Druids and the materials of civilization
BelgarathMTH
Member Posts: 5,653
in Off-Topic
Hi, so, this topic was inspired by my current World of Warcraft run, where I'm playing a druid, and secondarily, by my recent NWN2 run as a druid, which inspired the current WoW run.
I decided it would be fun to work on the "Pathfinder of Draennor" achievement, which unlocks the ability to fly in the WoW "Warlords of Draennor" expansion, in which flight has been arbitrarily restricted. (Let's not even go there about whether it's good or bad that Blizzard changed their game like that.)
So, as part of that, I have to unlock "daily quests" in Tanaan Jungle, which will require me to build a shipyard, which will require me to upgrade my garrison to level three, which takes wood, wood, wood, and more wood.
To assist in the goal, I just built a sawmill in the stronghold. And I have to cut down trees all over the expansion map to get the wood to make the garrison resources to make the level three garrison to make the shipyard to travel to the jungle to unlock the daily quests to eventually realize my goal of unlocking the ability to fly there.
All of this is in service to "the Alliance", which consists of humans, elves, and dwarves, against "the Iron Horde", which consists of orcs corrupted by fel demons, and basically just lots of fel orcs and demons and warlocks who want to destroy the "good" Draenei of the setting.
All of this got me to thinking about druids in fantasy settings, and about the relationship between their philosophy and civilization.
To build our houses, tools, weapons, paper, and everything else that is basic to all of civilization, we have needed *so...much...wood*. We clear-cut ancient forests, destroy entire ecosystems in the rain forests, and plant vast groves of trees just so we can cut them down.
So now my current WoW game has me needing to find trees all over the expansion map, and have them cut down. And every time I cut down even a single tree, as a druid, I get this horrible pang of guilty conscience.
In traditional D&D, druids are supposed to use wooden and stone weapons and shields, and only leather armor and bindings. But wood requires killing trees, and leather requires killing and skinning animals. Supposedly, traditional D&D druids won't use metal because it requires "raping" the earth to get the raw ore. But how is that any different from cutting down trees and hunting animals for food, fur, and leather?
My first thought is that, as always with good druids, it all has to do with the Balance. Take your wood but don't destroy the forest. Kill only the animals you need and perform ceremonies to thank their spirits. But you should also be able to mine precious gems and ores, as long as you don't create a strip mine. And that means a fighting druid should be able to wear and wield steel just like any fighter. Maybe shapechanging would preclude that? Like maybe, the magic involved in shapechanging can only incorporate naturally occurring materials into the altered magical form, such as wood, fur, or leather, but not smelted metal? I guess it would be a similar logic to wizards not being able to cast arcane magic wearing metal armor.
I wonder if we might have something to learn from fantasy druids in how we treat our environmental resources in real life? Only extremists of various stripes advocate that we should *never* kill a plant or an animal, or mine ore out of the ground. (I wonder how some of those people eat, or in what structures they live and find shelter? I guess "fruitarianism" might be an example of "eat without ever killing *anything*.)
Anyway, this is getting way too long, but I'm very interested in any insights people here in this forum might have about fantasy druids in various games and how their philosophy might relate to the use of wood, metal, and animals as base resources of all civilization.
I decided it would be fun to work on the "Pathfinder of Draennor" achievement, which unlocks the ability to fly in the WoW "Warlords of Draennor" expansion, in which flight has been arbitrarily restricted. (Let's not even go there about whether it's good or bad that Blizzard changed their game like that.)
So, as part of that, I have to unlock "daily quests" in Tanaan Jungle, which will require me to build a shipyard, which will require me to upgrade my garrison to level three, which takes wood, wood, wood, and more wood.
To assist in the goal, I just built a sawmill in the stronghold. And I have to cut down trees all over the expansion map to get the wood to make the garrison resources to make the level three garrison to make the shipyard to travel to the jungle to unlock the daily quests to eventually realize my goal of unlocking the ability to fly there.
All of this is in service to "the Alliance", which consists of humans, elves, and dwarves, against "the Iron Horde", which consists of orcs corrupted by fel demons, and basically just lots of fel orcs and demons and warlocks who want to destroy the "good" Draenei of the setting.
All of this got me to thinking about druids in fantasy settings, and about the relationship between their philosophy and civilization.
To build our houses, tools, weapons, paper, and everything else that is basic to all of civilization, we have needed *so...much...wood*. We clear-cut ancient forests, destroy entire ecosystems in the rain forests, and plant vast groves of trees just so we can cut them down.
So now my current WoW game has me needing to find trees all over the expansion map, and have them cut down. And every time I cut down even a single tree, as a druid, I get this horrible pang of guilty conscience.
In traditional D&D, druids are supposed to use wooden and stone weapons and shields, and only leather armor and bindings. But wood requires killing trees, and leather requires killing and skinning animals. Supposedly, traditional D&D druids won't use metal because it requires "raping" the earth to get the raw ore. But how is that any different from cutting down trees and hunting animals for food, fur, and leather?
My first thought is that, as always with good druids, it all has to do with the Balance. Take your wood but don't destroy the forest. Kill only the animals you need and perform ceremonies to thank their spirits. But you should also be able to mine precious gems and ores, as long as you don't create a strip mine. And that means a fighting druid should be able to wear and wield steel just like any fighter. Maybe shapechanging would preclude that? Like maybe, the magic involved in shapechanging can only incorporate naturally occurring materials into the altered magical form, such as wood, fur, or leather, but not smelted metal? I guess it would be a similar logic to wizards not being able to cast arcane magic wearing metal armor.
I wonder if we might have something to learn from fantasy druids in how we treat our environmental resources in real life? Only extremists of various stripes advocate that we should *never* kill a plant or an animal, or mine ore out of the ground. (I wonder how some of those people eat, or in what structures they live and find shelter? I guess "fruitarianism" might be an example of "eat without ever killing *anything*.)
Anyway, this is getting way too long, but I'm very interested in any insights people here in this forum might have about fantasy druids in various games and how their philosophy might relate to the use of wood, metal, and animals as base resources of all civilization.
7
Comments
Maybe the restriction not to use iron is because it can't be used in its natural form and has to be worked in a long and dirty process to be of use? I mean, ore is as natural as wood.
The other things? It's all about balance. Animals eat animals, too. Nature isn't all nice and peaceful. There are volcano eruptions, thunderstorms, wildfires, there are animals eating their own young ones, there are nestlings pushing their siblings out and fighting for food, there are predators and prey, there are diseases and plagues. Nature can be merciless.
That said, I think it's a huge difference to hunt for game and use every piece of it, or to raise pigs in a kind of meat factory without room to move and breathe and without ever seeing the sun.
I'm being a hypocrite here, too. I wouldn't eat meat if I had to kill the animal myself, or even watch it being killed (except if it meant the difference between death or survival). I rarely eat meat and I try to pay attention where it comes from, but I don't have the strength of will to be vegetarian (though I used to be, for about 7 years).
The militant extremists who don't want to hurt plants or animals at all are more like the Shadow Druids, I think. And I bet they have houses and computers, too.
It's also not possible to turn back time and live in caves again and die of measles. Technological progress has saved many lives. It just needs to be balanced, tempered with understanding and responsibility (that's where the druid would take care, if wood is needed, to see how much can be taken without upsetting the balance, how to help regrowth).
The ecosystem is very complex and we're very short-sighted. Sometimes our ideas to save an endangered species or improve an environment make things worse.
There was this example I remember from biology class, where people on an island had introduced snakes to scare off the indigenous population, but the snakes bit the working slaves, then they introduced mungoose and those ended up extinguishing the local population of rare birds incapable of flying, and never even went after the snakes. I probably mixed up the details, but something like that.
In my corner of the woods, people are crazy about e-cars as a clean solution for future mobility. But how useful are e-cars if the source of electricity is coal? And what about the huge amount of lithium needed for the battery packs?
Balance can mean giving and taking, but not exploiting. I think a druid may cut down a tree to build a shelter and weapons, but he wouldn't cut down all the forests in a speed that doesn't allow regrowth. He would hunt game and eat it, but he wouldn't build a "pig factory".
We can't go back to living that way. But we could reduce our negative impact on the environment by controlling the driving factor behind all this: Greed.
TL;DR: We can take things, but we should take less.
It didn't even occur to me as a reason that ore doesn't grow back, good point.
The scimitar explanation makes sense.
But what about the Iron Skins? Why not Stoneskin?
So I would say (simplistically) that it is sometimes beneficial to the environment to kill some living things so that other living things can thrive.
Could be just a name that had not much thought of it. But I would risk to consider that maybe it's related to Iron Wood, a material that druids can make with a spell to make equipment of wood with the hardness and duration of Iron. Also, Iron Wood can be used by druids to craft armors and shields without breaking their vows.
But, I think what I'm saying came only in D&D 3rd, so it's entire my speculation.
@Arvia I agree that seems odd. Druids felt like a bit of an afterthought in BG, with far fewer of the P&P spells translated into the game than for mages (IWD, which came along later, addressed that imbalance). I suspect Bioware may have wanted to help compensate druids for their relative lack of spells by offering them a stoneskin equivalent spell, but wanted to differentiate it with a new name (the mage spell stoneskin is from P&P, but there was no ironskin equivalent for druids in P&P).
If the spell didn't already exist in P&P, you might have expected the naming to be the other way round - ironskin could then work as a precursor to mages getting the ability to take iron golem form, while stoneskin would be a more natural progression from the earlier barkskin for druids.
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/ironwood.htm
Apparently the D&D druid's power of nature includes the ability to turn wood into an iron-like substance, and naturally occurring metals like iron thus seem to fall within the druid's sphere of power.
I've been thinking some over the past few days about Jaheira's quotes from BG1, and I wonder if they represent the classical druid attitude, really, or if the original writers were just using an over-simplified stereotype to write Jaheira.
:upon entering any city: "This city is a blight on the land!"
:upon entering any mine: "A hole in mother Earth! I would plug it, had I the power!"
:upon entering almost anywhere: "This would be a good place for a henge."
And Elanee in NWN2 upon entering Neverwinter (paraphrasing) "This city is so cold and unnatural. It's as though the stones have been silenced."
A lot of these lines really seem to make druids out to have a very uncomfortable relationship with civilization.
It's not a spell that appears in any of the 2nd edition books.
The complaining about every piece of civilization is certainly an exaggerated stereotype. But so is Ajantis' "This [insert random location, building or landscape] has a sense of *evil* about it."
But I think a druid would really feel uncomfortable in any kind of city, or even among farms and ploughed fields. Not necessarily resentful and wanting to tear it all down (that would be the Shadow Druids again) but certainly not at ease.
Still strictly talking about AD&D druids here, not the historical celtic druids, and not the neopagans ?.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironwood
You know what though? Ironwood Skins even sounds better...
Also "Iron Skin" was a 5th level mage spell in the AD&D goldbox games, e.g. in Death Knights of Krynn, where it improves AC by 4. Does not sound like much, but I think unless the other spells it stacked with bracers and other armor.