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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5887500" data-attributes="member: 4937">A very good question.First of all, this very set of questions struck me about 20 years ago as I was beginning to formalize my homebrew setting.  Why should there be 400 or more sentient races in the world?  My inclination was and is to trim down the number of races considerably.  That however still leaves a lot of things that need to have an origin explained for them.Species in my world can be broken into the following categories:1) Gods: The big gods of the campaign world, direct prodigy of the fruit of the Tree of Life.  There are about a thousand of these.2) Fairies: All the small gods of the campaign world, including fey, genii, and various spirit creatures.  These are all the results of the Tree of Life's pollen fertilizing pretty much everything it touched.  They are contemporaneous with the gods, though usually much less powerful.  A few of the most powerful are classified as gods themselves, but of a different origin.3) Giants: The offspring of the big and little gods, particularly the gods and genii, are the giants.4) The Free Peoples: After the Gods War, the gods signed a treaty and decided to settle their disagreements through proxies.  They wanted to create a servitor race modelled more or less after the fairies in stature and power.   Unfortunately, each of the gods wanted the race to most resemble themselves in nature and inclinations.  To prevent the treaty from collapsing, it was finally agreed that mutliple models would be created, alike in power but differing design according to the gifts that the gods would grant to them.  Each of the six major families of gods offered up a design, which are now known as: goblins, elfs, humans, orine, dwarfs, and idreth.  These six creations are usually named along side the fey races as 'The Free Peoples' because the treaty specified that the jointly created races would be granted the right to choose who they would serve and worship (and indeed, whether they would serve and worship anyone at all).  While, as intended, it is most usual for the free peoples to worship gods from the family responcible for their design, there is a considerable amount of overlap both because the divine families are intermarried and because the free peoples appear to be truly free (indeed, in some respects perhaps far more free than even the gods intended).5) Greater Servitors: There are notable races of powerful creatures that exist primarily on the outer planes.  Most seem to have some sort of divine blood, being descended from various conjoinings of the gods or perhaps are the equivalent of outer planar fairy beings.  6) Lesser Servitors: Not all of the gods are particularly happy to have servants that are free to pack up and leave.  A number of gods have created races patterned after the Free Peoples but which lack the capacity or inclination to serve any other than their creator deity.  These usually exist in fairly small numbers (an exception would be water dwelling beings), and often have some fairly particular purpose - like gaurding the deities most sacred sites or avenging some sort of slight.  Much like the OP's Bullywogs, a some portion of the Lesser Servitors are the descendents of Free Peoples who through some curse they brought upon themselves (or perhaps because they saw slavery as a reward), have lost thier status as free creatures.  However, it would be far far beyond the power of a member of the Free Peoples to deprive another group of Free Peoples of this status.  It would generally require a consensus among the gods themselves.7) Abominations: There are a few creatures that apparantly were created unintentionally as the result of some sort of curse or the gods dabbling in things that are perhaps beyond even them.  The creatures created as a result of Usurl and his sister Varna attacking and injuring and otherwise attempting to gain control of the tree of life are the most obvious of these, but there are also creatures that appear to have been pulled into creation from someplace outside it as a result of the gods perhaps misguided attempts to contact the creator.  These are things that apparantly the creator had decided to not create, or which perhaps exist in other creations.   Pretty much everything capable of technology falls into one of those categories.  Players are generally only allowed to play characters that are members of the race of Free Peoples (including certain fey types).   Some things have rather bizarre origin stories compared to the real world.  Dinosaurs for example aren't living fossils, but survivors from a now destroyed societies magical genetic engineering.  They were orginally bred as war beasts and beasts of burden, and thus have roughly the same linage as things like Owlbears.  Whales on the other hand are the somewhat failed results of lord of the Shark spirits and the lord of the Elephant spirits attempts to produce a joint ruler over all of the animal kingdom.   Griffins are the more successful results of the lord of Lion spirits and the lord of Eagle spirits attempts to do the same thing.</blockquote>

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