What other fantasy games are out there?

[Koloth]

Steve Jackson Games - The Fantasy Trip. Core rule book In the Labyrinth does include elves and dwarves but they are not essential to the game or setting. Several other intelligent races are available for use as PCs. Base setting is Cidri. There is a Bestiary. Possible to play Octopi as PCs but they are more normally NPC monsters. TFT is often considered a precursor to GURPS, but has a much simpler character design.

Cidri proper is fairly lightly described but the system plays well in almost any pre-written world. Just be sure to delete those pesky elves! Gaming Ballistic has written some FT material as well as a bunch of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy stuff.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. GURPS optimized for dungeon crawling. Probably has those elves and dwarves because so many folks seem to expect/demand their presence. In most cases, probably fine just replacing elves/dwarves with humans. If the elves never existed, probablee that humans would mostly fill those slots anyway. Elven ranger/human ranger. Dwarven miner/human miner. Someone has to do it. Lots of Gaming Ballistic stuff for DF.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Aether Nexus.

• A rich and detailed setting It's a shattered world/god that may be slowing dying alone in the cosmic emptiness - but its inhabitants are still still living life as best they can, still fighting back against the creatures that originally broke the world, and the grim/hopeful setting can be twisted around as your players desire. Nowhere near as detailed as Forgotten Realms or Glorantha, but like many OSR games it relies on a uniquely weird setting and a whole lot of tables to inspire the GM when coming up with adventures - when the dozen shorts in the book run out.
• no elves None. No dwarves either. Nor plain old humans for that matter. All the kin are unique to the setting, and the one fungal kin doesn't care that you don't like myconids because that's not what they are.
• no dwarves You'd have to stuff the closest parallel into a hydraulic press and glue fake beards on the corpses to turn a tuskarin into anything much like a Dwarf.
• a variety of non-human races to play It's nothing but non-humans. Closest you even get are few humanoids like the Cloven and Tuskarin, and a few kin like the glyphx aren't even organics. Technically there's eight of them in total, but some kin like buforog and chimru are really a culture shared between multiple species with similar environmental preferences or common philosophies.
• lean to the side of serious or darker Turn the dial as desired. The threats to Eskhara can be as dire as you like, or you downplay them in favor of relatively petty feuding between the residents of the world itself.
• Rules system does not matter, any is ok. That's a strange thing not care about, but FWIW it's a heavily-modified variant of Mecha Hack (a scifi game) which is itself based on the Black Hack OSR rues set. Where MH was more obviously drawing from Black Hack's OD&D roots, Aether Nexus feels like it pulls more from modern-ish games, with a tactical system that reminds me a bit of both 4E D&D and Lancer without being either.

Could use a supplement book adding more foes like the Mission Manual did for Mecha Hack, but it's still more complete as is than MH was, and it's under a year old still. Might happen yet.

 

[kronovan]

I'd recommend having a look at the Mythras RPG. It's a d100 system with its own free to download setting of Thennla. Mythras is somewhat of a universal gaming engine, but being a descendent of Runequest 6 it's primarily targeted at Sword & Sorcery fantasy. There's no elves, dwarves or any demihumans (present in the Mythras Classic alternate rules), but instead there's 4 human cultures (Barbarian, Civilised, Nomadic & Primitive), with great variation among them via cultural skills, many different careers and cultural passions. It's showcase location is Monster Island, which thematically is a Weird Science + S&S blend, with a full campaign that can be set within Thennla, or not.

It's recommended first downloading the free Mythras Imperative rules, as they're a briefer and simpler intro to the system.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

• A rich and detailed setting (I don't want to write by own world or write my own races, etc)
• no elves
• no dwarves (I want to get far away from anything that feels close to Tolkien tropes)
• a variety of non-human races to play (but not cartoonish or things fungus or cactus or duck people)
• lean to the side of serious or darker (not looking for cozy or cute)
• Rules system does not matter, any is ok.

Skyrealms of Jorune!

 

[TheSword]

Yeah, I guess like someone else mentioned, as long as I can either ignore it, or its quite different (which, to a degree, i am not even sure Warhammer Fantasy gets far enough away from it... hmmm)

I really want to try and dig deep here, find some gems - or at least some stuff that is decent.


Anyone =
Was there ever any non-human races in L5R?

I wasn’t going to bring it up, because you said non-human races but no elves or dwarves. Which doesn’t fit Warhammer. Seeing as you did though

It has probably the best and most detailed setting I’ve ever seen. It is bursting with flavour and leans towards to dark side of fantasy. The adventures are also very different to typical D&D fare. Far more investigation and mystery.

When it comes to non-humans you can play ogres when is fun. Though to be honest the setting subverts a lot of the Tolkein tropes. It’s more mage-punky than Tolkein and is closer to a low magic Pratchett than to Tolkein.

If it’s an option I would highly recommend the WFRP 4e Starter Set. It is one of the best rpg sets I’ve ever seen.

 

[Staffan]

I haven't had the opportunity to play it myself, but I hear good things about the 50 Fathoms setting for Savage Worlds, and it seems to fit most of your criteria. You have numerous different races, but no elves or dwarves. It's pretty dark, with a rather tragic backstory. The book comes with a Plot Point Campaign which takes you all over the setting, and deals with a lot of the background and (hopefully) solves some of the setting's issues. The PPC is designed so there are nine main adventures plus a side quest of another nine, and in between there are smaller adventures connected to the places you visit.

The setting itself is heavily nautically themed, as one might infer from the name. The description is fairly sparse, about 1-3 pages on every port. That's sufficient, but we're not talking Forgotten Realms levels of detail.

One issue is that the setting is written for the previous edition of Savage Worlds, the Explorer's Edition. That means there are some things that need a little conversion work if you want to use the current version of the rules, the Adventurer's Edition (aka SWADE). But we're not talking edition changes like D&D has for the most part, where AD&D, 3e, 4e, and 5e are basically different games that share some common ideas. It's more like 3.0 to 3.5.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Talislanta.

You can even legally get almost everything published in prior editions for free at:

Talislanta Library – Talislanta

talislanta.com

 

[Sir Brennen]

Talislanta

Which I believe has the tag-line "No Elves"...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Chaosium & Mongoose have published several versions of Stormbringer/Elric of Melnibone RPGs, based on Michael
Moorcock’s books. Chaosium also published Hawkmoon and Corum RPGs, likewise based on the books.

TSR released 2Ed D&D rules to play in Lankhmar, Fritz Lieber’s story word, which is almost entirely human-centric.

 

[jdrakeh]

Everway, especially - arguably only - if you can procure a copy of the Spherewalker Sourcebook (it's entirely systemless detail of the many worlds of Everway).