The Minimum Necessary Changes

02 Jun, 2024

I was talking to my brother Nick about my main 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign, hashing out a cloud giant villain’s actions, and he said, “You tend to stick very close to the official lore in your games, don’t you?”

He was right, but I hadn’t thought of it that way before. It seems to me that there are many places where I deviate from the official published lore of 5e: I have no interest in races kinships¹ that are always mentally ill, nor in the worst stereotypes of cave-dwelling barbarians, nor in using the word “races” to describe fantasy peoples. These are some of the places where Dungeons & Dragons's published materials either break my sense of what is anthropologically plausible, under-develop a potentially interesting idea, or go in a direction I find otherwise tiresome. But when I do make adjustments according to my sense of what’s plausible, I still try to stay as close to 5th edition published materials as possible. Here are some examples in alphabetical order:

1. Ettins. As in the Monster Manual (2014), ettin siblings in my games frequently quarrel and have difficulty getting along. My ettins aren’t brutish stooges, though; I don’t run whole species of brutes. In order to explain how relatively intelligent people might behave in such a counterproductive way, I lean partially on a strong sense of individualism they learned from giantish culture and partially on the curse which 5e uses to explain ettins’ origins: not only has Demogorgon cursed them to always be dicephalic, but conjoined siblings will also always have divergent values that put them at odds more often than not.

2. Kuo-toa. It is simply absurd (that is, meaningless or self-contradictory) to propose an entire species of people who are mentally ill. Given that kuo-toa have the Ethereal Sight trait, and given the lore about their unique ability to create their own gods, I have decided that kuo-toa are nearly always experiencing what in other peoples would be called religious ecstasy; some of their neighbours characterize this as madness, but importantly it is not. They actually do perceive certain spiritual truths directly, sometimes at the expense of the material world.

3. Lizardfolk. According to Volo’s Guide to Monsters (2016), lizardfolk do not exactly feel emotions; instead of feeling scared, they feel that an external object is scary. Although I do very much appreciate Wizards of the Coast’s attempts in Volo’s and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes (2018) to make non-human peoples psychologically distinct from humans, in my view this particular depiction is psychological nonsense. I instead say that lizardfolk do not naturally emote (but can learn to do so if they live or work much among mammalian humanoids) and also that lizardfolk habitually project their emotional states onto external stimuli. They will tell you that they do not feel scared, but instead feel that the monster is scary, but they’re wrong.

4. Orcs. In Volo’s, orcs are a warlike people who live in caves, behaving savagely because of their enslavement to evil gods. They are not naturally evil, but they are supernaturally evil. This does not work for me. First of all, you cannot have fires in caves without smoking yourself out, and you cannot live in caves without either electricity or fire for warmth. The setting does not have electrical engineering, so orcs cannot live in caves. (I have so far handwaved all of this away during the Underdark adventure; I justified this to myself by saying they have systems of flues.) Second of all, I am not usually interested in wholly evil peoples and neither are my players.² I am therefore mostly running orcs as a once-nomadic pastoral people who, as an ethnic minority, have come into frequent conflict with their sedentary rulers; I have kept their pantheon and their habit of organizing themselves socially according to that pantheon (some of whom are belligerent and isolationist). Also, they use caves as ritual locations and build their shrines as grottoes.

Why do I try to stay so close to the published materials? There seems to be no practical reason to do so. My setting is homebrewed, so any changes I make won’t have the cascading effects they could have if I was using a published setting. My players do not especially seem to care about published lore and mostly do not seem to know the 5th edition material as well as I do anyway. It wouldn't be much easier to keep track of the campaign’s setting details if I stuck to the originals. What’s the motive here?

The truth is that I don’t really know, except that I prefer it this way. I suspect that it has something to do with my autism: my brain has a kind of fixedness to it, such that whatever I read about a published setting simply is what it is to me. I have a hard time imagining it otherwise (when I’m in the GM’s seat, anyway). However, my sense of anthropological plausibility is at least as powerful a kind of fixedness, and a more important one to me. Therefore I compromise: I make the minimum necessary changes so the lore feels anthropologically realistic and coherent with what I’ve already established. For what it’s worth, I find this task immensely satisfying, and based on some of their comments I think my players enjoy the results.

Originally published 21 January 2024.