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Message: <blockquote data-quote="InVinoVeritas" data-source="post: 3194730" data-attributes="member: 41485">Hey, sometimes, the standard-fantasy influences sparks the innovation.Some years back, I was tinkering further with my homebrew for a new campaign. It had a lot of the standard elements: dwarves, elves, etc. I had a pantheon of nine gods, arranged like a wheel, originally based on the alignments, but that changed over time to something not entirely alignment based.I assigned a race to each god, so I had to add extra PC races to fill out the ranks. For the god of cold and death, I chose the goblin. There was a need to fill a high-Wisdom niche in the list of PCs, so I modified the goblin to get a Wisdom bonus. When I showed the resulting set to my players, they commented that they couldn't imagine a wise goblin.Then I thought, why call it a goblin? And once it's not called a goblin, why make it act like a goblin?So, I redid the race, and came up with a twisted, crone-like race called the Wizened. I imagined a race kinda like Gollum, kinda like hags, but not completely like anything else out there. Then I redid the other races. Dwarves became the Grachen, a people apparently made of stone. Elves became the Amborae, a beautiful, carefree race descended from flowers, and had flowers growing naturally on them. Humans became the High Ones, tall, regal, and paragons of skill. The new races were similar enough to be familiar, but different enough so that the standard tropes need not remain on them. The players loved the new races. Furthermore, they pulled the new races in ways I never imagined. One Wizened character became a child-like but ruthless ranger who rode a velociraptor. The party's brawler and ladies' man was a Grachen. The group's "Beardaxe the Stereotypical Dwarf" was a High One samurai (who came up with the Caliphate of Dikama, a Turkish/Celtic/Japanese nation that was a blast!). It's been great working with the players to grow the campaign world in new, flavorful ways!So, that's my advice. Don't go hating Tolkein, but identify what specifically about Tolkein is causing you trouble, then change it to suit your fancy. Still, make it recognizable enough that it's easy for your players to grasp. Don't make the "you'll know how to play this character after reading Volume III" game, but the "you'll know how to play this character after reading these couple of paragraphs" game. If you can say something like, "It's like standard D&D, but with beastmen and wizards in flying cities," then the players will naturally take the game in cool directions outside of stock fantasy just by virtue of giving them something new to play with.</blockquote>

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