I'm sick to death of dwarves, elves, halflings, and gnomes!

[nsruf]

Now that takes guts and imagination. Thank you a thousand times. I'm going to spend the rest of my vacation reading this very promising material. By the way, nsruf, did you have a hand in creating this world?

No, the setting was developed by K. David Ladage and written by him and Rich Bowman. I found it when I was looking for a world to base my D&D campaign in that was somehow different from the standard. And yes, this included not using the same old races again However, I am official editor for JEG since the third book (arcane magic) and have contributed some game mechanics and play test comments.

Nice to see you have found your way to the Umbragia forum, BTW. If anybody else would like to join, it is a sub-forum of the Hosted Settings forum on these boards. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

 

[Ezrael]

I'm actually playing a Lizardfolk Monk now...

And I played a Lizardman back in 2e. For me, the way I approach the character is by thinking about brain structure. Since Lizards don't have Paleomammalian Brains (and yes, I know the Triune Brain Hypothesis may not mean squat, but it's useful for my purposes) I assume that my Lizardmen *don't have emotions as mammals do*. Basically, all that matters to my Lizardman is getting enough food, propagating the species, and either destroying any threats or avoiding those threats he can't destroy. He's pragmatic, intelligent (he has a 14 Int) and utterly willing to sacrifice anyone in the party to preserve his own life without being especially sinister or malevolent. In essence, he's amoral; he won't waste effort to do something just because it's the 'evil' or 'good' thing to do, but convince him it will allow him to accumulate enough power to ensure his own survival in the hostile human culture he finds himself in and he'll jump for it. Kind of enlightened self-interest. It's not too hard to comprehend as a human, and yet it's reasonably alien from the way we think.

I'm actually working on a campaign set 65 Million years ago on Earth, based loosely on Lovecraft and REH, with various reptilian races from the Monster Manual and Dragon as PC races. At present, I have Lizardfolk, Kobolds and Troglodytes as well as Sean Reynold's Saurials, although in all cases I don't use those names. I may use Yuan-Ti abominations as the 'Drow' of the campaign, along with Loacanth and Kuo-Toa as rivals and Illithids as the great evil race of the campaign, in service to Undead Trilobite-Gods (Think Aboleths and Alhoons) that want to destroy the reptile empires by bringing the long-imprisoned Tarrasque down from its prison in space. The great thing is that the continents were so different back then that it's possible to use actual maps of the earth and they're barely recognizeable. I think homebrews are more fun that way: you can do anything you want with them. It's interesting to consider what a reptile society (well, reptile/saurian, anyway) would be like. How do they interact? How does such a group decide on a political structure?

This doesn't mean I don't like elves, dwarves, et al: I do, actually. I just like playing around with other options sometimes.

 

[Codragon]

I agree. The standard elf-dwarf-gnome-halfling racial assortment is a bit boring and overdone. It needs to be in all the major WotC campaign worlds so they can be all-inclusive. BLEH. There''s nothing inherently wrong with them, though.

However, I think it's not just the races's themselves, it's their general roles. Elfs as long-lived mysterious forest fey, Dwarves as mountain mining folk, Halflings as hill dwelling homebodies, and Gnomes as tinkers/illusionists. All of those roles have been in D&D for 20+ years, and it always refreshing to see the traditional races in different roles.

Dark Sun did a good job of this - by making Elves tall, desert raiders that could run lke the wind and by making Halflings jungle cannibals.

I don't mind that 3E changed the "image" of some of those races, either.

 

[Voneth]

My question to those that want to play something truly "exotic" is how do you do it?

I mean, playing a Lizard would be so foreign to a human thought process that I do not know how one would do it - after all you have spent X number of years having your brain wired to think like a human and suddenly you are a Sahougin for a couple of hours a week - I just don't see it being done (or at least with any sort of justice)

Well, first off you refuse to hiss your "s," even if the DM thinks it's cute. Second, you use some of the older ribal languages that use clicks and popping sounds since Lizards don't have lips.

 

[Henry]

That's a bit, extreme might be the best word.

I can see wanting a change....

But believing that a game world with (paraphrase) "any of those four is severely lacking in imagination" is, yep, extreme is a good word for it.

Patrick Y.

I mean no offense, but isn't that kind of like not wanting to buy a car if the manufacturer puts the gas and the brake pedals in their standard positions?

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Re: I'm actually playing a Lizardfolk Monk now...

...I assume that my Lizardmen *don't have emotions as mammals do*...

That's one way to approach it. Another would be to say that they ONLY have emotion, and only simple ones. i.e. they don't have love, but a similar emotional state will drive them to defend their eggs (or mates, if the species is monogamous). They don't comprehend hate, but they get angry at anything that threatens their survival. And I mean angry in a way that will seem like unreasoning hatred to a humanoid, because the lizardman would be ruled entirely by emotion without all the cognitive baggage we throw on top to channel it. He could still be very clever, but his cleverness would be more wisdom-based than intelligence-based. He would reach the same conclusions more "intelligent" beings do, but wouldn't bother with all the rationalization steps that we use to justify what our instincts told us 10 minutes earlier.

Now that I think about it, a lizardman monk would make a great member of the Ciphers... Mmmmm, factions... Anybody hear anything about Planescape 3e lately?

 

[Mercule]

Just change them all to different "breeds" of humans. Not like anyone takes much time to make the different races really different, anyways.

Dave Duncan did this in his series "A Man of His Word" (first book: "Magic Casement"). Also an interesting magic system. Highly recommend the series.

 

[Voneth]

bump

 

[Henry]

Another thought - the best TSR world to turn the Demi-humans on their ear was Dark Sun. I dare another to say that the Halflings, Dwarves, and Elves of Dark Sun were unoriginal. Between the Halfling Cannibals, the Elven Gypsies, and the just plain weird Dwarves, nothing was quite the same. Add to this Thri-kreen as PC's, Half-Giants, Human/Dwarf Crossbreeds, and Psions crawling out of the woodwork, and you had a world where NOTHING was familiar, expect the vague similarities of name only.

That's why I keep an eye on www.athas.org, and other Dark Sun fansites, just to see the different takes on the 3E verison of this setting.

 

[Ulrick]

In my home brew world, I've gotten rid of elves, gnomes, halflings, adn dwarves.

I just got tired of these races and their themes being regurgitated over and over again.

So, when will elven retreat end?
So, when will the dwarves take back their mountain strongholds?
So, when will the halflings quit eating the party's rations?
So, when will the gnomes invent the next big thing?

It just gets old.


Ulrick