Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

[Odraude]

Reading through the other threads about non Tolken races or only humans in a setting got me wondering. Has anyone ever played, ran, or just read about settings in which there were no humans?

 

I remember playing one such a campaign where humans were actually the oldest race (with dwarves and elves coming in later), but because of an unknown cataclysm, the humans vanished and became something in the creation myths of the new races. The humans had a legendary and holy feel to them amongst the races here.

 

Anyone else have stories about such campaigns?

[Vondy]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

Reading through the other threads about non Tolken races or only humans in a setting got me wondering. Has anyone ever played, ran, or just read about settings in which there were no humans?

 

I remember playing one such a campaign where humans were actually the oldest race (with dwarves and elves coming in later), but because of an unknown cataclysm, the humans vanished and became something in the creation myths of the new races. The humans had a legendary and holy feel to them amongst the races here.

 

Anyone else have stories about such campaigns?

 

I ran an immensely popular Elven campaign many moons ago. It had its own elven creation myth, history, and culture. It also has several elven kingdoms, which were connected by air routes. There were humans, but the characters never met a human or entered a human area as they traveled on griffons with the scruffy humans far below. We could have just as easily had no humans. As it was, humans were created by one of the ancient elves (some of whom still walked the earth akin to demigods), from elvish blood poured into a well. In other words, humans were watered down elves with thin blood. In the mythos (which were rococo), trolls were the main evil (spawning from spores) despoiling the world the Elves wished to preserve. But the game revolved around an ancient rivalry between the descendants of an exiled ancient witch who was known as a kin-slayer and our heroes, the descendants of the demigods who founded the most powerful elven kingdom. I essentially took the AD&D 2nd Ed. Elves kitbash and dressed it up for a home brew setting.

[Shadowsoul]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

In the days before I adopted the Hero system I threw together a homebrew setting with no humans. There were Dryads however, because I liked them. And the four armed, blue skinned wanderers with a penchant for living in trees were basically the result of humans in rubber suits syndrome. It was quite a fun setting despite all that.

[yamamura]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

Hmm the animated movie Rock and Rule would be such a setting for an Urban Fantasy.

 

One ideas I have played with is a world that the human race was populating a world with genetically modified humans to survive in the planets varied and sometime hostile environments (including mining race that could easily shift from biped to quadped). Then the long night comes and contact with Earth disappears. Instead of magic, psionic powers with a mystic bent in their use plus ancient technologies as artifacts.

[Cancer]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

I've played in a couple of anthropomorphized animals campaigns. I don't think that's quite the same genre, though.

[BlueCloud2k2]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

I've guest-played in two campaigns similar in essence.

 

The first was based on Larry Niven's Ring World series... Mankind built a Ring World (think HALO) and filled it up with every Terrestial-compatible life for he could find (it was a massive biological preserve). Then Man wiped himself out. The game used D20 3.5 rules. The Races available in the Ring-World (called Cycle) were the Simi-an (descendants of monkeys the size of Halfling, basically Halfings in everything but name), Saurials (a semi-sentient lizard-folk race Man found amongst the stars and put in his zoo. After a few thousand years they became fully sentient and thus are Lizard Folk), Elves (one group of human-descendants from a low-gravity world) and Dwarves (another group of human descendents from a high-gravity world) and Orcs (what happens when Dwarves and Elves breed). Wizardry was having an understanding of Quantum Physics, Sorcery was having Quantum-Nanites in the blood-stream. Dragons were genetically engineered. So on, so forth. My character was an 10th-level Elven Paladin that was a star-ship captain who's ship crashed on Cycle. The whole adventure was the players assisting me in getting a power-crystal so my ship could fly again.

 

The other campaign was also DnD, but a magical plague wiped out almost all humans, half-elves, and half-orcs. Those that survived bred into the Elves. The only playable races in that campaign were Dwarves, Elves, Halfings, and Gnomes. The character I was playing was the human that created the spell-plague and put himself into stasis (he'd intended the Spell-plague to kill all NON-humans). Talk about backfire.

[Curufea]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

I ran an Elf only (plus one Lizardman) campaign as my first Fantasy Hero game. It was set in the Golden Empire of Elves, where they'd basically conquered the entire Western Shores. The first multi-part adventure the PCs went on was on behalf of a treacherous Human - a mage of the Elven high king. In that setting all Humans were second class citizens (or worse). On the completion of the adventure (we didn't finish), the PCs would have gathered all the parts for a magic item, that causes their ancestor - who is the one solely responsible for the Empire, to have never been born.

In order to gather the parts, they were given protective necklaces, which also had the property of protecting them from the effects of the device when activated as a side effect.

 

This basically meant that all the Elvish PCs ended up in an alternate reality that was the Western Shores with multiple racial kingdoms.

Some of them survived and still wander the Western Shores (as the Weeping Prince and the Great Dragon in the mythos for my setting). At least one of them took off their necklace and ceased to have ever been born.

[Odraude]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

I've guest-played in two campaigns similar in essence.

 

The first was based on Larry Niven's Ring World series... Mankind built a Ring World (think HALO) and filled it up with every Terrestial-compatible life for he could find (it was a massive biological preserve). Then Man wiped himself out. The game used D20 3.5 rules. The Races available in the Ring-World (called Cycle) were the Simi-an (descendants of monkeys the size of Halfling, basically Halfings in everything but name), Saurials (a semi-sentient lizard-folk race Man found amongst the stars and put in his zoo. After a few thousand years they became fully sentient and thus are Lizard Folk), Elves (one group of human-descendants from a low-gravity world) and Dwarves (another group of human descendents from a high-gravity world) and Orcs (what happens when Dwarves and Elves breed). Wizardry was having an understanding of Quantum Physics, Sorcery was having Quantum-Nanites in the blood-stream. Dragons were genetically engineered. So on, so forth. My character was an 10th-level Elven Paladin that was a star-ship captain who's ship crashed on Cycle. The whole adventure was the players assisting me in getting a power-crystal so my ship could fly again.

 

The other campaign was also DnD, but a magical plague wiped out almost all humans, half-elves, and half-orcs. Those that survived bred into the Elves. The only playable races in that campaign were Dwarves, Elves, Halfings, and Gnomes. The character I was playing was the human that created the spell-plague and put himself into stasis (he'd intended the Spell-plague to kill all NON-humans). Talk about backfire.

 

heh wow that one sounds like a dozy. Especially having to play that character with such a large stigma on them. How'd he handle it?

[tkdguy]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

Didn't the Wizards rpg (based on the Ralph Bakshi cartoon) have only nonhumans as player characters?

[Tasha]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

Didn't the Wizards rpg (based on the Ralph Bakshi cartoon) have only nonhumans as player characters?

 

Yep correct (I just looked it up in my copy of the rules). That's really because the only humans left are Mutants from the wastelands. What you play are the Faeries that have come back into the world after Technology ebbed and magic became dominant again.

[Tasha]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

BTW I played in an all Dwarves Campaign. No Elves (they had disappeared leaving all sorts of evil magics behind). Eventually we ran into some humans beside the mercs that accompanied us.

 

Everyone had a Dwarf character and a support character. All characters had backgrounds that linked them to the overall metaplot. We were on a quest to reunite the split up dwarven peoples before the evil necromantic lich destroyed all dwarfkind. All of the NPCs had an agenda and a definate purpose and personality that pushed that agenda.

 

The best part was that we all got to choose what character(s) we played. The name, and general background was already generated by the GM, but beyond that we were allowed to write the character up as we saw fit. (It was all done in D&D 3.x for the GM's sanity). I played the Princess of the dwarves who was on this quest. She was a Rogue/Ranger named Kiera. Her Twin Sister was a Paladin (yes they didn't always see eye to eye). She was accompanied by a cousin and some of her retinue (Bodyguard/Maids and a Valet). She also had a small company of Human Cavalry along.

 

It was a ton of fun and the GM who ran it is one that I still miss. Wish he lived in CA still.

 

If I am VERY lucky I will be in a game that is as good as that one was. If I am VERY VERY lucky perhaps we will someday get back to that game (and perhaps convert it to hero)

 

Tasha

[Curufea]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

It would be cool to have an all-Dwarf game set in the world of Dwarves and War of the Dwarves by Markus Heitz...

[Tasha]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

It would be cool to have an all-Dwarf game set in the world of Dwarves and War of the Dwarves by Markus Heitz...

 

Yeah it would. it could be a lot of fun. Though there are humans in that setting, and elves, but neither are the center of the stories

[tkdguy]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

The Elfquest rpg is geared towards playing elves or trolls. You can play a human, but it's assumed most humans are NPCs. That's because elves are the heroes in the graphic novels, and humans are usually the enemy. Trolls are sometimes enemies of the elves, but elf/troll relations are not necessarily hostile, even if they're not friendly.

[Markdoc]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

Actually, I think a game set in the world of Poul Anderson's Broken sword, where a three-way war between Elves, Trolls and Goblins was ongoing, would be pretty cool. There are humans in that setting but they are largely irrelevant: with a few exceptions the war is playing out under their noses, invisibly.

 

cheers, Mark

[Jongluer]

Re: Humans Need Not Apply: Campaigns Without Humans

 

I'm currently joining a game without humans. It's a friend of mine's homebrew setting that he made explicitly to have a world without humans (so that everyone would take a unique and interesting racial packages). There are only two standard fantasy races (Dwarves, and Halflings) who have some twists to them, and then a horde of various other races culled from other fantasy ideas and even some that are drawn a little from science fiction more than fantasy.