Demihumans as Gender

Inspired by the Demihumans as Social Constructs post by Throne of Salt and Cavegirl, I thought I’d do a similar sort of thing just in time for not in time for pride month.

The premise is, essentially, taking the standard dungeon-and-dragony demi-human races and reimagining them as socially constructed. In this case, as a kind of gender role/expression.

I’ve seen a couple of people complain when they hear modern gender-terminology in their fantasy and thought I’d make a more setting-appropriate terminology.  

I doubt any of this is actually gameable but maybe your table is different from mine.

Elves

Androgynous pseudo-nobility.

Elves are a kind of third-gender with a long list of requirements.

The first and most obvious is meeting an overwhelmingly high beauty standard. Elves are expected to appear ageless, as well as hairless and flawless. Surgical ear-pointing is an extension of this.

The other requirements relate to skill and demeanor. Elves are expected to be courteous but never friendly, wise but never practical, and sensitive but never emotional.

Being neither men nor women, elves aren’t obliged to perform either men’s or women’s work, which is a not-insignificant part of the appeal. Elves aren't expected to go to war, to bear children or take part in any activity that might blemish their perfect skin.

Typical elf-work is artistic and spiritual in nature and includes the  accumulation of magic items, of which elves are considered the traditional keepers, as well as the bardic arts, religious ceremony and historical recitation.  

Typical taboos on homosexuality are waived in the case of elves. Elves are considered highly desirable partners irrespective of sex. Although they’re also famously difficult to court as partaking in relationships with a non-elf may degrade their elvish mystique.  

Half-elves are those on the fringes of elfdom, either transitioning in or out. They are often quietly shunned or demeaned for their failure to perform elfdom. A sufficiently talented elf can make up for their aging appearance, while an untalented elf can acquire a great deal of makeup.

Orcs

Alpha-male militia units

Orcs are men who believe marriage is a devious trap designed to emasculate and subjugate them. They reject not only marriage but the entire society that facilities it and advocate a return to, what they consider to be a more traditional, rape-and-pillage model of gender relations.

Orcs consider the warband, not the family, to be the fundamental unit of society. Naturally, these societies don’t have a long life-expectancy. Brotherly comradery is constantly vying 6 with fierce macho competition

Amazons were a similarly-minded female counterpart to orcs which supposedly menaced the menfolk of eastern plains during the reign of King Gandrin the second.

Dwarves

Hobbyist Masculinist Separatist

A more peaceful approach to masculinist separatism. Dwarves are men who've abandoned marital relationships in favor of pursuing traditional masculine hobbies such as metalworking, ale brewing and hole digging. This arrangement has led to a skill imbalance in dwarven communities which has been somewhat mitigated by substituting plate armor for clothing.  

Dwarves are generally thought of as undesirable men who've turned to dwarfdom as a last resort, hence the stereotypical image of the dwarf as short, pudgy and elderly.

Halflings

Rural Mommune Derivatives

Beginning as something like the female equivalent of dwarves. Halflings are communities of female-separatists, most commonly abandoned, widowed or divorced women who come together to raise their children collectively. The term “halfling”, meaning “half” a married couple.

Coming, as they often do, from an impoverished situation, halfling women are commonly stereotyped as small, shoeless, hungry and hole-dwelling.

The halfling label will often stick with a community for generations after. Halfling men born from such communities, are known for being submissive to their wives and mothers. While often used as an insult some men adopt the label of halfling if they forgo traditional masculine trappings in favor of gardening and jam-making.

Dragons

Powerful Polygynous Patriarchs

A dragon is the, typically male, possessor of a “hoard” of courtesans, concubines, and the occasional catamite. A dragon is rich and powerful while being independent of the nobility, whose strict marriage customs he flaunts. Wealthy merchants, rogue princes and cult leaders are all archetypal dragons.

A dragon’s “color”’ indicates his sexual preferences and disposition. Bronze dragons style themselves as the first among equals in a community of freelovers. Red dragons are notorious princess kidnappers.

Kobolds are underlings of a dragon that aren't part of his hoard; servants, flunkies, lingering cuckolds etc. Dragonborn are, as the name implies, offspring of the dragon. Expect a complicated relationship with your parents and a small town's worth of half siblings.

Goblins

Low-status itinerant harlots

Although most commonly used as an insult, a Goblin is a member of a culture of wandering prostitutes, known for advertising their services loudly and shamelessly. Goblins are commonly pictured as short, scrawny from poverty and with skin a sickly green from disease.  

Tolerance for Goblins varies from place to place but is never very high. They will often be able to find a camp or slum to call home but are routinely chased out of town before holy days.

The sex of a goblin is considered largely irrelevant, since the shame of being one, or coupling with one, far outweighs any associated with homosexuality. If you told people you fuck goats, no one’s going to care if it they’re male or female.  

Hobgoblins are a subset of goblins who follow armies on the march and sometimes turn soldier when the looting is good or the commander is desperate.

Gnoll

Obsessive taboo violators

Gnolls are a bogeyman depiction of sexual degeneracy taken to an extreme.

If some moralisers are to be believed, the hinterlands are teeming with prowling bands of gnolls, covered in animal skins and various bodily fluids, abducting innocents and debasing them before pagan idols.
They’re also supposedly just as likely to gather in the catacombs of certain rival churches or the basement dungeons of the wealthy and powerful. The Marquis de Sade is an exemplary gnoll.

While true gnollism might be effectively non-existent, the vivid descriptions  found in supposedly-educational literature on the matter indicates a few interested gnolls may lurk among us.
 

A Political History of the Elemental Planes

Preamble

Elementals are hard to figure out.
Unlike say a goblin, dragon or demon it's not obvious what drives them or what their function is in the world.
I had a bit of an epiphany when I was perusing some d&d wikis when I came across something interesting.

From the Forgotten Realm Wiki’s page on the government of the Plane of Ice:

The Plane of Ice was unique among the Para-Elemental Planes in that it had a powerful archomental desiring to establish his realm with the full status of a major Elemental Plane. Lord Cryonax longed for ice to be considered the fifth element and wanted the borders of his realm to be the Para-Elemental Planes of Slush and Snow.

Now this was interesting. I’d always seen the elemental planes as something stable, something constant, something primordial (Something, dare I say…elemental).

But if what I read is to be believed then an elemental plane doesn’t mean what we thought it meant. It's a political status, not unlike ‘global superpower’ or ‘empire’. Like the sight of an iceberg with it’s tip peeking over the water, this implies a whole deeper side to elemental politics waiting to hit us in the starboard.

And that’s the purpose of elementals.

Elementals exist to give a political personality to primal forces.
Geological activity is political activity.
The elemental is political.

To that end I’ve written an alternative history of the elemental planes.

In the Beginning

The gods had forms of pure thought.

The gods had a wish to make worlds.

The gods had a problem.

While the likes of beauty, piety and justice are all fine things, you can’t make a planet out of them, much less a person. And so the gods decreed that there be matter, so they might make worlds and shape them to their liking.

Several of the greatest of the gods ventured into the void and expended great effort to create elemental planes. Each plane held a unique form of matter and all its multitudinous varieties. (The exact number of original planes is politically contentious.)

Meanwhile another group of gods created the Nexus, a means by which matter could be brought from the elemental planes to their own worlds. Today the Nexus looks like something between a violent storm and a black hole. The elemental planes are constantly spilling into it, swirling around and disappearing off into the worlds beyond. If you’ve ever heard someone describing the planes as ‘elemental chaos’ they were probably talking about that part.

If a god wanted to create a planet they would call up a great mass of rock from the plane of earth, fill its oceans from the plane of water, grab an atmosphere from the plane of air and then draw from the plane of fire to light up the heavens. (Wizards perform a lesser version of this when they throw fireballs or conjure up a pitcher of water.)

After eons of work only one step remained: unite the elemental planes together around the Nexus and let the elements flow.

This is where it all went wrong.

Calamity

First supersonic winds tore across the lands as the Plane of Air decompressed.
Floods followed behind it as the Plane of Water spilled out across the lands.
The Plane of Earth discovered what geological activity meant.
There was reportedly once a Plane of Wood next to the Plane of Fire, in the spot where the Plane of Ash sits today.

It was only some last minute dimensional re-engineering that stopped the planes from completely collapsing in on themselves. Although to this day the planes remain riddled with little enclaves: great lakes in the Plane of Earth and floating mountains in the Plane of Air.

Now you might think the gods, wise as they are, should have seen this coming but keep in mind that matter was a new invention at the point and the gods hadn’t considered that the elements might react with one another.

Although the elemental planes were a mess by this point, there were some upsides to all this chaos.
At the borders of the planes where elements merged and mixed, new substances were formed. The palette of the gods would now be much broader, even if the paint was smeared all over the place.

The Nexus and the Rise of the Elementals

After eons of delays the planes grew somewhat stable and the gods grew somewhat impatient.

And so the Nexus was finally opened to all and the creation of worlds could finally begin.

Immediately a whole new set of problems emerged.

The first problem was demand. All types of matter were created in equal proportion but not all matter was equally desired. Precious metals, perfumed winds and rejuvenating waters were being drained rapidly while duller and deadlier elements were gathering dust (dust was also in very low demand you see).

Reportedly a draconic deity managed to get in early and now sleeps happily on a planet sized hoard of gold.

Soon the remaining high-demand elements became trapped behind a surplus of unwanted mud and seawater.

The gods had to spend another eon or so establishing a complex pricing/rationing system among themselves. This, incidentally, is why wizards can’t just conjure up wealth for themselves, the effort and time needed to conjure up gold is often more difficult than just mining it out of the ground.

But while the Gods were hammering out their matter market, another problem was taking hold. Things were finding their way back into the elemental planes.

The Nexus had always been envisioned as a portal from the elemental planes to our worlds. But portals work both ways.

Life, a recent invention who’s talent at invading new ecosystems was as yet unknown, started creeping its way into the elemental planes.

This proved a great annoyance. Someone would summon up a pitcher of water only to find an angry crustacean inside. A great many monsters can trace their origin to planer cross contamination of this sort.

But a more troublesome thing was seeping into the elemental planes.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned elementals yet.
This is because elementals are not native to the elemental planes.
The planes were places of base matter.
Life, thought and sentience were foreign to the planes.   

But souls seeped in from the worlds of the gods and, finding nowhere suitable to reincarnate, made due with elemental bodies.

Elementals emerged in many forms.
Some intelligent and some animalistic.
Some mighty and some meager.
Some microscopic and some colossal.
All were problems.

The elemental planes were already enough of a mess without its elements standing up and walking about. It was time for the elemental planes to become the elemental polities.

The Rise of the Genies

Gods create.

They do not oversee, supervise or micromanage.

This sort of work is unbecoming of a divine being.

Not to mention tedious...

So the gods delegated.

They went looking among the elementals for noble souls with the wisdom, prudence and might needed to command their lesser kin. To these elementals they granted great power and the right to rule over the elemental planes.

They became known as the genies and were tasked with bringing order to the elemental planes.
This went about as well as you’d expect by this point.

While genies did indeed have plenty of wisdom, prudence and might they also had no shortage of all the other traits common in aristocracy: a strong sense of self-importance, a contempt for those beneath them and an appreciation for the finer things in life.

While in retrospect, assigning the status of demigod to the smartest looking lump of granite might not seem like the best solution, understand that the concept of royalty was also very new at this stage and many gods were still quite proud of inventing it.

Inevitably the ‘order’ the genies chose to impose was focused squarely on their own enrichment, and so the elemental  planes became a series of despotic principalities. Most of the elemental distinctions we know today derive from genie efforts to unify or divide elementals into factions. Ancient genie rivalries and alliances are why fire and brimstone are such close associates and why oil and water don’t mix.

All this intra-elemental conflict has given rise to a plethora of ideologies.

This is about the level of accuracy you can expect from diagrams of the elemental planes. The reality is much more geographically and politically complex. 

D12 Polemicist Elementals you can Regret Summoning:

1. Genieist Smoke Elemental: Firmly maintains the divine-right of genies except genies they don’t like who are illegitimate pretenders.
2. Gold Elemental-Supremacist:  Believes in the natural supremacy of their own very specific material. Constantly questioning the purity of others of its kind. Disgusted by alloys.
3. Traditionalist Basalt Elemental: Believes in living as a stationary thoughtless rock unless it needs to preach to others about the joys of a traditional life, which it does often.
4. Technocratic Uranium Elemental: Believes the elemental planes should be reorganized according to a logical scientific basis. If they had their way the planes would look like a periodic table.
5. Jingoist Fire Elemental: Unapologetic about every crime committed in the name of fire. Denies the wood elemental genocide.
6. Fifth-Planist Ice Elemental: Believes ice should be recognised as the fifth element.  Had convoluted reasons for refusing to extend this status to mud, ash or magma.
7. Pan-Earthist Sandstone Elemental: We can only become strong by putting aside our differences, even minerals that react explosively with one another. Solidarity among the solids!
8. Egalitarian Saltwater Elemental: Believes in the natural equality of all elementals. Politely but frequently reminds you no to use terms like ‘precious metal’ or ‘noble gas’.
9. Pedantic Ash Elemental: Very knowledgeable on the latest political happenings, very eager to share. “Actually the Confederacy of Cinders declared independence from the Plane of Ash, which you should actually be calling the United Republics of Ash, Dust, Slag and outlying Grit territories…”
10. Honorary Steam Elemental: Due to some aggressive territorial claims on the part of a particular djinn, this chilly fog sometimes shows up when you summon a piping hot steam elemental.
11. Energetic Exclusionist Topaz Elemental: Believes the likes of fire and lightning are completely illegitimate elements. Not even real matter.
12. Organism-Inclusivist Ooze Elemental: Believes that since you’re composed of elements, you too are an elemental. Pushes you hard for your opinions. Wants to know how your blood and bones get on so well together.