Random fun fact: there is a German roleplaying system (Das Schwarze Auge) which explicitly mentions that elves do not have belly buttons, because the “wound” gets magically healed right after the cut. There is a lot of similar weird official canon that occasionally makes me wonder what TH they smoked at the time of writing their rulebooks.
Sure, why not? ;) Sorry that most of the sources are in German, but I don’t know about relieable English sources.
Orcs are big, bulky warriors with green skin and very little hair in almost all other franchises. DSA has a bad case of “our XYZ are different than yours!” for most of their species, so their orcs are covered from head to toe in thick, black fur (they’re condescendingly called “Schwarzpelze” / “blackfurs” by other races) and are noticably smaller than humans. Think of small, dark wookies with big teeth. Orcs generally don’t view women as people - not even their own! Female orcs are called by a name that allegedly translates to “animals that birth orcs” and they’re generally treated like livestock.
Goblins got the same weird “ours are different” overhaul. In almost all other franchises they’re the smaller, big-eared, smooth-skinned green people, but in DSA they’re basically orange monkeys (some official art) who ride swine and are literally incapable of understanding where babies come from because the “goblin queen” (Kunga Suula) held a ritual to permanently erase specific traits of that species, these being: understanding what fatherhood means, understanding what personal property is, understanding any type of death rites (they just toss deceased relatives to their swines), understanding loyalty of any kind. A bit more info here: https://pnpforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=56697 … and the “best” part is that this ritual was held to protect the tribes from the Nameless (basically the main antagonist) because that entity often corrupts people by false promises appealing to their desires, like promising to liberate a folk from harsh conditions or protecting their loved ones and the like. A Goblin who doesn’t care for his offspring or friends won’t be tempted by that, right? Extremely weird way to protect your people IMHO, but canon.
Elves, at least the “purebred” ones, never have unwanted pregnancies. They can f*ck all they want and won’t need protection or birth control, because elven babies have to be “called from the light” which is basically just a ritual to make a female elf pregnant. No idea what this ritual is supposed to look like, but sex isn’t necessarily involved. Elves having fun with other races, that’s a different topic tho, and might lead to an inconvenient surprise when the elf in question suddenly understands why other races don’t have / need such a ritual…
Elves start out incapable of digesting fermented or highly processed stuff. The entire race is basically lactose intolerant and “spice-tolerant” like a Brit until they VERY slowly get used to eating human meals. The Elven language (isdira) is also basically unlearnable by other races, because elves speak with two voices at once, so a single elf sounds like two different people saying the same thing at the same time, and THAT in turn is a prequisite for the correct pronounciation of a lot of elvish words. Like I said earlier; I really wonder what TH the creators smoked … I also faintly remember reading somewhere that the second voice comes out of their nose when they say two different things at the same time, but I can’t for the life of me find the source for that so take it with a grain of salt. It might have been a fan theory. Some more info here: https://dsaforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=51042
Every single person on the continent Aventurien has a “soul animal” that represents their character traits. They may not know about it, or may know that such a thing exists but don’t know WHICH soul animal they are associated with, but there are magic spells to “see” said soul animal in others to give the spellcaster an insight of the spell-targets soul. If for example a wizard casts that spell on a person claiming to be a war veteran and they see a battered, scarred, old lion then the wizard will know the other guy speaks true, whereas if their soul animal turns out to be a stressed-looking chicken or something like that, then that guy is probably a liar.
Simlar to that, witches usually have an animal companion that is basically a separate part of their own soul, so it should be identical to the soul-animal of the witch in question. The rulebook suggests some “classics” like crows, black cats and frogs, but any regular (non-magical) animal between the size of a bunny and a cow is okay to use when creating the character. You want your witch to have a monkey, goat or tortoise as a companion? Go ahead. Witches also have some …unusual spells. They can make their saliva have healing or damaging properties, so they can heal wounds by licking them but also melt the face of an attacker by spitting at them. And they can reanimate and move “dead” wood. The witch of one of my regular players once was in a situation where she was tied to a chair, and she decided to make the chair run away with her still on top while their captors weren’t looking. We had to pause the session for a while because everyone was laughing so hard at the mental image of a tied-up 80-something wrinkled old lady galloping through the streets on an effing chair, yelling “so long, suckers!”
There is a goddess named Rahja, who stands for lust and love and joy. One of her “Alveranians” (basically angels) carried her child to term in her stead, to spare the goddess the pain of having to birth the child herself. The thing is … that Alveranian was a man. I do NOT want to think about this any further.
So…yeah. There you go. One big serving of coversation starters ;)
Honestly, their orcs don’t seem odd so much as old. Green orcs mostly come from Warhammer and Warcraft and were backported into DnD after they became popular enough to be the default. Dark, hairy, and short isn’t actually far off from how Tolkien described his orcs.
I’ve seen The Dark Eye at book and game store in the past, but I’ve always passed it by. Thanks largely to this comment, I will now be spending a lot of money on it.
That animal companion thing sounds like the daemons in His Dark Materials, which is cool.
Lots of neat unusual concepts there too, I like. Though using familiar names like orc and goblin just makes things confusing. They should have come up with different names for their weird races.
It’s basically that, minus the ability to talk (the “daemons” in HDM can talk like people, whereas the soul animals in DSA can only talk telepathically with their respective witch). The only other difference is that a witches’ companion is usually born elsewhere and has to find their witch in the real world later, which usually happens when the witch is around seven years old and her magic awakens. IIRC the daemons in HDM are somehow born alongside their respective humans and keep shapeshifting until they settle for a matching animal form eventually.
I fully agree with the name change tho. I mean, it should not have been that hard to just stick to Blackfurs and Redfurs for orcs & goblins when they’re “nicknamed” that way in the actual game anyway. Both races also have noticably different names for themselves in the game (goblins call themselves Suulak, for example) so that would have been yet another option for a unique name. No need to call these fictional races by a name that most people already associate with very specific traits and then go out of your way to make them “different”.
To be fair, most ear piercings are not “cored”, but merely punctured. Considering all phalanges begin as flippers, would this spell also render the target a better swimmer, as well? 🤣😜
Personally, I’m fond of healing potions, when used in lieu of common sense after the fact, posting a risk of addiction (likewise, arcane healing spells) as a cautionary lesson to would-be murder-hobos dabbling in meta-dickery at the table. 🤘🏼
would-be murder-hobos dabbling in meta-dickery at the table.
DM: Oh, so we’re meta-gaming now? Is that why you keep executing my quest-givers and plot-leads? Hold my ale.
But seriously, as a DM I’m chill with some meta-ness if it fits the “rule of cool” and doesn’t break the game or story into unusable pieces. Then again, my style is heavily improvised so they can’t break much in the way of grand plans (there aren’t any). Besides, I can always call down some deity and rewrite physics to my liking, so the risk is basically nil.
So, if an intentional body modification is a “wound”, I guess that means the spell doesn’t differentiate and mundane sex changes would also be reversed? 🥲🤷🏼♂️
I feel like puncturing a hole is pretty clearly a wound, but having a cockatrice petrifying someone and casting Stone Shape (which I assume is how sex changes and cosmetic surgery works) probably wouldn’t be a wound.
I would say that “missing” implies that in some sense the body parts ought to be there but the umbilical cord ought not to be there in both the “natural” and the “desired” senses.
What about scar tissue? Does it get cleaned up? People who have been in a lot of fights tend to have a big build-up of scar tissue. Also, what about calluses? Does the warrior suddenly have baby-soft skin, losing the calluses he/she built up over years of training with the sword?
Imagine all the dust from dead skin cells that you’ve accumulated over your entire lifetime, returns to you as skin. I wonder what that would look like.
The RAW debate nonsense I like makes the game unplayable. It’s what I argue online for. Though I suppose people probably debate RAW while playing and just don’t actually play that way.
I’ll admit, I’m coming from a very heartfelt and argumentative place. For instance, my brother and his friends complained that Warhammer 40k 2nd edition ruined the game because they made the rules clearer. It upended the whole dynamic by eliminating all the arguing.
As a DM, I use moments like this as a way to let the players help craft house rules; this is the flavor for our game and it just feels like DnD that way.
This is exactly the kind of RAW debate nonsense that I play DnD for.
So, what about the whole belly-button and umbilical cord situation? That might be on the line as far as “mortal wounds” or “missing body parts” go.
Random fun fact: there is a German roleplaying system (Das Schwarze Auge) which explicitly mentions that elves do not have belly buttons, because the “wound” gets magically healed right after the cut. There is a lot of similar weird official canon that occasionally makes me wonder what TH they smoked at the time of writing their rulebooks.
My Fams been playing the game care to tell a few More facts to mess With Them?
Sure, why not? ;) Sorry that most of the sources are in German, but I don’t know about relieable English sources.
So…yeah. There you go. One big serving of coversation starters ;)
Honestly, their orcs don’t seem odd so much as old. Green orcs mostly come from Warhammer and Warcraft and were backported into DnD after they became popular enough to be the default. Dark, hairy, and short isn’t actually far off from how Tolkien described his orcs.
Agreed.
I’ve seen The Dark Eye at book and game store in the past, but I’ve always passed it by. Thanks largely to this comment, I will now be spending a lot of money on it.
That animal companion thing sounds like the daemons in His Dark Materials, which is cool.
Lots of neat unusual concepts there too, I like. Though using familiar names like orc and goblin just makes things confusing. They should have come up with different names for their weird races.
It’s basically that, minus the ability to talk (the “daemons” in HDM can talk like people, whereas the soul animals in DSA can only talk telepathically with their respective witch). The only other difference is that a witches’ companion is usually born elsewhere and has to find their witch in the real world later, which usually happens when the witch is around seven years old and her magic awakens. IIRC the daemons in HDM are somehow born alongside their respective humans and keep shapeshifting until they settle for a matching animal form eventually.
I fully agree with the name change tho. I mean, it should not have been that hard to just stick to Blackfurs and Redfurs for orcs & goblins when they’re “nicknamed” that way in the actual game anyway. Both races also have noticably different names for themselves in the game (goblins call themselves Suulak, for example) so that would have been yet another option for a unique name. No need to call these fictional races by a name that most people already associate with very specific traits and then go out of your way to make them “different”.
To be fair, most ear piercings are not “cored”, but merely punctured. Considering all phalanges begin as flippers, would this spell also render the target a better swimmer, as well? 🤣😜
DM: I have good news and bad news.
Player: give me the good news.
DM: We’re naming a new PC race after you.
Personally, I’m fond of healing potions, when used in lieu of common sense after the fact, posting a risk of addiction (likewise, arcane healing spells) as a cautionary lesson to would-be murder-hobos dabbling in meta-dickery at the table. 🤘🏼
So, this is very on-brand for me, as well. 🤩🍿
DM: Oh, so we’re meta-gaming now? Is that why you keep executing my quest-givers and plot-leads? Hold my ale.
But seriously, as a DM I’m chill with some meta-ness if it fits the “rule of cool” and doesn’t break the game or story into unusable pieces. Then again, my style is heavily improvised so they can’t break much in the way of grand plans (there aren’t any). Besides, I can always call down some deity and rewrite physics to my liking, so the risk is basically nil.
Sounds like you might really dig Ironsworn/Starforged. 🤘🏼
I’ll look into that, thanks!
And the revived’s first words are “Dry land is real!”
It also says that the spell “closes all wounds”.
So, if an intentional body modification is a “wound”, I guess that means the spell doesn’t differentiate and mundane sex changes would also be reversed? 🥲🤷🏼♂️
I feel like puncturing a hole is pretty clearly a wound, but having a cockatrice petrifying someone and casting Stone Shape (which I assume is how sex changes and cosmetic surgery works) probably wouldn’t be a wound.
Heh. Mundane sex changes don’t often involve a cockatrice, AFAIK.
The placenta. Next question.
It’s right there, though?
😶
I would say that “missing” implies that in some sense the body parts ought to be there but the umbilical cord ought not to be there in both the “natural” and the “desired” senses.
the innie becomes an outie
What about scar tissue? Does it get cleaned up? People who have been in a lot of fights tend to have a big build-up of scar tissue. Also, what about calluses? Does the warrior suddenly have baby-soft skin, losing the calluses he/she built up over years of training with the sword?
Also the classic question of does a lock of hair or a drop of blood count as a body with (a lot of) missing parts?
oooh that sounds like a variation on the ship of thesius.
Imagine all the dust from dead skin cells that you’ve accumulated over your entire lifetime, returns to you as skin. I wonder what that would look like.
The RAW debate nonsense I like makes the game unplayable. It’s what I argue online for. Though I suppose people probably debate RAW while playing and just don’t actually play that way.
I’ll admit, I’m coming from a very heartfelt and argumentative place. For instance, my brother and his friends complained that Warhammer 40k 2nd edition ruined the game because they made the rules clearer. It upended the whole dynamic by eliminating all the arguing.
As a DM, I use moments like this as a way to let the players help craft house rules; this is the flavor for our game and it just feels like DnD that way.
BrikWars has a rule where if you disagree on the rules, you just roll to see who’s right.
I like this. That has “Roll for Shoes” energy behind it.