You might find some of these things cool too. Or you might not. You might even find other parts of the setting more interesting - your perspective is unique, and all your own. I encourage you to peruse the rich lore of the novels; with 59 years in print and 38 books, there's bound to be something that interests or inspires you. But these are mine.
Technology Laws
In my personal opinion, Gor is the only setting to do Medieval Stasis right. For those unaware, Medieval Stasis is a concept in worldbuilding describing how a setting can have an in-universe history stretching back centuries, yet never develops modern technology in order to keep the medieval fantasy feel. Various settings over the years have come up with their own answers to this, ranging from "magic makes technology unnecessary" to "technology just doesn't work on this world" - I, personally, just go with "the stories I am telling in this setting happen to take place during its preindustrial era." I don't think you really need an excuse to have medieval technology and society in your setting, considering our world had such things for hundreds of years. However, if one does need an excuse, Gor handles this concept the best out of every setting I've seen.
Gor, as a planet, exists simultaneously with our Earth in the modern era, just on the other side of the sun. However, the people there have technology around the level of Earth's Iron Age, with some later innovations like crossbows. Although it's technically a sword and planet story, I find the feel a lot closer to sword and sorcery - or perhaps sword and sandal - because of the relative lack of advanced technology. However, the possibility for advanced technology is there - but it's limited by the Priest-Kings.
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| Art by Chris Achileos |
If you're wondering how the Priest-Kings go about doing this, it's quite simple. Most Goreans don't know that they're alien bug people at all. They've established a cult around themselves to posit themselves as gods, and insist that technology is to be shunned as witchcraft. They themselves have technology the Goreans don't have access to, including spaceships, and use it to work "miracles," including causing people who invent banned technology to spontaneously combust. That tends to get the impression across.
Some might recognize this as quite similar to Forgotten Realms, in which the Harpers are an international organization that suppresses societal and technological progress by assassinating anyone who disturbs the status quo. The difference is that the Priest-Kings are actually portrayed as having questionable motives. They're actively suppressing progress in the name of their own ends, be it research or something more nefarious. This is an easier sell to me than accepting the Harpers as good guys in spite of everything they do. One could even conceive of a campaign in which the Priest-Kings are set up as the villains for this, and the PCs are rebelling against them. I find this answer does a good job of answering why technology doesn't advance, grounding it from a conceivable in-universe explanation that - better yet - offers compelling opportunities for storytelling.
Furthermore, if technology is illegal but not impossible, this creates even more opportunities. You could easily pull an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and have off-world technology take the place of magic items in a Gorean campaign. Goreans would likely react to, say, a laser gun or a communicator as enchanted artifacts, which could help introduce what functions mechanically as magic into a world where actual magic doesn't exist. In addition, the party would likely have to hide these items from the authorities, lest they be reported as witches, which presents opportunities for conflict. This is actually where I would deviate from the books a little - instead of having the Priest-Kings be able to spy remotely on people and immolate them at will, if I was running a Gorean campaign, I would have "witches" be hunted down and persecuted by the people of Gor. That would make it easier for PCs with such items to avoid undue attention, and could allow for more human drama if the enemies they stand to make from using technology are people they can see and interact with directly.
In terms of the roles they play in the story, the Kurii are essentially Gor's equivalent of orcs - a monstrous race that usually appear as antagonists and enemies of Gorean society. However, they deviate from the stereotypical orc in a number of ways, and those ways provide some insight into how one can shake up fantasy tropes to make them feel more fresh.
First of all, they are only orc equivalents in terms of the role they play in the story. Visually, they have more in common with Wookiees than anything else, standing seven feet tall and covered in thick fur, with claws and fangs. We've seen plenty of settings where the main bad guy race is one of tusked green-skinned brutes, but how many can you think of where the heroes fight armies of Bigfeet?
Secondly, in keeping with its attention to detail in worldbuilding, the series goes into great depth about the society, culture, and biology of the Kurii. Like most portrayals of orcs, they are a barbaric warrior race that enjoy fighting and believe that might makes right; they engage in ritualistic combat in order to be allowed the right to mate. They also see humans as a food source, and their word for "human" translates literally to "meat animal."
Where things get interesting is in their biology. They are more active at night, they go into a frenzy at the scent of blood like sharks, and they store food in a second stomach to digest it later, meaning they don't need to carry food while traveling. They also have four sexes, although two of them - Dominant and Nondominant - seem to be more akin to genders and have more of an impact on their place in society than their role in reproduction. Then they have another sex called a Blood-Nurser, which is akin to a cross between a queen insect and a biological incubator; an Egg-Carrier, after being fertilized by a Dominant, implants that egg in an immobile Blood-Nurser to gestate until the baby forcibly eats its way out of the Blood-Nurser. All in all, the Kurii truly feel like another species, and not just humans with funny heads.
What's perhaps most interesting of all, though, is that despite their warlike ways, Kurii are not merely dumb brutes that exist to raid and prey on civilization. They are, in fact, an advanced spacefaring race that are in a state of cold war with the Priest-Kings. Many Kurii on Gor are actually secret agents working to undermine Gorean society and overthrow the Priest-Kings, though others have gone native and have no ulterior motives. They don't just pull out guns and shoot everyone because they too are subject to the Priest-Kings' technology laws and will be persecuted for them, so they use the same limited technology Goreans do. It certainly subverts expectations if a setting's equivalent of orcs are some of the more advanced races around (ironic, because that's what they were in Tolkien, but I digress), and if they have bigger motives than just wanton destruction. Those motives also help to justify their role as villains. They aren't inherently evil, and in fact some Kurii even develop respect for the protagonists of the stories, but they're on the other side of a war most Goreans don't even know they're fighting.
Exotics
Gor is a humanocentric setting, but other races do exist. The aforementioned Kurii and the Urt People, for instance, are sapient nonhuman species, but they don't appear to play a very big part in mainstream society. Most Goreans of most cultures are human. However, the books do make occasional references to so-called Exotics. They don't go into much detail about them, which is unfortunate, but the information we do get is quite interesting.
An Exotic is a slave that possesses some unusual quality. The term is a broad one, and it isn't limited to physical characteristics. One example given is that of a female slave who was raised not knowing about the existence of men, only having been exposed to women. But the term also describes slaves specifically bred to have unusual physical features. These traits can be cosmetic, like unusually large earlobes, or more unusual and stretching the limits of plausible human biology, like having venomous saliva.
I find this concept quite interesting, and it could certainly be used to add additional races to a setting that doesn't have them. Want to play a dwarf? How about someone with horns? Just keep whatever stats are relevant and flavor them as Exotics bred for those traits. It could also be a good excuse to break out your favorite mutation table. Even those Exotics that don't possess strange physical features could present interesting opportunities to roleplay as a character with a very unusual outlook on the world, shaped by their upbringing to serve as a curiosity.
Wagon People
No one can get kaiila right.
Those of you with a good memory might remember that what kicked off this series in the first place was me kitbashing some miniatures to make an army of Wagon People for something like Kings of War. I started on that a while back, and I do intend to return to it. My motivation goes beyond simply having the appropriate parts on hand, though. Out of all the cultures detailed in the series, the Wagon People might be my favorite.
The Wagon People play an extensive role in the fourth book in the series, 1969's Nomads of Gor. Because so much of the book focuses on them, we know quite a bit about their society and culture, which provides ample source material for gaming. Quite fortuitously for my project, we know what weapons and tactics they use, how their military units are organized, and even their heraldry - it all reminds me of the information found in wargaming materials (or even how humanoid armies were organized in the old Monster Manuals), and gets back to my point about how John Norman totally would've been involved with tabletop gaming had he been born a decade later. But besides being easily adaptable to a gaming context, the Wagon People are just cool.
As nomadic raiders and pastoralists, they fill a role similar to the Mongols; indeed, they seem to be largely based on them. They travel in tents on wheeled platforms similar to yurts, and their armies consist almost entirely of cavalry. However, while many cultures introduced later in the series have details borrowed heavily from their real-life counterparts, Norman did not get so lazy with the Wagon People, and they have many quirks unique to them.
They use an elaborate system of facial tattoos to indicate rank in society. They don't eat vegetables (meat, dairy, and fruits are okay) because they have a cultural taboo against eating anything that touches dirt. They accept certain outsiders as welcome guests and allow them to trade with them, but in order to receive such status (marked by a brand on the forearm), one must present themselves to the Wagon People offering gifts, and if they aren't impressed they might just kill you. Because they trust their memory more than the written word, they have people tasked with memorizing the calendar and recounting the passage of years - which are named after important events that happened in them, and are counted from snowfall to snowfall, so they don't have a fixed length. I love these sorts of little cultural details that give you a window into how these people think, and help make their societies feel more real, fleshed out, and lived-in.
Also, perhaps more usefully to DMs, the Wagon People are a good example of how you can vary up a culture based on a real-life one by mixing and matching details from other cultures. Although they're mostly based on the Mongols, they don't feel like Mongols, but like something all their own. A lot of the details are either completely invented or taken from other sources - they have skalds, for instance, and some have noted that they appear to be partially based on gauchos, as they live on the plains and use bolas and throwing knives. If this is the case, it showcases how the New World has just as many interesting cultures as the Old, and how even for a medieval fantasy setting one need not limit themselves to the medieval era when it comes to inspiration. As someone with a culture based on Mexico, I should know.
Finally, while most Goreans ride either giant birds or dinosaurs, the Wagon People ride a creature called a kaiila. Most renditions that I've seen draw them as horses with fangs. This is coward behavior. To me, the way they're described, with long necks, silky hair, and clawed feet, makes them sound much more like carnivorous killer death-llamas. I shouldn't need to explain why Mongols with bolas on carnivorous killer death-llamas are cool.
We exist in three-dimensional space. That statement might seem trivially obvious on the surface, but it's something a lot of games forget. Because of the limitations of depicting it on maps, and because of the fact that we rarely have to interact with our world on a Z axis unless we live in a big city, not a lot of maps truly make use of three-dimensional space. Adding towers, chasms, tall ceilings, and the like can really liven up your dungeon design, quite literally giving the players a new dimension to explore, and adding new challenges to how they approach the world around them. For instance, they might need to scale a sharp cliff in order to get from one level to another, or balconies on one level could overlook rooms on another, providing opportunities for ambush. I think it's something a lot of people forget, since we're so used to dungeons being stacks of simple floors on top of one another. But looking at real-life cave maps shows how complex an enclosed vertical space can really be.
Gor has verticality baked into its setting, and because of that, it serves as a good illustration of what vertical design can do for a game. It achieves this through two ways - first, through the ready availability of flying mounts (one can buy a tarn for a single gold tarn disc, although that's "more than many common laborers will earn in a year"), giving characters a means to maneuver up and down, and secondly, through the use of vertical space in the design of its locations. Many large Gorean cities are complex multi-leveled affairs; buildings consist of tall towers, with different businesses and facilities on different levels, and bridges spanning between them. One could navigate a city not only through the cardinal directions, but also moving up or down, and discover new things. Mapping a Gorean city would be quite similar to mapping a dungeon, and could provide just as many opportunities for exploration. It would also make chases through the streets more exciting, as PCs would have to move between levels - or avoid falls off narrow bridges, particularly because Goreans think railings are for cowards. All in all, it's food for thought that presents an interesting perspective for designing dungeons and other spaces.
Spider People
He just wants to discuss philosophy.
I love these guys. The Spider People don't really do a whole lot in the series. There's one brief encounter with them all the way back in Tarnsman of Gor, and they kind of get forgotten about afterward. But the concept is so batshit insane that I have to mention it.
The Spider People are another sapient race on Gor, dwelling in the swamps north of the city of Ar. With a name like that, your mind might conjure the image of driders. They're part spider, part person, right? No - Spider People are literally just giant spiders. They're "people" insofar as they're capable of rational thought and speech, but there's nothing anthropomorphic about them. Considering giant spiders are a staple of dungeons, having one of them turn out to be a friendly, personable NPC could be a fun way to subvert your players' expectations.
What's also quite interesting is their culture. Although the Spider People are sapient, the people of Ar hunt them for sport and to harvest their webs. They could easily wipe them out if they wanted to, but keep a small population alive to have a steady source of silk. The Spider People are completely okay with this and do nothing about it, because they have such a strong taboo against violence that they will not do anything to harm another sapient being, even in self-defense. If a person wants to kill them, they'll just assume they have a good reason to and let it happen. This line of thinking is so alien that it stands as a great example of Norman's approach to worldbuilding, making his cultures and races feel truly distinct from humanity, and avoiding Flintstonism.
I hoped you enjoyed this look at the world of Gor. Hopefully, you came away from it with a better idea of what the setting is, how it's informed gaming, and how it could continue to do so. For all the books' flaws, I truly do find the series to be up there with some of the most fascinating worldbuilding projects put to paper, and I'm sure many of its ideas would appeal to DMs.
This will probably be the last post I write about Gor. There's so much more I could talk about, but Luther has already catalogued everything far better and more extensively than I ever could. I might make some more posts here and there if the mood strikes me, but for those interested in looking into the setting more, I encourage you to click around his site, or even to seek out the books if you truly are interested. Until then, I'll be continuing to post on other settings, and intend to get back to The Saga of the Ortegids. See you then!
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