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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Dallman" data-source="post: 8336738" data-attributes="member: 6999616">Would you settle for "quite a lot of it does?" Because I, and several others who started FRPing early on, found a different kind of setting emerged from the wide variety of sapient species and non-sapient monsters that D&D presents, if you try to rationalise it at all. It's completely implausible that they all evolved in the same world. That can be tossed out to start with. So there needs to be a different explanation. Those fall into two families:Creation: somebody deliberately created all these species. The best-developed version of this that I've seen has the primal inhabitants of the world creating species for particular tasks. Dwarves were created to make material things, elves to make art, trolls that can eat anything as garbage disposal units, and so on. Gnomes were a variety of dwarf that tasted nicer to the dragons who made these species; giants were for earthmoving or war and humans and orcs both seem to have been made as fast-breeding species suitable for war, by different factions that had slightly different ideas about ideal soldiers. Obviously, this kind of large idea influences just about everything in the setting, and makes it seem weird to present-day gamers. That's OK, because the chap who created it did so long before TSR published any settings, and was never interested in running those worlds. Refugees: by some means or other, groups of people have been able to travel between the many, many worlds of the multiverse. The setting of the game is a world where many different groups have arrived. They have influenced each other, of course, but all of them have wanted to maintain their own cultures. This is my preferred method, and it discards the concept of "intrinsically evil races" completely. Different species have different cultures, but they're all workable cultures, which allow for a functioning society. They may seem strange, crude, over-refined, violent, or over-repressive to different species, but they can all work, and adapt to having contact with other societies. I've seen a half-orc paladin played, and yes, he was a genuine paladin, although quite a few of the people he met didn't believe it at first. Again, this approach is completely incompatible with many published settings, and this is just fine with the people who run and play these homebrew settings.</blockquote>

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