What is it like to be a whiner?

The GM’s Guide spends barely half a page talking about Whiners, but they’re integral to the Vale of the Dead, where you’re intended to find Stanengist. And despite some early half-baked ideas, the general concept of whiners is potentially really interesting, certainly as an NPC race. So what should they be like?

Underground humanoid eusocial termite analogues: yes please!

The GM’s Guide indirectly tells us how large whiners are in the halfling/goblin section (p. 70): “Goblins and halflings are half the size of humans, but twice as large as whiners.” A quarter-sized humanoid is basically going to be 40-odd centimetres high, or about as high as a cocker spaniel and a bit shorter than a labrador.

In the whiner section proper (also p. 70), it says: “Whiners make their lairs in hollows – a sort of rock formation riddled with passages and chambers to the point that they look like overgrown sponges. Other kin have great trouble following whiners into the cramped passages of the mountain. Druids claim the whiners have colonies like ants far down under the mountain, with a large, egg-laying queen present there. They also say the whiners create the hollows themselves by chewing stone and then throwing up a mushy saliva and rock mix that hardens into something like porous stone.”

The existence of a whiner queen who lays eggs is confirmed by the Vale of the Dead adventure (ibid., p. 237). This means that we’ve got a eusocial setup like that of bees, ants or termites, where only a very small number of special whiners (the queen and a small number of fertile males) get to breed, a similarly small number of females sort of hang around in case anything happens to the queen, and everybody else is a sterile worker, male or female (but from their perspective it doesn’t really matter), directly related to each other.

A mammalian eusocial creature, like naked mole rats or smurfs, and they’re sentient and humanoid, and they chew up rocks and regurgitate them to create an intricate network of tunnels. What’s not to like?

The problematic first half of the whiner description

Orcs and humans both like to hunt down whiners and keep them in cages for, we’re told, three reasons (all quotes from GM’s Guide p. 69).

The most trivial is that “Orcs appreciate the taste of their meat which is considered to be positive for both health and potency. Whiner flesh is also believed to promote growth.” This can easily be true, and if you and your players are comfortable with humans killing and eating chimpanzees as “bush meat”, or superstitious people deciding that they need to eat pangolin parts to increase their fertility, then by all means this can be a reason in-game for people to hunt down whiners. Conversely, if you prefer to draw a veil over conduct like this, it doesn’t change anything significant about the game world.

“It is said their living flesh has a healing and fattening ability, so infected or deep wounds covered by parts of a whiner heal quickly.” If whiners are in the business of chewing up rocks, especially if they’re not too fussy about cleaning them first, it’s plausible enough to say that they need a really good immune system to deal with all the weird algae, lichen and other grime that rocks attract. You might also want to say that whiners also need to cope with all the cuts and scrapes you get from wandering around narrow cave tunnels filled with sharp rocks, especially if they don’t have much in the way of textiles to protect them; but that assumes they haven’t developed other ways of avoiding being cut by rocks, like some kind of tough skin, or manually smoothing off sharp edges.

A more interesting aspect of whiner physiognomy, incidentally, is surely their ability to break down rocks and then regurgitate them in a reshaped form. This feels like some kind of powerful stomach acid should be involved, maybe something that makes the resulting sticky concrete-like substance dry quickly when exposed to the air. An enterprising orc might be able to turn it into some kind of coating for a blade that would do additional damage, especially if it could be mixed in with oil or wax to keep it from from drying out. And you can be sure that whiners can dip arrows or blow-darts in their regurgitated stomach acid if they need to deter attackers.

Finally, “Whiner flesh is also believed to promote growth. Gold objects or other valuables inserted under the skin of a whiner will grow heavier in a day.” It’s probable that this is a misunderstanding of a whiner practice of putting shiny minerals under their skin as a way of demonstrating rank or personality, like modern-day bodymodders and their subcutaneous implants, except that maybe the whiner immune system means that said shiny minerals end up getting broken down and spread across the skin, so it looks like the minerals got bigger. But no, if you stick gold objects under the skin of a whiner, the object will not get bigger, and you will not have more gold. This feels like one of those legends about turning lead into gold that medieval alchemists talked about.

A brief aside on whiners’ evolutionary ancestry

The most obvious explanation of whiners is that they’re weird and distant relatives of all the other humanoid races, and therefore mammals. Naked mole rats in our world are eusocial mammals; platypuses and echidnas are mammals that lay eggs; having a really weird mammal that does both is possible, right?

The place where they chew up rocks seems like it should be distinct from their main stomach, but again, plenty of mammalian herbivores do weird things like chewing their food in multiple goes, having multiple stomachs with different internal biochemistry etc.

Except…

A place separate from your stomach where you store rocks sounds awfully like a gizzard. And that could make whiners birds or, more awesome still, dinosaurs. Which are, after all, known for laying eggs (but not so much being eusocial, granted). So if you were thinking of giving whiners tough skin, you could give them feathers instead.

As to why they’re humanoid, (a) the body plan of a deinonychus isn’t too far removed from a human, (b) why did elves choose to be humanoid by default, when they could have any plausible body form? Maybe the Forbidden Lands just likes humanoids. (If you’re playing a more epic campaign where the gods matter, it’s possible that the gods themselves are humanoid, or otherwise decided that it was the body form for this world.)

I mean, whiners are almost certainly mammals. The picture in the GM’s Guide pretty much says so. But if you want to make them awesome archosaurs, who am I to stop you? (If you do, remember to make them hop about from time to time, using their tails for balance, and for them to tilt their head like inquisitive crows.)

Why are the whiners eusocial?

We know how ant colonies work: an individual ant is pretty simple, but the ant colony as a whole is smart, because something something emergent phenomenon. And we can understand that humans could decide to augment their individuality by adding on some kind of group consciousness, via a mind-meld thingy, so you’re not just a thinking person, you’re a thinking person in a collective, and you can ask the collective for advice. (You probably can’t lie to the collective either, which is probably ultimately healthier than the setup we have right now, as long as the other members of the collective acknowledge some kind of right to privacy.)

I think whiners are half-way between those two extremes. It’s not that something a quarter of the size of a human can’t be just as smart: in our world, there have been plenty of hominins with larger brains than us, and of course crows have comparatively tiny brains and are still pretty damn smart. Rather, I think the ecological niche that whiners fit in is one that favours many mostly-smart, tough and replaceable members of a colony, over a smaller number of smart-but-fragile individuals. Life is dangerous for a whiner: a potential tasty snack for many creatures larger than them, children need to get up to speed quickly, and adults need to survive blows, falls and environmental hardships that would kill a whiner built for brain power.

So individual whiners are smart enough to do the job they were bred and trained for (dig and maintain tunnels, explore, fetch food, scout the wilderness areas, make and maintain tools, etc.), and to carry out a reasonable conversation, demonstrating some kind of personality. They have basic knowledge of what’s going on and what’s happened recently. Beyond that, they need to ask the hive mind, or call for a specialist.

The various types of whiner

So, as well as the half dozen or so types of whiners who do things, there will be specialist administrator and thinker whiners at the centre of the hive, who collate and analyse reports from the rest of the colony, then send out corrective orders, and generally set priorities for the hive as a whole. There may even be some small number of roving diagnosers, who will be sent out to investigate problems and recommend solutions.

Note that these specialists are really specialists. The diagnosers, for instance, are extreme versions of Sherlock Holmes, good at analysing problems and nothing else. They may be borderline incapable of moving about in the whiner tunnels (the sign that a diagnoser is coming might be the sound of four whiners manoeuvring a litter through narrow tunnel passages, maybe in extremis asking for them to be widened), and certainly unaware of anything other then absolute basics of whiner society. Sherlock Holmes in our world deliberately decides to forget, when told, that the Earth moves around the Sun, because it’s a fact that is irrelevant to his task of solving weird mysteries, so he doesn’t need it cluttering up his Mind Palace. The whiner equivalent may be incapable of learning this.

All in all, there may easily be close to a dozen different types of whiner, each with their own particular specialised task to carry out.

Note that while the specialist term for this sort of thing is “caste”, there is no implied hierarchy: you don’t have e.g. Brahmins at the top living in luxury, and untouchables doing all sorts of dirty jobs at the bottom. And while the idea of planners and administrators at the centre and workers everywhere else suggests communism, whiners really are all in it together (also they’re all related, which helps), and the standard objection to any kind of planned economy doesn’t hold, because workers don’t have individual interests or a potential for exciting ideas that could be stifled by central planning. Sex means little for the vast majority of sterile workers, so why shouldn’t they call each other a gender-neutral term like, say, “comrade”? If a whiner explains to the PCs “comrades from central planning say dig tunnel here”, the players may expect the whiner to continue “central planning comrades idiots, live in comfortable burrows, never build a tunnel in their lives”, but that will not happen, because whiners understand that they do each care about the hive, and such a division of labour is only natural and good and proper.

Whiners of different castes will make some effort to look different. Maybe they inherently look different, with some castes having different types of markings (including feathers, if you went down the archosaur route); maybe, if there are enough different colours of rock that whiners can stick underneath their skin, different castes will choose different colours. Failing that, body shape should give you some idea: a whiner that does a lot of carrying is built differently from a whiner who does a lot of thinking.

Given that gender makes no difference to the vast majority of the population which doesn’t and never will breed, whiners have no nudity taboo, which is just as well as fibre is hard to find underground, and will tend to catch on rocks and fray. Besides, if you live underground where it’s basically 12 degrees all the time, you don’t particularly need clothes if you’ve got a decent metabolism and tough skin. The exception may be for whiners who spend a fair bit of time outside, e.g. because they’re in charge of getting food from the outside world, in which case they might kill and skin rats and wear their pelts as clothing.

How are whiners born?

We’ve established that the whiner queen lays eggs; the question is, how many, and how often, and what happens to the eggs before and after they hatch?

You’ve got a queen, maybe three or four fertile males, and up to a dozen castes: that feels like the upper bound for a hive should be about 80-100, beyond which the volume of reports from outside explorers becomes too much for the central planners to deal with. Whiners are more disposable than humans, so let’s posit a natural age limit of about 30 years, and a median life expectancy of 10 years because of accidents and predation. That means a mature hive needs to produce just 10 whiner children a year to maintain population levels, but a starting hive will need more, maybe up to three or four per 45-day phase rather than just one or two. (Wait, one or two per phase? Do mature whiner hive queens lay eggs on the full moon, because being born under a full moon is auspicious?)

The good thing is, laying eggs and eusociality go hand-in-hand: if you’re not planning in devoting all of your attention to nurturing your offspring, you can devise a division of labour where the eggs are the responsibility of a number of whiners in turn.

Start with the queen: strictly speaking all she needs is food, warmth and a ready supply of gametes. If she has a number of different breeding partners and they’re not genetically identical, that may be enough to make some babies different from others; or the general caste of a baby may depend on environmental factors like temperature, moisture levels, songs sung to the quiescent queen by nurse whiners, and/or anything the queen does herself when she’s not eating, breeding or sleeping. Maybe you get different results if the queen is surrounded by many pretty stones, or she regularly dances with her breeding males to keep up her physical strength, or advisors regularly recite to her the activities of the hive so she understands its needs better, or she mostly sleeps in comfort and bliss, helped by the regular ingestion of narcotic mushrooms.

A newly-mated queen will start laying eggs after only a few days, especially if she’s been well-fed, but the timing of her production of eggs appears to be under her control. Queens may well be able to pause the development of embryos, maybe even on an individual basis if they feel that a promising candidate is not needed yet; or maybe they just decide to absorb the embryo if they feel it wouldn’t be needed right now. Maybe pausing an individual embryo is a skill that queens develop over time.

Once the eggs are laid, a caste of nurse whiners takes over their care, making sure they’re kept at the right temperature and moisture levels, regularly rotated, maybe exposed to further stimuli to further determine the caste of the eventual child: e.g. this one is clearly going to be an errand whiner, but decisions made at this point may determine whether it becomes a rock-carrier or a vegetable-carrier. This takes about a month. If you want there to be a dark undercurrent to the apparent communist utopia of whiners, maybe at some point the nurses decide that an egg will be of no use to the hive, so will be fed to the favoured children to feast on? (There needs to be a way for the hive to make a new queen if the previous one dies, and probably the answer is that they feed something to an existing nurse whiner. Maybe they occasionally keep a failed egg back, just in case?)

Once the babies hatch, they’re given over to the care of educator whiners. Whiners mature quickly, so toddlers will turn into infants will turn into children, sent to boot camp to educate them on the best way of e.g. carrying large roots, alarmingly quickly. After three months or so some of the more physical castes will be sent out to join a work crew as an apprentice, where their official job is “watch, learn, try not to die”. Some of the more involved castes like central planning or diagnosers may get a further three to six months of education by the professor caste.

How do whiners communicate?

There are two ways to do this. Every time two whiners meet, they’ll automatically and unconsciously go through an exchange of “here’s what happened to me recently” information, very much like how bees do a dance to talk about where the flowers are. As befits an underground race, this is typically expressed in low-pitched tones, probably augmented by gestures if the two whiners can see each other; but when multiple whiners come together, each may wish to express themselves in a part of the audible spectrum that isn’t taken yet, which may eventually mean something unusually high-pitched. This is possibly where the name “whiner” comes from; unless whiner speech is just naturally high-pitched because they’re small and the scaling principles of wind instruments apply. Or they have naturally deep voices and “whiner” is an ironic name, like how large people are nicknamed “Tiny”.

The second way is when a whiner decides that they need knowledge that the whiner collective possesses, but they had no reason to know personally. This is when a more forceful call goes out, booming and resonating through the stone passageways as other whiners pick it up and relay it, until it reaches its destination; at which point a response is sent back, through similar relays, until the information reaches the questioner.

If you’re talking to a whiner and they decide to talk to their fellows: they might be able to carry on talking to you (is something like circular breathing going on here?), their speech might become distorted and confused, or they might have to pause for a moment. Whatever feels most dramatically appropriate to you.

What happens if you’ve got whiners?

Whiners can potentially crop up anywhere, and when you’ve got whiners they’re hard to get rid of. Their tunnels could be anywhere, and if you try to persuade them not to build tunnel networks into your stuff they’ll just say “we build tunnels here, comrades from central planning say so, is good plan”. (“Can I speak to the comrades in central planning?” “Why you want speak to them? You not whiner”; “I want to tell them that their plan is wrong” “You silly! Plan correct!”; and so on.) You might be tempted to kidnap a bunch of whiners and set them loose near Vond, then hope that when you come back in a year they’ll have eaten through the fortifications; but whiners might easily turn up near your stronghold as well.

Killing a bunch of whiners is unlikely to do much good by itself, because they’ll just send more eventually, once they have some spares, because they assumed that the previous whiners in that sector just got unlucky. If you get aggressive and try to break down the tunnels, whiners will scatter and eventually start to shoot poisoned darts at you if you come too close to the inner chambers where the queen, her advisors and the birthing chambers are.

Whiners probably don’t domesticate animals, but they could easily take a hunter-gatherer attitude towards their environment, deliberately spreading the seeds of plants that are useful for them and eradicating plants that are unhelpful, leaving marks for other whiners to read about useful food sources, warnings about predators and so on. Again, this can come into conflict with other Kin and their intentions regarding agriculture, especially if whiner tunnels expand into root cellars and the likes, and they start taking the food that was supposed to last the winter, or the seeds for next spring’s crops.

Whiners are unfortunately smart enough to be experimented on

A whiner hive is fundamentally robust: if some workers get killed in a cave-in, or eaten by large birds, there’ll be more along soon to replace them, and in any case whiner workers are typically organised into multiple crews, deliberately kept apart, so the hive should never be crippled by mere accident. Add to that the queen’s ability to fast-track workers in cases of emergency, and whiner hives should stay at a healthy population level.

Like any other kind of eusocial species, a hive may eventually decide to split off a new queen if the existing hive is getting too large for the central administrators to cope, or if the hive has expanded into a significantly different environment and now has competing requirements. Expect hives to refer to the old hive by function in that case, e.g. “we live by sea now, but previous hive was dry, very different”.

But while a whiner will be trained to say “I’ve found a strange thing; does anybody know what it is and what to do with it?”, there is no obvious way for a whiner to say “I know this all looks fine, but nonetheless I’ve got a feeling there’s something hinky about it all”, because individual whiners don’t have the brain power. This makes a whiner hive unadventurous and predictable; so much so that, for instance, dwarf miners may be able to predict the likely mineral levels in a cave by examining how the local whiners have built their tunnels, or watching how they decorate themselves. (“They’re wearing quartz, rather than something more interesting; pack it up, lads, we’re done here.”)

In fact, you can take it further. Dwarf natural scientists may establish models of whiner society that they occasionally test by asking stone-singers to come in and disrupt the environment and see what happens. And of course the less ethical researchers may decide to deliberately manipulate whiner hives’ environment – especially the queen’s birthing chambers, if they can – to see what happens. It’s a rare breeding experiment where after a year or two, tops, you get a new generation that can talk to you.

The really ethically-challenged types of researcher will be trying to turn whiners into demons, or make one hive go to war with another; but then, they try to do that sort of thing to everything they research.