshoots may be, you've got heaps of creatures that appear to fill exactly the same ecological niche and are scarcely differentiated in appearance: norkers just look like angry, underdressed snirfneblin, after all.
Where does it all stem from?
Well, one source, I think, is that line in The Hobbit where Gandalf talks about the slopes of the Grey Mountains being "simply stiff with goblins, hobgoblins and orcs" of the worst description. Now, what Tolkien's doing here is indulging in a rhetorical trope of repetition: in this case, calling the same thing by several names. "Goblins, hobgoblins and orcs", if we follow Tolkien's own notes, simply means "goblins, big goblins and goblins".
That sort of repetitio is perfectly suited to a children's book. We might imagine Gandalf talking about somewhere else being "simply stiff with bandits, brigands and footpads of the worst description". If he did so, he wouldn't really be describing three separate classes of criminal, but just peppering his description with synonyms for elegance and effect.
Tolkien (or Gandalf) loves that sort of effect. Later in The Hobbit, we get "they ride upon wolves, and the wargs are in their train". But we can be pretty sure (from when we first learn of orc/warg cooperation) that all the wolves involved are wargs.
A second source is, of course, the original set of D&D booklets. The bare-bones descriptions of humanoid monsters seem to map fairly well onto the titles for character-class levels. So, just as we have "veteran/warrior/swordsman/hero ...", we have "kobold/goblin/orc/hobgoblin/gnoll ...".
And just as the fighting-man titles are often synonyms, the humanoid names are pretty much exactly synonyms: kobold and goblin share a common root and are also German/English translations of each other; goblin and orc are synonyms according to Tolkien; hobgoblin is just a variation of goblin that at different times meant a small goblin or a particularly fearsome one; and gnoll is a misspelling of gnole, about which all we can say is that it's an evil creature of some type.
I'd suggest that the multiplication of humanoid types in later forms of D&D comes from this initial distinguishing of synonyms. There's a kind of nerdy impulse in doing this sort of thing; Tolkien succumbed to it himself, with the character of Gandalf arising from the question of what a "wand elf" (Gandalfr) was doing in the Edda's list of dwarf names. Of course, dwarfs and elves often seem to cross over in the Edda, with "dark elves" and "black elves" most likely being synonyms for "dwarfs". But that doesn't please a certain sort of systematising mind.
In the original D&D booklets, there's at least the ghost of the suggestion that the different names are fairly loose characterisations based on size and might. A goblin king and his bodyguards "fight as hobgoblins"; hobgoblin heavies fight as ogres; and gnoll leaders are trolls in statistical terms.
That's the way I like to go in my games - to the extent that pretty much all humanoids get referred to as "goblins" or "orcs" indiscriminately. The distinctions are between tribe rather than type; so that the pale cave goblins of the mountains range from dwarfish creatures to towering ogre-sized beasts; and members of the blue-grey Black Skull tribe are generally somewhat smaller than man-size, but feature both tiny imps and hulking brutes.
I think it's simply more evocative to have the players talk about "that huge bastard" or "those little wretches" than picking out some humanoid sub-type from an exhaustive taxonomy. Or even better, "Black Skulls!" and "Bloody Tusks!".
This approach also allows me to get plenty of variety in tactics, motives and appearance without requiring the players (or me) to commit all the subtypes to memory. It creates a world in which heraldry is more important than hit dice. And that, I think, is just as it should be.
No comments:
Post a Comment