D&D 5E Thought exercise: Faerun as Human Only

[Tales and Chronicles]

For my part, I prefer Faerun with its wondrous variety of peoples. That being said, were I to make Faerun human-only, I would say that the dwarves and elves and whatnot were a thing once, but have disappeared for one reason or another. The setting is already filled with ruins and remnants of their ancient civilizations.

That's also my idea. The elves would have fled to the Feywild and be more Eladrins now. The dwarves would all be duergars and derros now, having been forgotten by their gods after being enslaved by the mind flayers and other slimy stuff. Gnomes disappeared from being ''forgotten too much'', sadly most people dont even remember that they once existed.

Anyway, its just a weird thought I had.

Next step: What would be the Realms if all human nations were replaced my non-human nations!

Cormyr, nation of Elves Dragon-slayer, with the Dalelands = the Shire?
Eltugard, home of the Hellriders, an army of Centaur Paladins?
Waterdeep, cosmopolitan cities of 1000 races? (not much change there)
Icewind Dale, halfling and gnomish frontiers?
Chult, tropical paradise, home to albino dwarves, tabaxi and sentient undeads?

 

[Dr_Phil_Good]

The Forgotten Realms do much with the other races, and if have the opinion that only humans affect the lore then perhaps your reading is limited.

Almost every race has had a huge hand in shaping the world as we know it, and all have contributed notably in some way. The most popular book series out of the FR is literally about a drow elf changing the world's perception of the drow and setting the stage for his entire race to have a chance to redeem themselves.

The interaction between races is purely on the DM, because lore provides us with an abundance of info on the various racial interactions, and what isn't spelled out precisely we can use context to make an educated guess. Spoilers, there's far more racism in the FRs than people realize. We just don't always to to that extent because its not always relevant or fun.

In short, you have a lot of reading up to do friend. To suggest the removal of all non human races in the Forgotten Realms is to suggest you do not understand on a fundamental level what the Forgotten Realms actually is.

I say none of this out of anger or to chide you. You asked a question, I answered. Much like yourself, I fully admit I could be wrong here.

 

[cbwjm]

Oh, and I've always this article about reorganizing the dieties in FR into more recognizable religious groups of related dieties, it would mix nicely with a human-centric FR without all of the other racial pantheons.

Organized Faiths and Silent Gods: Redesigning Religion in Forgotten Realms - Tribality

This week we have a guest post from Nitai Poddar that looks at religion in the Forgotten Realms and offers a variation where faiths coalesced and organized into a system of religions, each with its own dogma, values and philosophy. Forgotten Realms is the original homebrew setting, a patchwork...

www.tribality.com

Cool article, it's given me some ideas for my own setting. Thanks for sharing

 

[cbwjm]

I'd totally be into a game set in FR where the only race is human. It should be fairly easy to make changes. The old elven kingdom of Cormanther was simply another human kingdom filled with magic that fell to ruin, you don't even have to change the reason, I believe it was demons that organised an army to invade, rather than beastmen, they organised some human tribes to invade it.

If you still want drow, then that might be a little harder to explain, but they could easily be humans driven underground using magic and turning to worship of the spider queen for survival. The custom lineage might actually suit them since it can give them darkvision without going full elf.

The orcs vs dwarves just becomes a human kingdom trying to resist the encroachment of migrating mountain tribes led by a mighty chieftain who has united them.

Most of the kingdoms are human kingdoms anyway so i think this would totally work, it would still be recognisable as the realms.

 

[Bacon Bits]

So, what do you think? Are the classic fantasy races such a must for the FRs?

No, not at all. Fantasy races are humans with rubber ears and plastic noses.

The sole purpose of fantasy races is to make certain cultures especially different. To make them more unusual. It makes it easier to hand wave away why dwarf kingdoms live and work entirely underground or why elven and orc kingdoms live in natural forests when we say, "Oh, they're not the same species." But in reality, they're just humans that believe different things. That's why the cultures for other races are often monolithic. The purpose of them being another race is to mark their culture as inseparably, visibly distinct. What good would that be if appearance didn't mean anything? That's why goblins and hobgoblins and bugbears all act wildly differently. Not because they're not closely related to each other, but because they look different so they must have different cultures.

Think about Tolkien's elves of Mirkwood and those of Lothlorien. But merely being ethnically different just isn't enough. How often have we seen that because they live in different places and in different ways that they must be racially different? Greyhawk's high elves and grey elves. FR's sun and moon elves. They must look different or be visually distinct because the purpose of a fantasy race is to visually identify an ethnicity. A culture. Not a species. This is like saying you've got Irish and English and Scottish people in your game, and they must look different. So different that it's visibly apparent that all English are English and all Irish are Irish and so on. It's weird.

In reality, all fantasy civilizations are human, because we, the players, designers, authors, and developers, are human ourselves and we cannot invent a non-human civilization of sapient creatures. We've never identified one, have no examples of one, and can only create one based on what we already know. That's why we almost always make other sapient races humanoid. We don't know how to invent a culture and body for a non-human sapient creature. How could we?

So, no, eliminating fantasy races doesn't fundamentally change FR at all, because fantasy races are just humans in disguise.

Edit: Spelling