What is it like to be a human?

This may seem like a weird question at first: what do you mean, what is it like? We know! We are humans!

But we are humans who live in a world of industry and technology (you’re using it right now to read this), and we live alone. If we ever coexisted with Neanderthals, Denisovans etc. they’re long dead. Humans in the Forbidden Lands, in contrast, are newcomers in an ancient land which they have to share with orcs, dwarves, frailers / elvenspring, elves, hobbits, goblins and so on.

Oh, and the technology is centuries’ less advanced than ours, but to make up for it there’s magic and demons.

Still feel like you inherently understand what it’s like to be them?

Humans are weird

Many of the other Kin still have problems dealing with humans. It’s not just that they’re recent arrivals in the Ravenlands, so there hasn’t been enough time to get used to them, culturally and politically; arguably there’s an unusual amount of difference to have to get used to as well.

Humans are unlike nearly all the other playable Kin

To start off, let’s compare humans to the other Kin you can choose to play (i.e. not whiners and saurians).

Humans do not live long. They’re old after 50 (Player’s handbook, p. 31), compared to hobbits and goblins’ 60, dwarves 80 and half-elves 100 (and half-elves live three times as long as humans – GM’s Guide, p. 50 – so it’s even worse than it looks). They beat orcs by 5 years, and most orcs don’t survive into adolescence, so at least they’re not the worst. Still, they are definitely a short-lived lot.

Maybe as a consequence, they’re in a hurry. Unlike elves, and in my headcanon half-elves, hobbits and goblins, every time a human has heterosexual sex (and this includes the particularly terrible crime that is rape), there’s a possibility of a child – often a weird one, given that they can breed with dwarves somehow, as well as with the elvenspring that arguably were designed for this purpose.

And they don’t have much in the way of culture – or rather, they don’t have any one culture. Most humans live in villages, apart from the Aslenes who are nomads; wait, sorry, the Quard Aslenes used to be nomads but now live in stockades again. At least they all worship the Protector God; wait, no, they often violently disagree about whether to worship the snake or the raven, or whether they should worship both of them but they’re made of iron and wood, or whether they should just agree that being human was a mistake and they should just kill themselves as soon as they’ve killed everyone else.

You can argue that humans are the bad guys…

Talking of which: the reapenters have a sort of point that arguably humans are responsible for much that is bad and wrong about the Ravenlands.

Consider the charge sheet. Humans arrived on the eastern shores of the Ravenlands, crying that they’d broken their land and could they have another? They were told to take a bunch of land to the south of the Ravenlands, and they did, until they decided that some of them also wanted some of the land further north, which the elves and dwarves grudgingly gave them because the people asking seemed nice; then some more humans asked for more, or claimed that it was theirs by right according to religious texts they’d just made up, or sent armies to conquer it. Not content with hideous experiments on the dead, they graduated to experimenting on demons, to the point where after the other Kin had stepped back from the wars in horror, they ripped the fabric of the world asunder so they could summon an endless army of demons to fight a completely new war against each other. One side eventually won, but at that point enough demon stuff had come through that that entire part of the world ended up under demon quarantine for a quarter of a millennium.

If you want an example of how bad humans are, consider elvenspring vs frailers. They are genetically identical, differing only in upbringing. Elvenspring are lovely people, living nice calm lives surrounded by beauty, occasionally visited by their elf friends who appreciate the work they do. The most famous frailer, in contrast, is what most people would refer to as “the big bad evil guy”, and is currently welded to the back of a giant demon spider, along with his daughter who wishes he would die.

Now, it would be unfair to blame all the bad decisions since the Shift on the humans. At least in my headcanon, the opening of the rift and the enslavement of the orcs were down to the creation of the World Crown Stanengist, which the elves and dwarves were under no obligation to do. I’m also not convinced that the hobbits were always as nice as they desperately want people to believe.

But OK, that still leaves a pretty black mark against humanity as a whole. So?

…but it won’t help

This is like the theory that “humans were targeted by the blood mist because they knew that they shouldn’t be here”. It’s comforting, seductive, and wrong. Humans don’t care about that stuff. At all.

I mean, consider one of the most clear-cut examples of humans getting things wrong: the gold mines at Glethra (GM’s Guide, p. 22). Some humans found gold, and started building mines. The dwarves said “no, stop, this isn’t yours”, and they said “don’t care, want”. Eventually both sides came to an agreement, but the humans found that even with huge export tariffs, they still had far more gold than they could ever use – i.e. they’d accidentally caused massive inflation. What was humanity’s response? To abandon gold coins, shift to using silver instead (because nobody had found massive silver mines yet), and now nobody even remembers whether the goddamned gold mines were!

To repeat: the humans did not decide that they should have listened to wiser people (like e.g. the dwarves), or at least learned from their mistakes after they crashed their economy. They did not decide that they would make sure that every child growing up knew of the cautionary tale of the gold mines of Glethra, like post-war West Germans in our world remembered the inflation of the Weimar Republic for decades (as well as a few other much worse things). No, they decided “oh well, that didn’t work”, and walked away.

This is not a Kin you can train into being calm and considered, any more than you can teach orcs to maybe not try hitting everything with a rock, or get elves to hurry up from time to time. If you try it will almost certainly not work, or if it does it’ll only be temporary, and they’ll be miserable for as long as you make them behave in this unnatural way.

Humans are restless

Maybe as a result of their short lifespan, humans are determined to make the most of it, and it’s very hard to make them sit down, shut up and do as they’re told.

What makes humans special?

Plenty of world-builders, especially science fiction where humans are just one of many species, try to work out what makes humans special (compared to e.g. proud-warrior race guys, unemotional scientist people, back-stabbing traitors etc.). Forbidden Lands is very much in the camp of “humans will do crazy shit others wouldn’t even think of”.

Because consider what it means if an entire Kin can say “when you are about to roll a skill, you can possibly roll any other skill of your choice to achieve the same result”. That means that every single human, when faced with a problem they don’t know how to fix, instinctively is going to say something like “I don’t know anything about <insert thing here>, but I’m pretty good at <other thing>, and I reckon: how hard could it be?”

The first Aslenes reckoned: I don’t know anything about horses, but I guess you just try be nice to them, and I’m a nice guy, so I’ll give it a go. And then: horses want to move about a lot because they end up eating / trampling all of the grass, and that means moving our houses as well; well, I move the privy from time to time when the hole fills up, and moving an entire house is just like that except a bit more, right? Which is not that startling: plenty of smart-ish guys in our world tend to say things like “I dunno, but it’s basically just like maths or leverage, right?” (It’s often not just like maths or leverage, but humans pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on to the next thing.)

Eventually, once they decide this is a thing they’re going to do long-term, they put points into the appropriate skills; but they don’t need to start off with any. This makes it much easier for humans to experiment with new things.

There is no institutional knowledge

The flip side is that even though humans grow up learning the skills they need for the here and now, they’re always ready to parlay them into something more interesting; even if the result of the experiment ends up being “we mined too much gold lol oopsie”.

This means they have little respect for institutions. For any other Kin, the ancient library of Falender / Farhaven (GM’s Guide, p.37) would be a major seat of power and/or a place of pilgrimage. Humans? They’re not even sure where it is! (Yes, the GM’s guide says it’s “very important culturally”, but e.g. Raven’s Purge makes no mention of it.)

Or consider the reigns of the Alderland Kings. Algamar reigns from 798 to 825 when he dies in battle; Alvagard then reigns until he dies of old age in 870; the “young king” Algarod ascends to the throne but is promptly undeaded in 874 (GM’s Guide pp. 22-30). But Raven’s Purge says (p. 22) that Algared had frailer children, starting with Algared, contradicting the GM’s Guide which describes them as humans, with expected human lifespans.

Occam’s Razor is that the writers just forgot about this, but that’s boring, so let’s nerd out about how to reconcile these two statements.

The most reasonable fix is that the only thing we have to deal with is Alvagard dying of old age, and that could just be a convenient lie: humans expect to be ruled by someone with a human life span, and Alvagard might just have abdicated so to let Algarod have a go, possibly by faking his death like Algared did back in the day. This would also explain why frailers had children so quickly (even though they’ve got 70 years of sexual maturity to play with): they were expected to have children soon, same as how the British tabloids coo over the heir to the throne popping out a couple of sprogs as soon as physically possible. (It also means that you could add an undead or ghostly Alvagard to Weatherstone, probably earlier on, to give the PCs more plot.)

Another possibility is that they lived a normal frailer lifespan, but still had children at the usual human interval, so you have a gerontocracy where all three Kings were near death when they finally ascended to the throne (eat your heart out, Charles), and the term “young king” is sarcasm or misinformation or what have you.

But bear in mind that the Nekhaka sceptre, as written, is debilitating.

So maybe the answer is: Alvagard is an elvenspring, and he did die of old age, even though as an elvenspring he shouldn’t have. Because the thing about ruling humans is that you can’t just show up and say “lo, as was written, I am your rightful ruler; bow down before me and pay me homage” like a few times a year, and spend the rest of the time eating grapes and larks’ tongues. Because every, single, time, there’s going to be someone who says “OK, but I don’t see why you get to be King”. At which point you need to get out the elven sceptre of life-draining majesty again.

Human institutions are fads, in the best way

For the best example of human restlessness, consider their religions.

Saurians are all about having fun, and want nothing to do with Gods. Orcs have been scarred by slavery and aren’t inclined to swear allegiance to anybody, even if they’re merely a big beard in the sky rather than a mortal person with an army and/or a police force, because their experience is that where there’s a god, there’s a non-god with a fancy hat who says that he knows what the god wants, and he has an army to back him up. (It’s always a he.)

Elves, elvenspring, hobbits and goblins worship Clay, Flow and Wail, sure, but in a noncommital, pantheistic “if you want a good harvest, ask the harvest Goddess” sort of way. Dwarves honour Huge, but the sermons that the dwarven priests deliver are all about what dwarves-who-worship-Huge should be like; i.e. it’s a way of talking to the community, and Huge is primarily a metaphor delivery mechanism.

Humans poke and prod at religious claims. They argue and schism about the true nature of the Protector God, as befits a Kin who are capable of believing 6 impossible things before breakfast. They will fiercely debate what happens when you die: is that just the end and you stop? (In which case you should absolutely max-out your carpe diem attitude.) Do you become a ghost or undead, and if so is that bad? Is it possible to prevent becoming a ghost or undead if you have sufficient belief, or your community helps you, in which case it might be possible to reincarnate or live forever in some other way? (Trust humans to come up with the idea that it’s possible to fail at dying.)

Ironically, this is why humans tend to gravitate towards oppressive dictatorships, like monarchies. (Kim Jong Un is the third of his line, in case you thought that people who ruled by conquest and bequeathed the land to their favourite son were safely in our world’s past.) If your subjects are the sort of people that will constantly debate why anybody should be in charge, and can’t be satisfied by a pat “this is just the way it should be” answer, then there are two ways that the polity can reach equilibrium. The most obvious (to us modern-day people) is a kind of democracy where the people in charge rule with the consent of the rest of the citizens, and political structures constantly change.

But the other stable solution is where a strongman says “all of you people shut up! I’m the King, I rule, and I don’t need to listen to any of you” and has enough hired goons to terrify the rest of the humans into obedience. And this doesn’t have to be a Genghis-Khan-style military dictatorship, either: you can tap into humans’ ability to fervently believe weird shit and have your rule be that of a religious theocracy instead.

Situational stuff: what do human settlements look like?

Humans tend to crop up everywhere, given a quarter of a chance, like cockroaches; and once established, they’re hard to get rid of. What makes them even more challenging to deal with is that they’re constantly changing.

Human settlements change rapidly and randomly

The combination of a lack of strong respected institutions, and rapid turnover because of the small human lifespan, means that a human settlement can look very different after even just one 30-year generation.

Part of this is a natural process of the next generation of powerful and influential people having different ideas from their predecessors: “now that I’m in charge, let’s do the things I’ve always wanted to do”. This isn’t necessarily bad: in our world we joke that science progresses one funeral at a time, and a constant injection of new ideas is probably a healthy thing.

A strongman or a ruling religion can at best delay this phenomenon. The double whammy of “we all agree the ruler is strong and legitimate” and “if you disagree, hard bastards will kill you (strongman) / your soul is forfeit (theocracy)” will keep a lid on open discussion of the regime, but it won’t stop humans from thinking about it. And if a culture is imposed rather than embraced, then when e.g. the King or the Pope dies, things can change very quickly.

Other Kin have political manoeuvering and palace coups. Humans are the only Kin who regularly have revolutions.

There’s going to be a lot of strange villages out there

Especially after 260 years of isolation due to the blood mist, this means that most small isolated human settlements will have undergone a series of effectively-random shifts in customs and political structures, uncorrected by travellers from other settlements saying to them “you know that your village makes no sense, right?”.

In our world, we use the model of Chesterton’s fence as a reminder that reformers should properly understand what they are trying to reform before they change anything. Humans in the Ravenlands could similarly have done with the wisdom of such a parable. (The other Kin marvel that they need to be taught this.)

Suppose that a hundred years ago, after a series of fires, the ruler(s) made sure the paths were always swept clear of pine needles, limited when the smith could fire up their forge, and encouraged people to keep goats (because they’d eat the undergrowth in the forests). Fast-forward to the present day, and now the same village ritually worship a bronze statue of a goat, which is in a somewhat bad state of repair because they have decreed that making any new metal is wrong and taboo, so nobody can repair the damage made by every single villager constantly rubbing the goat for good luck (they no longer sweep the paths clear of pine needles since they chopped down all the conifers, so the sweeping custom became a rubbing custom instead).

A lot of humans are going to travel to neighbouring villages once the blood mist is gone, and have conversations along the lines of “wait, you can eat beans? They don’t contain the souls of dead people trying to reincarnate?”, and decide that they like the neighbouring village a lot better than their own. Humans being what they are, some people will make the opposite journey and decide that e.g. “I knew it! Eating beans is evil!” and balance out the migration to some degree; but still, overall, you’d expect the more dysfunctional villages to lose significant amounts of population, in favour of the saner villages.

Every settlement is at risk of becoming at least a partially-human settlement

Humans reproduce quickly and unwisely, sure, but population changes build up slowly and gradually. A well-run human settlement with decent access to water and arable soil is going to expand significantly over time, as the restrictions of the blood mist no longer apply, and you can safely tend fields more than a few hours’ walk from your home. And in the absence of any need to huddle together for protection (e.g. rampaging orc or dwarf armies), new hamlets will spring up near the newly-tilled fields, slowly reclaiming the wilderness in the name of civilisation and enterprise.

But all of this will take time. Maybe in 50-100 years you could run a successor campaign to Raven’s Purge and friends, about how there isn’t a new jewel of irrelevance or a recently-unearthed magical artifact, or a powerful demon or a rift that’s been opened to another world, it’s just that the humans are everywhere now and other Kin are getting pissed out about it. (If your PCs are elvenspring, they could even remember the previous campaign.) But in the handful of years after the end of the blood mist, actuarial tables about relative levels of births and deaths among the various Kin of the Ravenlands aren’t going to be particularly consequential.

No, the issue with a Kin with no inherent attraction to traditions, and that the blood mist is no longer keeping cooped up in their villages, is that enough people will say “I’m bored; let’s go see what’s over the horizon” and “I’ve never climbed a mountain / drained a swamp / learned to farm hippopotomases for meat, but how hard could it be?” that individual humans will turn up in the weirdest of places. Travelling scholars from Farhaven aren’t content to travel to neighbouring centres of knowledge like Pelagia or Maidenholm; they’ll venture into the Dankwood to ask ancient elves questions about what it was like back in the day, and if you’re not careful they’ll head all the way to Belderand to try to consult ancient dwarven texts. Some humans will decide that they like the idea of dwarven or orcish society and decide to join (“living underground in cramped quarters / constantly fighting your peers for the right to exist? Yeah, I could do that”), much to the bemusement of the locals (“This has to be some kind of cunning ploy, right?” “You’d have thought so, but they seem so happy!”).

Humans upset the natural (aka previous) order of things, just by their presence. They turn up, asking awkward questions, and if you let them stay and settle down, then before you know it, they’re an indelible part of your society now.

Humans are the future, which you didn’t use to have

One of the weaknesses of fantasy as a genre is that it tends to posit that things stayed basically the same for thousands of years, even though the last time this happened in our world was before we invented writing. Standard fantasy looks like 10th-14th century Europe, where in fact all sorts of things were happening (e.g. the horse collar, crop rotation, etc.) even if it wasn’t as obvious as the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution.

Still, if you look at the various Kin in the Ravenlands, you could be excused for thinking there’s not much desire to experiment. The immortal elves aren’t striving with each other to survive so don’t have the standard motivation for innovation, the saurians just want to hang out in the swamp and have fun, orcs have the structural problem that most of them are pretty stupid, and while the hobbits could well have urges to invent new things, the goblins are probably going to set them on fire for a laugh. Only the dwarves, constantly competing with each other, are likely to come up with reliable technological innovation, and even they are limited to comparatively rigid ways of thinking, viz. how can we build mountains so high that we reach the stars?

Note that this theory can be overstated. Individual elves might have been researching better ways of doing things for centuries; female orcs are totally smart enough to come up with new things; goblins don’t destroy wantonly, and their rampages are both well-known and predictable.

Still, it’s true that humans are far less restrained than any other Kin when it comes to trying out new approaches; and their lack of cultural or political uniformity means it’s more likely that individual ideas will take off rather than be suppressed for being too weird or politically undesirable. One of the reasons historians have postulated that Europe eventually out-technologied China is that China was one big state where political changes had massive consequences, whereas in Europe if you had an idea that the French didn’t like, you could nip over the border to Belgium, Holland, Germany or England looking for backers, and your idea would live on. Humans’ diverse, scattered polity lends itself very firmly to this sort of propagation of ideas whose time has come.

And, OK, yes, sometimes the sort of idea that humans come up with is stuff like the mass summoning of demons which eventually leads to most people having to huddle inside at night for 260 years, hoping that bloodlings don’t coalesce out of thin air. But agriculture and the industrial revolution weren’t fun at first either, and yet we can’t live without them now.

It’s pretty clear that there’s no easy way to get rid of all of the demons in the Ravenlands, for the same reason that the USA will never get proper gun control, so path dependence says future generations will have to come up with ways for humans, other Kin, and demons to cohabit and work together fruitfully. But if that turns out to be good, then surely that means the humans were right to experiment with crazy stuff?

Maybe that’s what the Shardmaiden saw in them.