Science Fiction Remix - Baron Harkonnen

My first introduction to the world of Dune happened years before I read the book, when I saw Wayne Barlowe's illustration of a navigator who was mutated by consuming Spice in the quantities needed to allow interstellar faster-than-light travel without the benefit of computers.

The illustration is colorful, and seemed to promise a setting filled with post-human beings, descendants of Old Earth who had gone so far, adapted so much, and been apart so long that they were effectively aliens. 

image from Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials

Frank Herbert offers us just the barest glimpse of this. Spice consumption allows the Steersmen to navigate between the stars, the Mentats to remember and calculate at a level akin to the real world computers of 1965, and grants the leaders of the royal houses a superhuman longevity. 

The text also gives us an interstellar society that's halfway between the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch East India Company - great houses, supposedly peers within the Landsraad beneath an elected emperor who is like the first among equals, all squabbling and jockeying for position and control and a larger cut of land and money and power and influence and Spice, the most valuable resource in human space, Spice, the whale oil or petroleum of its day, the source of the best medicines, the fuel for all travel, the thing that the shared economy cannot function without.

I imagined the costumes in Dune as being modeled after 18th and 19th century European military and nobility, Ruritania in space, and to a greater or lesser extent, both the David Lynch film and the Sci Fi Channel miniseries gave me back some of what I'd imagined, with costumes inspired by Moebius and HR Geiger and probably Star Wars, whose look was allegedly inspired by Moebius and Geiger anyway by way of the unproduced Alejandro Jodorosky version.

The recent Denis Villeneuve Dune film certainly plays up the militarism of the houses, but it also might as well have been filmed in black and white for all the color that Villeneuve allows to appear onscreen. The recent Apple TV version of Foundation probably looks more like my dream vision of Dune than any of the adaptations that actually exist. (The plot modifications probably make Apple's Foundation closer to Dune than to Isaac Asimov's Foundation anyway.)

I'll admit that I might like the world of Dune, with its psychics and mutants, its Great Powers competition that's equal parts espionage and economics, better than the story of Paul Atreides gradually accumulating various Chosen One statuses until he is the Duke of House Atreides, and a trained Mentat, and a trained Voice user, and the culmination of the Bene Gesserit eugenics program, and the leader by marriage of the Fremen of Arakis, and the fiancé of the daughter of the Emperor of Space, and and AND! Paul is the ultimate of what C Wright Mills calls the "power elite," combining military, political, and economic power; he accumulates every possible type of what Max Weber calls "the sources of legitimate domination," hereditary, charismatic, meritorious in every way.

Look - color! Look - costumes that visually distinguish the different factions!
image from Foundation

In contrast to Paul's over-determined heroism, Herbert poured a super-abundance of "villainous" traits onto his chief antagonist, Baron Harkonnen. It's not enough for him simply to be the enemy of House Atreides, or for him to be a sore loser about being forced off Arrakis and away from the most lucrative part of the Spice business. No, Herbert REALLY wants you to know that he's a bad person, so the Baron is fat, so fat he can't support his own bodyweight without antigravity devices, and he's gay, and he's a rapist of adults, and pedophile, AND, because this somehow wasn't enough, the Lynch film also covers him in scars and boils and other skin ailments. 

There's maybe some message in Baron Harkonnen's traits about how unchecked autocratic power allows a person to indulge and over-indulge in every possible kind of appetite, and how people who derive pleasure from pushing past limits and boundaries need to keep escalating, keep doing more and more extreme versions of whatever it is they enjoy if they want to keep one-upping the severity and outlandishness of their own past endeavors. There's maybe a warning about what happens to a person when no one else can say no to them for fear for their lives.

Okay. But like, real talk, it certainly seems like Frank Herbert wrote the Baron as fat and gay because he's the villain.

Apparently one of the prequel novels claims that Harkonnen isn't fat because of overindulgence, but because the Bene Gesserit give him a venereal disease that causes obesity and muscle wasting. This is a retcon that I actually think is worse than the original interpretation.

image from National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe

The thing is, the larger setting of Dune is one where, kind of, everyone is a villain. Everyone the audience is likely to meet, anyway. The emperor assigns each great house a planet to govern; the locals have no say in who governs them or how often new regimes are rotated through. The houses themselves are absolutist monarchies with a single, superannuated hereditary ruler. The economy is colonial and feudal, with the resources of entire worlds getting funneled inward to purchase of Spice and other luxuries, which the houses use to keep their members young and healthy, and to allow themselves the interstellar travel that makes the whole system possible. This is a morally abhorrent society, which means its leaders can be interesting, compelling, captivating characters, but they can't really be good in any meaningful sense.

And while the elite of this society may designate certain of their members as being on the margins of acceptability, its more likely to be for violations of etiquette and decorum as it is for anything the rest of us would consider wrong or cruel. The leaders inherently cannot be criminals, both because they make the laws for everyone else, and because they themselves are explicitly above them. Baron Harkonnen is more interesting to me when he's not THE singular villain, laden down with so many cartoonishly evil characteristics that he needs his antigrav harness just to support the weight of all those tropes, he's more interesting when he is both flawed and, in some small ways, admirable or sympathetic, when he's A bad person in a setting full of bad people. A Harkonnen who's not pure evil is also less likely to make his enemies seem good just by virtue of opposing him.

Let's start with Baron Harkonnen's sexuality, because I'm intrigued by the idea of the head of one of the planetary governments being an out, proud gay man. While I'm sure he has as many consorts, courtesans, and flings as any other house leader, I would prefer to avoid any implication that his homosexuality gives him a special taste for nonconsensual encounters.

In Dune, in addition to the Emperor and his house, and the other great houses that make up the Landsraad, and whatever indigenous political structures exist on the planets underneath the colonial rule of the houses, you have a few major non-governmental power centers. You've got the Guild of navigators who control space travel, CHOAM, which in my limited understanding serves as the equivalent of both the stock market and the marketplace for the sale and trade of Spice and manufactured goods, and the Bene Gesserit, an all-female organization of geneticists and eugenecists devoted to increasing human psychic potential by selective breeding, who hide their scientific prowess beneath a religious mystique, and who have enough social power to insist that every house leader take a Gesserit consort and participate in their breeding program.

Arranged marriages, obligatory consummations, tracking "matings" and "pairings" with the obsessive attention of a zookeeper trying to revive a near-extinct species, and really the whole idea of mandatory "breeding" of human beings are already incompatible with the idea of consent as we understand it. None of the other parts of the history of eugenics are any more palatable. The Bene Gesserit have unlocked humanity's latent psychic potential, but those born with powers just become the psychic bureaucrats so necessary to keep the imperial system running, and the Gesserit themselves are a secondary source of tyranny, alongside the empire. 

Remix Harkonnen has no interest in "doing his duty" to the species, "lying on his back and thinking of the empire," or any of the rest of it. He is an open critic of the Bene Gesserit and their eugenics program, opposes their attempts to arrange marriages and breedings, not just for himself, but for everyone, and he will eventually pass rulership of his house down to a protégé rather than a child. Remix Baron Harkonnen might still be a reprehensible bastard on other issues, but let's let him be right about this one thing.

Next, the Baron's size and weight. The detail I keep thinking about is his antigravity device. What if Remix Harkonnen isn't simply a fat man, but truly someone who can't move around, or perhaps even survive, under Earth-normal conditions? I imagine that he's basically spherical, and looks like the illustration of hypothetical Venusians from the old Our Universe book, seen above. His body has been adapted to survive in an atmosphere that is incredibly thick, heavy, and crushing, and simultaneously very buoyant, like the deep ocean. The inside of any House Harkonnen building recreates this atmosphere, and requires pressure suits for anyone who looks like the humans of Old Earth to survive inside. But when the Baron travels to other houses, he needs a forcefield bubble to protect himself from the same effects you or I would feel in a vacuum.

Why do the members of House Harkonnen look like that? I think that an earlier era of space exploration relied on direct genetic engineering to produce durable, post-human bodies, rather than the combination of Gesserit eugenics, Spice, and high technology that are used in the current age. (As an aside, maybe the natives of each planet have been engineered to survive their specific conditions. This permits them to live openly and in poverty on the surface, rather than requiring specialized and luxurious habitats like the great houses. It also means they can never leave, unlike the comparatively hyper-mobile ruling class, who jet from planet to planet as the Emperor demands. The Fremen would likely be another example of this type of engineering.)

As the product of this prior regime of human improvement, Remix Harkonnen has yet another reason to oppose the Gesserit and their way of doing things. His body is visibly different from the Old Earth phenotype that most of the other ruling houses wear - although perhaps the Harkonnens are not the only ones who have been engineered rather than bred. I imagine he comes from a trash planet that falls outside the empire's direct sphere of influence, meaning that no great house is ever required to relocate there. 

Like some ambitious combination of Kingpin and Jabba the Hutt, Remix Baron Harkonnen started out as one gangster among many, became the don of dons through a combination of smarts and ruthlessness, and graduated to the interplanetary and interstellar big leagues, forcing his way into great house status and a seat on the Landsraad. The other house leaders dislike him for his disreputable origin, post-human appearance, and perhaps for refusing to hide his thuggishness behind the veneer of respectability the rest of them maintain. 

I suppose I ought to consider what sort of economic resource the Baron brings to the table that requires the others to offer him a seat. Perhaps a metal that can only be mined on his planet, or technology from before the AI wars that can no longer be replicated, or knowledge of genetic engineering that can produce results that the Gesserits can't reproduce in the short term. Or maybe he's just that good at bribery, coercion, extortion, etc. Or maybe his knowledge of the above makes his house ideal for rooting out local corruption and slapping the hand of any other great house that sticks their wrist too deep into the cookie jar. 

 

 

 

My remix version of Baron Harkonnen is more like Magneto or Killmonger - a man with a sympathetic origin and understandable agenda, who is nonetheless still deserving of condemnation for his actions. If your Remix Dune coexists in the same setting as a Remix Legion of Superheroes, then I have to assume that Bouncing Boy is a do-gooder outcast from House Harkonnen. If your Remix Dune is also a Solar Dune, then Harkonnen might come from Venus, or perhaps from a cloud city on Jupiter that's deep enough beneath the "surface" to require his distinctive body modifications to survive.

Gygax 75

There's a worldbuilding challenge called Gygax 75 that's been making the rounds on the blogosphere. I decided to try to look its origins and follow the people who undertook it, as is my way.

 

 

The earliest origin of the Gygax 75 challenge is an article written by Gary Gygax in the April 1975 issue of the Europa fanzine. Gary lays out a 5 step process for building a new fantasy campaign. I think it's fair to say that this 45 year old piece of ephemera isn't the immediate source of most blogger's participation in the challenge, though.

 

 

 

 
Initial credit goes to Charles Akins from Dragons Never Forget. Charles is the one who found the long-forgotten Gygax article on the Internet Archive and shared the link with the blogosphere. Charles is also the one who called this worldbuilding method "Gygax 75" and threw down the gauntlet to make it into a blogging challenge.

 

The Gygax 75 challenge is a 5 step process that's supposed to take place over 5 weeks. Dragons Never Forget describes these in much better detail than me, laying out the parameters of the challenge, but permit me to at least briefly outline them.

Week 1 - decide on the thematic basis of your campaign and pick out some inspirational materials that you can refer to whenever you need help populating your campaign with details

Week 2 - draw a region map of the wilderness adventuring sites that will surround the dungeon that will form the heart of your campaign.

Week 3 - draw your dungeon! in one week! Gary recommends starting with some overview planning to pick themes, monsters, and architectural oddities for each dungeon level, and then setting out to draw and key the first few levels. in a week! I would argue this should be an 8 week challenge, with week 3 devoted to planning and perhaps mapping, and weeks 4-6 given to keying levels 1, 2, and 3.

Week 4 - design a "home base" for your players, replete with factions, NPCs, and rumors so your players can engage in social intrigue in between trips to the dungeon.

Week 5 - design the larger world around the starting region. you don't need a detailed map of the whole world, but you should know the other regions that can be reached from the current one (either by overland or magical travel) so that you can start writing rumors to entice your players to travel to them.

  

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge Introduction - Charles links us to the original Europa article and provides links to his other posts in this series.

1 The Setting of the Campaign - summarizes Gygax's worldbuilding advice and lays out his own campaign inspirations, setting the stage for post-apocalyptic science-fantasy.

2 The Map Around the Dungeon - Charles creates his starting region, the Valley of the Three Forks.

3 How to Build the Gygax 75 Dungeon - summarizes Gygax's dungeon-creation advice. pick your themes, place your setpiece treasures and encounters, then write or borrow random tables and procedurally generate the rest.

3 Dungeon Level 1 - the top dungeon level is a ruined, abandoned temple

3 Dungeon Level 2 - the next level features a hall of statues and a giant chamber full of pools

3 Dungeon Level 3 - a prison level, with an exit leading down to allow for further expansion

4 The Local Town and All the Trouble - Charles goes over Gygax's town-building advice and comes up with a list of neighborhoods and the most important shopkeepers in each one.

5 The World Plan - describes three important factions that will be encountered outside the Valley

0 Conclusion and Links to Other Challengers - Charles once again encourages us to take up the Gygax 75 challenge, and points us to Viridian Scroll and Beyond the Gates of Cygnus.

 

 

 

 

As is often the case in these kinds of situations, the person who created the challenge and the one who popularized it are not the same person. Credit for successfully spreading the word goes to Ray Otus of Viridian Scroll. If you've seen another blogger taking on the Gygax 75 challenge, they've likely been directly inspired by Ray. If you've seen a single-link version of the challenge, it's probably been to Ray's free pdf version on itch.io. Ray fully credits Charles, but Charles inspired a couple bloggers, while Ray inspired at least a dozen. I should note that Ray's pdf contains both more detailed instructions and a workbook to follow along in, so the work he put into the presentation might explain his greater success in popularizing the challenge.

As we'll see in a minute, Ray and JJ from Beyond the Gates of Cygnus did the challenge at the same time and recorded several episodes of the Plundergrounds podcast about their experiences.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - Ray describes the premise of the challenge and links back to Dragons Never Forget and Europa.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - gathering together inspiration, Ray envisions a world where Iron Age humans in city-states reside uneasily alongside communities of monstrous humanoids.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - Ray sketches and then finalizes a vibrantly-colored map of a desert region, Timuria, the Land between Two Rivers.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - more iterative sketching results in a single dungeon level based loosely on a Hindu temple. 

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - released more retrospectively than the others, this one covers setting up the town of Addak, which matches the vaguely Babylonian naming scheme of the other cities.

 

 

 

 

Over at Beyond the Gates of Cygnus, Cinderella Man JJ used the Gygax 75 challenge to create a setting for a Delving Deeper campaign.

0 Creating a Delving Deeper Campaign in 5 Easy Steps - JJ announces the start of the challenge, which he's completing simultaneously with Ray Otus from Viridian Scroll.

1 The Overall Setting - in addition to using the Delving Deeper rules, this setting will be inspired by the band Rush.

2 The Starting Area - a town called Willow Dale, a Necromancer's tower in the heart of dead forest, and the River Dell leading to the Down Mountains.

3 The Dungeon - JJ creates the most important details for the Necromancer's tower dungeon.

4 The Home Base - the basic features of the town of Willow Dale.

5 The World - more Rush albums are brought in to help define nearby regions of the gameworld.

 

 
 

 

The Plundergrounds podcast is a collaboration between Ray Otus and JJ. In addition to taking the challenge at the same time, Ray and JJ met once a week to compare notes and talk about their worldbuilding progress.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - introducing the challenge and comparing sources of inspiration.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - drawing the starting area maps.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - starting dungeons that will continue being updated over the next couple weeks.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - working on the starting villages.

5 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 5 - thinking about the wider worlds, and looking back on the challenge.

 

 

 

 

Not everyone who starts the Gygax 75 challenge decides to finish it. Most people, in fact, seem to stop after a couple weeks. The next person I found who started the challenge was Italian blogger Omnia Incommoda Certitudo Nulla. They were apparently inspired by a post by Shane Ward on a message board called OSR Pit. 

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week One - the starting pitch here is for a campaign world inspired by The Hobbit, but also by Dracula and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week Two - a starting map, largely without features, and a wandering encounter table emphasizing human antagonists like duelists, cultists, and bounty hunters.

 

 

 

 

Shane Ward from 3 Toadstools Publishing was the first person I saw who took up the challenge because of finding Ray Otus's itch.io. He got scooped from being the first person to start it without a personal connection to Ray because he managed to inspire OICN to try the challenge before starting it up himself.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - Shane announces the challenge and starts brainstorming, drawing on ideas from Piers Anthony and fantasy botany.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - a more developed start to the setting, inspired by Xanth, Shanara, and Disney's Robin Hood.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2? Sorta - Shane begins drawing a region map, listing possible encounters, and thinking about character classes

 

 

 

 

Verbum Ex Nihilo also briefly attempted the challenge.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - about the potential benefits of structure and deadlines in worldbuilding, with the challenge as one way to impose them.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - about the process of selecting a notebook, creating a mood board, and attempting to conquer writer's block by looking for structures to build one idea off another.

 

 

 

 

Dave from Blood of Prokopius was the next to complete the challenge. Dave comes in with his own ideas and methods for creating sandboxes, keying dungeons, etc, so an interesting part of his commentary is about trying to set his own approach aside to try it Gary's way (as interpreted by Charles and Ray).

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge - introduces Dave's inspirations, science fantasy pitting the forces of Heat & Light against the forces of Cold & Dark.

1 Laser Guns and Plasma Swords - defends adding scifi weapons to this particular fantasy setting.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 2 - Dave draws a fantasy map loosely inspired by Kyrgyzstan, starts stocking his sandbox, and creates a very Lost World random encounter table full of dinosaurs and cavemen.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 3 - a general plan for a dungeon of caves atop a glacier atop a crashed alien spaceship.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 4 - keying the dungeon with monsters and treasures, and writing a wandering monster table.  

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 5 - Dave names his starting city Darkport.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 6 - Dave creates a random name generator to name two shops, and observes some differences in the equipment lists of Basic and B/X.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 7 - human and elven factions for Darkport.

5 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 8 - Dave builds out his world by adding three more factions and developing a key NPC for each.

 

 
 

 

King Brackish actually attempted the challenge twice, first starting it on Tomb of the Wandering Millennial (apparently inspired by Verbum Ex Nihilo), and then restarting and finishing it on Brinehouse.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - Brackish proposes a setting inspired by Berserk and Dorohedoro, among others.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the city-state of Evangelos, surrounded by the Blackmange Forest and the Sancana Steppe, and a random encounter table full of megafauna, necromancers, and skeletons.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 1 - Brackish restarts the challenge with a similar, though not identical list of inspirations.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 2 - a new region map with the port city of Dis on the coast of an ocean, surrounded by three distinct forests. the new random encounter table emphasizes boars, wolves, dragons.

3 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 3 - Brackish outlines the three-level Temple of the Swine God.

4 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 4 - the village of Mun, along with 10 shops and 5 NPCs.

5 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 5 - more worldbuilding, including a sun god, rumors of dragons and falling stars, and religious-themed magic treasures.

 

 
 

 

Andrew Sawyer from Seven Deadly Dungeons is the last person on my list to finish the challenge. 

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - Andrew's plan involves creating a fantasy postapocalyptic Meso America.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the region contains an active volcano, a ruined city, and several places where ghosts are on the haunt.

3 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - Andrew has a pretty cool dungeon concept here. the whole complex is a superweapon meant to kill angels. the top level is filled with ghosts, the middle is a star chart that functions as the weapon's targeting system, and the bottom level is a site for the blood sacrifices needed to power the weapon.

4 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - NPCs from the character's home base, all of whom have terrible injuries, which is presumably meant to communicate something about the danger of this place.

5 Gygax 74 Challenge Week 5 - encounter tables for three terrain types.

 

 

 

 
I've noticed religious themes, and especially postapocalyptic settings have come up in several of these challenges. Justin Hamilton from Aboleth Overlords picks a decidedly Biblical apocalypse to set his game in the aftermath of.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - human civilization has returned to a late bronze age in the aftermath of a Deluge that drowned the world.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the setting gets a name, Umbroea, along with a list of villages, geographic features, possible dungeons, and encounters. 
 
 

 

 

I'll admit that Liche's Libram's Tlon setting is the one that excites me the most out of all of these. It's one that they were working on before, and seemed to use the Gygax 75 challenge as a way to continue building out their setting. Tlon reminds me of Dying Earth fiction, but transplanted from Earth to a Dying Mars.

1 Tlon Week 1 Gygax 75 Challenge - an overview of the setting's themes. everything is old, civilization is crumbling, water is the most important treasure.

2 Tlon Week 2 Surrounding Area - a visually compelling map, accompanied by descriptions of two cities, a couple geographic features, and a necropolis.

 

 
 

Rob Magus from Penny Ventures decided to make a setting in the aftermath of a cyberpunk apocalypse. I like the image he conjures of whole forests of solar-panel trees.

1 Technoccult Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - the opening setting pitch. images of demon-haunted computers and ghost towns of still-functional neon lights.

2 2d6 Electric Devil Skeletons Gygax 75 Challege Week 2 - locations for the Technoccult setting and a random encounter table with a number of undead cybernetic monsters.

 

 
 

Like Liche's Libram, The Eternal Slog was already working on their Zorn setting when they discovered the Gygax 75 challenge, and started it as a way to do a bit more worldbuilding on an ongoing project.

1 G75 Challenge Week 1 Zorn - the setting here is a previously undiscovered island that rises out of the ocean in 1936 on the even of WWII. various countries send explorers to the island to plunder its ancient occult treasures to use in their war effort. a pretty solid pitch!

 

 

 

 

Jim from d66 Classless Kobolds is an interesting case to me. He published his Weird North game in August 2020, then started the challenge in October to start making a campaign setting for the game.

1 The Conceptual Beasts of the Weird North - human Vikings on an alien planet that resembles Earth's arctic north, full of ancient tech and extradimensional visitors.

2 The Dank Morass A Swampcrawl for the Weird North - a rather nice-looking pointcrawl map and a random encounter table full of dinosaurs and robots.

 

 

 

 

Mihau from Fractal Meadows of Reality started the challenge to work on a far-future alien world setting. One interesting thing about going through these challenges is getting a chance to see where the current campaign setting zeitgeist is at. Science fantasy, post apocalypses, aliens instead of demihumans, and magitech meets stone-age all seem to be en vogue right now.

1 Attempting the Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - inspiration from videogames and an online art book that looks very cool to me. humans and aliens on a distant world ruled by satellite gods.

2 Gygax 75 Week 2 Plains of Eyes and Hands - the Ascendancy of Teal arcology sits aside the Plains of Salt, and an encounter table full of megafauna and cavemen.

 

 

 

 

Phoe of Magic Trash is the most recent person I've spotted to start the challenge. His proposed setting is inspired by extremophile biology and vernacular architecture - a winning combination as far as I'm concerned!

1 Gygax 75 Week 1 - no humans, no humanoids, only talking animals and extremophile aliens, each building unique cities.

2 Gygax 75 Week 2 The Legend of Gygax's Gold - a few points of light in the wilderness, with attention given to the architectural style of each place.

Tolkienian Science Fantasy - Replacing the PC Species

Recently, Trey of From the Sorcerer's Skull proposed a worldbuilding concept that interested me. How would it change the game to replace the species available to the player characters?

Trey first proposed imaging a fantasy setting without elves, dwarves, or hobbits, but featuring the species from TSR's Star Frontiers setting - the insect-like Vrusk, amoeba-like Dralasite, and flying-monkey-like Yazirians.

Later, he suggested a pulp scifi campaign using the same species, set entirely within the Solar System. (Trey has a bit of a cottage industry reimagining interstellar scifi as 1930s-style pulp confined to just our one star system. In addition to the Solar Frontiers I just mentioned, he's briefly written about Solar Wars, and he has a whole series of posts about Solar Trek.)

  

  

Elf Replacements - Vulcan, Talosian, Minbari

 

I want to build on his original suggestion though, and try some worldbuilding that stays relatively close to D&D's world, populated with Tolkien's heroes and monsters, just with, you know, different heroes, and different monsters.

We know that constraint encourages creativity, and I think that's especially true of worldbuilding. By limiting yourself to a small number of component parts, you can create a compact, thematic setting that's uniquely your own. Look at the 10 Monster Setting, or the 7 Class Setting, or the New New Crobuzon Challenge - they're all worldbuilding prompts that encourage you to select a small number of components and use them as the basis for a fantasy world.

 

If your handful of seedlings are particularly weird, so will be the garden that grows from them. The downside of that is that you can end up with a setting that's so weird that it doesn't really make sense to other people, and maybe not even to yourself. And obviously, actually running a campaign like this requires securing enough player buy-in beforehand, since their options for possible characters are radically restricted compared to a more open setting.

(Alternately, if you wanted, you could spend your Session Zero letting each player pick out their bespoke species and occupation combo, and then working together to imagine what sort of world it must be if those particular sorts of characters are a totally typical, run-of-the-mill adventuring team.)

  

  

Dwarf Replacements - Klingon, Narn, Rigelian

  

A variation on this kind of prompt would be to try to make your own "French Vanilla" setting. By that, I mean a setting that mostly draws on the tropes of vanilla fantasy, but is specific enough to be uniquely your own, the kind of thing Trey writes about here. And as both Trey and Jack from Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque have argued, vanilla fantasy is, almost by definition, something that is understood by almost all potential players, something that essentially generates its own buy-in because its expectations are so clear. Done well, french vanilla might give you the best of both worlds - enough familiarity to form a solid basis for a shared fantasy gameworld, but enough difference to make something that's personal and interesting.

(I had some success with this in a campaign where I offered my players a handful of classes - human fighters, thieves, and wizards, plus "venturers" who are basically adventuring capitalists, or like, white collar thieves; elven druids and "courtiers", another variety of legit thieves; and dwarven roboticists and tomb robbers, who are, you know, basically more thieves. My players seemed content with the assortment, and I felt like I had established a strong sense of what sort of people go adventuring in that setting.)

What I've called the "Non-Core" is one source for a french vanilla setting. The non-core is made up the kinds of ideas that don't usually make it into the core rules of most fantasy games, but do usually appear in the first batch of expanded content. 

 

Imagine the sort of setting you end up with if you replace elves, dwarves, and hobbits with drow, duergar, and svirfneblin? Instantly you have a darker and spookier campaign setting, and one will make extensive use of the Underdark as a location. 

 

Or what if you used only the species that got added when OD&D expanded to become AD&D? What if you had only half-elves, half-orcs, and gnomes? Unlike the "good fey" of a straight Tolkienian game, this settings imply that humans deal with the Unseelie Court as often as the Seelie, and that full-blooded elves are, in their own way, as monstrous as orcs, and both are ineligible as player characters.

Restrict yourself to just "new school" creature types like tieflings, dragonborn, and goblins, and while Old School players might grumble about the loss of elves, the younger generation of Critical Role and Adventure Zone fans might not even notice the restriction - or if they did, they might be more upset by the loss of aasimar and genasi than of hobbits and dwarves.

In a variation on Trey's initial idea to use the species from Star Frontiers, you could also borrow the playable species from TSR's Alternity game - the psychic Fraal, cybernetic Mechalus, bat-like Sesheyan, fringed lizard Tsa, and bestial Weren. 

(One advantage of using totally alien species like these is that it lets you get away from an effect you sometimes see with the standard demi-humans, where each represents a different extreme, with humans like Goldilocks in the middle, defined by our flexibility and moderation. I suspect but I don't know, that Tolkien intended his elves to seem French and his dwarves German, one overly artistic and cultural and the other too industrial and militaristic compared to the "just right" modern middle-class British hobbits and medieval British humans. Though for all I know, old JRR could have been taking potshots at the Irish and Scottish, or maybe I'm imagining chauvinism where none exists. In other people's writing, I think I sometimes see elves, dwarves, and hobbits as representing feminine, masculine, and childlike qualities. This is fine if you want it, though it always contains some embedded assumptions about what humans are "supposed" to be like, which others might find objectionable. Scifi species potentially give you the chance to make humans just one species among several, rather than the center of Creation.)

  

  

Hobbit Replacements - Ferengi, Orion, Centauri

 

But suppose for now that we want to stick fairly closely to the Tolkienian archetypes, but use alien species to create a kind of science fantasy french vanilla. Still unquestionably D&D, still built on familiar tropes, but with enough a difference to make this campaign feel special. For each species being replaced, I have a suggestion from regular Star Trek, from Babylon 5, and from the original Star Trek pilot episode "The Cage".

 

Elf Replacements - The alternate elves I've chosen here all reflect a vision of elves as "human, but better". I could write a whole post - and who knows, maybe sometime I will - about how fundamentally weird it seems to me that there's a widespread belief reflected in science fiction, everything from pre-Golden Age pulp stories to Star Wars and The Matrix suggesting that human perfection, whether it comes on a species level through evolution or individually through enlightenment, looks like an emotionless ascetic in a monochrome outfit, living in a harsh environment, spending all their time meditating for mental discipline and learning to fight real good.

Vulcans - The Vulcan homeworld is a harsh desert with habitation concentrated around the few oases. Both as individuals and a society, they used to be very passionate and emotionally-driven. At some point in their past, they adopted en masse a philosophy of logic, asceticism, and emotional self-control. The lawful Vulcans have a counterpart in the chaotic Romulans - who are the same biological species, but a different society, one that split off from the other Vulcans before the adopted their new philosophy (or perhaps as a rejection of it?) Vulcans famously have the the abilities to perform a Nerve Pinch that can stun most humanoids, and a Mind Meld that allows them to share thoughts and memories.

Minbari - Minbari society is divided into three castes - warriors, workers, and religious. They value honor and tradition, formal rituals and baroque decorations. Their society is the oldest of the current age, and they have the closest relationship with the Vorlons, the last remaining elder civilization of the previous age. They grow buildings out of crystal, and their ships incorporate biotechnology. Their warriors are skilled martial artists, while their religious caste can use crystal-based technology to produce almost magical effects.

Talosians - The remaining Talosians are the last survivors of a once great civilization. Their physical bodies are weak and somewhat frail, but their enlarged brains possess incredible psychic powers. They speak only telepathically, and routinely project illusions to disguise themselves and their allies. Talosians can read thoughts and project physical pain, but their powers can't penetrate really powerful emotions, such as rage.

I would represent Vulcans and Minbari with D&D's Monk class, which is a good match for their fighting style. I would probably pick the Cleric as a second option. Spells like Command, ESP, and Hold Person are pretty good representations of their abilities. Talosians should probably be Bards and Wizards, perhaps with an emphasis on illusions and enchantments to match their powers.

 

 

Dwarf Replacements - Although we might think of dwarves as being miners, or engineers, the replacements I've chosen all kind of tap into the "proud warrior race" archetype. Really, scifi has an embarrassment of riches for this particular trope, so you have plenty to choose from that aren't listed here. Your only limitation is probably your willingness to use a species that's been portrayed as an antagonist for your player characters, since these guys are rarely the heroes in fiction.

Klingons - The Klingons are a very proud society. They prioritize personal honor and the glory won in battle and they inflict harsh corporeal punishment for all crimes and moral transgressions, especially cowardice and other forms of perceived weakness. They consider a death during combat to be the only acceptable way to die. Klingons have distinctive ridged foreheads and fight with a two-handed, multi-pointed sword called the bat'leth.

Narn - The Narn have a reptilian appearance, hairless and mottled with spots. Although once a peaceful society, they were conquered by the Centauri and their planet occupied until they could drive the invaders out. They are now militaristic and intent on both protecting themselves and getting revenge on their enemies.

Rigelians - Okay, so technically these guys, the inhabitants of Rigel 7, are called Kalar, while it's the inhabitants of Rigel 5 who get the honor of being called Rigelians, but it's clearly the better name, and could be applied to anyone from that star system. They are notably taller than other humanoids, and prefer to fight with spear and shield. While Klingons and Narn routinely wear metal armor, Rigelian's wear thick layers of leather and fur.

All three of these species should probably receive a Fighter option, although they have different fighting styles - Klingons prefer two-handed weapons, Narn daggers, and Rigelians fight with one-handed weapons and shields, and are the only species here who wouldn't use guns. Although most Klingons vocally support honorable conflict, their ships use invisibility cloaks, they surgically alter spies to pass as human, and occasionally use poison and suicide bombs to achieve victory, even at the expense of honor. Their second option should probably be Assassin, or its equivalent. The Narn are shown to be pretty religious, so their second option should be Paladins or Clerics, even though in the show, it's a big deal that they're one of the only species to not have indigenous telepaths. Rigelians are clearly also Barbarians.

 

 

Hobbit replacements - The symbolic role of hobbits is a bit unclear to me. As I said above, I think Tolkien wrote them as being essentially like modern humans, contrasted against the old-fashioned humans of Rohan and Gondor. In most D&D settings, they don't seem to have a culture that's any different from human society, with the exception of Eberron, where they have their own little Dinotopia. For my replacements here, I've chosen species that are cast as sort of "dark mirrors" of humanity, reflecting our worst qualities back at us. Instead of modern middle-class homeowners, I've chosen capitalists, gangsters and slavers, and colonizers.

Ferengi - The Ferengi are mercantile capitalists. They don't particularly make anything, but they make money as middlemen, buying low and selling high. Their whole society is structured around commerce; their Rules of Acquisition are practically a sacred text, and their currency, gold-pressed latinum, is more-or-less the currency of universal interchange. Their leader is simply whichever Ferengi has the most money at any given time. The Ferengi have very prominent large ears, and they're immune to telepathy. Ferengi society classifies women as property, owned by their fathers and later by their husbands; by law and custom, their rights are severely restricted.

Centauri - The Centauri are a society past their prime. They once had an expansive empire, but most of their former colonies have since won independence. The hierarchy of their society is based on proximity to the hereditary emperor; status in the royal court is the primary determinant of social position. Centauri culture and fashion are still very much frozen as they were at the height of their power; anything new is almost automatically worse. Their taste is ornate and baroque. Centauri look very much like humans, although their women shave their heads bald, and their men grow fan-like crests of hair, the taller the better.

Orions - The Orion people have carved out a niche for themselves as dealers in illegal merchandise. While the Ferengi sometimes dabble in legal vice - such as gambling and holographic prostitution - Orions deal almost exclusively in contraband and outlawed services. Orion slavers kidnap members of their own species, and others, to sell into forced labor. Orion pirates raid ships and seize their goods. Orion gangsters make loans, collect debts, deal illegal drugs, and sell stolen goods they received from the pirates.

All three of these species should obviously receive Rogue as one of their class options. After that, I'm a little bit torn. Ferengi and Centauri would both probably alike another roguish archetype, but more along the lines of a Merchant or a Noble, though most rulesets don't treat those as playable classes. Bard might be a fair representation of their more flamboyant and charismatic members? As for the Orions, I think they could use a Fighter type to act as enforcers for some of their more violent crimes.