Half-Orcs possibly out of 4E. Fate of the Caliban?

[Lord Soth]

Apparently, Half-Orcs aren't going to be in 4E. At least not as a player race. So what does this mean for the Caliban in 4E? For those of you who're going to continue your Ravenloft games in 4E, what're you planning on doing? If the Half-Orc is in the Monster Manual, are you going to use that? Are you going to create a Caliban race from whole cloth? Or seeing as how the Tiefling is now core, will you be filing off the Tiefling's serial numbers and using it as a Caliban, instead?

And assuming that Ravenloft sees print again in 4E, which of those options do you see being used to implement the 4E Caliban?

[Jakob]

Honestly, I don't care. ^_^
I use a totally different Caliban race (inspired by the article in QtR #8 ), so I'm not particularly concerned, nor I liked too much the "Ravenoftian Half Orc" idea for them.

I have two more campaigns in 3.5 to begin and end (not to mention the ongoing RL campaign), so I'll have a lot of time before shifting to 4E. And nothing bars me from shifting directly to True20.

[HuManBing]

The move to the Caliban in 3E was a stroke of genius, in my opinion, precisely because it takes us out of the high fantasy "orcs and goblins" and more into the Gothic darkness of "birth mutations". This has made it different enough from the orc in regular DnD. Even if the half orc disappears from regular DnD, the Caliban can continue - they're no longer the same thing in my book.

[DocBeard]

Really, what appealed to me about the Caliban was that it was a great way to have /any/ "scarred touched-by-darkness" type. Markovian Broken One sane enough to be a player? Caliban. Escaped experiment of Emil or Mordenhiem trying to be human? Caliban. Cursed child who's mother ticked off a hag? Caliban.

The stats mean less than the versitility, y'know?

[Dhampire]

The Caliban is just plain all kinds of neat. The other side of the coin is that, like the 1/2 orc, I have never seen more than one PC play it in the past 4 years.

The other thing that I see in its disfavor is that the Caliban, as a PC playable, was strictly an Arthaus idea, not WotC. To that end, WotC has little behind the development of it as a PC race and little vested in keeping it so.


In the end, I think it will not be resurfacing and getting the ax like so many other aspects of the game since they are focusing on 'the majority' and 'the majority' does not play the caliban. At least, in my experience they are not.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

If the 4E half-orc (which will surely be in the new MM; after all, they're a major race in Eberron, and that setting's being updated) is too different from the caliban, we'll definitely present a conversion for the race here on this site. Possibly even more than one version, depending on what we come up with and/or what caliban-fans care to submit.

Calibans are too strong of an archetype for us to let them vanish, merely because WotC would rather hype tieflings than half-orcs. If anything, this will help them become even more a race in their own right, rather than re-dressed equivalents of a race that never had a presence in the Ravenloft setting.

[cure]

If WOTC's 4th ed declared that rain was yellow, that no vampire was slain by the sun, or that devils were to their last fallen angels, what obligation would we have to follow?

We have a higher authority to obey. Continuity with, and creative within, the living, breathing Mists.

[Jester of the FoS]

Eh, like gnomes they'll be in PHB2, along with druids, bards and other stuff they hold out of the first book so the second seems more "core" and important.

[order99]

Well said. Ravenloft and Masque belong to US-and I have the 2nd ed. Boxed Sets on my shelf to prove it!

[Jester of the FoS]

Calibans were only really added to make an otherwise unplayable core race playable so fans of that race could still play.
Calibans are crazy fun though, so they should definitely be updated online, but probably customized for the Mists.

My concern is whatever new races come out of the PHB... It'll be harder explaining regular numbers of warforged or hobgoblins.

[DocBeard]

Warforged: Bizarre creations of the Monestary of the Quickening Light, or Odiere's strange toymaker's attempt at creating more, less-evil "children", a Mordenhime or Hazlik experiment that escaped the trash bin...lots of potential sources for constructs with hearts of gold.

Hobgoblins: A tribe/tribes of advanced goblins that are trying to claim Demihuman status, under the logic that if elves, relatives of the mercurial fey, can count as people, than so can they, despite the more savage goblins and the magical goblyn monsters.

[Nathan of the FoS]

My concern is whatever new races come out of the PHB... It'll be harder explaining regular numbers of warforged or hobgoblins.

Between Mordenheim, Easan and Azalin (doomguards), it's not hard to explain warforged. Heck, they're downright atmospheric if there are only a few. (Like Ed in Fullmetal Alchemist!)

Hobgoblins are, well, much harder. For an individual campaign it would be pretty easy to retrofit goblyns and/or the Crown of Souls to explain a hobgoblin presence in Ravenloft, but that's too big a change to be palatable as a canon explanation. You'd probably have to add a hobgoblin-centered domain somewhere to account for it.

[Dimitri Mazieres]

May I ask if there's an edict anywhere stating that all the races presented in the PHB must be present in Ravenloft as playable races? Because, as far as I'm concerned, warforged and the like shouldn't even be considered as standard races in the Land of Mists. But that's just me.

[NeoTiamat]

Considering the crazy patchwork world that is Ravenloft, I've actually always wondered why it's so human-centric. If the Dark Powers are snagging Darklords and Domains from all over, then why aren't there more demihumans roaming about? Elves that get a bit genocidal in protecting their woodlands, dwarves that get greedy in mining, an orcish warlord that wants civilization ala Harkon Lucas, all of them seem to be good possibilities for domains.

[Dimitri Mazieres]

I've always thought (or assumed) that the scarcety of the demihuman races was one of the elements that favored the gothic-horror theme, enabling one more possibility for the "fear of the unkown" scenario. Even more so, for players of said races.