The Original Monster

Here's a question I doubt has every been asked before: what is the very first monster described in Dungeons & Dragons. If you turn to Volume II of OD&D and look at monster descriptions, you'll find the answer – Men. 

OD&D states that Men exist in "several categories," namely bandits, berserkers, dervishes, nomads, buccaneers, pirates, cavemen, and mermen. Later editions of the game, such as the Holmes Basic Set, AD&D, and Moldvay/Cook include some or all of these and, in a few cases, add categories of their own (e.g. merchants, nobles, pilgrms, etc.). Examining these categories could, I think, shed a great deal of light on the implied setting of the original game and I'll get to that, at least in part. At the moment, though, I'm more interested simply in the fact of it.

What I mean is this: D&D – every edition of the game – includes many, many types of monsters, some of which have now passed into popular culture beyond the game itself. There are also monsters, like the beholder or the gelatinous cube, to choose just two, that are so strongly associated with the game that simply seeing them reminds you of D&D, assuming you're already familiar with the game. But, at the very beginning, before anyone was familiar with it, what monster is listed first and what, if anything, does that mean?

It's long been a position of this blog that Dungeons & Dragons is fundamentally humanocentric. Human beings – "Men" in the parlance of the early editions of the game – are the standard by which all other intelligent species are judged. That's why all the TSR editions of the game included level limits for demihumans, as well as limiting their access to character classes. A humanocentric world, even one where magic exists, is probably a recognizable one, which is to say, one whose social and political structures aren't all that different from those we know or that have existed at some time on Earth. 

OD&D describes itself as "rules for fantastic medieval wargames campaigns." The word "medieval" wasn't chosen haphazardly, even if the game also makes it clear that it's "strictly fantasy" and therefore not limited in its scope. Both Gygax and Arneson had a keen interest in the historical Middle Ages and this interest spills over into the presentation, content, and rules of OD&D (whose standard combat system, we shouldn't forget, is that of Chainmail). Given this, I think it makes perfect sense that human opponents would be put front and center in the monster descriptions of Volume II, since humans dominate the world.

Another possibility, one that I don't think is inherent in the text of OD&D, but which is nevertheless interesting to consider is that "humans are the real monsters." Phrases like that can be trite, even humorous, but they don't have to be. Instead, the phrase can be understood simply to mean that, for many purposes, there is no need to use a monster when a human opponent will do. There's no reason, for example, why a rural village needs to be menaced by orcs or goblins when bandits or berserkers will do. Granted, orcs are more fantastical than mere bandits and, for many gamers, D&D adventures must be fantastical. I'm quite sympathetic to that perspective. Still, I think there can be value in reserving the use of monsters in order to preserve the wonder they can engender (says the person who just argued for making dragons more prevalent).

Of course, there's not any necessary opposition between a setting's being fantastical and the prevalence of human opponents. For instance, my Empire of the Petal Throne campaign is almost completely humanocentric and yet I don't think any of the players would say that it's not fantastical. Nearly all the major antagonists of the campaign over the last five and a half years have been human, whether they be pariah god cultists, Yán Koryáni secret police, Tsoléini pirates, or rival clans. Some of these enemies have used magic or possessed strange abilities, because Tékumel is a fantasy setting. The same can be true of human opponents in D&D or other fantasy games, which is why I don't think that humanocentrism necessarily leads to dullness. If anything, I'm tempted to argue that humanocentrism heightens fantasy, but perhaps that's something for another time.

Gloranthan Humanocentrism?

I've been devouring the Gloranthan Classics volumes I received yesterday with great pleasure. Reading them is a joy and, unlike my re-immersion in old school D&D, no one can rationally claim the positive feelings they're generating in me are based on nostalgia, as I had only a very limited exposure to RuneQuest in my youth. Reading them, among the many things that stands out is how human-focused published Glorantha appears to be. Most of the NPCs and sample PCs are humans, for example, and human concerns seem to drive most of the adventures. I find this interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, one of the things I "knew" about RQ even though I didn't play it was that the rules allowed you "to play anything." And of course there were the dreaded ducks, the very idea of which kept me away form RuneQuest longer than they ought to have. But if published products are any indication, non-human PCs don't seem to have been very common. Second, being a skill-based system, there are no level limits or mechanical disincentives to playing a non-human. Yes, there are Charisma penalties when interacting with members of other races, but they apply equally to humans in a non-human environment. Yet, talking to people who did play RQ extensively back in the day, hardly anyone ever chose to play non-humans. I find this especially odd, given both the variety of non-humans in Glorantha and the depth with which Chaosium invested many of them, enabling them to transcend stereotypes.

In the end, Glorantha, at least as it was published back in the second edition era, reminds me a lot of the way classical science fiction treated alien beings. Sure, there are lots of aliens out there, many of them quite different than human beings, and they often figure prominently in stories. However, they're rarely protagonists and, if they are, they're a lone example of their kind in a tale that's dominated by human beings. That's how Glorantha strikes me at the moment. It may well be a caricature of the truth or merely an artifact of the products Chaosium was able to publish back in the day, but that's how things seem nonetheless.

I certainly don't object to it and, honestly, I find it a nice change of pace from D&D, which, despite the intentions of at least Gary Gygax, became annoyingly less humanocentric as the years wore on. Speaking as an admirer of pulp fantasy stories, these old Gloranthan products strike me as often more in line with their sensibilities than does Dungeons & Dragons. Whereas non-humans in Glorantha are clearly alien "others," elves, dwarves, and halflings in D&D are (generally) just "guys at the office." They may look a little different and have special abilities you don't, but, fundamentally, they're no different than you or I -- little wonder, then, that so few D&D players ever batted an eye about choosing to be an elf over a human, especially once the game's already-weak disincentives for doing so were eliminated.