Most D&D games, and their derivatives, hew closely to Tolkien's ideas and themes (many of which predate Tolkien, but his work is commonly viewed as a starting point for their appearance in fantasy). The standard setup of humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings populate nearly every fantasy world created since, with some notable outliers. A few attempts have been made to break free of this paradigm; Dark Sun radically reinvented the wheel, and Talislanta tried to abandon it completely.
But Dark Sun still had the classic races, morphed into a new iteration, and Talislanta, for all its posturing, still has like 17 character types that anyone would easily identify as an "elf" at a glance. And while many dozens of additional character options, from demon-descended to insectoid to avian have proliferated over the years, home base still seems to be the Tolkien norms.
I'm developing a fantasy setting, and I'm drawing heavily from weird fiction for it - mostly a mixture of C.L. Moore, Robert E Howard, and China Miéville, blended with 1001 Nights and with a dash of Jules Verne for good measure, and I'm wrestling a bit with character options. My goal is a system-agnostic world that nonetheless carries its own ruleset, and obviously I'd like it to be as broadly accessible as possible. I have ideas for plant creatures and mineral creatures and such for player character options, but I worry that prioritizing such non-standard folk will turn off many people - particularly the OSR crowd, despite the fact that my overall approach draws very heavily from OSR games.
What do you think? Are humans sufficient as a baseline character option, surrounded by more off-kilter options, or do you prefer to keep your games within the sphere of Tolkien's shadow? The ongoing popularity of the Forgotten Realms certainly suggests the latter, but my own preferences run much more strongly toward the former.
