Dark Folk (1983)

Stu Horvath — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 04:00:00 +0000

This is Dark Folk (1983), the Role Aids sourcebook for trolls, orcs, goblins, kobolds and gnolls. Not a great title, in terms of contemporary acceptability. The content fares better, though. Like Dwarves, the authors are trying to portray the societies of these “monsters” and there is a lot of thinking here about why they do the things they do (and, generally, finding fictional explanations for those actions, rather than subverting them). I find that they present these tribal humanoids in slightly more multifaceted ways then vanilla D&D but still basically fall back to essentialism. Chaosium’s Trollpak, a high-water mark in the portrayal of complex non-human sentient species, had come out in 1982, so this book probably marks a step back in this regard, even if it is an improvement on the Monster Manual’s absolutes.

One minor note: I think this might be the first time kobolds are explicitly characterized as reptilian and being hatched from eggs. The Monster Manual is ambiguous and I feel (without any particular evidence) that the dog-like portrayal of kobolds was dominant until 3E. ¶ A cool thing about the book is the structure. Each species gets its cultural profile, which is followed by an adventure that builds on that information. I’m a sucker for that kind of construction, which TSR employed nicely in the Monstrous Arcana series in the late ’90s. And because the adventures and the cultural histories would probably feel unmoored without a larger setting, the first few pages of the book are devoted to a broad description of the continent of Mamaryl.

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Dark Folk (1983)