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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rmcoen" data-source="post: 9732407" data-attributes="member: 6692404">In my current campaign, "The Three Kindgoms" (the PHB races) are recent arrivals to an old world.  "The Tribes" (the goblinoid races) have spread and control the entire rest of the world, but are closely tied to their "ancestor spirits", primal and fey spirits of nature from which they were created "in the long ago".  The Kingsfolk are invaders, were fought and harried and chased into a corner of the main continent, where the dastardly invaders wantonly magically destroyed the land to raise natural barriers to block off their area (cursed mountains, radioactive magical swamps, and a dragon-infested mountain range with a massive river flowing next to it).  Within the Kingdoms, the cities are cosmopolitan, but the elves and dwarves have also mostly withdrawn as societies to live in segregated areas.  So the cities of Prothus and Kalligan's Port have humans, dwarves, elves, and gnomes (no halflings in this world, and no orcs), with the humans having the majority, but most dwarves either live in the Burrowfound Barony and most elves live in the Alfendark Forest (which technically is in two different baronies, but is effectively its own mini-realm).  Mostly the gnomes live in southern Jendar.  Racial composition of the Kingdoms is because of who came with the original Arrival, and then species differences (lifespan and fertility), plus the attrition of a decades-long running war with the Tribes until the Kingdoms were founded only 400 years ago.  So humans have a majority over the other races, like 50% human, 20% dwarf, 20% gnome, 10% elf.In my previous campaign, though, I side with many of the other posts in this thread... the world had a racial spread that just formed a "backdrop" for a world that had space and opportunity for whatever the players wanted to play.  In the far past, the Elves came from a spcific place, as did the humans and the dragonborn.  At some point, they all came to the central continent, fought world-making and -breaking wars, and finally civilization collapsed into The Ten Cities.  There was Magisteria, the center of arcane power (cosmopolitan); Godshome, the center of divine power (cosmopolitan); Forgekeep; the center of "technology" (mostly gnome); Hammerdown, source of most minerals and gems (mostly dwarf); and... Well, I forget the other names, but there was a primarily dragonborn City, a human City, an elven City [each near where the races originally came to the continent], and a couple other "cosmopolitan" cities.  Fecundity and fertility weren't important; if you wanted to "just be an elf", there many cities you could be from - but if you wanted to lean hard into being an "elfy elf", you came from the Elf City.  And that's just where we left it.  It was the twilight of that world, with harsh wilderness encroaching on the magically protected Cities, so biological science didn't matter too much to the Story or to us.Overall, I like to reinforce societal differences between the species, to emphasize (or fit) the mental picture in my mind that I want to reinforce for the Story - but I don't generally worry too much about the science behind how it "works" unless it is important to the Story.  And I don't enforce anything on players who chose that race.  Just because the elves of Alfendark forest are insular, haughty, and distrustful doesn't mean a PC from there has to be.  Maybe she is, because she chooses to be a representative of that society, or maybe she is an adventurer because she didn't fit in!  Or maybe she's an elf from some other place, and sees the Alfenrealm as a throwback to a life that "never actually existed".  Options abound for stories, and biology doesn't really matter in the span of a campaign...</blockquote>

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