NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 7860105" data-attributes="member: 6801228">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...sighWhen 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?"</blockquote>

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