Welcome To My Maze

"My name is [low guttural sound] but I don't want to hear you butcher it. So you may call me She Who Arises With The Cold Mountain Sun."

"...Is that what your name really means? All that in just one word?"

"Yes. If you stress the wrong syllable it comes out as 'She Who Coldly Wakes Up The Mountain Sun', or 'The Cold Woman Who Wakes The Mountain Sun', and you will not call me that."

"Oh, huh. Could we just call you Mountain Sun, for short?"

A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.

In the "A" column, it's important to understand that Dungeons & Dragons isn't anything close to being a generic fantasy game: it's very specifically inspired by American literary sword and sorcery fantasy in the period roughly spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on the late 1960s and early 1970s strand of the genre. Other inspirations have crept in over time, but that core has remained largely unchanged.

Like most Western pulp fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy frequently featured scenes of lantern-jawed heroes manfully slaughtering their way through nameless hordes of jabbering, spear-chucking, dark-skinned savages. Even at this early date, however, the explicitly racist dimension of this trope wasn't necessarily playing well with contemporary audiences, so over time, depictions of these groups tended to drift away from direct stand-ins for real-world "races" and toward fictional ethnic groups, eventually culminating in the tribes of swarthy hobgoblins and degenerate lizard-men and such populating the pages of the Monster Manual. Such literature freely invoked the assertions of race science to explain why these creatures were morally okay to kill, and that carried over into Dungeons & Dragons.

(In brief, older versions of D&D had a soft rule that only "civilised races" were permitted to be player characters. The term for such races was "demihuman"; this was an umbrella which encompassed both characters of part-human ancestry, and non-human races deemed sufficiently civilised to be valid player characters, such as elves, halflings, etc. Species which were human-like but insufficiently civilised to be permitted as player characters were separately lumped together under "goblinoid races". Did you ever wonder why half-orcs were a standard player character option, but full-blooded orcs weren't? It wasn't a game balance thing – it's because a full-blooded orc is a goblinoid, but a half-orc is, by virtue of part-human ancestry, a demihuman, and thus a valid player character.

The trick is that games in the former category which care about the game's story are usually coming at it from the angle that interpreting the outputs of the game's rules is what produces its story, while the latter often think of the game's story as this pre-existing thing, toward which the rules' primary obligation is to refrain from interfering (hence all those awkward disclaimers about how "story comes first").

The upshot of this difference in opinion regarding where a game's story comes from is that many self-labelled trad RPGs end up thinking deeply about what player-facing behavioural incentives their rules expose, and if the players respond to these incentives, what narrative this produces, while many self-labelled storygames have never moved beyond 1990s "roleplaying XP" style incentive frameworks which attempt to bypass the game's own mechanical procedures of play and directly bribe players into playing the game "correctly".

Within the prosperous village of Langeldar, the guild's experiments have disrupted the chrono-stasis on an ancient tomb containing a cadre of time raiders. Freed from their temporal prison, these visitors from the Sea of Stars now gather to plan their revenge—defeat them before they regain their strength!