Redbeard's Ravings

James of Grognardia posted his campaign's take on demihumans and how they are different than humans with different stats and an ego problem. Below is my own take that we've used in our Greyhawk/Yggsburgh/Zagyg campaign. I surrendered to how players would play elves et al as humans with different stat bonuses, but wanted a rational for why demihuman communities and npcs would be different and separate from the mostly human setting, for tension to exist between isolationist elves and expansionist human nations. Each player with an elf or gnome would get a copy of this although it is written from the elf perspective. If I was to rewrite it I would make it more concise. If DM prepared setting material is over a page you run risks of making the campaign for the DM's self indulgence and not about the player's actions. Players won't read or remember more than a page anyway. A player's advice to me some campaigns ago: 'you've got a great campaign, but you...

As I've posted before , I've been disappointed with how ordinary the Wychwood encounters seemed as depicted in the Yggsburgh hardback. I've tried to flavor it more with fey quality ala Midsummer Night's Dream. For players in Yggsburgh, there is a one very big unstated spoiler from the Yggsburgh hardback. Nearly all the rest of the adventure is my own creation or my own import from other sources. The players seemed to enjoy the puzzle solving and negotiation challenges that the evening entailed. Having had bad experiences on both sides of riddle situations, I picked a riddle that was hopefully easy to solve for the six players; the alternative would be that a party of level 2-4 would have to fight an ettin. They did have the idea from the ettin's size and description that they didn't really want to fight the ettin, but they had alternatives besides the riddle; getting the heads to argue and running away. Fighting was certainly a choice - one that surely woul...