D&D General So what colour are your dwarfs and elfs?

[doctorbadwolf]

So I was reading up on the green children of Woolpit, UK who were found in the town in the 12th Century. They were (apparently) human but green skinned, spoke a strange language and said they came from St Martins Land. Some modern speculation has suggested the story was a garbled retelling of a real event with the children suffering from chlorosis (green skin anemia) and that lead me to investigating other skin colour variations/defects like the blue skinned Fugate family of Kentucky (1820s)

Anyway with all the recent threads on race/ethnicity and colour I got thinking on how Races are depcited in games. SO when you think of dwarves and Elfs how do you see them?

DO you see them as having skin tones of Europe or do they run the gamut of human types (eg would a dwarf being described as Black skinned fit your expectations?).
DO you allow for any skin and hair variation - Green-skinned humans, Blue skinned elves, tan skinned humans with purple hair?

Humans; mostly as RL

Elves; human-tones or shades of blueish grey, sometimes green tinged.

Rock Gnomes; Browns and greys mostly, with hair in various shades of white, grey, orange, red, yellow, and more rarely blue or green, or even jet or obsidian black. Basically, colors of stone.

Forest Gnomes; bark colors, with hair in leaf tones.

All gnomes have eyes like precious gems or crystals.

Dwarves: Dark, usually brown or grayish, rarely pale with yellow undertones.

Halflings; usually darker human tones, very rarely “white” tones, but skin hair and eyes similar to Indigenous and Asian peoples is also common.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I like my dwarves the way I like my coffee.

Spoiler

Rich.

Why, what did you think I was going to say?

 

[Fenris-77]

I like the Skittles approach. Players can go with whatever skin tone they want. I get a lot of green and blue elves, and a lot of grey dwarves, or orangey-flamey. Given the option I'd go with a non-realistic skin tone for a human character for sure. I've played more than one albino character just to get around the "use the skin tones in the book" rules in some campaigns (and Elric, I'll admit).

 

[Fenris-77]

I like my dwarves the way I like my coffee.

Spoiler

Rich.

Why, what did you think I was going to say?

Old and burnt was where I thought you were going...

 

[Tonguez]

Old and burnt was where I thought you were going...

That works, ground down into powder and plunged into boiling water is also an option

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Humans; mostly as RL

Elves; human-tones or shades of blueish grey, sometimes green tinged.

Rock Gnomes; Browns and greys mostly, with hair in various shades of white, grey, orange, red, yellow, and more rarely blue or green, or even jet or obsidian black. Basically, colors of stone.

Forest Gnomes; bark colors, with hair in leaf tones.

All gnomes have eyes like precious gems or crystals.

Dwarves: Dark, usually brown or grayish, rarely pale with yellow undertones.

Halflings; usually darker human tones, very rarely “white” tones, but skin hair and eyes similar to Indigenous and Asian peoples is also common.

OH!

Goliaths: Have striations of different colors, like sheer cliff face where many layers of sediment have created a multi-hued effect. Often this just makes then bi-colored in shades of grey and brown, but many have thin distinct striations of orange or yellow or red.

Orcs tend toward greens and browns and greys, and like in Wildemount are often two-toned.

 

[Li Shenron]

So I was reading up on the green children of Woolpit, UK who were found in the town in the 12th Century. They were (apparently) human but green skinned, spoke a strange language and said they came from St Martins Land. Some modern speculation has suggested the story was a garbled retelling of a real event with the children suffering from chlorosis (green skin anemia) and that lead me to investigating over skin colour variations/defects like the blue skinned Fugate family of Kentucky (1820s)

Anyway with all the recent threads on race/ethnicity and colour I got thinking on how Races are depcited in games. SO when you think of dwarves and Elfs how do you see them?

DO you see them as having skin tones of Europe or do they run the gamut of human types (eg would a dwarf being described as Black skinned fit your expectations?).
DO you allow for any skin and hair variation - Green-skinned humans, Blue skinned elves, tan skinned humans with purple hair?

Now that you made me think about it, I don't think I ever mentioned a default colour for demihuman races.

I also don't usually even mention the skin colour of indivuduals... I typically just say "you enter the tavern and you see an elf in robes and a dwarf in armor". Maybe my unconscious bias is making them white by default. Or maybe I just don't care, just like I usually don't care for the sexual orientation of the NPCs.

I do describe colors for creatures that are far from humans, such as centaurs and minotaurs, or lizardfolk and yuan-ti, and I use different colours.

 

[Zardnaar]

Generally similar to real life climate. Last game was Egyptian themed so default vwas brown and elves so rare as to not exist.

 

[delericho]

Whatever their players choose.

If I ever write an "official history" of my setting that may change, but I'm trying not to get locked down. If nothing else, I might have a good idea one of these days...

 

[DammitVictor]

I pretty much just default to European skin tones 99% of the time because when I'm thinking about it and when I'm doing something about it don't really overlap much. I should put more effort into this.

I usually have European humans and East Asian humans in my settings, and sometimes I remember to include African and South Asian and American humans. I'm more likely to do this when I'm deliberately doing this, like in Galactic Dragons. I posted recently about human ethnicity in Shroompunk, which runs naturally on a broader spectrum than Earth and includes more variety in undertones. And also more unusual features that would normally be associated with planetouched in standard D&D.

I'm more likely to do Skittles with hair than skin, and more likely with elves than anything else; in Shroompunk, without elves, goblins pick one ROYGBIV color for their skin and another for their eyes. In Galactic Dragons, gnomes have pale white-grey skin-- like fraal-- with pastel-colored hair.