Are civilization loving rangers real?

Chronicler

So rangers are woodsmen by and large, and have a reputation for being nature lovers.

I hear in the earliest editions, a ranger's thing was that they'd explore the deepest ranges of the untamed wilds, and tame it. Far from nature preservationists, they'd be paving the way for their employers to send more men and pillage these natural resources. Is there any truth to that?

Zaxares

I'd say that they're real in the sense that it all depends on what kind of motivations the player decides to give their Ranger character. Back in 2nd Ed, Rangers were required to have a Good alignment (probably a legacy from their inspiration from characters like Aragorn from LotR), but when this requirement was lifted in 3rd Ed, it freed up Rangers to have an entire spectrum of motivations. Some are as ardent protectors of nature as the most militant Druid. Some might simply be wanderers and frontiersmen who prefer the quiet and solitude of the wilds as opposed to the bustle of towns and cities. Still others might be skilled woodsmen who attempt to find a kind of harmony between settlers and farmers and creatures of the woods.

Once you also get alignments into the mix, things get even more interesting. Those Defenders of the Woods could be Good-aligned Rangers keeping both villagers and fey alike safe from creatures like orcs, hags or dragons, or they could be evil, Malar-worshipping hunters who seek to emulate fearsome predators or werebeasts, believing that only those strong enough to survive the Hunt, whether a beast of the woods or a woodcutter who happened to be in the wrong grove at the wrong time, deserve to live.

And here we come to your second question. An Evil, or even Neutral, Ranger could love the feeling of exploring and pitting his skills against the wilderness, yet hold very little fondness or respect for it. To him, his Ranger skills prove his superiority over nature and his mastery over it, and he cares little about whether the maps he brings back to sell to miners, loggers and farmers brings about terrible ecological damage.

2nd Ed rules wouldn't have allowed these kinds of morally ambiguous or evil Rangers, no, so I don't think they actually existed in those early editions. But I think they definitely do deserve merit as character archetypes.

Blackraven

This insightful post from @mashedtaters suggests that Rangers in early editions weren't quite as callous with regard to nature as you say @Chronicler, at least not consciously so. But apparently they weren't preservationists either, which was more a Druid thing. Rangers were about protecting civilization from the wilderness, and therefore tended to clash with Druids who aimed to protect the wilderness from civilization.

Isewein

From a different perspective than that of the anachronistic hippie druid, the ranger archetype you described could well be seen as good-aligned, paving the way for the extension of civilisation and thereby the creation of human livelihoods. Consider that for most of history, the symbolic fight between civilisation and nature heavily favoured the latter. It is only in the context of the industrial revolution that preservationism really makes sense. Princess Mononoke comes to mind.

Chronicler

Thank you guys. This has all been quite informative.

ThacoBell

Rangers are pretty versatile roleplay options, even with strict alignment. I tend to play mine like a Paladin that travels the wilderness. Someone who looks for lost travellers and protects villages from threats long before anyone is even aware the threat is there. They do lean a bit more towards nature in priority though. Like say, protecting a Dryad's grove from hunters and stuff like that.

Chronicler

I read something about some rangers being infatuated with the treasures and riches of the unexplored world at some point.

That's a concept I've had in the backburner for a bit. Like a One Piece Strawhat type just out there to claim the unclaimed.

It kind of rings true with the Forgotten Realms to me. The idea that out there in the deepest wilds you could find some fountain of youth or some temple of a forgotten god or something. Some repository filled with awesome stuff that belongs to nobody in particular.

There are a couple points in the Baldur's Gate series where that's basically what you're doing anyway. Durlag's Tower is just some death trap a madman built in the middle of nowhere and filled cool stuff before dying and leaving it all for anybody enterprising enough to to fully plumb its depths.

ThacoBell

@Chronicler "I read something about some rangers being infatuated with the treasures and riches of the unexplored world at some point.

That's a concept I've had in the backburner for a bit. Like a One Piece Strawhat type just out there to claim the unclaimed."

That was my Pillars of Eternity Ranger! I've also run Rangers as zoologists, monster hunters, and even archaeologists.