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General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
How do you make your races feel unique and/or more original?
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<blockquote data-quote="FriarRosing" data-source="post: 4605135" data-attributes="member: 63942"><p>One of my favorite things as a DM is world building. I like to keep notebooks full of random histories, people and societies even though a lot of it my players will never encounter, or may just hear of in passing and forget. I like to think up histories and cultures, I suppose. One problem I run into a lot, though, is making the various races seem unique and interesting to my game world while still retaining the general feel and assumptions people would except. I'm the kind of guy who wants most everything in my game to have at least some sort of inspiration in classic folklore or fantasy (my personal opinion on this has to do with my feeling that part of what makes a D&D work so well is the familiarity the players have with the subject matter--everyone knows who elves, dragons and hobbits are and what they look like. If I threw in Cardassians from Star Trek for some reason and several of my players had never seen a single episode, they would be somewhat lost on what the heck I was talking about).</p><p></p><p>Anyway, I've been having trouble thinking up unique personalities and societies for some of the standard D&D races (mainly Dwarves) and I was wondering what kinds of things other people did to make their races different. This could be social aspects, appearance, personalities or whatever.</p><p></p><p>I personally like to combine cultures from across the globe into interesting mishmashes of social ideas, structures and beliefs. One problem with that, though, is that it's a pretty common one, and a lot of the societies that I find interesting are pretty commonly applied to various races, or are so non-european like that the tone of Medieval Europe (which I want to retain to at least some extent in my campaign) is lost. My Orcs, for example, are less blood thirsty marauders and more a death-obsessed highly regimented and highly xenophobic society based equally around the culture of ancient Egypt, Dark Ages Scandanavia and Imperial Japan. Also they're much less brutish in appearance, and are essentially just larger, leaner humans with greenish skin.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FriarRosing, post: 4605135, member: 63942"] One of my favorite things as a DM is world building. I like to keep notebooks full of random histories, people and societies even though a lot of it my players will never encounter, or may just hear of in passing and forget. I like to think up histories and cultures, I suppose. One problem I run into a lot, though, is making the various races seem unique and interesting to my game world while still retaining the general feel and assumptions people would except. I'm the kind of guy who wants most everything in my game to have at least some sort of inspiration in classic folklore or fantasy (my personal opinion on this has to do with my feeling that part of what makes a D&D work so well is the familiarity the players have with the subject matter--everyone knows who elves, dragons and hobbits are and what they look like. If I threw in Cardassians from Star Trek for some reason and several of my players had never seen a single episode, they would be somewhat lost on what the heck I was talking about). Anyway, I've been having trouble thinking up unique personalities and societies for some of the standard D&D races (mainly Dwarves) and I was wondering what kinds of things other people did to make their races different. This could be social aspects, appearance, personalities or whatever. I personally like to combine cultures from across the globe into interesting mishmashes of social ideas, structures and beliefs. One problem with that, though, is that it's a pretty common one, and a lot of the societies that I find interesting are pretty commonly applied to various races, or are so non-european like that the tone of Medieval Europe (which I want to retain to at least some extent in my campaign) is lost. My Orcs, for example, are less blood thirsty marauders and more a death-obsessed highly regimented and highly xenophobic society based equally around the culture of ancient Egypt, Dark Ages Scandanavia and Imperial Japan. Also they're much less brutish in appearance, and are essentially just larger, leaner humans with greenish skin. [/QUOTE]
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