Po' Human Trash

[neoweasel]

Seriously, the concept of degenerate elves is an interesting one. Suppose you have a forest of "elves" which the normal elves shun and want nothing to do with. They have been corrupted by contact with humans, supposedly, and now are stupid and slovenly and weak.

Then you require the PCs to enter this elven ghetto in order to retrieve something - a person, information, whatever. Better yet, require them to redeem the elves in some way.

There are a lot of plot hooks here. Suppose the whole forest is an experiment by some God to see if elves can be degenerated into something feral, and the accusations of human/elven inbreeding are just malicious rumors? Suppose that these are really gray elves, cursed? Lots of fun possibilities here.

An addition to this, which I touched on above, is to make them speak a slightly different language. The language should be clearly BASED on elvish, but different enough to make for serious problems with communication. Make your Bards (and those with prepared Tongues spells) shine.

Then again, I play a character who speaks somewhere around 11 languages at 5th level. I LIKE it when things like that get me into the spotlight.

 

[alsih2o]

in my homebrew there is a serious social stratification between 2 "races" of humans and their "mixed breed".

the native churkey are regarded as being worth less than the non-native Maisseners. this has led to a large band of loosely organized rebel churkey massing in a large swampy area under a druid who wishes revolution.

 

[Breakstone]

Well, I suppose each time the characters encounter different towns and cultures of different races, I play the races a bit differently. So I suppose I've subconsciously created different social levels of races. Now it would be interesting to have one town of gnomes say something bad about another town, calling them bad names in Gnome and all that...

Wow, there are a lot of plot hooks in conflicts between cultures of the same race.