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GenericGuy
2011-02-20, 03:26 PM
Every race has their “origins” or how their people came to be, whether divine beings created them as is (or as maggots that grew out of a certain Nordic god), were they accidents or through a fantasy lands version of evolution. My question is what the origins of yours are or what are their creation myth?

My EX: Originally on a distant continent there were two races Humans and the Dra’Khans (heh heh I’m clever:smalltongue:, but seriously they’re lizard folk not “dragons”) both came to be by naturel selection over millions of years, but then something happened to the continent that made the Dra’Khans have to leave and take the humans (who were slaves) to a new land. While sailing there on massive ships, one ship got stranded on an island near the cost of two smashed together continents, and it is here that the humans overthrew their Dra’Khan masters and eventually evolved into Halflings.

The rest of the Dra’Khan fleet settled on these two conjoined continents and set up a new Empire. However, they decided to make their slaves more specialized for particular needs; and so using unnatural selection (with the help of magic) bred two new races. One for magic craft (Elves) and another for war and hard labor (Orcs).

Some humans escaped before the Eugenics program and so remained humans, but others went into hiding in and above the mountains; and eventually became the Dwarves and the Ogres respectively (again through natural evolution).

Eventually massive Wyverns (closer to fantastical dragons) that sleep for 1,345 years before waking to gorge on food and find a mate destroyed the Dra’Khan Empire along with the records of all this; giving all the humanoid races a chance to build up and start their own societies and cultures.

Yukitsu
2011-02-20, 03:40 PM
In my setting, you have a specific ring of planes based on the elements.

You have the planes of fire, earth, water and wind, the fey plane between earth and fire, the fey plane between water and wind, the plane of dark between earth and water, and the plane of light between fire and wind, then the divine plane of the alignments, angels and demons.

Creatures are made of various plane stuff formed into creatures. Humans for example are a byproduct of the pure material plane evolving into life forms as per us. Elves are the offspring born of the fey on the material plane, with the fey being inherent beings of their respective planes.

Similarly to fey creatures, dragons are elements that have spilled into the material given form. It's uncertain why elements naturally desire a living form, but it's theorized this occurs because the element naturally desires a return to its native plane, making it agressive and dangerous, as most lack the capacity to do so.

As an oddity, elementals and elemental creatures cannot inhabit their home plane. They simply discorporeate into its base form. Creatures made of several elements, do not do so as they are bound together by their other elements.

Other creatures, such as the dwarves, gnomes and halflings were created by divine beings out of the material plane stuff to inhabit the divine, though many move on into the material over time.

The other, more vile creatures were bred from the plane stuff by demons. Undead and orcs are primary examples of creatures created by demons of the divine plane.

This means most creatures have some sort of elemental affinity which dictates where that race can live.

Squally!
2011-02-20, 03:45 PM
The original inhabitants of my world were "Humans." These humans had the capability to shift into dragons, but saw it as primal. They were hand-crafted by the Worldbuilders, and left to their own means. Thousands of years pass, they figure out a way to become immortal, and basically starve themselves to death. A traveling pantheon of divines happen upon the world, see that its in a state of ruin, its inhabitants nearly dead, decide to each create their own race of beings, elves, dorfs, orcs and the like. These new races force the Humans into hiding, and take over the world. then a bunch of other stuff happens, and now any time there is inter-race breeding, you get a human, instead of a half x/ half y creature.

Yora
2011-02-20, 03:54 PM
I've gone for a really weird approach, that I think is kinda unique.

All the diferent people and cultures have their own mythologies, often contradicting each other and many are full of logical holes when examined closely. Those are the stories of their people and some believe they are true, others believe they are metaphors. But nobody has proof that one story is the truth.
But to get a good consistency for the whole world, as the creator, I have to come up with a way it really happened, even though no person in the setting knows it and no players, or possible GMs that one day might want to use the setting as well should ever hear anything about it. But here's the weird truth:

Monkeys!

Or more precisely, apes. And some ferrets and lizards. How the universe started even I don't care to come up with a good explaination for. But after some time stelar dust clumped into a star and a planetary system and primitive life forms came into existed and evolved into plants and animals. The humanoid races basically lived as animals and used very simple tools and language for a very long time. But then some races from the spirit world thought they would make good servants and gave the humanoids a huge push in knowledge and education, which pushed them right from the early stone age into the late stone age, skipping about 100,000 years of natural cultural evolution. With much better food and medicine that was provided by their taskmasters, their bodies could also adapt to the new lifestyle very quickly. But over the centuries the races from the spirit world no longer had any interest in maintaining cities and palaces in the world of mortals and they got abandoned one after another, leaving their servants to care for themselves. Much, if not most, of the advanced knowledge became lost pretty quickly, but even so the former servants were much taller, stronger, and smarter than their wild cousins and over time either assimilated them into their cultures or went extinct.
The two big servant races were the lizardfolk and the elves, with the lizards being much greater in number and much more advanced. Elves were trained as servants only in rather small numbers and either lost most of their knowledge or were never well educated to begin with, when they rejoined the wild elves, so it took them some additional thousands of years to catch up with the lizardfolk. The other humanoid races have just about left the stone age behind them and learned much of their new advanced crafts from traders that had come from the greater civilizations.

Admiral Squish
2011-02-20, 06:19 PM
Well, in my latest homebrew campaign setting (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=187311), the humans were the only race around in the first place. Stone age primitives, they lived in a world completely devoid of magic and cut off from the multiverse. However, a race of massively powerful creatures known as Shapers (Think a lawful version of the Daelkyr mixed with the Zern from MMIV) arrived. The very act of them arriving punched a hole in the plane's walls that allowed magic and otherworldly energies to enter the remote plane. The shapers themselves decided the plane was a perfect place to set up and experiment. They quickly became living gods among the humanoids, and using powerful flesh-shaping magic, they made all the humanoid races, then set to work turning real-world animals into the staggering array of monsters that exists in typical D&D worlds.

LOTRfan
2011-02-20, 06:28 PM
Pretty much like how humans in real life came to be to their current state. The Material Plane also happened in a way that parallels real life, except it is definite that an overdeity spliced parts of the eight inner planes together to create it.

RndmNumGen
2011-02-20, 07:00 PM
I like having it so that each of the gods have their own domain, which may include creating a single race(they are not obligated to do so however, so while the god of nature might make elves and the goddess of earth might make dwarves, the god of shadow doesn't have to make anyone. )

onthetown
2011-02-20, 07:13 PM
I've got the standard "one race per god" thing with my setting (just for writing, not for roleplaying, but it's my latest setting that I've worked on), and they're pretty standard fantasy races to boot. The triumvirate of major gods created the three races and they each like their own creation best (and have basically pitted them against each other). Since I wasn't planning on doing something big with it like having their creation be a secret or a shame or some such thing, and a fancy creation story wasn't necessary for the plot, I went with the simplest idea.

Shademan
2011-02-20, 07:20 PM
everyone claims they did it.
The gods say that they made the sentients
the dragons claim it was their doing
and even the Daeva(false star-gods) like to claim credit

so it is entirely unknown.
well, Nerull, death himself, might know. but I think one of the characters will kill him before anyone even thinks of asking

Malfunctioned
2011-02-20, 07:51 PM
An square world balanced on four spherical elemental portals, one at each corner. Each portal was ruled by an elemental king. They created their own subjects in order to achieve some kind of rule over the world.

Earth created the Elves and they built cities with towering stone buildings and unimaginable alleyways.

Fire created the Orcs and their passions made them change the land for their own good. They could pull a plough by themselves or even crush a boulder in their path.

Water created the Dwarves and they gathered wisdom so it could not slip away. They tunnelled into cliffs and made their homes and libraries.

Air made the Gnomes and they soon tamed the whales of the sky, turning them into fortresses that could hold an entire nation above the world. They then turned their focus to war and protecting the little land they had.


But one God decided this was not good enough. He was Apal and he was Togir and he was Niut. They were one and he was three. He saw the different races and placed them together.

This new race was not as strong as the Orcs, or as quick as the Elves, or as tough as the Dwarves or even as determined as the Gnomes. But they were flexible.

They were humans.

John Campbell
2011-02-20, 08:32 PM
Well, when you have a mommy human and a daddy orc, and the daddy orc raids the mommy human's village...

Callista
2011-02-20, 08:37 PM
Created by their respective deities, by a deity that no longer exists, or in some cases by the overdeity himself, long ago. In a few cases, created by powerful magic-users or by magical accident. Some were simply created along with their home planes (Outsiders, for the most part). And in very old planes, some will have come about by normal biological evolution.

(Why not have everybody evolve? Because the prime material is barely a few hundred thousand years old, and that's not nearly long enough...)

GenericGuy
2011-02-20, 08:48 PM
Well, when you have a mommy human and a daddy orc, and the daddy orc raids the mommy human's village...

More often than not it’s a daddy human and a mommy Orc in my world.:smallamused:

LOTRfan
2011-02-20, 08:49 PM
More often than not it’s a daddy human and a mommy Orc in my world.:smallamused:

Yeah, why is it that the Orcs are always evil?

GenericGuy
2011-02-20, 09:02 PM
Yeah, why is it that the Orcs are always evil?

I definitely don’t make “Evil” races, but I do try to make them each different and not just humans with stuff tacked on.

Orcs: extremely passionate, chaotic, and tend to have a might makes right philosophy. The Orcs biggest enemies are…Orcs, so warfare between the tribes leaves a noticeable gender imbalance between males and females.

LOTRfan
2011-02-20, 09:04 PM
I definitely don’t make “Evil” races, but I do try to make them each different and not just humans with stuff tacked on.

Orcs: extremely passionate, chaotic, and tend to have a might makes right philosophy. The Orcs biggest enemies are…Orcs, so warfare between the tribes leaves a noticeable gender imbalance between males and females.

Man, if only my players had your mindset...

Zaydos
2011-02-20, 09:26 PM
In my current game I'm still working out how the elves came into being. I'm fairly sure it had something to do with one of the gods of chaos as immortal beings of god-like power whose king is older than history and might be as old as the world tend not to come about naturally. I'm currently varying between blaming Tzeentch, Yog-Sothoth, and Gaia (who in this world I'm focusing on her roles as mother/grandmother of all monsters than of the gods). I don't think the elves were an intentional creation of whoever made them, though.

As for other races that exist in the world:
Dwarves: haven't been seen for millenniums but they were spawned from natural creatures of the world and modified by the Aesir (not using all the Aesir and incorrectly labeling Frey and Aesir but still).

Humans: Made by dwarves in their own images. On that note dwarves in this world look more like Norse dwarves than Tolkien's (so they're human sized with maggot colored skin).

Wolfen: A race one of my players made for an earlier campaign... I generally describe them as Mary Sues... winged wolf men with coronas of flames... They were most likely made by an insane elven duke.

Catfolk: Hmm... need to find good cat-people deities, might go for some Olympians. Might have been made by the same elf.

Hobgoblins: I'm fairly sure they were made by Arioch the Duke of Chaos. Who is for some reason LE in this campaign (actually looking at his original portrayal he doesn't quite fit D&D chaotic evil being honorable and bound by his word and all that).

And that's all I've got for now.

John Campbell
2011-02-20, 09:37 PM
I definitely don’t make “Evil” races, but I do try to make them each different and not just humans with stuff tacked on.

Orcs: extremely passionate, chaotic, and tend to have a might makes right philosophy. The Orcs biggest enemies are…Orcs, so warfare between the tribes leaves a noticeable gender imbalance between males and females.
My half-orc character's tribe - he was raised among orcs - is polygynous because of this. This is also the reason that my first favored enemy was "orc"... when your status in the clan depends on whose butt you can kick, those combat bonuses come in real handy. The Bluff and Sense Motive bonuses don't hurt, either. And it's not like you need them for killin' weak little short-tooths...

So of course we've ended up playing Sliders between a series of alternate Primes, none of which have had any orcs on them. Since we got plotted out of Faerûn, I've been the only person in the world - several worlds - that my favored enemy works on. On the other hand, while my character doesn't go in much for the kind of casual rapine that produced him, there have been enough human women on these worlds who are willing to overlook a little green skin and tusks in an otherwise big, strong, powerful, mysterious, rich (insanely rich, on the metal-poor world where we showed up wielding and wearing steel and mithril) guy that there's at least one of those worlds where, in a few months, the origin of the half-orc species will be, uh, me.

AshDesert
2011-02-20, 10:01 PM
Spoilered for length.

In the beginning, there was Void. One day, in his boredom and loneliness, he decided to create two diametrically opposed forces, Good and Evil. For a time, watching their fighting was amusing, but he realized he could make it more interesting by creating three new forces, Law, Chaos, and Neutral. He delighted in watching their alliances and betrayals along the two axes, but still it wasn't enough. He realized that he could make things even more interesting by letting The Five use his body as a canvas to let them create instead of him.

Each of The Five used the raw energy of Void to create new planes and beings to reside in them. Good created Paradise and the Angels, Evil created Punishment and the Infernals, Law created Justice and the Inevitables, Chaos created Insanity and the Improbables, and Neutral created Balance and declined to create any beings, instead preferring his realm to be a peaceful meeting ground between the other beings.

The first Gods were the greatest champions of the beings who became rulers of their races by adopting some of the ideals of one of the other members of The Five, creating the alignments. The Gods were granted the power of Creation by their patron force, letting them create their own planes for them and their like-minded beings.

Despite these new planes and beings, The Five were unwilling to let battle come directly to their planes. For fear of making Void bored, and having him undo all their work, they met in Balance with their Gods with the goal of creating a world that would bear the markings of all The Five but be the domain of none, on which they could let their Gods loose to entertain Void. So, they created the Material Plane, a place ripe for battle.

However, Good had an ulterior motive. Seeing that the Gods would create sentient races and send them off to meaningless deaths and suffering, he became determined that he must prevent as much of it as possible. To that end, he created a lock on the world, completely locking the Gods out of the world after ten years.

In those ten years, Good was proven right, with the Gods creating four sentient races to do battle that they valued less than their own beings. Note that though these say Proto- they were just called the race names, and are now called Proto- due to essentially being elementals. The Good Gods carved the Proto-Dwarves out of the mountains, short, stout, stone golems with immense strength and endurance. The Evil Gods created the Proto-Orcs from the fire beneath the mountains, huge, ferocious bloodthirsty monsters. The Lawful Gods created the Elves from the air, aloof, elitists with an extremely rigid society that has lasted to this day. Finally, the Chaotic Gods created the Gnomes from the Water, a small race of tricksters and tinkers, pranksters and inventors, but almost all ingenious.

Good's plan succeeded, locking the Gods out of the world and letting the races decide their own destinies. Though they were initially enraged at him, Void commended Good for his ingenuity in creating an even more interesting scenario for his entertainment. However, behind his back, Void told the Gods that the prayers of the races on the Material Plane would give them more power, allowing them to send through their servants, and eventually return themselves. To this end, they used the remainder of their power to send messagers to their races to establish the religions and increase the flow of prayers.

However, the races were changing on the Material Plane. The influence of all the different Gods caused them to evolve away from their elements. In addition, the Dwarves splintered into two different races, those who burrowed into the ground after the Orcs and maintained their short stature, who kept the name Dwarves, and those who stayed on the surface, growing to larger heights and losing some of their stoutness, but becoming the most flexible race in existence.

I have origin stories for other races (giants = Infernal corrupted Dwarves, dragons = Elves plus Angels or Infernals) but I think that's enough for now.

tl;dr- All of creation is entertainment for and on an extremely old and extremely powerful being who can end it at any point he gets bored and rewrite it completely.

Callista
2011-02-20, 10:10 PM
Yeah, why is it that the Orcs are always evil?They're not always evil; they're just evil more often than they're not evil.

Why do they have such strong evil tendencies? Blame that one on Gruumsh... the influence of a god who is strongly evil and rules the race in question does tend to do things like that. The orcs do have free will though (unlike, say, demons); so there are quite a lot of non-evil orcs.

archon_huskie
2011-02-20, 10:21 PM
A long time ago, the continent of Koordan was populated with Dwarfs. They studied magic and where the masters of the planet. Even the mighty Dragons from their perches in the Dire Lands learned not to provoke them.

But one day, the Dwarfs did something that sent their race into decline (The What and how is not something that affects the plot of my world so I have not come up with it.) Magic was forgotten and the Dwarfs slowly disappeared.

New species evolved with Dwarfs as a common ancestor: Humans, Elves, and Orcs. They slowly started to discover the ancient ruins of the Dwarfs and discover their lost magic . . .



Also the Fey were involved somehow, but they are not talking.

Yora
2011-02-21, 05:29 AM
Pretty much like how humans in real life came to be to their current state. The Material Plane also happened in a way that parallels real life, except it is definite that an overdeity spliced parts of the eight inner planes together to create it.

Yeah, so I'm not the only one not going for intelligent design or creationism. :smallbiggrin:

hamishspence
2011-02-21, 11:32 AM
They're not always evil; they're just evil more often than they're not evil.

Why do they have such strong evil tendencies? Blame that one on Gruumsh... the influence of a god who is strongly evil and rules the race in question does tend to do things like that. The orcs do have free will though (unlike, say, demons); so there are quite a lot of non-evil orcs.

The most common alignment after CE (according to MM V) is CN.

It's not clear if more than 50% of Orcs are Evil- in theory, it could be 31% CE, 14% NE, 4% LE (or some similar fraction).

Zaydos
2011-02-21, 11:39 AM
The most common alignment after CE (according to MM V) is CN.

It's not clear if more than 50% of Orcs are Evil- in theory, it could be 31% CE, 14% NE, 4% LE (or some similar fraction).

Actually it is quite clear. Orcs are Often Chaotic Evil. Looking up the definition of Often in alignment terms:


Often: The creature tends toward the given alignment, either by
nature or nurture, but not strongly. A plurality (40–50%) of individuals
have the given alignment, but exceptions are common.

So no more than half and at least 40%. This does mean that you are more likely to see a non-Chaotic Evil orc than a Chaotic Evil one.

hamishspence
2011-02-21, 11:55 AM
Sorry- thought Often began at 30% rather than 40%.

So- unless NE and LE orcs are pretty rare, it does seem likely that over 50% of Orcs will be Evil-aligned.

AtlanteanTroll
2011-02-21, 12:03 PM
Yeah, why is it that the Orcs are always evil?

Well, you see...


ORC: Alignment: Often Chaotic Evil

EDIT: Ninja-Ed

Zaydos
2011-02-21, 12:10 PM
Sorry- thought Often began at 30% rather than 40%.

So- unless NE and LE orcs are pretty rare, it does seem likely that over 50% of Orcs will be Evil-aligned.

When I started writing I thought they were Usually Evil.

And yeah I had thought often started at 30% too. I learned something new today.

RagnaroksChosen
2011-02-21, 12:41 PM
Well to understand the origin of species in my homebrew setting you have to understand the origin of the setting.

The main plane of existence in the setting was created through use of Genesis and epic magic. It was forged in the astral plane seeded with life and time. It was created by a chaos Mage known as Nathan the Crimson(he is epic). When he created this plane, he created it with the mind set that he was tired of what was "real" and wanted to be left alone. He figured out how to strengthen the astral plane around the world so that it would be more difficult for creatures to get into and out of the plane. While working on the world he brought in a team of giants(really settlers) as well as dragons(1 of each of the chromatic) to help with the creation of this world. During this time a gnome(who's name i stole from a particular poster who invented the tippyverse) who happened to be addicted to the haste spell(he was the prc that was all about haste) thought he could abuse this new plane of existence for the creation of a better more powerfull haste-esc spell.

Well needless to say Nathan was not please with this. After the gnome gained access to the plane of existence Nathan found him and they battled for what seemed like years. Though the strain of the battle was causing Nathan to loose control over the plane it self. Then in a final battle between nathan and the gnome both defenseless, they cast mindrape at each other which happened to trigger a slew of contingencies. With the plane it self weakend from the battle, it cause both to forget who and what they were and to be trapped in the plane it self. It also potentialy through divine hands made the plane it self become unhinged from the astral plane and sent tumbling through the astral plane and other similiar planes.


So after said planar creation story what was left on the plane it self, was a few groups of giants, which had orc and goblin slaves. These giants soon found bountiful lands and quickly the population boomed and started the first age of Giants. 1 of each of the chromatic dragons.. well the chromatic dragons needed there gender counter parts of the same color to breed so they forged what is known as the dragon pact and forged a one use ritual to summon there gender opposites. They only created this one use ritual as they wanted to rule this world as there own and bringing more then the 5 would cause issues.

From here the other species evolved or where brought here from other planes through random coincidence, (such as the drow, through the plane of shadow a group found there way, and where never able to find there way back, so they set up shop and slowly over the years forgot that they where from another plane). Same thing with gnomes they migrated while mining the plane of earth. Dwarves are the breeding of giants and gnomes(through the use of giant size and shrink of course). Seeing as a this plane of existence moves around the inner and outer planes in an irregular orbit it has picked up races as it's moved closer or farther away from a plane, which is largely unknown to the population.

Humans are from the offspring of nathan and the original dragons children.

The other issue with Nathan and this gnome is that due to there connection with the plane they seem to get tossed around the time stream so they appear in different ages. Once i actually make this setting into a hard copied setting they will continue this jumping as my players have seen them in multiple places and have helped them effect the planar time stream.

any way thought i would share it.

Ajadea
2011-02-21, 01:09 PM
I definitely don’t make “Evil” races, but I do try to make them each different and not just humans with stuff tacked on.


Hear hear! Different species, different psychology, different thought process.

Ok, this is getting ridiculously long, so spoilering.

Humans are the oldest true mortal race, created by the goddess of mortality. She was created when the concept of mortality and death rose into being, and she thought like the true mortals who did not yet exist. So she got bored. And she made humans from apes, put death in them so that their lives would be finite, put a drive to learn and control in them so that they might actually do something interesting, wiped their memory of the fey world to create fear in them, and made them weak to force them to invent other ways to survive.

This goddess made a child for herself, to watch and rule over the mortal races. This child, Nethail, was displeased with the fear the humans felt. She thought they were weak. She wanted to shame them, to humiliate them, and to prove that she was better than her mother. She stole human children in the night, and made them into halflings, brave and quick and curious and agile. She became the goddess of the halflings, and released the humans from her domain.

Take a fey, turn it mortal, add human blood. Force them to fight alone against a ton of aberrations, and make them take the power of those twisted creatures for their own. The result is a gray elf. From there, the elf subspecies can return to the forests and the fey, becoming a high elf, or descend to the underworlds and fight the lesser aberrations in a neverending struggle to preserve the world, becoming a drow. A halfling that made the same choice as the gray elves would become a gnome, losing conviction and self-assurance for toughness, losing the wanderlust and curiousity that once defined them and choosing a life in the shadows of other races, never conquering and always controlling.

The oldest elves alive today probably knew someone who knew someone who was never a modern elf at all, but the ancestors of those modern elves. Not kidding. Two thousand years isn't such a long time for them, and that is how old their species is.

The drow are borderline crazy as a species, with a thought process similar to small children or WH40K orks; if it doesn't work the first time, add moar dakka and try again. They're the sort of people who can genuinely believe the solution is always giant anthro frog, and they have the power necessary to make the solution always be giant anthro frog. You know the E6 balor fight thing? They kinda did that, with less loot and most combatants were actually level 4.

Kobolds aren't the scaly little dragon worshippers that they are in the standard setting. The kobolds were created by a powerful dragon as slaves, and they rebelled, killing that dragon and creating one of the most powerful underworld civilizations in existance. A dragonwrought kobold is likely to be ostracized and run out of the country, as a hated reminder of what they had escaped. They are nearly as innovative as humans, and live in labyrinthine cities that are reminiscent of the Tippyverse when you are limited at 2nd level spells. Purify food and drink traps remove pollution from their rivers, mending replaces carpenters, and free cure light wounds, again from traps, is easily available. This is technology at a level no other race has matched, though kobolds as a whole are a new race, maybe a thousand years old.

Dwarves and orcs are both offshoots of ancient humanity. Dwarves are, in fact, the product of halfling-human relations, who left the overworld for the underworld and bonded with the earth elementals, making agreements that have long been forgotten, form changing more as they forgot all their roots and forged their own path. They made their own choices, and unknowingly, they support the aberrations, as they consider the drow, the hunters of those lesser aberrations, enemies and kill them on sight.

Orcs were tribal, savage, humans, but they too were changed by the Aberration War, against their will, losing their intelligence and insight for brute strength. They regained some of it over time, and while their society is crude, it is bound by traditions few orcs would break.


Also, mechanically, my standard halflings are Strongheart Halflings, my standard gnomes are actually Whisper Gnomes, and my standard kobolds use the web enhancement version and ride dire rats.

JohnnyCancer
2011-02-21, 02:36 PM
In a campaign I'm building; the original native intelligent species were dragons, humans, and halflings. The humans and halflings are culturally inseparable. Other races came about as major heroic and villainous figures achieved divinity and changed their tribes or followers. The changes are usually intended to promote a certain cultural outlook or to achieve some grand, epic mission beyond the scope of a lone god or adventuring party.

TheEmerged
2011-02-21, 02:37 PM
It's a conceit that my current fantasy world represents a far future of the "real" world. The character creation document advised the player not to bother looking for the Statue of Liberty buried up to its chin, it's a conceit that will in no way affect the plot.

As such, it's understood that all the races have a common ancestry that was "scrambled" into the current races back when "the rules changed" (when technology stopped working and magic started working). The event is called Zardox's Folly and is related to the creation of dragons. It's essentially the campaign world's equivalent of the Tower of Babel.

Where things get a little interesting is that some of the races argue about that common ancestry. The Eladrin for example will tell you that they represent a group that was elevated above the original ancestor (they'll be nice about it, but they do teach this). The goblins will tell you that they were the original race. Some of the less civilized races believe that the original race were giants that had wings. The "man in the street" presumes it was humanity.

There are other iterations as well. The Drow in particular have essentially their own creation myth, of which 90% consists of how stupid & childlike the other races are and how the "benevolent creator" the other races worship is actually the bad guy. The Derro (evil psionic patriachial dwarves) on the other hand believe *they* created the world, and all the 'lesser races' are their failed experiments.

Welknair
2011-02-21, 02:42 PM
I said that the Original God created several of the base races, namely Humans, however. Then he killed himself to give life to his universe and accidentally made a bunch of new gods. After a while, they decided to test their powers. Among other things, they wanted to try creating a full-blown Dominant (PC) Race. So they took the Human, the most versatile of the Original's creations, and morphed it. They realized how powerful Arcane Magic was, so they gave it a natural aptitude in that field. Then the decided to further differentiate these new individuals from Humans by making them taller, more regal looking, and have pointy ears. They were dubbed "Elves". My entire game-world is based around balance however. The gods were pleased with themselves but were confused when a group of large, green, brutish humanoids appeared - the seeming opposite of their creations. These "Orcs" were created by the universe itself to match the Elves. And since both were based off of the Humans, both can successfully breed with said humans.

The gods later tried again, believing that the Human was the error. This time they took a boulder. And they turned it into a humanoid and gave it life. Then all of a sudden, we have these quick little green buggers running around the place. "Dwarves" and "Goblins" they called them. At this point, several of the new races started raising gods of their own and the old gods decided it was a bad idea to continue this line of investigation.