I have seen few druid/shaman-type PCs in fantasy RPGs where they exist. Indeed, in D&D 5e, druids appear to be the least popular class (https://dice-scroller.com/en/most-popular-dnd-classes-and-races/).
And though I do not have any empirical data to back it up, in my personal experience, PCs with a noble background are rather uncommon. I play them often, but I seldom see them from other players.
How do these intersect? In all my seventeen years of playing and running tabletop RPGs, I do not recall any PCs or npcs who were both a druid/shaman-type and a noble. (Well, other than my own characters, anyway. One PC was a druid/shaman-type noble who channeled the aristocracy's heraldic beasts and ancestor spirits, while another PC was essentially a Disney princess. There was also an organization of druid/shaman-type NPCs who invoked the ancestor spirits of the emperors and empresses of old, each symbolized by an animal, such as the Cunning Fox Emperor or the Mother Bear Empress. I have also had multiple wood elf nobles who were druid/shaman-types simply due to their affinity for nature.)
The closest I usually see are NPCs who are some sort of elven or fey noble with nature-themed powers, but I have seldom seen these openly identified as druid/shaman-types.
How would you personally portray a druid/shaman-type noble, whether as a PC or as an NPC? How would you flavor their magic and the animals and spirits they call upon?
Well, medieval Europe was pretty environmentally friendly, so just lean into that. The nobility would prevent the peasantry from cutting down too much wood or hunting game in their forests, which kept the animal life plentiful. There was no mass industry, no strip mining, no deforestation, no pollution, the human population was kept small.
Naturally a druid would love all of this.
>in D&D 5e, druids appear to be the least popular class
Least popular core class, rather.
Yes, this is a fair point. What of medieval cities, for comparison?
Medieval cities tended to have the burghers and tradesmen in power rather than landed nobility. They were filthy, and people literally died of disease faster than they could breed. The only reason cities were able to exist at all was because immigration from the countryside outpaced the high rates of death occurring from disease within.
In other words, nature is punishing cities for existing, and there's little in the way of druids around cities to keep them safe from nature's wrath.
Except artificer there are no classes but core classes.
He's probably the type of freak who allows strange homebrew classes from obscure wiki pages.
It's rare, but there are certain people who think playing games with people who are using classes with names like "Shadowmancer" is totally normal.
Better than most WotCslop anyway.
Depending of the city, they could have a lot of groves of fruit trees, lots of animals and get nearly all they necesities. Granted, a medieval city was a lot smaller than what we consider a city, but I could see lots of burgs getting into a kind of coven with "druids" in echange for getting into a kind of Dehesa environament, where humans would maintain the system. Add stuff like the terra preta from amazonias or stuff like smart ways to use the city trash (from all the kinds of compost from human shit for trees and whatever) and it could work surprisingly well, it wouldn't be a "Wild" system, but a bit of both. You could even get humans to help protecting slow lived monsters, animals or tribes, as sacred x. It would be a win win situation with just some tought.
>medieval Europe was pretty environmentally friendly
With zero regards for waste management? With slash-and-burn being common agricultural practice? With whole species of plants and animals getting harvested so aggressively they went extinct?
>With zero regards for waste management?
Keep in mind medieval "waste" was literally that, just waste, ie fertilizer. They didn't have plastics, or pollutants, or industrial chemicals, or any of the modern forms of pollution that we have today. They had shit that they'd throw away which would then fertilize the ground and make plants grow stronger.
>With slash-and-burn being common agricultural practice?
Forest fires are a natural phenomenon. In fact, wood ash is good for the soil, and the fires clear away excessive trees that choke each other of sunlight. Slash and burn is a sustainable and environmentally friendly practice.
>With slash-and-burn being common agricultural practice?
In medieval Europe? Not particularly. It was all over the place in the Americas though. Of course it's cool when the Native Americans do it, because they're in tune with nature or whatever.
>Of course it's cool when the Native Americans do it, because they're in tune with nature or whatever.
Hell, even knowing that the natives practiced slash and burn is something most people aren't aware of. They just sort of believe they lived in one with nature.
Though, conversely, the native practices weren't nearly as destructive in the long term.
>Though, conversely, the native practices weren't nearly as destructive in the long term.
I mean, compared to modern industrial stuff, yeah. Still, a lot of it is just time smoothing things over. When you look into the pre-Columbian civilization collapses (i.e. collapses that happened before the Europeans were ever on the scene), they're typically led by drought, but environmental degradation is a consistent factor as well. Overhunting and deforestation are common symptoms.
I think the grand "trick" here is that the tribes who survived both the pre- and post-contact collapses are basically the scattered bumpkins. People who either never left hunter-gatherer mode or they quickly regressed to it after the cities fell apart. The cultures that had ravaged the landscape to suit their purposes were gone by the time the Europeans are around and writing stuff down. So thus the image of humble native tribesmen who are one with nature becomes monolithic, at least north of Mesoamerica that is.
Funnily enough, the first two rpg characters I ever played were both druid nobles (they were pretty similar characters since the first game only lasted two sessions and we all basically redid the same characters with some minor changes).
The first was the rightful king, long and orphaned as a child, saved from the evil scheming vizier by one of his father's last loyal knights who fled, mortally wounded, into the woods where he delivered my character into the hands of a woods witch to raise. Unfortunately the woods witch was evil and raised him as a revolutionary, determined not just to regain the throne but to tear down society entirely - a sort of 'survival of the fittest', 'after winter, comes spring', 'the fires clear dead wood so that new growth can thrive' sort of thing; also just revenge on society for his dead family.
Forgive me for the whole "long lost orphaned king" stereotype. I was like 12 or 13 at the time.
The second was adjusted to fit Eberron, rather than the generic homebrew setting of our first campaign.
He was a Greensinger Initiate (a sect of druids with close links to the fey) of House Vadalis (a dragonmarked house that dominates various industries related to animal breeding and handling). We decided that House Vadalis secretly offered up some number of their children (and sometimes other people's children) to the fey in exchange for being taught druidic magic. Sometimes the children would be killed, sometimes blessed and sometimes taken, never to be seen again. My character was one of the latter; except, unlike the rest, he was returned.
As far as portrayal, being a druid and being a noble both contributed toward a belief that it was his responsibility and his right to shepherd the development of society. He was motivated by a desire to preserve the balance between nature and civilisation, to keep old traditions going (such as sacrificing children to fey - 'never did me any harm') and to prove himself to the family.
The "deposed, rightful monarch" archetype certainly is not bad, as long as the GM and the group are on board with the idea.
House Vadalis is, in fact, a good example of an entire noble house (and megacorporation) of druid-adjacent people. I have run various Vadalis NPCs in the past, though they more biologist than druid.
I think it is somewhat out-of-character for Greensinger druids to be portrayed as callous enough to allow children to be killed. That sounds more like the Children of Winter.
>I think it is somewhat out-of-character for Greensinger druids to be portrayed as callous enough to allow children to be killed. That sounds more like the Children of Winter.
As a group we always tended towards darker tone.
I disagree that child sacrifice is out of keeping with Greensingers though. There's no alignment requirement to the Greensinger Initiate feat and stealing children is a pretty classic fey thing to do.
>And though I do not have any empirical data to back it up, in my personal experience, PCs with a noble background are rather uncommon. I play them often, but I seldom see them from other players.
With the players I play with, I think I am the only one who's yet to. I'll have to try it sometime!
>How do these intersect? In all my seventeen years of playing and running tabletop RPGs, I do not recall any PCs or NPCs who were both a druid/shaman-type and a noble.
I've never seen anyone play druid. But on the event we go back to 5E, that sounds like an intriguing idea. Is there a spec for planting flowers? That sounds fun!
>Druidic Noble.
Nobility that draws its Divine Mandate as a promise to protect the land and its people for the good of both. They're responsible for both cultivating the land's beneficial properties AND for preventing unacceptable damage to those properties. Miners do their work exclusively with a royal permission slip, and are required to have noble-blooded consultants on-site or available to guide their processes, help optimize them, and ensure that After a mine has reached its end, it is collapsed safely in a fashion that will allow its natural state to recover. Logging happens, but with required-under-penalty-of-thorn-crucifixion re-planting immediately after clear-cutting a region, leaving any younger trees, and avoiding areas that are known to have specific animals, plants, or spirits for which they must be preserved.
Essentially, imagine a state in which Fish & Game is one of the biggest state institutions and have a license to kill along with a habit of burying the bodies to replenish the land.
I did something kinda like this for a setting in which one of the main institutions was the Resource Management Guild; an institution of druidic bureaucrats who oversee all mining, logging, hunting, and any other gathering processes in the kingdom's territory. To a certain degree, they also manage imports when supply of natural resources needs time to recover, regrow, etc, while also having druidic spellcraft to accelerate said environmental healing and restoration projects. I also took the old 2e druid promotion hierarchy into account, so if you wanted to advance in your RMG Career you'd better wild-shape the frick up and Take that corner office on the Arboreal Fortress. A couple of druidic PCs mostly tried to avoid the home office because of this, and had to make a bit of a skill-check to get to their department past the lightning-bear and fire-breathing stag fighting in the main lobby.
Agriculture is LITERALLY against druid code of coduct...
I don't see why.
Literally industrial revolution, despoiling land by making natural order go domestic...
? Lots of different kinds of agriculture are beneficial for the land. Its only stuff like pesticides than literally poison it. Look at for example the Dehesa, is a sistem where wild animal benefit, wild plants befit, pastoral animals thrive, agricultural trees/crops thrive, and humans with it. The only downside is an extensive system and not intensive.
Nature was never meant to be that way so isn't it despoiling by definition?
What. Nature is ever changing. The amazones was thousands of cities and towns soem hundreds of years ago, it only got "rewilded". The majority of forest of north america where tended be the natives, the majority of forest of europe are tended be the natives.
The only way your argument makes sense is you think humans are unatural. Mature is not meant to be anything, nature is nature, we have had like six massive die offs and nature adapted, changed and thrived again.