I started writing this with the idea of having a quick showcase of how I feel like tying humans to adventure scenarios and using humans instead of generic fantasy monsters fleshes out and gives the adventures more flavour as well as amps up the creepy-factor but at this point I'm not sure whether or not this is just ramblings of some edgy grim-fantasy fan drawing pentagrams in a corner of the room while screeching incessantly, but here we go.
In my preparations of learning how to play the part of a referee I've gone through all sorts texts and youtube videos and have picked up on one or two tricks that I wish to get to try and play around with at the table, but this one idea I've really taken a liking to, which is to "keep things grounded". Why use monsters for your scenarios if humans would work just as well if not even better? When you tell players that goblins have kidnapped the daughter of the village blacksmith the players will immediately know roughly what to expect out of the creatures, same as when orcs or trolls or hill giants are razing towns near the mountainside which has been why there have been so many refugees coming to the close by cities.
Of course I'm not saying you can't do interesting things with such scenarios but hear me out here, what if instead of goblins having taking the blacksmith's daughter it was a band of children covered in mud and dirt and wrapped in hides?
You could essentially run this band of feral children just as you would your goblins but now you also have your players second-guessing what might happen when they find wherever the missing girl has been taken. Who are these children? What are they doing? Where and how have they been living and are there adults with them? Maybe this is a band of children gone feral that now live with wolves and have stolen the girl as food for their wolf-mother, or perhaps a long time ago some children had enough of adults telling them what to do and disappeared from the village deep into the forest and hid there living off of the land. Other children playing in the forest would occasionally join their "tribe" and that's how they've gradually grown more and more feral while still remembering the hatred the first kids of the tribe had for grown ups.
And if you really wanted to throw a curveball at your players, see how they react when they learn that this tribe of feral children is cannibalistic and when the kids grow too old and start to become too much like adults they willingly offer themselves as sacrifice for the rest of the tribe as this is just how much they've learned to hate grown ups, which is why they now keep snatching children from passing groups of travelers and even from just outside the local town since the numbers of their tribe are dwindling as children no longer come to play in the forest as often as they used to. These children probably have some sort of fruits, plants or other source of either addicting or hallucinogenic substance that makes the new children they snatch into their tribe to join in more willingly after being subjected to them for long enough time.
See, we've now got a whole tribe of little murder-children hiding deep inside a forest that the players will not be anywhere as sure how to handle as they would be with goblins. Not only are they likely unique to this location but they got some backstory too just from thinking a bit about why they are there, although just like with the goblins that would not have been necessary if you just wanted feral knee-shanking little-people running around in a cave.
Just like that. Band of marauding orcs? Band of thugs, bandits, deserters or escaped convicts. Zombies? A bit more case-by-case but why not try thugs so high on drugs and/or other substances that they're not feeling the pain. Going up on the list towards things like griffins, dragons, beholders and such are obviously something where this trick stops being feasible to pull of, but the idea in the first place is to use monsters just a bit more sparingly. Sure there might still be goblins and orcs and zombies out in the world but especially when first starting off I would be more inclined to not immediately shower players in them and only start to introduce them gradually as the party gets more experienced, searches more dangerous places and overall establishes themselves above just common travelers.
To get to the part about why I personally think using humans instead of run-of-the-mill and expected monsters to be more evocative and horrifying is that you as a player expect the goblins to be capable of horrible deeds such as kidnapping and eating humans but when it's other humans that are just slightly off from what you would expect them to be, that's where the nagging feeling of "okay this is not right" starts to set in and things might start giving you the chills. Also, now you're facing the moral dilemma of "these are other humans as well" and maybe even wondering how they came to be like this.
This of course can backfire, especially with the goblin example since it's using children, so it'll be good to discuss things with your players before dropping them into your game on what they are comfortable with being depicted (there's a reason I will never take part even in a game set on the high seas, and neither will I ever put my players in a situation where I'll have to use too much imagination describing them at sea), but still even with using monsters it might not be a bad idea to remind them from time to time that they're using sharp and/or blunt objects to inflict major bodily trauma on whatever they're fighting with.
Anyways, I hope that wasn't too rambly or besides the point that I was hoping to make. I am now thinking that I should just make the feral child tribe into a post of their own and elaborate on it even further but I've already written all of this down and just tossing it away at this point felt like a waste so hopefully you got atleast something out of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment