Creating non-stereotypical game worlds
Herobizkit
Adventurer
I've done a few race swaps in my day (with many thanks to Pathfinder's alternate racial traits):
* Dwarves are actually Vikings. They're primarily shipborne coastal raiders and worship the Norse pantheon. They often clash swords with Githyanki, who are their fiercest pirate rivals.
* Goblins are non-magical Gnomes with an affinity for alchemy and metalworking (read engineering); Gnomes are savage, near-mindless Goblins often used as livestock by Gnolls.
* The Drow are a peaceful, spiritual race (similar to Githzerai) who wish to simply be left alone by their 'evil' surface-raider kin.
* Dwarves are actually Vikings. They're primarily shipborne coastal raiders and worship the Norse pantheon. They often clash swords with Githyanki, who are their fiercest pirate rivals.
* Goblins are non-magical Gnomes with an affinity for alchemy and metalworking (read engineering); Gnomes are savage, near-mindless Goblins often used as livestock by Gnolls.
* The Drow are a peaceful, spiritual race (similar to Githzerai) who wish to simply be left alone by their 'evil' surface-raider kin.
MarkB
Legend
The trick is getting player buy-in on that. You can say that humans are the minority race with strange customs, but a player who hasn't fully engaged with your setting may still just look at them as the default choice and play his character that way.
WayneLigon
Adventurer
I jumbled up all the various 'goblinoid' races into the overarching category of 'Beastmen'. They are actually one race that has a much higher degree of individual differences than human have, to the point that to humans it looks like they are composed of several different races. Broad 'types' of beastmen tend to breed true, so an extended family of 'goblins' will all tend to be short and twisted-limbed creatures, hairy and skulking. Unfortunately for them, they tend to top out at about a 70IQ and they have a much higher degree of both aggression and territoriality than humans do. They were the majority sentient race in what humans called 'The New World'. Human discovered the New World and promptly enslaved large numbers of the weaker and more pliable tribes, not realizing that any particular mating could produce not a 'goblin' but a 'troll'. They found a plant-based drug that worked on the beastmen to keep them relatively non-aggressive but because of their see-saw genetics, it didn't work on all types.
Eventually the various slaves developed an immunity to the drug, there was a massive slave revolt, and human civilization took several steps backwards save for the countries that never practiced said slavery. Still, the 'beastmen' have long memories, and they hate humans with a blinding passion that even they barely understand anymore.
So, the set-up gives me beastmen that can work with humans, and beastmen that attack human settlements for just the sheer joy of slaughter. Their weird genetics means I can use many types of 'beastman' without having to wonder about 'There are x number of sentient creatures, all different', etc.
Our old 3e setting -- The World of CITY -- was made by embracing cultural appropriation. Really appropriation of every kind we could think of, as we turned anything we thought was cool into a sort of fantasy gumbo (with a few dollops of science fantasy as the setting grew more steampunk over time). Examples...
A playable race called the Shirac were psionic Sufi-elves who had a mix of Arabic and Zoroastrian names. Whose religious cultural was partially stolen from P. C. Hodgell's Kencyrath from God Stalk.
Most of them lived in a region called the "Lassantees Wastes". "Lassantees" comes from my buddy smooshing "sand" and "Atlantis" together.
In the city of Narayan -- a Hindu name, natch -- everyone had these French and Indian composite names, like "Delphine Laxshmi St. Sous", "Pavur-Pierre Arjuna St. Sous", and "Noemi St. Sikh du Mer". They also baked a crusty flat bread called "pain" in big stone dome ovens called "paindoor".
The city of Gallina was basically Venice in a caldera of an extinct volcano. With Lake Como in there, too. The people had Italian-esque names like "Donatello Pazzi de Gallina" (whose nickname was 'The Right Reverend Don Magic Wand", which is stolen from one of Snoop Dog's pimp friends -- see, steal from everywhere).
We had a playable race of kung-fu fighting Abolitionist monkey-men called the Hannu -- named, of course, for the Hindu god Hanuman. They lived in a forest-y, jungle-y temple city cribbed from mythic China, or perhaps mythic Cambodia.
A god/devil figure, Erebus was named for Greek myth. But his characterization, as a canasta-playing, gin-loving sophisticate who lived for a century in a fancy hotel, was taken from things like Peter Cook's devil in Bedazzled, Gene Hackman's Royal Tenenbaum, and maybe the sunset-admiring Lucifer from later-period "Sandman".
Another god, Nadanya, who brought civilization to the Yeti by giving them the gift of pants, was inspired by the myth of Babar the Elephant (yes, that Babar).
This should give you a pretty good idea of the governing logic of the setting. Such as it was...
A playable race called the Shirac were psionic Sufi-elves who had a mix of Arabic and Zoroastrian names. Whose religious cultural was partially stolen from P. C. Hodgell's Kencyrath from God Stalk.
Most of them lived in a region called the "Lassantees Wastes". "Lassantees" comes from my buddy smooshing "sand" and "Atlantis" together.
In the city of Narayan -- a Hindu name, natch -- everyone had these French and Indian composite names, like "Delphine Laxshmi St. Sous", "Pavur-Pierre Arjuna St. Sous", and "Noemi St. Sikh du Mer". They also baked a crusty flat bread called "pain" in big stone dome ovens called "paindoor".
The city of Gallina was basically Venice in a caldera of an extinct volcano. With Lake Como in there, too. The people had Italian-esque names like "Donatello Pazzi de Gallina" (whose nickname was 'The Right Reverend Don Magic Wand", which is stolen from one of Snoop Dog's pimp friends -- see, steal from everywhere).
We had a playable race of kung-fu fighting Abolitionist monkey-men called the Hannu -- named, of course, for the Hindu god Hanuman. They lived in a forest-y, jungle-y temple city cribbed from mythic China, or perhaps mythic Cambodia.
A god/devil figure, Erebus was named for Greek myth. But his characterization, as a canasta-playing, gin-loving sophisticate who lived for a century in a fancy hotel, was taken from things like Peter Cook's devil in Bedazzled, Gene Hackman's Royal Tenenbaum, and maybe the sunset-admiring Lucifer from later-period "Sandman".
Another god, Nadanya, who brought civilization to the Yeti by giving them the gift of pants, was inspired by the myth of Babar the Elephant (yes, that Babar).
This should give you a pretty good idea of the governing logic of the setting. Such as it was...
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Lots- looking at what I designed for my homebrews as well as helped other gamers for THEIRS, here are some faves:
1) Minotaurs who had a Plains Indian style culture, using chariots instead of just riding horseback (due to their size, of course)
2) drawing inspiration from the novels of Kurt R.A. Giambastani, used the Plains Indian cultures (again) to help a fellow ENWorlder create a tribe that used moas and/or other large flightless terror-birds instead of horses & dogs as steeds and hunting animals. Almost used velociraptors (like Giambastani did), but thought the birds were more fun.
3) fused typical "Dwarven" societal structures with the river culture proposed for some setting's halflings, and used that for a society of anthropomorphic snapping turtle folk. IOW, long-lived, short, powerfully built critters with a mercantile river society, strong family ties, and a string warrior culture. Also, a touch of Romani was thrown in the mix.
4) in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, the elves were very few in number, and had used magic on themselves to permanently make them part plant in order to survive. They lived mainly in partnership with the equally rare Inheritors, psionic Dwarves culture whose normal bodies were all replaced by psi-powered bio/mechanical ones that housed only their brains and a few key organs. Think fantasy Cybermen or Daleks.
5) aquatic elves who had used ancient magic to permanently add both chromatophores (to change colors like Cephalopods) and nematocysts (to sting like Cnidarians) to their bodies.
6) alien "Grays" who used their technology to appear as "elves", cast "magic", and create stasis fields ("time passes differently in Underhill...") while trying to survive long enough to be rescued from crash landing on a typical fantasy world.
7) Drow who were drawn to the black widow spiders more than any others, and were EXTREMELY matriarchal. And cannibalistic.
8) size S Thri-Kreen who flew like dragonflies and could communicate via bioluminescence.
9) earth elemental dwarves who carved themselves from stone, with the stone type determining what their abilities were. In a very real sense, their abilities were "set in stone", with constraints on what classes they could take based on their origins: Dwarves from metallic ores could be warriors or clerics, but were not able to be rogues or any spellcaster affected by ASF. Those from gemstone matrix were arcane or divine casters, and were too delicate to be front-line fighters. (Yes, this all made them subject to kidnapping plots, too.)
10) I reworked the various Planetouched of 3.X into the Nephilim- essentially a broad template covering any sentient being who had some otherplanar ancestry.
11) using the Seshayans from Alternity as the unknowing and scattered remnants of the fallen lords of a vast and powerful Underdark empire. They are mostly meek as a rule because of their small size, stature and outsider status, until evidence of their former Empire is unearthed... Real boogeyman stuff.
For those who haven't a clue as to what Seshayans are:
...and many more.
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IME, most players want at least the OPTION of playing a human, even if you know they're never actually going to play one.
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