Every campaign world needs a race that is truly outcast,
truly deformed, truly ugly, truly untouchable. And in a world of half-breeds, quarter-breeds, magical
experiments, planar breaches, and more, there has to be a place for those born
just…wrong. Mongrelmen are it.
The best part is, mongrelmen fit in any campaign. Need a subterranean race of sewer
dwellers corrupted by alchemical sludge?
Mongrelmen. A reason
half-dwarves, half-gnomes, and half-halflings don’t exist? Mongrelmen. A fey market out of the Dark
Crystal, Labyrinth, or Hellboy II? Mongrelmen.
Need to people a forgotten space station, or emulate New Crobuzon’s
Remade and fReemade?
Mongrelmen. No matter how
close to Golarion, Greyhawk, or Tolkien you stick—or how far away you run from
them—mongrelmen have a place in your campaign.
Mongrelmen are lawful neutral, not in the dogmatic fashion
of axiomites and inevitables, but in the quiet way of a community that knows it
has to stick together to survive, and for whom revolution is not an
option. Of course, if one is not
of that community, there are no guarantees. So a mongrelman village might be a party’s lone site of
refuge while exploring the Realms Below…or the village headman might offer them
up to the next morlock tribe that comes calling (see James Jacobs and Greg A.
Vaughan’s Into the Darklands). The point is, mongrelmen survive—and
they make few apologies for doing so.
A city is thrown into
chaos when mongrelmen boil up out of the sewers. They immediately take up residence in the poorest quarters,
scavenging, collecting refuse, and otherwise doing useful menial labor. When questioned, they say only that
they have completed a pilgrimage.
The city fathers want the mongrelmen gone, despite their utility, and a
party of adventurers is dispatched to find out more about this pilgrimage if
they can, and to force the mongrelmen to move on if they can’t. The investigation involves cryptic
warnings about rakshasas and “worm-things”…and attracts ravenous morlocks who
are even less welcome than the mongrelmen.
A village of
mongrelmen toil as slaves,
harvesting strange psychic fungi and weird glowing crystals for their derro
masters. The derro and the mongrelmen
are separated by a great chasm, and any outsider can see the mongrelmen could
free themselves just be destroying the three bridges where the ritual trade
takes place. Getting the
mongrelmen to throw off years of custom and subjugation in order to strike is
another challenge altogether.
The asteroid cluster
known as the Hermit Hollows hides the system’s largest colony of
mongrelmen. It also hides the
legendary Cygnus Solis, a swan-shaped
elven cruiser that vanished at the end of the last war. Retrieving the Cygnus will be difficult: the grotesque humanoids (led by a claw-armed,
giraffe-spotted oracle) worship the swanship as a goddess of beauty who will
one day rejuvenate the mongrelmen race, and they will defend their icon to the
death.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 2
191
I’m surprised it’s “mongrelmen” and not “mongrelfolk.” Speaking of which, 3.5’s Fiend Folio mongrelfolk had an
extraordinary ability that let them emulate other races for the purposes of
using race-tied magic weapons. I
definitely recommend adding this to your Pathfinder mongrelmen to reinforce
their role as the ultimate scavengers.
Wait. I’m wading into dangerous territory,
because I really, really, really don’t want to wade too deep into 4e/D&D
Next waters. Some people love 4e
(I’ve heard it’s quite good for new players), others hate it; I meanwhile
simply followed Pathfinder and never looked back. So take everything that follows as the musings of one
ignorant dude.
Anyway, I browsed the articles a little…and I can’t decide
if this is a good exercise or not.
I know that Wizards of the Coast is trying to get lots of input for
D&D Next…but is crowdsourcing monsters necessary?
That’s not rhetorical; I really don’t know—crowdsourcing
seems like an amazing way to test mechanics, but monster flavor? Is rating these descriptions on a
five-point scale really useful for Wyatt, et
al? It’s hard not to see this
as playing everything too safe—after having been burned by 4e, WotC is
determined in this edition not to tread on any toes at all ever.
The nomenclature dilemma for archons/devas/eladrin in the
linked article points to another issue of 4e vs. previous editions—the way it
ran roughshod over the world’s oldest role-playing game’s established
conventions. Sometimes that’s good. Big bold change can be more freeing
than incremental tweaks. Mechanics-wise,
for instance, healing surges were a great idea. I love the idea of boosting wizards slightly so they always
have something to do in the game. (That’s one of the reasons I tend to
play eldritch knights or clerics, so I’m never reduced to being a wizard with a
dagger or dragging the whole adventure to a halt so I can nap.) And Torog, the Raven Queen, and several
of the other new deities were pretty cool.
But—setting aside every other drastic change 4e made, of
which there were many—4e’s habit of casually slapping old labels on new
monsters/gods/settings often seemed to be disrespecting what had come
before. So instead of seeming like
a revolutionary rethinking in the style of Dark Sun, it often seemed
kinda…rude.
Of course, now I’ve written myself into a trap: first I’m
tsk-tsking WotC for being too cautious, the next lambasting them for having
been too bold. Fair point.
Maybe what I’m getting at is this: Creating fantasy is
tricky. It’s hard to conjure up a
shared experience at the table. In
radically altering mechanics and monsters and setting all at the same time, 4e
may have been asking too much. It’s
always great to rethink and reinvent, right down to the smallest goblin—that’s
what we try to do here—but it should be a process of addition…the “Yes, and” of improvisational theater. In replacing and reassigning old names
to unfamiliar faces, maybe what was upset and lost obscured what was fresh and new.
(On a very personal note, I will stand by a comment I’ve
made before, which is that there was also a very hard-to-pin-down but
nevertheless very real failure at the writing and page layout level. 4e books (I’ve bought one or two here
and there when I had a gift certificate) just never read right. My eyes would just fall off the page,
and I retained absolutely nothing no matter how many times I re-read. And that matters, especially for GMs,
whom buy most of the non-core books.
Everyone talks about Paizo’s playtesting and GameMastery products and the
leg up/ease they had by “just” releasing “3.75”…but what doesn’t get said is
that they put a premium on rounding up the best writers and giving them a place
to play. That matters. And it’s a
spirit I try to emulate here.)
Finally, speaking of devas, this diva will be on the air
tomorrow for the first time in weeks.
Tune in 10:00–noon Eastern U.S. time. I haven’t prepped at all, so it won’t actually be good, but it will be me. And that’s something, right?
