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I really enjoy communal worldbuilding, not just in the lowkey, organic ways it happens in the middle of a game - where a player inadvertently creates world lore by gradually revealing the rites of his priesthood or telling you about the town she grew up in - but in deliberate, organized ones. Like before my college (3E D&D) game, which has been about 10 years now, all the players sat down together for a couple of hours in a library conference room with a whiteboard and sort of collectively designed our world, drew a basic map of the known world, assigning various countries and cultures to different players who were eager to fill in the blanks, etc. It had mixed results, but at the time I was very proud of what me and one other person in the group did with the Elves. We preserved the existence of three distinct Elven cultures - High, Wood, and Dark - to hew as close to the core rules as possible, but the actual details of the event that led to the splintering of Elf society were very different from the standard. Early on, we decided that one of our world's "twists" is that humans were the oldest player race, not the youngest; we had evolved from higher primates in a way very similar to human history on Earth, and after the first men built their first societies, all the "normie" demihuman races were created by the gods in attempts to emulate or improve upon humankind. In gameplay terms, we reflected this by making the Sorcerer class verboten to human PCs - they were never born with the "spark" - and available to all demihumans, while wizardry was a human science (that others could practice, but that was originated by us, not by Elves or whoever). Elven society became an arcanocracy, a highly-stratified culture where the amount of sorcery in your blood determined your prospects in life, and the people with the greatest natural acumen for magic considered that their divine right to power. All Elven leaders were sorcerer kings. The first Dark Elves were revolutionaries, members of the lower classes who studied the human science of wizardry (which was forbidden) in secret to weaponize it against their rulers. This led to a bitter war in which the sorcerer kings did all the horrific poo poo fascists do when their hierarchies are under threat, and the revolutionaries resorted to whatever forms of magic they could - including demonology and necromancy - for the greater good. In the end, the Dark Elves lost because Corellon was an rear end in a top hat who sided with his original creation and thought its magical order was good, and were exiled and cursed to fear the sun. After the war was over, the remaining Elves agreed this sort of thing could never happen again, and had irreconcilable differences about what had caused this rebellion and how to prevent it; those that would became High Elves believed the answer was basically liberalism - throwing open their borders, opening up trade with others including mankind, and slowly making their government a bit less classist - while the Wood Elves were essentially reactionaries or even primitivists who thought the problem was clearly the insidious influence of human ideas of things like liberty and justice, so they disappeared into the woods, preserved the sorcerous hierarchy, but focused on using that magic to provide for everyone's basic needs and create an isolationist Elven ethnostate. Meanwhile, the Dark Elves stayed angry, built a friendly relationship with one of the great human civilizations, and between the two groups of "mundane-bloods" created the most prestigious academies of wizardry in the world. The antipathy between the various Elven cultures was very deep, because it was still "new"; the events that sundered their people felt like ancient history to humans, but they were still living memory for the eldest Elves. Even though colorism wasn't a function and we had dark-skinned High Elves/did not have blue-black Drow, we preserved the name "Dark Elves" due both to their curse and to make players think about words like "light" and "dark" and how they relate to the way we perceive morality and value. They were set in contrast to Corellon, a god who was depicted as a sort of very pale, white-haired, alabaster-skinned god in silks who clutched a harp to his chest with his right arm and held a bloody sword in a bloody left hand, the only pop of color. To most Elves in the setting, this simply read as a symbol of how their peaceful, beautiful people were also capable of terrible vengeance and incredible violence if injured. To Dark Elves - and the players, who obviously saw a variety of real-world Marxist and racial parallels - it had much more sinister implications. We maintained the matriarchal values from FR Drow culture, figuring that to be a logical development in a society of revolutionaries against traditional power structures, but excised all the weird BDSM fantasy poo poo that got rolled into that right alongside the "racially evil" shtick, because we wanted to actually deal with matriarchy as a concept rather than reducing it to fetish fodder or "the bad guys are matriarchs because matriarchy is stupid". Not perfect, and there's things I'd change or develop differently if we did it over, but I think it served (at least, from 19 year-olds who weren't game designers) for an alternative take on the core Elf mythos that came closer to the complexities of a believable history.
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May 19, 2019 10:10
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:16 |
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