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DixieDevil
2013-02-05, 02:03 PM
Okay, I'm working on a fantasy world for a semi-political campaign I'm working on, and I'm having trouble with what races to include. So far, I'm using humans, gnomes (which are a slave race in this world), and a dog-like humanoid race (they're without a name at the moment) that come from the "wild" regions.

I would prefer not to use the stereotypical elves and dwarfs in this campaign, and would really appreciate some suggestions.

Lord Il Palazzo
2013-02-05, 02:39 PM
A few random ideas off the top of my head:
A race that are more "powerful" than humans (physically, magically or whatever makes sense in your setting) but are generally shorter lived. (Humans are almost always get stuck with the shortest lifespans and the races that are "better" like elves usually have very long lives.)
A flying race (bird-people, bat-people, insectoids?) that are eccentric and fascinated with the mindsets of earthbound races. ("They always think so two-dimensionally!")
A migrant race similar to the Quarians in Mass Effect or real-life stories of travelling "Gypsies" except that these tend to deserve the bad reputation they have among other races.
A race from some distant place that somehow got trapped in your setting. They could be a seafaring race of which a single trade ship wrecked off the coast and the navigational charts that would get them home were lost. Alternately, they could be from another plane/dimension and either fled to this world as a result of some disaster or were summoned by mages and got stuck.
A race (or several) of intelligent elementals.
Some sort of half-human hybrid (always good for introducing racial tensions.)

Morph Bark
2013-02-05, 02:54 PM
Do you want to not use elves and dwarves at all, or not have them be stereotypical IF you use them? In my games, elves are hardcore socialists and their view on time is entirely different from humans (which is extremely significant to their life and society, though for adventurers less so). On the other hand, dwarves are less Scottish/German/Norse/Russian and more Mongol/Hun/Plains Indian.

How many races do you plan on including? How different do you want their politics and views on life to be from humans? What's the general location and natural environment of the area it'll take place in? Those all seem important things here.

While I have used humans and the above-mentioned elves and dwarves, I excluded halflings in favour of goblins, and made gnomes a sub-race of a fey race with elemental ties. Orcs are prominent and not as savage as in standard DnD, and there are angels (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=252925), jotun (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=253022) and hedgefolk (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=253921).

There's also a human king with a large harem full of extraplanar beings and he has a lot of planetouched/half-human offspring. They're a great source of political intruigue and backstabbing in that part of my world.

DixieDevil
2013-02-05, 03:55 PM
How many races do you plan on including?

4 or 5


How different do you want their politics and views on life to be from humans?

I would like for one race to be pretty similar to humans, but other than that, go wild.


What's the general location and natural environment of the area it'll take place in?


Well, I have no clue yet. It's a sandbox politics/adventurer game, so the whole map is available.

I'm working on a map, and I plan on plugging in races/kingdoms.

I hope that made sense.

ArcturusV
2013-02-05, 04:31 PM
Well, there's Minotaurs. As far as I know Minotaurs aren't really a Major player in any given campaign world. Sure some of them might have an Island of Minotaurs out there or something but they're not a political powerhouse. But they're humanoid enough, smart enough, and generally able to maintain a culture to be eligible for being a political power.

In fact I did this with my last home brew setting, where Minotaurs were running the central power block in the world and had 3 very large, mighty nations (Whereas other races had 0-1). Including the Halfling Nation which was basically just a satrap of one of the Minotaur Nations.

Similarly Lizardmen would be interesting. They don't get a lot of play. They are an iconic creature. They are usually stuck in the "Arbitrarily barbaric" category like Goblins even though they have regular contact with civilized folk and enough Int and Wis that they should be able to put together a society.

The strength of these two choices as well is that the races in question are so different from the usual Player Races of Human and Human with a slight feature, that you have a blank check not to be THAT realistic with them and give them a fairly alien culture that might have significantly different values from the humans. Though I'd avoid using Good/Evil or Law/Chaos as the values. More like an appropriate gift to a Human Duke might be gold and jewels, while an appropriate gift to a Lizardman Duke would be something like a chinchilla, and an appropriate gift to a Minotaur Duke might be a custom crafted Masterwork Warhammer etched with the personal markings of his family and clan.

Ninjadeadbeard
2013-02-05, 04:37 PM
Well, there's Minotaurs. As far as I know Minotaurs aren't really a Major player in any given campaign world. Sure some of them might have an Island of Minotaurs out there or something but they're not a political powerhouse. But they're humanoid enough, smart enough, and generally able to maintain a culture to be eligible for being a political power.

And they're immune to Maze Spells (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMzDyIJT2g&playnext=1&list=PL5l-JUOSQNLBge0R43yJLnZwfusk1ZocY&feature=results_video). :smallsmile:

As to the OP's problem, I think we need more of the World laid out before real advice on specific races can be handed out.

DixieDevil
2013-02-05, 04:56 PM
Okay, here's what I'm working with:

The world is in the middle of political turmoil. There are two factions "controlling the world" I guess you could say. We'll call them Faction A and Faction B.

Well, Faction A consists of three nations and their protectorates. One nation is human, one is an "equal state", and the other is up for grabs. The nations aren't racially exclusive, but the politics generally are (excluding the "equal states")

I'm still working out the main details on Faction B, but I'm sure it will center around the idea of some kind of "king worship". This faction is probably going to be a bit more "alien".

I'll provide more details as I come up with them.

Lord Il Palazzo
2013-02-06, 11:58 AM
Just how alien do you want faction B to be? Are you looking for "recently discovered and still largely unknown" alien, "different shape and/or values, but fairly well understood" alien or something else all together? Having faction B be a recent discovery (maybe they live underground or across a previously impassible sea or mopuntain range or something) could increase the "mystery" to them and let your players get to know them at the same rate as the rest of the world.

Yora
2013-02-06, 12:07 PM
Hobgoblins really make an interesting alternative to orcs. Given their more controlled temper and less extreme ability score modifiers, they can be mixed right in with the other PC races without any problem.

Lord Il Palazzo
2013-02-06, 12:43 PM
Hobgoblins really make an interesting alternative to orcs. Given their more controlled temper and less extreme ability score modifiers, they can be mixed right in with the other PC races without any problem.Funny you say this. Hobs are actually pretty common in my campaign setting for just this reason. Tending to prefer structure and militarism, they make up a large section of the main mixed-race nation's military, as well as the police force and the leadership of a few fighters' guilds.

If you're looking to run this using D20/3.5 (you didn't say and this is in the general roleplaying forum) elans (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/monsters/elan.htm) could be good as the "alien" Faction B. They're described as looking like humans, but subtly different enough to be off-putting in an uncanny valley kind of way. (They are also aberrations instead of humanoids which mean that X Person spells like Hold and Charm Person don't work on them.) More importantly for making them bizarre and alien, they can also survive indefinitely without eating or drinking (by their repletion ability each day with one of the two power points they have by default.)

Imagine a society that isn't built around the limited resource of food. Agriculture would be a niche industry for those who wanted or could afford food rather than a necessity for everyone. People wouldn't have to work to afford food and thus fewer might have jobs (or at least jobs that consume as much time). They could live in unusual environments other races couldn't survive in because of lack of water and food (whether in the form of things that grow locally or of fertile land for farming). All food and drink could be treated as luxury goods, similar to fine alcohol and high quality foods like steak and lobster; the rich might eat regularly for the pleasure of it, while the poor might only have food on special occasions and even what we would consider ordinary food could be extravagant. ("Buttered bread and salt-cured meat! This is the best birthday ever!") Travelers unfamiliar with the elans' culture could be surprised by how rare or expensive even simple food is and their standard trail rations might be a powerful bargaining tool when offered to a person who rarely has the pleasure of eating.

Just a few thoughts; there's a lot of room to build on these or go in a different direction entirely. Eating is just such a universal part of life as we know it hat not needing to do it has the potential to change almost everything and make for a very alien culture.

Anderlith
2013-02-06, 04:24 PM
Androids, Ratfolk & Stryx from Pathfinder are fun

DixieDevil
2013-02-06, 05:52 PM
Just how alien do you want faction B to be? Are you looking for "recently discovered and still largely unknown" alien, "different shape and/or values, but fairly well understood" alien or something else all together? Having faction B be a recent discovery (maybe they live underground or across a previously impassible sea or mopuntain range or something) could increase the "mystery" to them and let your players get to know them at the same rate as the rest of the world.

Fairly well understood.

By factions, I mean something along the line of Axis/Allies, Capitalist/Communists, etc.

FreakyCheeseMan
2013-02-06, 07:02 PM
I have a metric ton of races that I've played around with, but I'll try to restrict myself here.

Angels/Devils, minus that actual "Divine" components- in my view, Angels would be basically Vikings with wings, while Devils would be more cunning and agile than strong, probably native to caves or jungles.

Consider a race with a weak hive mind- so, they're not all one entity, but they have some sort of psychic link between themselves.

If you're stuck for ideas, start with reproduction. A lot of human society is based off of how we reproduce- reproduction informs the family structure and altruism, which together form some of the basis of our society. If you have a race that reproduces asexually, or from eggs, or in such a way that that have no contact with their young (And thus no concept of inheritance, no hereditary rule, etc,) they may be very different.

As a corollary to that, you might consider population pressures; humans are capable of limiting their reproduction to what their environment can bear, but not everything is like that. You might consider something like Kobolds or Halflings that have such a high birthrate that they always end up overpopulating whatever societies they're a part of.

If you're doing a lot with the backstory of your world, you might also consider the origins of the races themselves. In a setting that I'm designing, elves started appearing as Changelings a few generations ago- human children disappeared, and elven infants were left in their place. As a result, Elves are almost universally distrusted, and while individual Elves may be very young, they've really only coalesced into a society within the last few decades- before that, every Elf was an outsider in a predominantly Human world.

tbok1992
2013-02-08, 12:55 PM
Well, I'd suggest stealing Jon Hodgman's (Yes, that Jon Hodgman) mole-men, as they are a really awesome race that has no RPG equivalent, which is a shame.

They're basically reptillian naked mole rat-like humanoids covered in bioluminescent slime, with acidic spit and something called a cloacal life-sac. But they're actually very intelligent, with a society inspired by the 18th-century enlightenment, and lots and lots of hideous steeds (Like the hoary chiggers, lesser and greater chariot worms,the brain sharks, the dirt puma, the man-eating Clydesdales, the dire newts, the pseudo-saur, ect.). Read their write-up in the book "More Information Than You Require," as they are one of the best parts.

Or, for something slightly more original, how about some race that was artificially created to be perfect, but their creators died before they were able to finish them, so they are incomplete (Though they have limited compensation), Ala Edward Scissorhands. Maybe they have great psionic powers, but are blind, maybe they are winged and beautiful but also missing their legs and have to walk on their arms, or maybe they are great artisans and magicians, but unable to speak. The list goes on.

Or, if you want to go really gonzo, how about aliens? Maybe some creatures inspired by real abductions, like the Pascagoula Star Mummies, the Hopkinsville Goblins, the Mothman, and so on who are relatable in some ways but very weird in others.