D&D 5E (2014) Real world shorthand for D&D races

[Riley37]

Ever played in the Sea Trek setting? It's an archipelago; much of the adventuring happens either traveling between islands, or upon arriving at a never-before-visited island.

The main nonhuman races:
- the mystical, peaceful-unless-provoked, pointy-eared Vulcelves, allies of the Human Federation
- their close kin and mortal enemies, the militaristic, cunning, and equally pointy-eared Drowmulans
- the fierce, aggressive, less-intellectual Klingork Empire
- the small, cowardly, clever Ferengkobolds
- the green-skinned hotties

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

For the reasons above and to provide variety...plus, it isn't middle earth so I feel no need to follow Tolkien really.

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

One thing I have done a little is give races universal accents regardless of where they actually live. I have not really gone beyond that, though.

Drow - French - from Christopher Perkins
Dwarves - Scottish - from countless
Tieflings - Russian - the Tiefling in our campaign is Razputtin, and we ran with it.
Halfling - Yorkshire - although I cannot really fake it all that well.
Gnolls - nothing in particular, but lots of growling
Dragonborn - only one we have is the PC.
Elves - Oxford English
Humans - "American" English

If your Dwarves are Welsh, maybe the Duergar could be Scottish?

I'm going with German for duergar.

 

[fjw70]

My non-human NPCs don't correlate to real world ethnicities. I don't really use accents in-game.

 

[JWO]

My current campaign is set in Calimshan so I really ought to be doing Arabic accents for most of my NPCs but I'm not really comfortable with that so I just let my players use their imaginations.
I have vaguely Middle Eastern themed versions of most of the races that I'm working on, mainly just because I'm pretty bored of how all non-human humanoids seem to be portrayed as ethnically white about 90% of the time.

 

[Mallus]

OK. So my group has done this in our various homebrew settings. But under a very specific context - to critique & take the piss out of racism in fantasy fiction and, also, general society. Our particular (and peculiar) gaming style leans heavily on both satire and parody.

So our 3e campaign setting featured the Germanic/Hawaiian "Polynietzschians" (or "Polyneecheeans") who were actually more like Polynesian Vikings. They worshiped "Tiki-Ishii" a volcano god which was also their home island (which exploded).

They venerated "Nee Chee", a philosopher-king who espoused a sort of brown ubermensch ideal and led them in the early years of their diaspora. The Polys sailed the high seas in catamarans raiding ports & stealing blonde women. They're based on, well, me. I'd never encountered an unflattering fantasy analogue of my specific heritage, so I made one! In the long history of awful puns in our games, this is the best/worst.

(okay, so the Polynietzschians are a culture and not a race, but I'm still proud/amused by them)

Sometime during our 4e campaign, it was decided that Tieflings, were, in fact, Jewish. Or, rather, we made Tieflings a parody of antisemitic stereotypes a la Sascha Baron Cohen's Borat. Yes, the person responsible for all this was Jewish. He also deserves credit --or blame-- for the Infernal God of Money, Source of All Evil, the G-LD. As well as credit/blame for using Hebrew to represent Infernal, and all the Tielfing names which were all common Hebrew words.