BiggusGeekus@Work
Community Supporter
Planescape.
You could be a modron. The role-playing opportunities of being a walking cube are endless.
You could be a modron. The role-playing opportunities of being a walking cube are endless.
I'm sick to death of dwarves, elves, halflings, and gnomes!
- Thread starter Geoffrey
- Start date
For my homebrew I created some very heavily altered races, in an effort to make them more alien.
Elves, The Star People, are extremely tall and thin and emaciated and have completely inhuman skin tones and eye colors, etc. They approach looking like the Genosians (sp?) from Episode II or the android-aliens from AI.
My dwarf correlate would more quickly be recognized as dwarves than elves would elves, but The Mountain People are actually composed of rock, have only one gender, etc.
My orcs are basically just orcs, although the females are wildly divergent (tiny and frail), though I did give them extensive cultural reworking (making them more like Mongolian hordes).
The biggest rewrite would be my "halflings", which are rather more like faeries of the woods than anything vaguely hobbitish or even gnomish.
I'll agree with you, though, I'd love to see a game world set up with completely divergent races instead of heavily modified ones.
To a certain extent, though, I think any fantasy d20 publishers are going to have to contend with the kind of thinking that made paladins and rangers a core class and kept magic missile and shield at 1st level: D&D fan stubbornness.
Elves, The Star People, are extremely tall and thin and emaciated and have completely inhuman skin tones and eye colors, etc. They approach looking like the Genosians (sp?) from Episode II or the android-aliens from AI.
My dwarf correlate would more quickly be recognized as dwarves than elves would elves, but The Mountain People are actually composed of rock, have only one gender, etc.
My orcs are basically just orcs, although the females are wildly divergent (tiny and frail), though I did give them extensive cultural reworking (making them more like Mongolian hordes).
The biggest rewrite would be my "halflings", which are rather more like faeries of the woods than anything vaguely hobbitish or even gnomish.
I'll agree with you, though, I'd love to see a game world set up with completely divergent races instead of heavily modified ones.
To a certain extent, though, I think any fantasy d20 publishers are going to have to contend with the kind of thinking that made paladins and rangers a core class and kept magic missile and shield at 1st level: D&D fan stubbornness.
Dragongirl
First Post
LostSoul said:
WOTC is doing that anyway. Gnomes and Halflings lost much of their individual characteristics in 3E, just short humans now. And the poor elves have been undergroing a shorter lifespan since 2E.
KnowTheToe
First Post
I have this same problem, but when creating new races you lose the familiarity that most players/readers have. Every knows what an elf is, but if I create a Dwelvinic in my home brew I have to create physical attributes, culture, personalities etc, and that is the easy part.
The hard part is creating a passion in your players about a new race they have no experience with. It is much more difficult to do than you think. Because of literature many gamers already have a passion for elves, dwarves ......
The hard part is creating a passion in your players about a new race they have no experience with. It is much more difficult to do than you think. Because of literature many gamers already have a passion for elves, dwarves ......
King_Stannis
Explorer
i appreciate the original sentiments. i, too, am getting tired of lifting out twinky elves as town constables in printed material. personally, i really, really downplay nonhuman races in my campaigns. it would be nice to see a line of products break tradition and use all humans. D20 Conan, perhaps? D20 Lankhmar?
Olgar Shiverstone
Legend
Harn?
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