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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 8093691" data-attributes="member: 6777454">I think the issue is that one of three things happens when you try to move away from Tolkien in terms of the denizens of the world.1) They just make a "big, strong guys warrior" race, a "little people" race and a "thin, magic" race and usually there are bad guys who are a "beast race", though usually there are a number of those so there are plenty of mindless goons to slaughter when you walk out of town. Anything beyond that is added and it tends to just double, triple, quadrouple up on those first three molds and it is almost always the thin, magic race as it is pretty easy to make something "magic-- just in a different way". In short, the traditional Tolkien races just get replaced with ones that have exactly the same traits (except that Dwarfs get to be taller than humans instead of shorter). All too often what there is to say about these races would nicely fit onto a single page word document in 10 point font easily. The extent to which they are successful usually depends on people taking their preconceptions of elves, dwarfs and hobbits and just projecting them onto these races. You can scribble "My OC, do not steal" all over it as much as you like-- everyone can see you just took the Tolkien races into photoshop and did a bit of color adjustment and added some horns or something.2) It uses animal people. So they are just humans who tend to act like well-- whatever the common preconceptions about those particular animals are. And which animals get to be people and which only exist in the setting as animals is naturally entirely arbitrary. These sorts of settings almost certainly never try to build an entire culture around whatever these animal-people are as generally just what they can do as being partly that other animal is the main thing that gets focused on.3) Okay, you actually make something original that can't be compared to the Tolkien races in any way. That also means they are so alien that no one really knows what to make of them. So there is nothing familiar there for them to latch onto. Try to hit them with all of the exposition they need to actually wrap their head around these novel things and you will probably lose their interest as it will no doubt be far too much noise all at much. And if you got to do that for 5 or more peoples? Yeah-- it gets pretty hopeless pretty fast. You could pull it off in a movie or a novel where the behavior of one of these creatures can be demonstrated to someone before you ask them to play one, but that's just the thing-- you need to show them, not tell them, and you can't ask them to play a role they know nothing about.And, at the end of the day, the setting is probably going to feel more like a sci-fi setting than a fantasy one even if there is no sci-fi technology because it is typically sci-fi franchises that are tasked with coming up with their own array of unique races. And, on that note, I should add-- going out of one's way to make them all super unique looking can still result in them feeling super bland. Star Wars alien races are WAY more visually distinct than Star Trek ones. I have seen most of what each franchise has put out and I can understand how to play a Vulcan and an Orion and a Cardassian and a Ferangi differently, but with a Twilek and a Rodian and an Ithorian and a Duros and a Zabrak? They are basically interchangeable. So a setting going out of its way to make all of the races look super non-human isn't always going to result in them adding more to the setting.Anyway-- this is why most successful franchises just go with the standard Tolkien race pack and then tweak them rather than trying to start from scratch. Although, really, Tolkien didn't invent any of those races-- so if one was going to create a new setting the way he did it, what you would actually do is not try to create something from absolute scratch. What you would do is take a bunch of monsters from hundreds of years old mythology that are still iconic today and use those as the common denizens of your world. Thing is with applying that to D&D though? Well-- pretty much everything that would be a good choice to use in those respects has already been implemented into D&D, usually in the form of a mid to high tier level monster.I mean-- if one were to truly start from scratch on your setting, it is perfectly reasonable to say "this is going to be based on Greek/Roman myths, so the common non-human races are Satyrs, Nymphs, Dryads, Minotaurs, and Centaurs" -- those are all already sitting there in the Monster Manual and saying "I am using the same mythological creature, but in an entirely different role than the one the designers assigned to that creature and so please ignore virtually everything the officially WotC approved interpretation of what this word means" is quite a harder sell than just conjuring something novel up.</blockquote>

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