You have hit on one of the wonderful things about worldbuilding when it comes to adding new races. The mechanics evoke an idea, which inspires you when it comes time to find a place for the race in society. Most often real world events help feed that concept. And before you know it, you have this inspired amalgam of ideas that brings the concept into fresh territory.
One of my major sources of inspiration are the old "Suppressed Transmission" articles by Kenneth Hite - that guy is able to find connections and inspiration in
anything. I aspire to do the same, although I still have a long way to go...
The real world is also a major source of inspiration for me. I mean, it worked brilliantly for Warhammer Fantasy - so I figured I might as well try the same.
Oh, and since we are on the topic, I'd like to use this opportunity to plug the
Arcana Wiki again, which is dedicated to finding gaming inspiration from Real World material. I used quite a few things I discovered while doing research for this wiki for Urbis as well...
This is one of the reasons I like being presented with new races. It challenges me to find a place for these races in my world. Not necessarily "shoehorning", but finding a logical place for the race to dwell and to integrate its back story with my homebrew without retconning. The same goes for classes and power sources.
I experienced this strongly with the eladrin when I tried to work them into the setting. Not only did I come up with
a good explanation for their existence, but I also ended up making two of the
elven kingdoms of Urbis a lot more interesting than they were previously...
Once again, great stuff. I find Urbis to be of constant inspiration. Thanks for providing your ideas in the public forum.
No problem. I always like to plug my stuff.
I'm curious. Any thoughts on adding PHB2 races to your setting? Do you have plans to do that?
That's a tricky topic. I recently decided to move Urbis to a more "system-neutral" description, as I'm not sure what the GSL will cover once I start selling Urbis as a product - in that situation, the Urbis Wiki probably doesn't count as a "fan site" any more.
So now I'm trying to stay away from anything that's
too easily identifiable as D&D Product IP. The dragonborn (which I've renamed
dragonkin) are already a fairly borderline case, and I'm trying to avoid adding more.
Gnomes are already a part of the setting. Half-orcs are sufficiently "public domain" that adding them shouldn't be a problem, and I actually have a writeup of them dating back to D&D3.X lying around somewhere - I just need to upload it.
I have some vague ideas of a race roughly analogous to the Devas - which I intend to call "Nephilim" - but I need to give them some further thoughts before writing them up. Goliaths and shifters are probably too D&D-specific, and I'll likely not include them.