What interesting races...

Humans; five main groups, each with their own cultural differences

Dwarves; one variety, slightly modified from the PHB to make them closer to the other PC races

Elves; got rid of the spellcasting-related stuff, as well as the door-finding, searching, etc., and made them better at their spotting/listening, and gave them grace and good looks based traits

Gnomes; totally different from the PHB....they're basically small, pudgy elves with beards (for the men) who gave up all the tree-zen and archery mumbo-jumbo for a more pragmatic lifestyle in the forest. They get prestidigation and wild empathy as their main abilities.

Grovekin; these guys are the replacement for half-elves, in that they have elven and human ancestory. However, they've also got some dryad and nymph in there, and are, basically, slightly unnerving forest-people who are smaller and lighter than humans, on average, whose eyes change color with the seasons.

Giants; a 7-8 foot tall 'not quite large' (like half-giants or half-ogres in other settings) race. They're very rare in the part of the world the PCs are in, and they're the basic 'brute' race.
 

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The environment of my current homebrew is magic-laden, so races evolve/mutate very quickly over a small number of generations. This is basically just a way to make use of all the similar monster types in varioous books and have them related as part of the same basic species, but varied by location.

There are basic groups: humankin, lizardkin, dragonkin, serpentkin, preternaturals (based on animals, like centaurs, minotaurs, ratmen, catpeople etc), trollborn (covers most of the orc/goblin/troll humanoid races), avians etc. I ditched dwarves, elves, hobbits and gnomes and came up with a series of races called wights (not undead, but inspired by the cavewights in the Thomas Covenant books). These developed in lesser and greater varieties of cavewight, stonewight, forestwight, gladewight, moonwight (can't say that one out loud without giggling, unfortunately) and so forth. These encompass the mythical niches of dwarves, elves, gnomes etc without the usual fantasy baggage that comes with those races. The idea with these is that they are born from the locations they inhabit, kinda like incarnated spirits. I also use the giants from Monte Cook's Diamond Throne as they are superfly.

For the humankin, I am fiddling around with ideas that combine the stuff from the Wilderlands and the notes on human subspecies at the back of the Creature Collection (don't have any Scarred Lands stuff besides the CCs and R&R) and adding in a "ghost race" of semi-incorporeal humans whose kingdom was destroyed in past aeons or something. Oh, and I'm scattering the setting with various celestial and infernal races too, just coz they're cool.
 

For Urbis, I didn't alter the game stats for the traditional races; rather, I developed their cultures in new and (I hope) interesting ways - like the Elven Island Kingdom that, thanks to some recent developments, now bears a lot of similarity to Japan of the Meji Restoration.

However, I have introduced a new species, the Surathi (scroll down a bit), who are basically replacements for the yuan-ti (whom I couldn't use, since they are not in the SRD. They are pretty much the only "native" species that have psionic powers - and thanks to their psionic species, they can interbreed with pretty much anything. Human, elf, dwarf... but also giant spiders, sharks, wolves, and in theory, even dragons (though there are bound to be some practical problems with this combination...). The ones with the thinnest Surathi blood in their veins look basically like their immediate parent species, but can develop psionic powers. The most powerful among them look like a nightmarish mixture of many species.

They can be used to model the traditional "snake-men" (like the yuan-ti), but also Lovecraft's Deep Ones and other human-animal hybrids, as well as "intelligent animals" from folklore and stranger things.
 


Dwarf/Elf
Dwarf/Gnome
Dwarf/Halfling
Dwarf/Human
Dwarf/Orc
Elf/Gnome
Elf/Halfling
*Elf/Human
Elf/Orc
Gnome/Halfling
Gnome/Human
Gnome/Orc
Halfling/Human
Halfling/Orc
*Human/Orc
Or alternatively:

Dwelf
Gnarf
Dwarfling
Dwarman
Dworc
Gnelf
Elfling
?
Orf
Gnomeling
Gnoman
Gnorc
Threequarterling
Orcling
Orcman

Out of that lot, I think I like Gnarf and Dworc and Gnorc the best...they sound so stupid, but are fun to say. Note that Hackmaster already has Gnomelings and Rolemaster has Dwelfs, from memory.
 


I blanked the canvas and created some new races, I don't want to list the details but the most interesting ones are Ilyameitr: They have forearms, the extra pair grow out of their elbows. They evolved like that so their animal ancestors could climb trees and eat their staple diet of grubs and sap. I've been think way to heavily about this.
 

AU game..

In my Arcana Unearthed game, the mohjs are all gone. But I have dwarves, whisper gnomes and goliaths. I was planning on a similar racial line-up for my next campaign, so Races of Stone came in dang handy.
 

In my setting, gnomes are much taller - about chest-high on a human - and live in the same communities.

And so you get the inevitable - the nemmin. Half human and half gnome: charismatic, clever and ambitious.
 

going way back to 1E days, I was inspired by a brief note in the FF about bullywugs, that they could crossbreed with humans (love with a bullywug... ick! ick! ick!). I stole the 'Innsmouth' idea from Lovecraft and morphed the crossbreed idea into a storyline about this race. They would appear normal human at birth, although they had a 'popeyed' look and tended to go bald very young. As they aged, they became more and more 'froggy' and eventually, in a night of horrible transformation, became a type of uber-bullywug with great magical powers.....
 

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