Going beyond humans in funny clothes?

[Ry]

I was wondering if anyone had had success in making fantasy races that weren't just "humans in funny clothes" I'm talking about both the player side (portraying something as very different) and from the DM side (communicating that to players).

Because I'm stumped.

 

[Aholibamah]

It would require a cooperative effort and a lot of intense description on the part of the DM.

For example: if the creature in question was say an amphibian that communicated more through colour and posture than by speech it might see humans as rarely saying much of importance though they chatter like birds often. It might find clothing unpleasant or even disturbing since it means that humans are avoiding communication. Its morals might be entirely different--it might see its young as being totally nonsentient and good for food unless they show promise. It might regard sex as a seasonal and utterly unsentimental thing and find human mating bizarre and incomprehensible.

Imagine really roleplaying something as alien as this. A story like "The Iliad" would be incomprehensible. Because it partly communicates by shifting skin pigments books would be useless to it unless it acquired a feat in order to read them, say.

So anyway, example aside, why do you want this?

 

[Ry]

I'm tired of elves and dwarves and gnomes and orcs and halflings. It's not that I'm tired of anything in particular about them, or their names. I'm tired of single-sentence races like

Giants: They're like big humans with a parental streak.
Verrik: They're like red-skinned humans that think big, kind of like Vulcans.
Elan: They're like humans that are removed from other people because they don't have the same basic needs.

But I've also run a lot of human-only campaigns and I'm tired of them too.

I guess I want something more distinctive, more different, and it's hard to find. R. Scott Bakker's nonmen and inchoroi are definitely this different, not that the Inchoroi are playable. I get the impression of this kind of distinctiveness in Malazan books when one person finds that a phylactery is kept inside an acorn frozen in a block of ice. Human says "Strange choice for something so powerful." and her ancient companion (a T'lann Imass) says "The Jaghut were a strange people."

 

[DJCupboard]

The problem with designing races (or racial descriptions) under the paradigm of making them not just humans in funny suits, is that the more alien and unfamiliar something becomes, the less suitable it becomes for a pc race. If we cannot easily relate to our protagonists, we don't have as as many access points from which to be compelled by a story. So we end up making the pcs from this completely unhuman race into models of human emotion, anyway. The slime-people from under the earth may comunicate via their olfactory senses, but in play each and everyone of them will probably end up being misunderstood social outcasts who just want to fit in with their more human party members.

Alien and unhuman works great for villains and set dressing, but PCs need to be have qualities we can relate to.

 

[Glyfair]

The problem with designing races (or racial descriptions) under the paradigm of making them not just humans in funny suits, is that the more alien and unfamiliar something becomes, the less suitable it becomes for a pc race.

I agree. The very fact that a human is playing them (presumbably) means that they will have human mannerisms.

I really think the reward for doing so is small. There are only a very small number of players who are very into that level of immersion and want to play something they can't identify with (since the two goals are pretty incompatible).

 

[GSHamster]

To be honest, it's pretty hard to find "alien" aliens even in fantasy and sci-fi literature.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of two authors who do it consistently: C.J. Cherryh, (kind of mentally based), and Julie Czernada (kind of biology based).

 

[Thunderfoot]

I think the best example of the human in another skin is the movie "Enemy Mine". Louis Gossett Jr. played a great alien to Dennis Quaid's human, but ultimately the common ground of emotions, needs and survival showed the commonality of the two races rather than the duplicity. As humans, it is psychologically impossible to completely understand alien behavior, if it weren't we would have set up and underwater communications network with the whales and dolphins or some sort of inter-primate signaling with lower primates long ago. They obviously have the intellect, we just have no way of truly communicating with them. If that is what you are shooting for, they're probably your best real world examples.

 

[Phlebas]

I always regard it as a challenge to play up the non-human nature of my PC's (& NPC's). And i try to reward players that do the same (My Shifter always growls when annoyed - sometimes its enough to quieten the entire party....)

Unfortunately, or fortunately, for a DM he can always rely on stereotype - you just need to establish the stereotype based on something alien and keep to it.

Now if your trying to create a truly alien race that you can then portray easily and simply you're always going to be struggling unless you can either find a cultural reference that your players relate to, or you have players that will work with you

Having said that - given the huge breadth of human culture, inuit to aborigine, new yorker to bangaldeshi farmer etc etc, why should non-human races have to be truly alien? Perhaps the most disturbing thing is that they're so similar to humans, but with only one truly alien traits......

 

[ivocaliban]

The problem with designing races (or racial descriptions) under the paradigm of making them not just humans in funny suits, is that the more alien and unfamiliar something becomes, the less suitable it becomes for a pc race.

Bears repeating a few dozen times. The farther you get from something you can understand and identify with the farther you get from something you can convincingly play. Hence the problem with the Inchoroi.

 

[KingCrab]

I think the best example of the human in another skin is the movie "Enemy Mine". Louis Gossett Jr. played a great alien to Dennis Quaid's human, but ultimately the common ground of emotions, needs and survival showed the commonality of the two races rather than the duplicity.

That is a great movie. One I recommend to anyone.

As to the question, I too am bored with the standard races. I've been moving towards the idea of using some of the odder monster types (not everyone of a typically evil race is evil in my games, and even LE creatures can obey the law). I'm thinking it might be interesting to populate villages with some of these creatures alongside the standard races.

I guess I agree about the difficulty so I'm trying to use the idea of race differently since I got nothing for new race ideas.