D&D 5E How Do You Incorporate D&D Races & Classes Into Campaign Settings?

[MGibster]

When you construct a campaign setting do you give a lot of thought into how the basic races in the PHB fit into the world? For the most part I personally don't give it a lot of thought. The driving philosophy behind world design for me is basically "I'm not going to worry anything I don't think my players are going to care about." That means I don't spend a lot of time on things like politics, identity, religion, history, the economy, etc., etc. because for the most part my players aren't going to care about any of that unless it has a direct impact on an adventure. But lately I've been thinking it'd be a lot more fun to incorporate race and class into the setting itself with the hopes that it may help players engage with it.

I'm not looking to reinvent the wheel or anything so far as class and race go. But I'd like to have things like druidic orders, barbarian groups, etc., etc. actually tied directly into the setting. Does anyone here do that? And let's talk about how races fit into your world. I've got the drow in mine but they're not evil. They're aggressively isolationist known for producing the finest silks in the land but they're not designed to be antagonist. That's what I've got tieflings for. How about you guys?

 

[Jd Smith1]

I focus more on the enemy, than the PCs' races. If a PC wants to be part of a larger group, I have them write up the concept and then I tweak it. However, I've found that my guys are not generally joiners.

To encourage roleplay I focus more on the PC group. Here's what I am doing in my current campaign:

Company Standard | Dark Age | Obsidian Portal

The Brotherhood of the Light uses the DA 174 style bravo company standard. The first 'dagger' in the standard is used to display significant opposition to major

darkage.obsidianportal.com

Evil groups, on the other hand, define a campaign far better IMO. Here's what I'm doing in my current campaign:

The Darkness, The Four, and the Two | Dark Age | Obsidian Portal

The Darkness The Darkness wears many names: it is the Shadow, the One Foretold, the Destroyer of Worlds, the Hunger, the Shuddering One, the One Who Whispers, th

darkage.obsidianportal.com

 

[Chaosmancer]

I did a lot for trying to figure out the various cultures of my races, looking into how they view the world and interact to help give me more content.

For example, I took the Drow and Yuan-Ti and made them "non-evil".

To the Drow I played with the idea that the Elves messed with portal magic and blasted a city with Far Realms energy. The diety soon to be known as Lolth interposed herself in front of the blast, but all the elves were bonded with her shadow.

Then she went crazy, paranoid scizophrenic in every way I could think of. Which led to the Drow becoming more... well, more like the Addams family than anything else. They are odd, potentially dangerous but just as likely to pull harmless pranks as deadly ones, and always victorian era polite.

And the first time one of my players heard "drow" they immediately started telling the entire table how they were all slavers and evil, and there were these books...

sigh

When the players actually interact with the Drow, they thought they were awesome, because it was a society they had never seen, and even though I wasn't able to flesh it out, I was able to fake enough that they had a good time. So, I don't see it as wasted work, but it is incredibly hard to get players to break out of the mindset of what the race is "supposed" to be even though there are tons of different interpretations.




As for what I do, my biggest focus tends to be on Religion (I made every pantheon unique, there are no 'general' gods who all races worship in my games) and one or two big ideas. So, the Dwarves craft. They seek to make the world better and more beautiful by taking the raw materials of the world and forging them into better shapes. The Elves are very militaristic, and are pretty much in constant decline from their glorious empire days. The orcs are incredibly traditionalist, but struggling with growing movements that seek to change them to better adapt to a world that is leaving them behind. Gnomes are masters of technology and research. Halflings are wanderers like the Gypsy/Romani people, Yuan-Ti practice good ritual cannabalism to reempower the gods that saved their people from extinction. ect ect ect.

Essentially, I figure out who they worship, and what the most "X-ish" thing they could do is. From that I can hang details and figure out "okay, if this is true, how would that effect Z?"

 

[Coroc]

When you construct a campaign setting do you give a lot of thought into how the basic races in the PHB fit into the world? For the most part I personally don't give it a lot of thought. The driving philosophy behind world design for me is basically "I'm not going to worry anything I don't think my players are going to care about." That means I don't spend a lot of time on things like politics, identity, religion, history, the economy, etc., etc. because for the most part my players aren't going to care about any of that unless it has a direct impact on an adventure. But lately I've been thinking it'd be a lot more fun to incorporate race and class into the setting itself with the hopes that it may help players engage with it.

I'm not looking to reinvent the wheel or anything so far as class and race go. But I'd like to have things like druidic orders, barbarian groups, etc., etc. actually tied directly into the setting. Does anyone here do that? And let's talk about how races fit into your world. I've got the drow in mine but they're not evil. They're aggressively isolationist known for producing the finest silks in the land but they're not designed to be antagonist. That's what I've got tieflings for. How about you guys?

Yep, I absolutely do. In my greyhawk campaign pc can play humans and halfhumans. So halfelves halforcs tieflings(of devlish ancestry) and gnomes (humans of half height ).

Since I did put the techlevel into renaissance I wanted to have dwarves and elves to be few and secluded NPC only and halflings are more tolkienesqe, basically peaceful farmerfolk not suited to adventure.

The halforcs and halfelves and tieflings are mostly byproducts of the long waging war in my campaign, and I had everyone in the group start out being a refugee from this war. All of these grew up in human society so they are relatively accepted.

On the other hand drow would be considered and treated as monsters, and dragonborn do not exist in my version of greyhawk. My players mostly prefer to play human so I got these in my group and one gnome and one halfelf. So there is that.

Classes are also limited, no sorcerers no barbarians. Although there are barbarian cultures around still, the player would not descend from them. Sorcerers weren't part of the blue box which I took as a baseline.
Paladins only the LG variant (of Heironeous), Clerics of several of the greyhawk pantheon, but according to their race (Kord for HO, Ulaa for gnome e.g.) Druids would be Ohbad Hai, Nature Clerics Beory.

I also do only allow 2e conform race class combos. When it comes to D&D then at least for some of the campaign settings I love archetypes and I loathe diversity , for Eberron I would handle this differently.

 

[Li Shenron]

When you construct a campaign setting do you give a lot of thought into how the basic races in the PHB fit into the world?

In theory, I should design a new campaign setting at least in broad strokes with the purpose of making it more or less unique, different from others we have played in the past. That would certainly include to give at least some thought on which PHB races exist, where they live and how large their populations are, and whether they are any different than the default PHB description.

In practice, I haven't really planned a setting on paper since 3e, and I have instead let the players choose what characters they want to play. After their choices are done, I use them as an opportunity. For instance, nobody chose to play a dragonborn PC? Awesome, I can cut off that goofy race from the fantasy world completely. But they chose to be a High Elf, Wood Elf, Drow and a couple of more non-core elven subraces... well maybe it means the theme of this campaign should be more about the relations between these subraces.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think races are more important to fit in than classes. Classes are not necessarily a thing normal people have - that's a choice for a setting to make. Eberron 3E for example is a firm, loud yes to that, but most settings have classes as more vague, with only a handful as defined parts of the setting.

I used to take a similar attitude to the OP, long ago, but i found it ultimately leads to settings which don't feel as real to the players, or to me, so stakes and engagement aren't quite as high. As such I started considering stuff like how the basic economies of nations worked and connected with those around them, how cultures and religions spread, how D&D races integrated (or didn't) into various cultures, and so on.

It's interesting that the two different philosophies here have been part of RPGs since the 1980s. On the one hand you have stuff like Mystara, where basically every culture stands alone and barely interacts with others. It's almost like a randomly set up board game. Honorable lion people here, nuclear reactor elves there, etc. There's no consideration about interrelations or history or anything and A Wizard pretty much did everything. But in 1989 you see Taladas for D&D, which is completely about interrelationships and culture and even language, with a cool flow-chart showing lingual relationships and how well a character who speaks on language might understand someone speaking another. Religion and culture similarly flow and mix like RL instead of being bound and great attention is paid to how the societies actually function. Even the complexity of gender roles across societies is considered (one culture, for example, views all wizards as female, so male wizards exist but live with and dress like the women, are referred to in that culture with female pronouns and so on). The wonderfully different positions of Half-Elves in different societies are a thing too, and the way some societies are cosmopolitan re D&D races and others xenophobic is very well-handled.

When I started out I thought Taladas was cool but a bit much. Five years later I thought it was much closer to what I aspire to than stuff like Mystara (which I loved a lot of). Most D&D settings exist on a spectrum between these two more extreme outliers. FR is towards the middle. Eberron more up the Taladas end. Greyhawk between Mystara and the FR. Not every DM is going to be interested in that kind of stuff though.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I don't respect the canon at all and I like to create my own mash-up versions.

I alter the lore about the "evil" races because my opinion is all society too selfish to doomed to self-destruction, the groups have to share a common allegiance (religion, tribe, race, fatherland) to survive. Gnolls are dangerous, but if they cause too many troubles then their fate is to suffer a genocide, by good or evil races. In my setting the aasimars aren't too rare, but not very popular precisely because they are too "good", a too tall poppy, causing envy by rivals or discomfort by dishonest/sinner people.

I used the favored souls and psionic ardents for stories with a love-hate relation with clerics because this are like "workers hired indefinitely" or clery officers and those as freelance workers. Some times they are allies because they are follower of the same deity, but they don't trust each other. I have also used binders and vestige pact magic as the "low-class" or almost-outlaw version of spellcasters. Vestiges would try to get more followers, like religious cults, and gods don't like this. Some vestiges are the spirits of former deities in allowed cults, but killed by another power. Some vestiges would be mortal with special powers, like a titanblood giant lord or an ancient dragon aspiring to ascend to divinity.

And the warmages in the beginning of the age of the gunpowder (with firearms like in d20 Past) looking for new tricks to not lose their jobs as mercenaries, for example illusory magic as smoke grenades, or mind-controlling animal swarns, or animating constructs, or using ectoplasm to build walls instantly or using a special variant of teletransportation to put traps like in tower defense videogame (for example Orcs Must Die or Fortnite: Save the World).

 

[Bitbrain]

When I started out I thought Taladas was cool but a bit much. Five years later I thought it was much closer to what I aspire to...
...Eberron more up the Taladas end. Greyhawk between Mystara and the FR. Not every DM is going to be interested in that kind of stuff though.

You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Taladas actually inspired some parts of Eberron. It certainly feels like a sort of proto-Eberron.

You’ve got the Tamire elves (prototype for the Valenar), the Thenoi (not sure if I spelled it right) who seem like a mix of Thrane and Karrnath, and the gnomes who stand guard over the most inhospitable area (kind of like the Ghaash’Kala orcs in the Demon Wastes).

Edited for clarity.

 

[Blue]

To me, one of the most wondrous things about using the Eberron setting is how there are fresh takes on all of the races, and they have their own culture, dynamics and place in the world. It really makes it pop. I've been playing since the 80s and same-old-same-old is boring as heck.

So I alwasy homebrew my setting, and the same for adventures. I often work out new and interesting cultures and then work races into them, avoiding a racial monoculture. I run lots of shades of grey, and in most settings there are no "always evil" races. And even where there are, that doesn't mean that the players can't interact with them. Had a whole military communistic Hobgoblin culture one game that the PCs were (carefully controlled) guests in one of their cities due to being there under a treaty. Very interesting dealing with a generally LE society. (Note: they were communists because it made sense, not because of the "E" in LE.)

A world building series back in ole' TSR-era Dragon Magazine was for everything you build, put in a secret. Even if you never expect it to come out in play. I had one world that had a bunch of different sentient races because it had "thin" planar boundaries (in my own cosmology) and various gods over the millennium had sent their people (for whatever "people", not just PHB races) there in order for them to escape prosecution and genocide. The only exceptions were underdark halflings who were the original inhabitants (and had split as a race to have above ground cousins), and the elves who had multiple demi-plane "Courts" (lots of mini Feywilds) around a king or queen that randoms intersected various material planes for a while.

If you don't think your player will pay attention, part of it is that you need to make it bigger. Turn up the volume on what you are doing like Eberron or Darksun did and make the races really pop.

 

[jasper]

With an industrial wire whip, blend with air until the races are nicely beaten and lots of foam.