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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 9013644" data-attributes="member: 6750908">My Shroompunk setting doesn't use "traditional" fantasy races at all-- out of the PHB races, only Humans are present, though Humans have subraces you might recognize: Tiefling, Aasimar, Ifrit, Oread, Fetchling, and so on...In the Galactic Empire of Sagas of the Cosmic Rangers, "elf" refers to a type of extradimensional beings who've been slowly immigration to realspace over the last millennium or so. They're a little taller than humans at the shoulder, before their long necks and elongated, conical skulls. Their skin ranges from very pale white-grey with hints of lavender to deep eggplant purple, their hair is either silvery white or a variety of muted pastels, and their eyes are solid, slightly luminescent jewel tones. Elves are thin and graceful and supernaturally glamorous. Elves are biologically immortal, and seemingly soulless: they cannot effectively be cloned, they're similarly incapable of acts of prayer, and they're immune to many magical effects that harm or influence the soul. Elves appear compeltely unfazed-- somewhere between matter-of-fact and flippant-- about the fact that "biologically immortal" means they will eventually die of one misadventure or another, and while not generally fearless exhibit no fear whatsoever of death.While the typical elven reaction to sincere religious devotion-- elves cheerfully sing hymns for the Church and leave offerings at roadside shrines-- is pained revulsion, some elves actually grew envious of the mortal races' capacity to commune with the divine and went about painfully modifying their own brains and grafting themselves with artificial souls to experience it for themselves. The normally live-and-let-live elves considered this a bridge too far and sought to exterminate this offshoot.The ones they captured, however, were given a fate worse than death: they were transmuted into orcs. Their elegant, smooth skulls grew gnarled ridges; their graceful ears merged into the sides of their heads; their senusous mouths split into four independent venomous mandibles. (Think modern Klingon plus the Predator plus wolf spider.) These orcs were programmed to seek out and destroy their former comrades... but elven brains are plastic, and eventually this programming simply wore off and orcs started plying the spacelanes in whatever capacities they could.Many eventually settled down, building communities alongside humans and dwarves. The elves, realizing their error, launched a crusade to destroy these "orcish homeworlds" before their experiment could spiral out of control. Hundreds of planets burned, the elves lost any chance that they might be recognized as members of the Imperium for at least another millennium, and the orcs are now a nomadic spacefaring people by choice.I'm not doing mixed heritages in either Shroompunk or Sagas of the Cosmic Rangers because it just doesn't make sense with ancestries that so little resemble humans or each other. Until recently, I'd held the concept in some distaste and wanted to see it fall out of favor in fantasy game design... but some video essays on the subject have complicated my opinions, to say the least.</blockquote>

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