Expansion races for first-edition games are a little tricky to find. For one reason, the game's focus was never on the spectacular races, such as people playing as merpeople or dragon-kin, and the base races were great.
The "fantastical" races introduced in D&D 3.5E and D&D 4 were Wizards trying to compete with World of Warcraft, and we saw a plethora of human-like races added to the game. We also saw the planar nepo-babies of the Tieflings, and Aasimar added to the game, and these soon became default choices for many, making humans, elves, dwarves, and others "boring choices."
One Pathfinder 1e book even had a "race designer," which I thought was imaginative, but it fell flat since the world is a history and collection of races, and coming out of left field with a race of half-alligator half-turkey people with diva wings drove me insane.
One exception is the AD&D 2E book, The Complete Book of Humanoids. It is not too hard to back-port this to a game like ADAD, and it does include level limits for each race. You get about 20 here, and it is a good value if you want a monstrous PC in an earlier edition of the rules. Rules for monsters as PCs were very thin in the first and second editions.
Something tells me to keep the default race selections as-is and force people to have fun within a more constrained and average starting set of options. Still, I wonder about some of the modern assumptions that make Tieflings and Aasimars "default human" like they were more cosplay options than something akin to a "roleplaying condition" and "story element" for the character.
And I see Tieflings and "children of gods and humans" much differently. These conditions can happen to anyone; a dwarf can be a child of the gods, and a halfling can be twisted with infernal blood. We don't need "races" for these, which are mostly cosplayer human artwork, and these special situations should belong more in the character's story and background and never be codified into game rules with rules that apply the same to all.
Did your character have infernal blood in their family? You can go through life and have nothing happen because of it. If you encounter a source of infernal power, you may grow horns you need to live with for the rest of your life, complete with the reactions people will have to you (good, bad, or they run in fear). Same with claws, wings, demon traits, hooves, special attacks, and any other power a referee can add to your character sheet.
The same goes for god powers. Hercules was a normal human with high strength. If appropriate, the referee can add "special powers" and allow "god-like feats" at any time in the adventure. If one becomes a permanent addition to your character sheet, like the daughter of a love goddess getting a 1/day charm person power, guess what? Or if Hercules gains his godly 18/00 STR as a godly boon for holding back a collapsing dam above a village? That is what happens.
It will depend on the story if and how they manifest.
The referee will "call it and add it" to the character sheet.
Trust your referee more than you do the West Coast game designers. I don't need several pages of rules or dedicated character options on a computer-generated character sheet for this. I don't need to "buy rules" to have these character options.
How do you play "monsters" then? You take them from the bestiary, start them with those statistics, and then tack character levels on them. My succubus bard? She begins at 6 HD, 1d6 extra hp for her class, the powers listed in the book, and gets one level of bard to start her music career. She is now a 7-HD creature, but who cares? Let her play taverns, steal souls, and level up as usual. The human paladins representing the PRMC will be by after a few shows.
And oh, do I love the human-only paladins of ADAD. They are almost bad-guy "good-guys" with their righteous order, purging the land of slightly questionable evil and slight corruption. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Have a character turning slowly into a maralith? Well, that had 7-HD, so the complete transformation isn't happening until level seven, but we do have a list of powers in the monster to give to that character throughout the campaign in the monster entry. I see about ten special abilities, a snake tail, multiple arms, some defenses and weaknesses, and many other powers that can be handed out as the transformation manifests. One night, you have nightmares, and now you have a snake tail instead of legs.
Is someone turning into a vampire or lycanthrope? Same story. Dole out powers, and unforeseen things happen. The last night was a full moon, and villagers are dead, and you have no memory of anything that happened. This is how we did it in the old days! No game designers or Backerkit projects are needed! We don't need books filled with AI art or text, either.
Imagine a world like that.
I don't need a unique book of rules, a Kickstarter, paying a few hundred dollars for the collector's edition, or even the base game to support this. I don't need to wait years to be let down because no online character creators support these options. I have an imagination, you know. If I am a player, I can work this out with the referee, propose it, and have it play out.
Yes, 5E players, you don't need to buy books to have cool things happen!
Also, if someone really wanted to play a gnoll in a game, we just flip to the entry in the bestiary, give them those powers, start them with 2d8-HD, and tack on a class level. All monsters will have a set of classes, maximum levels they can reach, and multiclass options, but guess what? Work those out with your referee. If you want a gnoll ranger thief, set the ranger to a max level of 6 (centaurs can be ranger 8, so I say a little under that potential) and add an unlimited cap thief class there. We are done! They are a 3rd level character at first level, so consider that.
And yes, this article starts as a "where to get them" thought exercise and ends as a DIY article. You can't find many great sources of 1e expansion races these days, and most require you to do them yourself. You could buy a 5E book, like the ToA race guide, as an inspiration, but your creations for the first edition will be much more integrated into the multi-class system of first-edition than the "generic races" of 5E will have you believe. Books like this aren't "one-stop shops" since you will still need to do some design work to make them work correctly in a 1e framework.
This book has a "transformer" race of car people that would rate a first-edition monster at least 10 to 20 HD, yet the 5E "all must be the same" lens makes them first-level, 1-HD creatures. This "it is all the same-ism" mental plague infects most 5E products and removes you from reality.
Ask yourself, what monster is this race most like? Then, go from that starting point. You don't need to artificially weaken something to make it like everything else. Have faith in your game design skills.
Doing them ourselves is how we did it in the past before the Internet taught us how to do it.
We sat in our bedrooms, opened our books, and did what we thought was "cool" and "fun" for our game. What we created was "right," and the game was ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment