Fantasy Races and Originality

[harmyn]

I think you can get a lot of mileage out of the standard races if you just have a little fun with them. In various worlds I have had mighty and highly structured, if brutal hobgoblin empires that had earned enough fear and respect to be left alone by their human neighbors. I've used elves as travellers from the Realm of Faerie who have come to a world that has been harmed and they seek to replace the human farmland with vast forests creating a fair bit of hostility between the two cultures.

One thing I did, and while I am certain its not original but I found quite enjoyable was to make the only major known "evil races" to be cursed versions of the normal ones. A great chasm had been found and the first orcs were formed from dead humans tossed into it. When an Orc Chieftain and Orc shaman work a special ritual they can create a Breeding Pit. Living humans who are dropped in come out as Barbarian classed orcs and recently dead humans come out as warrior classed orcs. Halflings become goblins (they are always thrown in dead because orcs consider halfling eyes and hearts a delicacy), and elves were special. Legends say that only 1 elf was ever thrown in and it came out as the first Troll. Every time a troll is cut down if not all significant pieces are burned the remnants will grow into new trolls. Those are a few things I have done.

So I have to say that you can enjoy and find interesting things to do with the standard races if you only try.

 

[Wombat]

You don't need any non-human species to create an original fantasy adventure.

You don't even need any fantasy monsters to create an original fantasy adventure.

Have to agree with this.

Of late, I have found that having all-human campaigns not only are not limiting, but quite refresing. Equally, keeping the monsters few and special and keeping most of the opponents as classed-characters makes the setting more comprehensible, easy to run, and quite challenging.

That being said, I have nothing against the core races, with the possible exception of the half-orc (mainly due to how most people play it) and the gnome (the poor little guys keep changing what they are about). Elves and dwarves are particularly easy to fit into many settings, especially with alterations to their base cultural assumptions. In one campaign I ran, the elves were the enemy -- mysterious, long-lived, inherently magical, overly proud. It made a nice twist on a theme.

 

[Afrodyte]

I agree that new twists on an old theme are welcome, and I also agree that in order to keep things fresh, one must be careful of making things too one-dimensional. For instance, as written, the PHB races do seem one-dimensional. For me, the way to do that is to separate race and culture. The thing that plucks my nerves about so many elven subraces is the fact that their major differences are cultural, not innate. If you simply described the essence of being an elf (or whatever race) then gave examples of cultures that can arise from that (or even let the player come up with one/some), I think that goes a long way to making things more interesting.

 

[DMH]

One of the problems is what is a dwarf and what is an elf? How many changes can you make to them before they are no longer elves or dwarves? And that applies to all the races.

Are humanoid whales with a strong superstition orcs? They are in Soverign Stone. Are nature spirits given flesh by a power in exchange for eternal life and fielty elves. They are in Morningstar.

Do I believe the basic 7 have a place, yes. But I don't like slapping their names on other races just because there is a faint similarity.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

What interests me is culture, not race.

Me too.


I was reading a now-defunct d20 setting that bragged it had "no elves". True, it didn't. It had three elder races that were beautiful and wise, but they weren't called elves. I forget what the races were called and what they looked like, but if you take an elf, shave his head, round off his ears, and dye him blue ... he's still an elf. Nothing's changed.

A guy I know ran a game where elves were based on the Aztecs. They used obsidian weapons and were openly hostile to outsiders. They were stil called elves, but they were very different from the Tolkien archetype.

 

[Turjan]

Are humanoid whales with a strong superstition orcs? They are in Soverign Stone.

Sounds like orcas to me. It's not the first time that this association has been made. Both words have their roots in "demon", if I remember correctly.

Are nature spirits given flesh by a power in exchange for eternal life and fielty elves. They are in Morningstar.

Do I believe the basic 7 have a place, yes. But I don't like slapping their names on other races just because there is a faint similarity.

Morningstar elves are easily recognizable as such. In the art, they are depicted as typical (wood) elves. The nature spirit part and their connection to a malevolent godlike being is a standard mythological one for elves. Nothing particularly new here .

 

[howandwhy99]

I think the core races are sacred cows. And I have no problem with that. I know poeple call them Tolkien, but in my mind they are part of human mythology. Almost every single monster in the Monster Manual works simply because they are from human mythology. Trolls, ogres, giants, dragons, hydras, lamias, pegasi, titans, unicorns, vampires, and many more. The few that are not tied (borrowed) from the past are radically different. (i.e. mindflayers, beholders, gelatinous cubes and only a few more non-new in 3rd edition MM) Here's an attempt to find the origins of all MM creatures.

New monsters to me often feel like sci-fi creatures on Star Trek or other shows. But I must give kudos to Wizards for some of the intelligent humanoid-like monsters in their other books. Not all are my cup of tea, but they more often than not come off as fantasy creatures rather than a mutant human with a bizarre culture.

 

[fusangite]

So what are your thoughts on this? Can fantasy worlds use the "standard races" and still be original? Or are wholly new races neccessary to make a setting fresh and new?

In my view, creating a bunch of new races is as original as banana-pecan ice cream. No company I am aware of has released this flavour, but the simple fact that you have chosen to pair a nut and a berry that haven't been paired before doesn't make your ice cream flavour meaningfully original.

If people want to be original with "race," why not start by thinking about race in a non-genetic, non-essentialist way? Clearly, D&D biology isn't based on the Mendel-Darwin synthesis we use to explain and describe ideas like race in the world today; and yet, we act like it is; we expect that when races in D&D intermarry, their offspring will be what a modern geneticist would predict. We expect that someone's race cannot change during the course of their lifetime because you can't change your own DNA.

Creativity in the field of D&D race could include ideas like this:
- adopting Tolkien's idea, as applied with the half-elves, that the offspring of an elf-human union must choose, as a matter of free will, whether they are the race of their mother or the race of their father, after which point, they will be irrevocably and completely so
- inverting the idea of race determining how one tends to act and instead making one's actions determinative of race -- use an axe too much, refrain from shaving, drink heavily, avoid sunlight and, watch out, you could turn into a dwarf!
- making race contingent on worshipping and maintaining the favour of one's racial deity; without the favour of the elvish god, maintained through careful ritual observance and piety, one could accidentally turn into a human. Worshipping or calling on the aid of another race's god could turn one into a member of that race out of obligation and/or appreciation
- maintaining two overlapping concepts of race: social/political and physiological; other elves might recognize a human who speaks their language and wrorships their god as truly one of them whereas an elf who doesn't speak the language or lives in a non-elvish country might be considered a de jure human

Creating new categories isn't originality; as we saw with the expansion of castas in Spanish America, new categories in a tired old system is just a sign of a worn-out, baroque over-maturity, not true innovation.

 

[Goddess FallenAngel]

Can fantasy worlds use the "standard races" and still be original?

Yes - especially if they aren't used in a standard way or called by the standard race name.

The biggest example I can use for this...

Steven Brust's Dragaera books.

It took me roughly 3 books about Vlad Taltos before I realized that the Dragaeran race was actually elves - they are tall, slim, have no facial hair, live for hundreds of years, consider themselves better than Easterners (humans) and have pointed ears. Sound like elves to me. But they don't act like the stereotypical elf - they to live in cities, have a widespread Empire, and are at war constantly, along with many other stereotypical human traits.

I loved it.

 

[fusangite]

To echo what others have said on the thread, I don't really use D&D races at all. In my campaigns, all characters are human and it is about culture not race... Although in my last campaign, one character was a cynocephalus (dog-headed man). (The dog-headed men were, next to elves, the demi-humans that appeared most frequently in medieval documents.)