The Descent of Man

Last week: About Those Evil Humanoids... 

“The Underworld is not just a basement or a cave. The Underworld is a place that hates you. It is hostile architecture. It hates you in a way that only the blind tonnage of stone and cold air can have. It hates your lively blood. It hates the sunshine warmth still lingering on your skin.

Live there long enough, and the Underworld can learn to tolerate you. You will grow pale and cold and strange, like the other inhabitants of that place. The long years will render you smooth and inoffensive, like a pearl held in the mouth. The Underworld's irritation fades and scabs over.”

-Arnold K, Goblin Punch

Foster’s Rule

The simplest change is a change in size, usually as a reaction to claustrophobia and entrapment.

The dungeon is a world of sumps and shafts, narrow crevasses and collapsed tunnels. Like early industrial age children drafted into mines and factories, smaller adventurers could wiggle through the narrowest spaces. Those who spent too long in the dungeon became twisted, double-jointed, slippery, smaller. Their smallness of size became a smallness of spirit, craven cruelty, meager meanness. The first goblin was a man wedged under a boulder choke, ignoring their comrades’ cries for help as they were slaughtered, deep within the dungeon. The first kobold was a woman trapped under a landslide of gold coins as their fellows were roasted alive by dragon’s breath.

At the other end of the size spectrum are humans who exaggerated their size – who acted bigger and louder than they really were. But within the logic of the dungeon, that display of aggression was not merely figurative or temporary. It could be made real. The first ogre was a human warrior, swollen to nearly fill a small dungeon chamber deep under the earth, bellowing in blind rage at threats, real or imagined, in every direction.

Dungeon Extremophiles

Size is only a crude response. Some adaptations are more fine-tuned.

Remember that if we operate from the assumption that humans are the oldest ancestry, many of the strange humanoids of D&D make a lot more sense. Bullywugs, kuo-toa, lizardfolk, and merfolk are all primordial adaptations to their environment. 

Dungeons are frequently wet places, from the damp entrance in the swamp to the fully submerged lower levels. This is an alien and dangerous place for surface folk who should have just stayed home. But the adventurers who went back too many times found that the dampness no longer bothered them so much. Instead, it was the blindingly bright, abradingly dry world of the surface that felt wrong to them. Returning to the dungeon was slipping into a cool bath on a hot day. Retracing in reverse the ancient footprints of the first fish who walked on land, the first lizardfolk and fishmen found comfort in the cold, slow simplicity of a wetter world.

Internal Made External

These changes are still little more than skin-deep. Venturing into the deeper levels of the dungeon can alter human beings in much deeper ways. Like the Shimmer in Annihilation, or the titular home in House of Leaves, the dungeon can take the internal and subconscious and make it concrete and real.

Ivan seemed like a cheerful fellow back in town. Pensive in camp. A bit on edge in dungeon level one. On a hair trigger by level three. Barely able to restrain the urge to violence by level six. Did the dungeon make him an orc, or merely reveal the monster beneath the surface? His companions will never be able to tell us, because they never made it back to town.

Mishka did what they had to survive in the dungeon depths. When there was no food left and the choice was to die or to survive, Mishka did what civilized humans forbid. No one would blame them; no one who had ever ventured into the dungeon depths would blame them, anyway. But once that door had been opened, it never closed completely. The unthinkable became the possible; the possible became the likely; the likely became the routine. The hunger turned from a terrible curse to a constant companion, and thus a gnoll was born.

“Aberration” Is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Some adventurers – wizards and clerics, usually – believe that the dungeon cannot change them if they confront it with reason and logic. Seeing dungeon denizens twisted by instinct and bestial regression, they gird themselves with theories and theorems, spells and scriptures. This simply leaves them vulnerable to a different kind of dungeon corruption.

Laodice the priestess swore a sacred vow to delve into the darkest and most remote places in the world, shining light on the mysteries there. She didn’t understand that those mysteries were the white blood cells of the dungeon. She didn’t expect the mysteries to fight back. By the time her companions realized what was happening, she was far too gone. Secrets had become the only testament worth following; Vecna the only god worth worshiping.

Gremblesplice Grothengruel was a wizard par excellence. His formidable mind, enhanced by ioun stones and a headband of intellect, was famous for its unslakable thirst for knowledge; a hunger for learning that could not be sated. This was never a problem until the dungeon made that hunger literal. He cursed the decades spent poring over dusty tomes, once he knew the incredible rush of siphoning knowledge directly from one mind to another. What wonders he could share with the centers of knowledge of the human world… if only he were still human. But even his oldest friends don’t recognize the man they once knew in the alien eyes of the mindflayer they see now.

You’ll Never Make a Monkey Out of Me

We’re using the scientific language of evolution to inform several of these categories. But for a couple reasons, we should avoid the instinct to explain too thoroughly or work out the logic too neatly. At least for the large majority of fantasy games, there should be more magic than science on offer here; some folklore, an “unknown” to be in search of. Consider the evolutionary stuff just as a taxonomic jumping-off point.