I know you probably have all your western content planned out already but you can do this later. Trains, just like trains. Faster than horses, more accessible than teleportation. Trains are wonderful bringers of civilization & societal unifiers. Also they’re like really, really cool.
Drafting the Adventure: On track With Trains
I agree Anon, trains are cool. But you know what's not cool? Slavery, Racism, Corruption, and the industrial engine of exploitation that forces the poor and desperate to suffer endless hardship so that governments and tycoons can enrich themselves.
I have always loved trains, they were one of my first hyperfixations, and as someone who goes nuts for sustainable urban design I will gladly hype up the development of any and all rail systems . Sadly, like most other iconic elements of the industrial past, they were born out of widescale abuses that we all to commonly whitewash as signs of progress. The rail industry was built by robber barons looking to exploit government contracts in order to graft as much as they could as cheaply as possible, and to do so they employed virtual slave labor to keep costs low and progress steady. Because the rails were a matter of government interest, any time there was a labor strike (be it laying the rails itself or the production of materials or fuel) or the company simply wanted to appropriate someone else's land to build over, the military was dispatched to brutally pave the way. Think the development of the north American highway system in the 50s and 60s, or the pipeline protests today, and you'll understand how those contemporaries might think of the railroad. Yes, it benefits quite a lot of people, but others have their homes destroyed, all in the name of "civilization".
Now, below the cut I'm going to get into the nitty gritty of how trains might be introduced to a setting and how they change the pace of a campaign, but for the moment, here are some quick and dirty Adventure Hooks for you all to enjoy, sans history/civics lesson:
Just when the party needs to cross the rails as fast as possible, the train they're riding in is subject to a robbery, paradoxically forcing them to think fast while slowing their transportation plans to a crawl. In all the commotion, they might make a good impression on a first class passenger, possibly learning themselves a future ally or at least some good press.
The party is hired by the survey office of a rail company to protect their cartographers on a weeks long journey into the wilderness. There's a powerful monster lairing nearby, is the pay worth it to go disturb the beast?
In order to prevent a villain from shipping troops and supplies across country, the party are tasked with blowing up a key bridge. Do they do the job quick and give their enemy time to plan around it, or do they do the merciless option and time the bridge's destruction to when one of those trains full of soldiers is crossing over it.
Need to know news from across the whole nation? sure, swapping tales at the local tavern is a classic, but no one knows gossip like the folk who hop trains looking for work this way and that. Show up with a bottle to share and a story to spin and you might find yourself learning a few things among the tramps and vagabonds
Something about the liminal nature of train stations means that they're impromptu crossing points to the feywild, the way that standing stones or ruined arches might've been in a past era. Beware of boarding trains that seem deserted, pull in through the mist, or bear the markings of companies you do not recognize.
History: Trains emerged as an evolution of cart technology, as in the desire to move goods and materials from one place to another, we as humans realized that regular old wheels tended to make roads and other paths into pitted slogs by repeated use, and we invented carts that moved on rails instead. Eventually when engines got small and efficient enough to start doing the job of everyday people, we figured out a cart that could move itself with a little oversight, and the train picked up steam from there.
What began then was a patchwork of individual businesses building railways to improve their efficiency, leading to the development of railway companies specialized in installing these sorts of transit mechanisms at their client's expense. Eventually these companies started to pitch themselves to governments (who themselves were made up of business owners) and there was a sudden explosion of rail across the industrialized and colonized portion of the globe.
In order for you to have rail travel in your games ( even if you don't end up using steam engines), you're going to need powerful, centralized governments to make it all work, as individual nobles and landholders will likely be too squabbling to organize such a project, muchless have the funds. Any kingdom/empire/state with an interest in moving goods quickly from one location to another can build rail lines, with the added benefit of being able to project power across vast reaches of territory by way of deploying troops along the rails.
Rail travel makes cities and their surrounding settlements explode in size, expediting the flow of goods and supercharging the economic engines that communities already relied on. This allows for industry to be centralized specialized, and their products to be widely distributed, raising the general standard of living by allowing people in far off corners of the territory to have access to the same goods/tools/medicines as those living in the nation’s capital.
Gampeplay: Much like airships, railways change the way that campaigns have to be run, though rail travel tends to be available to the party much earlier in their adventures.
Travel between major settlements becomes near instantaneous, cutting down on the random encounters that might fill out an early game party’s XP . Compensate for this by having social encounters that occur on/waiting for the train, allowing the party to make contacts that they’ll be able to follow up on later in the game.
Alternatively, if you’re running an open world/travel based game, consider having the first few adventures occur in a region not yet connected to the rail network, to give them a bitesized taste of freedom before graduating to the larger map. This could be by traveling overland to a larger town, or by completing some quest that allows the railroad to finally be extended to their starting town.
Train companies become powerful movers and shakers on the political chessboard, rivaling merchants and powerful nobles as they act as both villains and potential patrons for players. In your classic d&d world, these companies are likely to be a constant source of monster contracts wanting to keep their most profitable lines clear of interruption or attack.
Everything is closer together now that the rails connect everything, meaning that if you want your party to venture out into the wilderness, you’ll likely have to put your hidden vaults full of mcguffins further out past whatever frontier town is the end of the line. Concurrently, Villains can now execute plans across a far larger territory with much fewer minions, which means multiple antagonistic groups might be playing around in a single settlement without the players even realizing it.
Paradoxically, those areas that the railway allows most people to skip past may become increasingly adventure-prone, as wilderness without adventurers to brave it will become increasingly wild, and settlements excluded from the railroad’s prosperity may become a haven for those wishing to avoid the scrutiny of the masses.
I hope that helps anyone thinking of including trains into their campaign, but I might do a follow up to this after doing a little more thinking on the subject.
I just read your Orcs reimagined and I loved it. An origin that I’ve been tossing around for Orcs in my own worlds is kind of stealing the mythological origin of the Klingons from Star Trek - they were created by gods a long time ago, but eventually they realized the gods were more trouble than they were worth and killed them.
I would love to see more Monsters Reimagined style pieces for Gnolls and Goblins and Drow and the ‘monstrous’ player races that are rooted in racism and colonialism
Monsters Reimagined: Gnolls
I wanted to follow up with gnolls specifically because they’re a case study in how d&d has tried to “fix” the issue of “monstrous humanoids” and the ethical concerns of “always chaotic evil” and ended up going the exact opposite direction of what they should have done, doubling down on the justifications for why they’re bad and why it’s alright to kill them rather than addressing
TLDR: Rather than the psychoic killing machines they’re presented as currently, Gnolls should be the game’s consummate survivalists. Better equipped to live a more naturalistic lifestyle thanks to their numerous animalistic traits, they thrive in the outlands and harsh wilderness. Because living as hunter/scavenger/gatherers has worked out for them so well, Gnolls never really integrated in with the other agrarian-focused cultures, preferring to keep to the safety of the wilds rather than the frequently contested farmlands, leading to a mutual unease and cultural barrier that both groups have to work to overcome. Gnolls have very few taboos about what is and is not “useful” and have been known to eat the bodies of fallen travelers when food is scarce, or dig up graves for the valuables stored inside. This has given Gnolls the reputation as cannibals and blasphemers, when really it’s only the hyenakin being practical.
What’s Wrong: As of 2nd edition, Gnolls were like just about any other monstrous humanoid dnd species, savage primitives who worshiped evil gods and participated in various acts of barbarism. Slavery and cannibalism were the things that typified the gnolls ( not that other monsters weren’t willing to engage in slavery and/or cannibalism) and they were decidedly cruel and lazy, capturing others because they thought work was demeaning ( which is a whole... crockpot of weird stereotypes that I’m not going to get into at the moment). This characterization continued up through 3rd edition and pathfinder, the latter of which substituted the gnoll’s cannibalism god for Lamashtu, “the mother of monsters”, who is said to have birthed most “savage humanoids” in her wretched womb ( again, don’t have time to get into that but YIKES).
Then 5th edition crept around, and the gnolls took on a new flavor. They were decidedly MORE evil, MORE savage, LESS sapient, than previous versions, driven to endless slaughter by the voice of their demon-god Yeenoghu, practically demons in flesh themselves. They were remorseless killing machines who desired only chaos, to the point where I often saw them referred to as “Jokerlike” by gamer-bros who lacked the media comprehension required to relate them to any greater motivation.
To explain why they went through this metamorphosis, I’m going to have to explain a little bit of gaming history, as well as d&d’s version of the trolley problem. Buckle in, this is going to get Pedantic...
First The history lesson: Because d&d had its roots in wargaming, enemy creatures in the monster manual were presented with a category called “Organization”, which told you how large the squad sizes of these creatures could/should be. Often these came with the chance to roll for additional troops, or have a leader who had advanced levels and special abilities. Problem was, for savage humanoids, these organization charts almost always included information about the demographics of a “monster” village, including how many non combatants and children there were in relation to how many fighters they had ( anywhere from 5-50%)
Here’s an excerpt from the 2e monster manual:
Habitat/Society: Gnolls are most often encountered underground or inside abandoned ruins. When above ground they operate primarily at night. Gnoll society is ruled by the strongest, using fear and intimidation. When found underground, they will have (30% chance) 1-3 trolls as guards and servants. Above ground they keep pets (65% of the time) such as 4-16 hyenas (80%) or 2-12 hyaenodons (20%) which can act as guards.
A gnoll lair will contain between 20 and 200 adult males. For every 20 gnolls, there will be a 3 Hit Die leader. If 100 or more are encountered there will also be a chieftain who has 4 Hit Dice, an Armor Class of 3, and who receives a +3 on his damage rolls due to his great strength. Further, each chieftain will be protected by 2-12 (2d6) elite warrior guards of 3 Hit Dice (AC 4, +2 damage).
In a lair, there will be females equal to half the number of males. Females are equal to males in combat, though not usually as well armed or armored. There will also be twice as many young as there are adults in the lair, but they do not fight. Gnolls always have at least 1 slave for every 10 adults in the lair, and may have many more.
Gnolls will work together with orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, and trolls. If encountered as a group, there must be a relative equality of strength. Otherwise the gnolls will kill and eat their partners (hunger comes before friendship or fear) or be killed and eaten by them. They dislike goblins, kobolds, giants, humans, demi-humans and any type of manual labor.
Remember, these are specifically the stats for a gnoll LAIR not a village. People build villages, Gnolls ( being not people by default) cram their living space into the dungeon the party is delving, or the living space is itself a target for extermination in order to save the land from the blight of gnollish exitance.
Skipping right over how the demographics don’t bear any resemblance to an actual hyena pack, lets look at the fact that there are TWICE AS MANY CHILDREN AS THERE ARE ADULTS, meaning that there are fuzzy families standing in the way between the murder-hobos and their treasure, and with each defender cut down, the party is creating scores of orphans. The book can cram in as many excuses as it wants about how these creatures are sadistic and terrible and bad for the environment, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re people, who according to the rules and greater lore of the game a) are capable of feeling pain and fear b) have souls, making them fully willed individuals and not simply animals . How then can their outright slaughter be a good thing?
Well... lets look at some of d&d’s inbuilt genocide apologia, and a classic session killing scenario that’s come to be known as the “baby monster dilemma”.
First lets acknowledge that d&d is fictional, existing separate to but directly inspired by our reality. Lets also acknowledge that fictional events do not hold the same moral weight as events in our world, and that an author writing about a murder does not in any way share the guilt of say... a hitman.
That said, a fictional work can still be said to express harmful ideas, even if the ideas only exist on a page. A movie is not racist because it has racism in it, it is racist because it reinforces the structures of racism, justifying the bigoted actions of others by helping to reinforce a worldview that directly harms others.
For most of its history, d&d has said that racism is GOOD, by creating an innumerable number of monstrous “others” to serve as opposition to the heroes, and justifying that opposition both by the moral framework of its universe and by the inherent foulness of those foes. In the same entry, Gnolls are described as “Evil”, “Preferring to eat sentient humanoids because they scream the most” and “ Hunting exhaustively to the point where the wilderness will take years to recover before they move on.”
If gnolls are inherently evil and sadistic, the only dead gnoll is a good gnoll, and adventurers (goodguys by default) should not suffer one to live.
This is how you end up in wild situations like the Baby Monster Dilemma, where characters like the paladin, who are compelled to do good and never allow an evil act ( in the earlier editions atleast) are forced to wrestle with the moral conundrum of what to do with all of those gnoll children they just orphaned.
Leaving the Gnoll pups alone means that they will either starve to death, or grow up to do more evil in the future,
Because like most monstrous humanoids, gnolls have inherently evil souls, and so adopting them and nurturing them to be good is doomed invariably to fail ( there are plenty of examples of this “call to evil” throughout d&d lore)
Therefore the best answer is to slaughter them all on the spot, which lays somewhere between an act of genocide and Cruella D’Ville level of puppy murder, depending on your conception of gnoll sapience.
This is why I say that d&d has genocide apologia baked into it. In the case of fighting a very common enemy the way the game wanted you to fight them, the mass murder of children is a morally sound decision that leaves the world a better place. The game creates a scenario where enacting genocide is good and makes “Kill the monsters, take their stuff” a primary progression mechanic.
I don’t want to play a game that constructs elaborate setups to justify why it thinks genocide is ok, much less one that uses the same arguments that were used to justify IRL genocides within the past century. Because D&D happens to be the world’s most popular roleplaying game, and because I like the underlying mechanics so much, the lore is going to have to change quite a lot before I’m comfortable using it, and by the way things look ... it seems like a lot of other people are in the same position.
Now with that in mind, lets look at how WOTC tried to fix this and where they went wrong:
In order to make purging gnolls from the world justified, the writers of 4th and 5th edition tried to double down on gnoll’s evil traits, saying that they don’t have emotions, and even making them constantly demon possessed, under a species wide curse that compels them to ruin and rend and destroy with no thought for others. By turning that monstrosity dial up all the way to 11 ( They’re so evil that not actively hunting them to extinction is a moral failing) the writers are trying to bulldoze past the baby monster conundrum by giving an objective answer, Problem is, the gnolls are still, technically, people, in possession of souls, families, and the ability to think and reason... the writers have just gone out of their way to create them in such a way that their evil invalidates all of that.
I wouldn’t have a problem with it if gnolls were literally beasts, or monsters spat out of the pits of hell, or manifesting spontaneously from nature, but the problem is that they REMAIN intelligent humanoids. The current Monster manual describes them as a plague that descend without warning on civilized lands to slaughter and pillage and wander elsewhere looking for new places to raise, making nothing of lasting value and instead taking whatever they might need from the corpses of their victims. I can’t help but compare that to villainized depictions of displaced communities or nomadic peoples, scorned by those of more settled societies that may or may not be expanding out into the nomad’s territory.
How we can make this better: Stripping the Gnolls down to their base concept as “ Hyena people” gives us quite a lot to work with while reimagining them. Hyenas are adaptable social creatures with a unique sexual hierarchy that you can spin out into a lot of interesting cultural dynamics out of ( go look up some hyena biology facts and tell me that’s not a goldmine for coming up with unique social patterns). Being strict carnivores means they miss out on the development that agriculture brings, but their wider palate when it comes to what’s acceptable as meat ( scavenged carrion, insects) allows them to survive in much harsher climates, though likely with smaller numbers. Groups would be transitory, following the migration routes of the animals that they hunted, splitting up and gathering together based on the availability of the food supply.
Though migratory, gnolls would likely be highly protective of these lands, as sustainable access to a highly limited foodsource would mean the difference between being able to stay with the route or being force to travel to unknown lands scavenging. Gnoll territory would likely clash with wolves, lions, and other large predators
Gnolls could also perform a unique form of insect-agriculture, cultivating colonies of termites, crickets, and leaf-cutter ants throughout their territory to act as backup food storage.
( Also this whole thing about gnolls keeping Hyenas as pets always bugged me. You don’t want pets that eat the same thing as you, gnolls would keep easily )
Gnoll culture would likely be eminently practical, with everyone expected to be able to cultivate different skills depending on the seasonal availability of food. This would lead to less specialization and stratification among the pack-members, as well as a network of mentor-apprentice relationships that would likely transcend individual packs. The best leatherworker would train leatherworkers from all allied packs, and this would foster a spirit of dependence and unity despite territorial separation. Gods of the hunt and weather would likely feature prominently, as well as dualistic gods of life and death, who the gnolls would thank for their random gifts of carrion.
Like most of the “always chaotic evil” ancestries, I don’t mind keeping the monstrous aspects of the gnolls somewhere in the toolbox, and the idea of the “always hungry, always bloodthirsty” raiders that not even other evils will align with is an interesting menace to face. In the default Gnoll lore, the gnolls were created from hyenas who fed upon the carrion left behind by the rampaging demon-prince Yeeenoghu. With a simple twist, we instead have “The hungry ones” a cult or demonically influenced faction of gnolls who are a dark perversion of gnollish nature much in the same way that vampires are a dark reflection of humanity. Made up of outcasts from stable gnollish society, these wretches revere a carrion demon as none of their people’s other spirits will watch over them, and aim o fill their bellies as many times as possible before the wilds finally claim them ( think Mad-Max warboys)
If you wanted to put a twist on it, have these hungry ones be the “first contact” point between your traditional fantasy cultures and the gnolls of the badlands, souring relations between both groups and feeding off the inevitable clash.
I’d be interested to know if you had any thoughts on what an actual magocracy would look like, or at least how you would approach making a magocracy the setting of a game to run in instead of the typical realm of the king. Do you have any ideas about that?
Largely I think it’d depend on how the magic a) worked b) was handed down, much in the same way as military power has shaped the way our IRL power structures have worked over the centuries.
Wizards make terrible rulers, as their need to study the arcane leaves them little time to attend to affairs of state. They do however make great conquerors or political strong-men, acting as a threat of force while leaving the day-to-day administration of their realm to underlings. The Gibili Eearthsea movie has a wizard who’s served by cartell of slavers, and uses the revenue squeezed out of the people’s suffering to buy rare tomes and specialized material components.
Inherited magical power makes for a far more stabilized ruling class, as they could be relied upon to produce erstwhile practioniers generation after generation, securing their place in society. Imagine the horsetrading of heirs and bastards but with sorcerous bloodlines, or a reclusive noble family allowed to do whatever they wish because they hold the patronage of some particular edritch being.
Divine magic is it’s own kit-and-caboodle, and largely revolves around a subjective connection to one’s particular deity/ideals. Standing religious structures likely have a place of honor for their magical devotees “ living saint, godstouched and the like” that grants these folks privlages while keeping them out of the core administration. Though cults forming around these folk can also be common.
As for how a magocratic society would look? Honestly not all that much different than another civilization that lived in the same environment: people still need to be fed and trade would still be the lifeblood of a culture’s prosperity. While magic can make food, it can’t feed a village, or make everyone sustainably rich, so the day to day lives of the citizens would likely be as you’d expect.
what WOULD change is where these magocratic nobles focused their efforts on building: Laylines and other sources of power would be especially prized, leading these nobles to build temples/sanctums in strategically inadvisable places ( swamps, off the side of cliffs, high up in the mountains etc). These sites would in turn require their own support structure of fortifications and supply-roads, stretching the society out in odd ways.
Industries would also likely be devoted to exploiting specialized materials that would fuel/boost/enable these casters, which would likely prioritize these industries over more domestic trades and craftspeople, leading to a need to import more complex trade goods.
Armies of magocratic societies would likely be smaller than those of their neighbors, either contracted mercenaries or conscript forces augmented with summoned or otherwise magically created irregulars. A magocratic military would rely on its standard troops for defence, while counting on its mage-commanders and summons to settle most engagements. High level casters have access to a LOT of crowd control spells, so expect your casters to stay far, far, FAR from the fray, and rain storms and meteors down on approaching armies.
This reliance on individual casters to turn the tide of battle would also create a surfeit of assassins, either hired by neighboring cultures or by rival noble families to sway the fortunes of politics and war. This in turn would cause the magocrats to seek guards and protections, likely further isolating themselves from the common people in proportion to how powerful they are.
Culture would also likely glorify these casters, so expect works of arcane art rather than suits of armor in noble’s houses, and mage duels rather than jousting as a popular sport of the nobility.
