A Setting Without Humans?

[The Oni]

Does anyone have any experience with a campaign setting where there are simply no humans in the game world? Either because they're extinct, near-extinct or just never existed?

I think it would be a good idea since it might encourage players to play non-human races in a way that's less arbitrarily alien. I.E. if Elves are the default, we don't need to make every Elf the representative of his race?

[Lord Raziere]

I agree with you on this. though I haven't ever played one myself. you might to look into Ironclaw....thought with it being all animal-folk, people might just play them as representatives anyways.

just beware of people who are going to come in and say "but playing them alien is the point, or they are just humans in a costume!!!!!!!11!!" by the way, In Before that happens....

[Rhynn]

There was a Finnish RPG called Elhendi, where all PCs are elves. (I forget if the world had humans at all; I think not.) It was preceded by Rapier.

There was an ElfQuest RPG, where PCs were elves and humans were basically orc/ogres...

I can't quite think of other examples just now... I guess there's Kobolds Ate My Baby?

I've long wanted to run a campaign based on Tom Proudfoot's awesome CRPG Natuk; a setting where orcs are the default race, and humans play no or next to no part.


just beware of people who are going to come in and say "but playing them alien is the point, or they are just humans in a costume!!!!!!!11!!" by the way, In Before that happens....

Yeah! Watch out for that, they might give you their opinion!

[Lord Raziere]

Yeah! Watch out for that, they might give you their opinion!

I know your not serious, but I have read too many forums to know that opinions are one of the most dangerous things of all....

[Tengu_temp]

The only problem or big deal with such a setting is that it might attract the "I play weird races, the weirder the better, as a replacement for any actual personality for my character" people. We've all met such players.

Earthdawn doesn't actually lack humans, but they are far from being dominant - from the eight main races in the world, humans are only the third most common, with dwarves being #1 and orcs being #1. Only 20-25% of the population are humans, everyone else is something else - and in Earthdawn, even the generic fantasy races like dwarves or elves are pretty interesting and exotic.

[Rhynn]

I used to have fun, but then I took an opinion to the knee.

An opinion killed my father and made inappropriate comments to my mother. (It was a very PG opinion.)


Seriously, though, I have no freaking idea why anyone should beware of people espousing a perfectly valid subjective opinion about how they like to play things. Is there, like, a chance you'll fail a Will save and be unwillingly converted to their opinion?

Edit: Oh, check out Talislanta (http://talislanta.com/)! Not only does it lack humans, it also lacks elves, dwarves, and the like; all the countless (playable) species are original and unique, as far as I can tell.

[NikitaDarkstar]

My only question is what would be the point? If you remove humans and put the elves as default will there actually be some interesting difference in how someone plays an elf versus how they'd normally play a human? And would it make people less prone to play say dwarfs and haflings as representatives of their races? I'm just curious as to what changes you expect this to actually have from the player side of things, but I do see it as an interesting experiment from a world-building point of view.

[VoxRationis]

There's a middle ground between "all elves act the same, weird, elfy way" and "all elves act like humans, but with pointy ears and low-light vision." The concerns that having a non-human race be the default for a setting would result in only cosmetic change is hardly illegitimate. The trick is to have diverse cultures and individuals while at the same time emphasizing that the "ground point," the center of cultural and psychological gravity, is at a different point among numerous axes from that of your average setting.

[Grinner]

just beware of people who are going to come in and say "but playing them alien is the point, or they are just humans in a costume!!!!!!!11!!" by the way, In Before that happens....

Ask and you shall receive. :smallwink:

But really, what is the point of removing mankind from the equation if you're just going to substitute in humans with pointy ears? To answer that, I guess you'd have to conclusively answer the question "What does it mean to be human?", but surely that's no excuse for dressing your characters up as caricatures?

[Red Fel]

I agree with you on this. though I haven't ever played one myself. you might to look into Ironclaw....thought with it being all animal-folk, people might just play them as representatives anyways.

Seconding this. Basically, none of the playable races in Ironclaw are human, although all of them are human-like in various ways. (Replace "race" with "social class in the middle ages" and you've basically got the setting.)

I'm not sure what you get from removing "human" from the equation; either all of the races will become "normal" the way human is the norm, or one of the other races will become the new baseline, and therefore the "human" of the setting. Ironclaw falls into the former; each race has minute distinctions, but none are so distinct as to be alien, so as a result all are essentially "human."

Do note that Ironclaw's mechanics are rather distinct from a lot of more combat-oriented systems, and that its setting is actually fairly mundane by many RPG standards, so if your goal is just to crib one or the other, you might be getting more (or less) than you bargained for.

[Thrudd]

What you call or how you describe the appearance of the people in your setting is irrelevant. There will never really be a setting without human-like people, because the designers and players are all human, none of us have ever experienced the universe any other way (barring some altered-state experiences which I don't think can really be used as the basis of an RPG system or setting.) You may make your people aquatic, immortal, incorporeal, magical, silicon-based, whatever. When we humans play them, they will have human characteristics and concerns.

A setting with interesting environments and cultures will be fun to play, whatever you want to call them.

[The Oni]

Well, for example, look at a setting like Mass Effect. Clearly, Krogan, Asari, Salarian, Quarian and Turian people have some human traits, but you couldn't put a human in their roles and get the same characters. Now take the humans out of the equation, and what do you have? (something good, I would hope)

I guess my idea is to eliminate human bias or, to use the MMO term, "Alliance Syndrome." Have lots of races that are human-like in some ways, but very inhuman in others, with no vanilla humans.

[Vrock_Summoner]

It works with the right players. You really can make races with functions and ideologies completely foreign to 99% of the human population and disagreed with by the last 1%, but the fact is your players WILL try to humanify their characters 99% of the time even if they're trying to play the "weird (elf/drawf/whatever)y" character, so having creatures that are more humanlike avoids players screwing with the internal logic of that race. That's simple fact, unless you're playing with people specifically interested in exploring foreign concepts. That's fewer people than you'd think.

[Sith_Happens]

Well, for example, look at a setting like Mass Effect. Clearly, Krogan, Asari, Salarian, Quarian and Turian people have some human traits, but you couldn't put a human in their roles and get the same characters. Now take the humans out of the equation, and what do you have? (something good, I would hope)

My guess? A lot more peace of mind in the galaxy as no one has to worry what the hell is up with these newbies already throwing their weight around. I think that's a bit of a digression though.:smalltongue:

[NikitaDarkstar]

My guess? A lot more peace of mind in the galaxy as no one has to worry what the hell is up with these newbies already throwing their weight around. I think that's a bit of a digression though.:smalltongue:

Lol I was going to say something along those lines myself.

But really, what do you have if you remove humans from the equation in Mass Effect (or a similar setting)? Well, honestly it sounds like we played very different games cause with the possible exception of the krogans I found all the "playable" races (the races featured among your team mates and who's planets and societies you actually got to explore) very, very human. I'm not saying the idea is bad, I'm just wondering exactly what you hope to achieve and how you expect it to shape the setting you're playing in. I don't really see it effecting the player characters at all, they're under the control of the players, and that means things tend to either go "human" or "stereotypical trope-race behavior" and unless you have very good players I don't see that changing. But how would it shape the world? That's what I'd be more interested in knowing as the answer to that may (or may not) influence the players. But that's also a very setting specific question so a generic answer is difficult at best.

[Erik Vale]

Your right, a lot more peace of mind, right up until the reapers find them and gank them...
And then Humans arrive late, take control of the citadel as the first race of their cycle, and maybe they find the crucible [relatively] early, and have it prebuilt and rearing to go pre-invasion... With a couple of well reaserched and taken apart ones... And a couple of copies... And some deliberately shifted relays.

I'm just saying, the council races are more than a little stupid.

Edit: Damn ninja's get out of the way of my posts...
But no, it would be different, no Eden Prime [ok, maybe a Batarian one], marginally less militarization by the Turians [no humans they need to compete with] unless the Batarian's raid a lot more than they did and spark a war.

[Kiero]

I only play humans. So such a setting would be an instant deal-breaker for me.

[Yora]

In my setting, humans are merely somewhere in the middle of the big five humanoid races, below lizardfolk and elves in numbers, and with a much shorter history in the region than the gnomes or beastmen. Humans exist, but most of them are either barbarian clans, or vasalls to one of the greater civilizations.
I chose this to give players who really want to play a human the ability to do so (can always be a traveling mercenary, as these are employed in small numbers by most cultures), and to also offer the option of starting in an almost fully human town from which the characters could set out and explore the strange world outside their small island of human culture (since the humans are relatively recent imigrants to the region).
I felt that going straight out no-humans and having elves be the major power in the non-tropical areas of the setting would likely alienate some people who have encountered hippie-elf settings before. And I'm also considering free publication at some point in the future, so that would be even more troublesome.

Kalimdor from Warcraft is a really quite interesting setting that doesn't have any humans before it's introduced in Warcraft 3, but got a serious amount of backstory for the time before that. It can be done, but selling people on it, who don't yet know anything about it, could be quite challenging.

Another thing to do, is have the human cultures be not "plain humans". They don't need to be 13th century english or german. Make the human populations Vikings, Egyptians, and Aztecs, and you already have something rather unusual. And you can get even a lot more creative and new.

[Mastikator]

I'm currently playing in a Bleach based game where the players play as death gods, which technically aren't human, some (few) don't even look the part. It's fun and interesting, we only need 4 hours of rest, only need to eat when we exert ourselves heavily, we're basically ghosts.

[Rhynn]

I actually think there's a lot of value in well-executed and detailed weirdness. Some of the best settings are intentionally weird and different, like Tekumél. A game where there are no humans and the default population is orcs, with ogres, trolls, goblins, and giants hanging around, is going to have a very different tone and feel. (You don't even need to go all Orc Stain...)

If you go even further and ditch all the familiar tropes, or at least twist them heavily (centaurs are brutish monsters, etc.), and maybe turn niche creatures into major populations, you can get a very distinctive setting.

Obviously, you can do it all wrong and get a load of weirdness for its own sake, but getting a load of crap is a risk whether or not you have humans. :smalltongue:

[Socksy]

I'm going to look more at mechanics here- you'll have no Elans, no Mind Flayers and therefore no Githyanki/Githzerai...
Yeah, psionics in general are going to be very different without humans.
Or you could just say something like "Right, the Elans used to be Lizardfolk, and the Illithids used to be Drow", of course:smalltongue:

[Spore]

I only play humans. So such a setting would be an instant deal-breaker for me.

May I ask for the reason behind your choice?

Also while Planescape and Sigil is NOT without humans, humanity is just another fraction and not the majority of the setting race. Within my own opinion, humans should be one of the longest living creatures anyway. Disease and accidents happen all the time, why are there several thousands of elves surviving centuries without weird Tolkienesque divine powers and not contracting a fatal disease or breaking vital organs when playing on a ladder?

Races like Goblins, Orcs and other less superlative species like Halflings make a lot more sense.

[GungHo]

There's Usagi Yojimbo. There are humans in the world, but they're vicious bastards. The "PC races" would be anthropomorphized rabbits, boars, foxes, cats, and the like. The animals are pretty human-like, though.

[DigoDragon]

I played in a one-shot adventure based on the story "Secret of Nimh". Everyone played as an intelligent lab animal and the object was to escape the lab because all the humans had disappeared and there was no one around to feed us. We were not even humanoid shaped (though an acceptable break from reality was that we could understand and converse with each other) so manipulating things and getting around a complex designed for much larger creatures involved a good bit of thinking and teamwork.

It was a lot of fun despite that we all died trying to fight off a group of owls.

[Frozen_Feet]

A setting without humans can work (I've tried crafting a few), but a game based on one needs detailed information or strict rules for how to play the role of a non-human. World of Darkness games actually come to mind, with their various mechanics for influencing player character behaviour (Humanity etc.). There needs to be some form of compulsion for the player to pick their choices differently than if they were playing a human character.

Ironically, some games achieve this to some extent without even really trying. Think of high level D&D. With their vast arrays of superhuman abilities and convoluted behaviours to avert horrible fates in their mind-boggling quests, can you really say high level D&D characters bear much similarity to normal humans? Especially if played by a high-end optimizer, such as Tippy?

[Rhynn]

A setting without humans can work (I've tried crafting a few), but a game based on one needs detailed information or strict rules for how to play the role of a non-human. World of Darkness games actually come to mind, with their various mechanics for influencing player character behaviour (Humanity etc.). There needs to be some form of compulsion for the player to pick their choices differently than if they were playing a human character.

This is a great point and immediately made me think of Burning Wheel; the elves, dwarves, and orcs in Character Burner all have their own core mechanic that differs from that of humans. Elves focus on sorrow, orcs on hatred, etc. (this being very much Tolkien-based). I always thought that the orc material would make an awesome orcs-only campaign, for instance...

[Komodo]

I played in a one-shot adventure based on the story "Secret of Nimh". Everyone played as an intelligent lab animal[...]It was a lot of fun despite that we all died trying to fight off a group of owls.

That's certainly one way to make the campaign palpably different from playing as humans: make all the normal animals that humans associate with as pets and make them giant predators to be avoided.

Digo's scenario reminds me of Mouseguard, whose RPG I am just starting to read. Is anyone else familiar with the setting, or the game?

[Rakaydos]

The Ironclaw RPG (either edition, though I prefer 2nd/Squaring the Circle) has an interesting world without humans, with strong parallels to early Renaissance, with conflicts between Nobles and Merchants, magic and matchlocks, the power of the Church vs little truths of hethens.

The same people also make a scifi RPG called Myrad Song using the same system, and while humans are there, they dont have the "everything is based on us" schtick you usually see. "Humans have the best color vision of the Myriad races, but their other sences are underdeveloped, and have no electrosensitive sence at all. They have two arms and two legs, and come in two sexes. They are one of the more sociable of the Myriad races."

[erikun]

That's certainly one way to make the campaign palpably different from playing as humans: make all the normal animals that humans associate with as pets and make them giant predators to be avoided.

Digo's scenario reminds me of Mouseguard, whose RPG I am just starting to read. Is anyone else familiar with the setting, or the game?
Yes, and yes. Although there are no humans (at least, none seen yet) in Mouse Guard - your enemies tend to be crabs, snakes, weasels, cats, and other manner of much-larger predators. The goals to make life and travel safe for mice in the area, which frequently brings you into conflict with other mice as often as large predators.

Other games that are similar are Warriors Cats (http://www.warriorcats.com/games-and-extras/games/adventure-game) (which rules for humans are "You lose") and Bunnies & Burrows (although I don't know if that has humans as well). There's also the Mice & Mystics board game, which pretty much has the same "You lose against humans" situations.



As for the main topic, what is the reason for removing humans? As others have mentioned, if the setting still has the elves dwarves orcs, then I typically just see people choosing one of the other races and playing them as humans anyways. You could change the culture of the elves to reflect different sensibilities, true, but you could do the same thing with a group of humans as well. A group of humans who live in treetops and use the magic of bird feathers would be just as strange and exotic as a group of elves doing so - perhaps even moreso, given that it's humans doing it!

I would generally prefer to see the elves, dwarves, and orcs leave before the humans do. Pretty much any situation is made more interesting by them being humans rather than demi-humans. A city of humans who delved underground and after generations of living in the underdark, became imbued with the ability to see in the dark? Neat! A cult who have devoted themselves to a deity of slaughter, being granted greater strength and resiliance to pillage the northern villages? Much more interesting.

On the flip side, if I'm seeing humans removed, then I'd prefer a much more non-human look at things. I mean, if I'm not playing a human, then I want to play something that isn't human. World of Darkness and Mouse Guard are some good examples of that, and perhaps IronClaw. As mentioned by other people, though, the tricky part is providing some mechanic to encourage players to not just behave as humans with a different name in the "Race:" line on their character sheet.

[Rhynn]

Digo's scenario reminds me of Mouseguard, whose RPG I am just starting to read. Is anyone else familiar with the setting, or the game?

Yup and yup. It's awesome. The whole perspective of actually being a freaking mouse is so great. A crab is like a dragon, but it's just a freaking crab. A wolf is a creature so far above you it probably won't even notice you (although it might decide to gulp you up if it had the chance!), and you couldn't do more than annoy it if you tried. Bears are just incomprehensibly vast and powerful by comparison to your own frame of reference.

[Joe the Rat]

If you're pulling humans and making another race 'default,' you could do the same thing by saying "we're running a <___> focused game."

What do humans do in other settings? A lot of times they're "special," Impassioned innovators, ambitious expansionists, immune to Fate, wielder of the power of Heart, etc. They are often the motivators of conflict, the seekers of things one ought not seek, and the social glue that draws the multitude of... damn, what is that obscure term for sentient beings?... eh, different people together. You could have some fun with a "want of a nail" exercise from there. Who will draw together the various races to face down the hobgoblin empire? Who will willingly go forth and explore beyond the borderlands? Who will provide the default bodies to generate undead?

Unless you are making them all horribly isolationist, treating the races much like nations - unique languages, different character and values, different secondary motivations... Pretty much what you should be doing with your humans if your story doesn't all take place all in one country. Another place to look at ideas of how "no vanilla" works would be the OWoD splats - some of them really focus on the inhuman traits and differences between clans/tribes/breed/etc.


It never got past planning, but I was putting together a no-human pseudosandbox fantasy game focused on a "neutral zone frontier" between several race-nations that is riddled with "precursor" ruins. The whole lot up and vanished about a thousand years ago. That means the eldest of elves (who is getting a bit on in years) knows what happened, but he isn't telling. Part of the plan there was to leave the players guessing or assuming that the lost ancients were humans. I hadn't decided which way to go.

[Coidzor]

If you wanted to include a sort of Humans are Cthulhu moment, you could include the possible genesis of humanity touched upon here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?323220-Creepiness-in-the-Daelkyr-Half-Blood-race).

[Rhynn]

If you wanted to include a sort of Humans are Cthulhu moment, you could include the possible genesis of humanity touched upon here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?323220-Creepiness-in-the-Daelkyr-Half-Blood-race).

Incidentally, that's pretty much canon in the Cthulhu Mythos, for much the same reason: humans are genetically compatible with Deep Ones, and hybrids produced become full Deep Ones. (There's more complicated explanations about the origins of humans as creations of Deep Ones and/or Elder Things etc. on Earth.)

:smallcool:

[DodgerH2O]

I started building a (D&D, 3.5) setting without Humans. What I've finished is very abstract, and the "role" taken by Humans in most settings was split among three different cultures of Elves, the Goblinoid societies, and a kingdom run by Dragons. In the end though, you could have made any of them into Human lands with varying cultures and traditions and achieved the same thing. I also toyed with having a "lost continent" of Humans, for the PCs to discover at some point, but that seemed like it could ruin the whole setting.

[Knaight]

I've seen this work pretty well with animals - Bunnies & Burrows, Mouseguard, the Fudge module Another Fine Mess. There are also games wherein species differences actually do have outlined psychological effects, that manage this in a non-terrible manner (mostly Burning Wheel) where I could see this working. Otherwise, I'd just note that I tend to get better results with only humans than most other combinations.

[Wraith]

Already mentioned are Mouseguard, Ironclaw, Bunnies & Burrows and Fudge. I've played the first two; they're both quite good, although Mouseguard is a very abstract system compared to the 'straight forward' systems like White Wolf or d20.

There's also Toon in which anyone can be anything - removing humans usually occurs almost entirely by habit.

After The Bomb does feature humans, but almost exclusively as NPC antagonists from a separate, potentially isolated culture. It's very easy to play a game featuring only Mutants if you want to (arguably, it's recommended that you do, since humans tend to be pretty far up the Tech Tree and are usually a significant challenge to reasonably well equipped characters).

Deathwatch, one of the Warhammer 40,000 settings, has the players as posthumans fighting all sorts of aliens and monsters. Humans are supposed to be the main players of the setting, but again it's easy to ignore them and only use the Space Marines/Xenos.

I also remember another game where the Players have characters who are exclusively.... things. Earthworms, Snot-Monsters, piles of sentient crap (I'm serious!) and other disgusting stuff that you might find in a radioactive sewer, but I'll be damned if I can remember it's name. Something-something-Filth, I think? Anyways, no humans in that, either.

[Knaight]

Already mentioned are Mouseguard, Ironclaw, Bunnies & Burrows and Fudge. I've played the first two; they're both quite good, although Mouseguard is a very abstract system compared to the 'straight forward' systems like White Wolf or d20.

With Fudge, it's the specific module - that's a generic system, and most material is human focused.