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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 4814006" data-attributes="member: 694">Hm.  This is tough for me to characterize, because the primary conceit of my setting is steampunk, with human and gnome tinkers running around building big scientific inventions all the time... and yet, apart from that (and the fact that my game is set in a period more like the Industrial Revolution than the Middle Ages), I'm very conservative about how I set up my setting's mythology.The list of allowed PC races is very short, and it basically comes from Tolkien, Celtic myth, Norse myth, and Greek myth.  Human, elf, dwarf, gnome, hobbit, fairy, merfolk, centaur, faun... and if you're not one of those races, and you walk into a tavern in a town, expect lots of screaming and bloodshed.In this regard, I think standard D&D is more "wahoo" than my world.  In D&D, you could have a friendly orc or kobold or troll get by in a big city.  Not so for my setting.In some cases, I even take pains to streamline things so that they're closer to the source mythology.  No need for different races of orc and hobgoblin and goblin and kobold: they're all just "orcs" in Tolkien, so that's how it is in my world.  No need for a monster called a "nymph," becuase "nymph" is a category that includes dryads, naiads, nereids, etc.  And a gorgon is a stony-eyed lady with snake-hair, not an iron bull that breathes gas (that's a catoblepas).  Elves in Tolkien are good fighters and skilled semi-magical healers, so their favored class should be cleric or maybe druid, not ranger or fighter/wizard.  That sort of thing.Why do I do this?  For one thing, my setting was first conceived for writing stories, not for playing RPGs.  RPGs lend themselves well to a proliferation of material: lots of different races and sub-races and monsters and monster-variants and sub-classes and prestige classes... but a literary setting needs only a few races and a few monsters and a few professions/organizations to serve as plot devices.  An RPG that mimics that style can be a whole lot more conservative and minimalist.</blockquote>

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