Question on fantasy races

[Aeolius]

Reskinning or modifying racial cultures is the easier way to go. A good example imho is the Eberron setting or Dark Sun. They use the standard races, but they're very distinct from the vanilla versions.

That was the route I went as well, as there are no standard races available for PC use in my game. I looked to existing creatures and modified stock monsters for my inspiration: Devising Undersea Races

 

[Doc_Klueless]

All of the below is IMO. It reflects how I like to play; not one-true-wayism.

The first is about the existance of varying races in fantasy settings. Do you feel that various races are needed to make a complete fantasy setting?

No. Absolutely not. The proliferation of fantasy races within most settings is very off putting for me. Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Half-elf, Half-orc, Tiefling, Dragonborn, Eladrin, etc. are all very cool races, but too much is too much.

Or are humans with various culture enough to make a fun fantasy realm?

Definitely. Look at Thieves World/Sanctuary: Almost completely human; almost completely awesome. I like it best when the non-humans are mythical and exceedingly rare. That way when they do pop up, it's engaging, mysterious and fantastic.

The second is this. While I was thinking about creating my own campaign world, I started thinking about elves and dwarves - and I see them as the cookie-cutter fantasy races. Used almost ad-nauseum. Does anyone else agree?

Yes.

I am juggling with the idea of creating new races.

Here is the last section. If I do decide on making new fantasy races for my campaign world, does anyone have any tips, resources, or suggestions about creating new races that aren't too outlandish and could believably exist in a fantasy realm?

Don't do furries. Catmen, dogmen, lizardmen... well, maybe do the last one! I likes lizardmen. Instead, do races that are tied to the world, much like RuneQuests: Elves are living plants, etc. That's my tip for now.

Now, on to read the rest of the thread! Yippee!

 

[jsears2002]

Thank you for adding your thoughts. What I am noticing is that this question is one of great debate or personal opinion amongst fantasy gamers and fans. While I like the idea of having mythic races be just that - and to have their appearance be something mythical and mysterious, I myself love playing dwarves and elves as well.

The more I read, the more I have to think deep about this topic. This is a great board. I am so glad I posted the question here!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Glad to help!

One thing you could do to help give your process some direction is to send out an email to your game group asking them the idle question of what they consider to be their favorite fantasy/SF/Horror races- fiction or RPG- to be.

You might find someone likes the Atevi from the Foreigner series of novels, and someone else might be a big fan of Melniboneans, while another one is just gaga for Giff.

And knowing THAT may give you an idea for a race or culture for your campaign...or an area to avoid. Someone who is nuts for Elfquest style elves may not like your spin on them if you try to do a version of them for your game and you're not similarly deeply familiar with them.

 

[Set]

The first is about the existance of varying races in fantasy settings. Do you feel that various races are needed to make a complete fantasy setting? Or are humans with various culture enough to make a fun fantasy realm?

Conan, Fafhrd, etc. seemed to get along just fine in fantasy worlds with no elves, dwarves, gnomes, hobbits, orcs, etc. It's certainly not required, and only helps to highlight the significant differences between various human cultures if you go the route of getting rid of the vast majority of humanoid races.

The second is this. While I was thinking about creating my own campaign world, I started thinking about elves and dwarves - and I see them as the cookie-cutter fantasy races. Used almost ad-nauseum. Does anyone else agree? I am juggling with the idea of creating new races.

D&D portrayals of elves and gnomes and dwarves tend to turn them more or less into the ethnicities that the setting is painting in a broad brush anyway. Elves turn into some combination of native americans (or, more accurately, horrible Disney-fied caricatures of the 'magical savage') and celtic people, while Dwarves have scottish and / or german flavors.

If you want to downplay those 'humans with bumpy noses' versions of elves and dwarves, feel free to make them different, by diving back into myth and folklore. Dwarves are surly twisted men (and powerful magicians!) who live under the ground, and are easily recognized because they have the feet of crows. Elves are whimsical and dangerous fey men who live 'under the hill' and tend to slaughter cattle of neighboring humans who encroach too closely upon their lands. Those captured by elves disappear, sometimes to return decades later, aged not a day, and with no memory of their time among the 'fair folk.' You don't have to go out of your way to come up with something original or freaky (like elves from space or elves as plants, or dwarves carved from stone), just look up some folklore and turn the elves into otherworldly tricksters and dwarves into mishappen folk descended from carrion-eaters that fed upon the bodies of fallen gods beneath the earth and so 'stole' the intelligence of man, and magical powers besides.

If I do decide on making new fantasy races for my campaign world, does anyone have any tips, resources, or suggestions about creating new races that aren't too outlandish and could believably exist in a fantasy realm?

If you look at various genre fiction, you'll see some tropes that get used a lot. There's often a brutal savage proud (and sometimes honorable) warrior-race. Sometimes they are orcs, other times hobgoblins, occasionally klingons, kzinti or even Krynnish Minotaurs. There's often a higher-than-thou partially-ascended race, often with a culture that's much older and more advanced than mankind, and just as often, inexplicably held back, preventing them from dominating the world. Sometimes this elder race will be elves, other times Vulcans, occasionally Minbari. There's quite often a race that was brought up 'too quickly' and gained technology or magic or whatever far more advanced than their culture was ready to deal with, resulting in them suffering all sorts of cultural upheavel and running around showing off impressive stunts that they never really learned how to develop on their own, having been lifted on the shoulders of giants 'before they were ready.' Some interpretations of klingons or ferengi go this route, at other times the role is filled by men, who received guidance in magic from the elves, and then turned around and did awful things with it, or the narn, enslaved by superior centauri overlords, and now using nearly equivalent technology that their own people might not have developed for centuries, if not millenia.

Figure out what niches you want to fill, socially speaking, and *then* think about whether or not you want exotic races, such as plant people or shapeshifting people or whatever.

 

[Ariosto]

Howard's Conan strode a Hyborean Age in which the serpent folk were either extinct or so scarce and reclusive as to be unknown. He encountered a number of isolated aliens, most often individuals apparently unique on Earth -- but there were no nonhumans rubbing shoulders with men in the street or holding frontiers on the map.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser met 'ghouls', 'gnomes', intelligent rats, the Sea King's folk, the aliens of the Bazaar of the Bizarre, sundry gods, and of course their own wizardly patrons.

What's notable in D&D is how common and 'naturalized' nonhumans typically are, how little they are really unearthly. The Dwarves and Elves seem commoner even than those of Tolkien's fiction, and those in turn are not so removed as their prototypes in Norse myth.

With Tolkien at least, I think the intent was to emphasize that he was dealing in a pre-mythical world; I see the same in Howard's use of names from myth and ancient history. Whatever the case, though, that is not necessarily the effect on readers -- especially readers under the influence of D&D.

For that matter, Gygax and crew may not have had quite an "everything but the kitchen sink" mash-up in mind as the usual state of affairs. Quite accurately or not, the first supplement was presented as offering material from Gary's campaign and the second from Dave's -- a model of choosing what to include, what to change, and what to add from one's own imagination. In any case, all the classes and creatures and features were more clearly optional in that presentation.

The AD&D books mixed most of that material pretty indiscriminately together, along with stuff from magazines and yet more new additions.

I would offer that the frequency of this or that type among player-characters need not reflect demographics in the wider world. If, say, one PC out of 10 happens to be an elf, that does not mean there must be a hundred elves in a village with a population of a thousand. The appearance of an elf might in most places be unprecedented in living memory.

 

[Ariosto]

I think one problem is that people so often come across the stuff of fantastic tales when it has already been uprooted and laid on a slab.

Dwarves and Elves and so on did not appear in D&D as "standard fantasy". Arneson and Gygax, Kuntz and Ward and Moldvay, had read not only Tolkien but also (among them) Poul Anderson, and Dunsany, and deCamp and Pratt, and Mallory, and T.H. White, and the Brothers Grimm, probably E. Nesbit and possibly Spenser; at least one (Moldvay) took an interest in the visionary poetry of William Blake.

They had read at least a bit of Greek myths and Scandinavian sagas, Celtic hero-cycles and Germanic and Slavic fairy tales, the Kalevala and the Thousand Nights and a Night.

On top of that were countless more modern stories of fantastic adventure in hidden reaches of the world or on distant planets.

There simply was no such thing as "standard fantasy" in the early 1970s. There was not even such a clear division between fantasy and science fiction as some D&Ders cleave to today. The very same works by such writers as Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley were marketed first under one 'genre' label and then under the other.

I do not mean to suggest that their reading was exhaustive or scholarly, or that it was dominated by hoary classics.

I do mean to suggest that what they brought to the game was what already fueled their imaginations, what had deep resonance because it had struck a chord in the first place, what was significant because there were meanings for it to signify.

To take up materials with which one has no such relationship, out of some notion of an Official Fantasyland established by Committee, does not seem to me at all what the pioneers of D&D meant to encourage. A fantasist's work of world-building is not only easier but better for being built of whatever lives and breathes in his or her own dreams, whatever lurks and stalks in his or her own nightmares.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

A fantasist's work of world-building is not only easier but better for being built of whatever lives and breathes in his or her own dreams, whatever lurks and stalks in his or her own nightmares.

Now that's a good point.

 

[jsears2002]

What's notable in D&D is how common and 'naturalized' nonhumans typically are, how little they are really unearthly.

From my new understanding, this means that humans could fill the roles that the nonhumans do in D&D without too much trouble. It's the roles that are played in the world that are important.

 

[Dausuul]

I've never thought of it in quite that light. That is actually quite a useful chart to compare to, even if it is completely self-made. Could you better define #2?

White Wolf's World of Darkness setting is the poster child for #2. (Well, eventually they started adding faeries and demons and it began drifting into #3, but the original conception was solidly in the #2 camp.) Werewolves, vampires, and mages aren't bog-standard humans by any means, but they all come from human stock, they all have a fundamentally human viewpoint - in the case of vampires, drifting too far from that viewpoint turns you into an NPC - and they can all blend in reasonably well with human society.

The core premise of #2 is that all player characters are, deep down, human beings. Humans with a twist, maybe, but still humans, with essentially compatible perspectives. I find it a nice compromise between the desire to play fantastic races and the desire to create a cohesive world.

Also, would your rating change if the elves and dwarves were changed into human naturalists and short humans?

I... guess? I'm not entirely sure what you have in mind there.

What's notable in D&D is how common and 'naturalized' nonhumans typically are, how little they are really unearthly. The Dwarves and Elves seem commoner even than those of Tolkien's fiction, and those in turn are not so removed as their prototypes in Norse myth.

This is hard to avoid when you make those races available as player characters. For that to work, not only do you have to make elves and dwarves and halflings comprehensible for human players; you also have to make them compatible with one another, so that you can have a party containing an elf, a dwarf, and a halfling without the elf drifting off into the forest to write poetry for twenty years, the dwarf refusing to venture aboveground for any reason, and the halfling giving up the adventuring life to go home and imitate 19th-century rural English gentry.

Hence my liking for #2, above, which neatly sidesteps the issue. Although it might be interesting to make a single-race campaign where the single race is not humans... but even then, you're depending on your players' ability to get into the mindset of a nonhuman race, and it only takes one player to yank everyone out of that mindset by acting like a human in a funny suit.