Race creation

[xBlackWolfx]

This is something I ponder a lot. Mostly because back on rpg.net, people would troll you for featuring ANYTHING that had been done before. And things like elves and dwarves were a big no-no, all because they're so prevalent, and used by some of the most widely-known fantasy franchises out there (namely tolkien and D&D).

But really, its hard to avoid. When you see rpgs adding in a huge number of races, normally they end up adding in anthropomorphic animals. WoW is quite plentiful in them, so is warhammer to a lesser extent. Hell, in the elder scrolls you can play cat-people and reptilian people.

I was just thinking about this again, because I just bought the Legend of Grimrock. In that game, you have a selection of four races to choose from. One is human, the other three are anthropomorphic animals (well, minotaurs might not count, but w/e).

And besides, thanks to the unwarranted infamy that surrounds the furry fandom, many people now despise anthros, heck if you have any they'll assume you're an open zoolophile. Even though ancient folklore abounds in peoples that are part-animals. Minotaurs are probably one of the better known ones (though technically in ancient mythology there was only one...). You also see beings with bird wings in a variety of cultures. Hinduism has an impressive variety of these. I mean heck, their ramayana features an entire race of monkey-people. And one of their numbers is a god!

But I don't see how you can really add in more races that either aren't part-animal, or don't bear a resemblence to the infamous elves, dwarves, and halflings of D&D.

Though I don't think you should pick on people that love dwarves and elves, but I do have to admit they're severely overused and have become pretty cliche. As for halflings, I admit I kind of like them. But it wasn't for a while that I discovered their link to hobbits, which I found rather random. And I still dislike games like pathfinder that make them look like hobbits. They weren't hobbits to me when I learned to like them, and I don't appreciate people depicting them as such now. Though to be honest, the most famous halfing on the NWN server I used to be a part of was an insane and highly comical wizard. Truth be told, his personality was more like that of a gnome than a halfling. Infact, one of the characters in his little posse was a gnome!

And ignoring all this, there's also the whole racism problem. I'm kind of a fence-sitter in that debate. Fantasy just isn't the same without fantastic humanoids, but at the same time I agree they reek of racial stereotyping. Especcially the fact that D&D races are kind of designed to encourage you to play certain classes. A half-orc doesn't make a good wizard, sorcerer, or bard. Elves and halflings can't really be barbarians. I kind of like pathfinder's idea of 'racial bonuses' to the classes, where you get different bonuses depending on your race, which would probably encourage people to play odd combinations like half-orc wizards and dwarven bards.

Anyway, do you just ignore all this and go for the typical race selection? And if not, how do you design your races? I personnally tend to fall into the trap of anthropomorphic animals. My world already has cat-people everywhere, several reptialian races (who are based off of rapters actually), a race of humanoid dragons, and it may go even further than that.

[Silverscale]

Honestly, there is a reason fiction so often includes elves, dwarves, halflings, etc. That's what people expect to find in a fantasy setting. Why these few races and not very many cat people, lizard people, etc? Because they allow us to explore different aspects or humanity since they're all "basically human/but not exactly human". Elves for instance tend to represent our more nature oriented idealized visions of what humanity could do if we were closer to nature. Dwarves represent our industrious side, and so forth.

By contrast when you see cat people or lizard people, sure they may represent an aspect of humanity but mostly they're portrayed as "other". A way for us to look at ourselves in the way we are different from "other"

Take for example the Navi from Avatar. Call them what you want, they're basically tall blue elves, who are portrayed in much the same way early Native Americans are portrayed in relation to European settlers. Viewed in that light the entire movie is an allegory for the early colonization of the Americas.

So what have you got left if you take out "Not-an-elf" and "Cat people"? Aliens. Some more like humans than others to be sure but, the more human like you make it so that we can more easily relate to it the harder it is to make it not just be another elf or dwarf. In the other hand the less human you make it, in an effort to get away from elves an dwarves, the harder it is for us to relate to it and play it in any meaningful way that isn't either a stereotype or something that devolves into comic relief.

Not sure if this helps at all but I just bought I'd throw in my 2cp.

[the_david]

I dislike race bloat so I would go with as little as possible. How many small races that live underground or in burrows do you actually need anyway? Just combine the dwarf, gnome, goblin, halfling, hobbit and kobold into one race and move on to the next one. Or maybe ettins, goblins, hobgoblins, orcs and ogres are just one race of mutant humanoids. (Small, medium and large variant with some rare extra limb mutations?)

You could try to fit your races into the five races trope (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveRaces), though you'll have a hard time making all your races fit exactly one category. You could also make one race for every ability + human. (Orcs = strength, halflings = dexterity, etc.) Alignment is another way to select races.

And if everything else fails, you could just add whatever fits the campaign. If you need an underground race, pick one that you like. If the story is about the return of a demon prince who tried to invade the material plane centuries ago, tieflings are an option. If you need something wild you could make up a race that is not a catfolk/shifter/wild elf.

My last advice is that you could alter the mechanics of the standard races to fit your campaign.

[Gritmonger]

In asking "why race" and you want a realistic answer, we could look at what is relatively intelligent on earth, and what in folklore is intelligent.

Let's start with folklore. If you have a particular setting in mind, you can start there. The Greek mythos, for instance, had nymphs and naiads and satyr and centaur, many nature themed amalgams that stood in for things that they presumed to have intelligence and a will. No elves, but plenty of woodland beings.

Any other folkloric or mythical setting you can pick abounds in mythical intelligent creatures, which you could adopt as a race. Many of them, however, have already been coopted by Dungeons and Dragons since a long time ago.

In the natural world, the creatures that are intelligent, problem solving and tool using include humans, great apes, corvids (crows and ravens and the like), psitticenes (parrots and their ilk), elephants, cetaceans (dolphins of various kinds), and octopi. You might also include cuttlefish and mantis shrimps and jumping spiders to include other behaviorally flexible creatures. So humanoid shape, in other words, does not appear to be a prerequisite for intelligence.

So, to avoid elf-dwarf-furry traps, try researching folklore or considering nonhumanoid intelligence.

[weaseldust]

What make different races interesting are their different needs, abilities and vulnerabilities. It's fun thinking about how I might approach life if I didn't age, or aged faster, or provided all my dietary needs through photosynthesis, or had to consume the brains of sapient beings to survive, or could breathe only in humid air, or had no sense of smell, etc., etc. From a world-builder's perspective, it's also fun to consider how a society consisting only of creatures with those features might develop, or how they might be accommodated in a culture also containing other races, perhaps including humans (because worlds with a 'one race, one culture' system are boring).

You could try to create interesting races by thinking of interesting ecological niches for them to fill or interesting biological differences from humans for them to have. Maybe you have a race that survives by parasitism on giant bats? A race that loves the taste of excrement and lives off the effluent from human cities? An echo-locating race? A race of immobile creatures (or creatures that are immobile for only part of their life cycle)? A race in which reproduction inevitably kills the mother? A peaceful, vegetarian race that evolved to mimic the appearance of terrifying giant arachnids to avoid predation and now wish they could live in human settlements without scaring the children?

[whisperwind1]

You could try to create interesting races by thinking of interesting ecological niches for them to fill or interesting biological differences from humans for them to have. Maybe you have a race that survives by parasitism on giant bats? A race that loves the taste of excrement and lives off the effluent from human cities? An echo-locating race? A race of immobile creatures (or creatures that are immobile for only part of their life cycle)? A race in which reproduction inevitably kills the mother? A peaceful, vegetarian race that evolved to mimic the appearance of terrifying giant arachnids to avoid predation and now wish they could live in human settlements without scaring the children?

I think this is neat, but again, it runs the risk of a race becoming too un-relatable, and being relegated to either stereotypes of comic relief (the poo-eating one...my players would never be able to take that one seriously).

I'm working on a setting myself, and this thread makes me want to swap out the elves/dwarves/blah for something more original, just for my own desire to stand out lol. I had an idea of creating races that don't have an easy physical resemblance to any regular fantasy race. I want to avoid someone saying "Oh so they're like insert generic fantasy race here", but I also don't want them to go too weird. I was hoping you guys had some advice.

In return, I'll share one of my own custom races (extrapolated from an existing setting):

The Ghaskrii, a race of chimeric people who are the result of a magical cataclysm that exposed them to centuries of magical fallout. No one remembers what they looked like originally, but now they are monstrous to most people. They resemble 6-7 foot tall humanoids with long, double jointed arms and thin, spidery fingers. They have hairless, hooved feet and sickled legs. Their faces are bizarre, with two pairs of eyes (one on top of the other), spider-like mandibles and thin, lipless mouths. They also have pointed, batlike ears that gives them superior hearing. They wear masks to hide their disturbing features, and live in their ruined homeland, Numarath in agrarian communities. Basically they mutated to adapt to the harsh conditions of their homeland.

[xBlackWolfx]

I have thought about having creatures that resemble satyrs/fauns, who specialized in both magic and one physical attribute (probably strength).

You could also have golems, ala eberron.

I've also for some reason feel inclined to add in cat-people, who have several ethnicities that can be found in all environments. There's one that lives in a desert, another in jungles, and another that lives in the arctic. The jungle one (which can also be found in temperate climates sometimes) is the most numerous and wide-spread of the three.

Lizard people are another idea. I guess in general you can just use monsters as races. I'm kind of inclined to do that, mostly because of how I was introduced into D&D. I played on a server in NWN that was very very liberal with the source material. Though based off of the forgotten realms, it didn't really bother to adher to it very strictly and showed many many deviations from the setting. They actually let you play non-evil drow, and they didn't suffer from the same bigotry that the llothite drow did (the two populations were about equal in number of players I believe). They also allowed things like Aasimars and Tieflings (this was long long before nwn 2 came out btw). I think duerger were also playable, though not very popular. They also had several different races of elves. At one point, they decided to expand the list considerably. Allowing you play things like goblins and kobolds (both were quite popular), rarer sub-species of elves, different nationalities of humans, you could even play a full-blooded orc or a hobgoblin (though neither of those were very popular, I don't recall seeing an orc, and I only saw a hobgoblin once). I think you could also play things like ogrillions. The list was quite expansive.

I liked this diversity, which is why I prefer huge race lists. To me, having just the standard ones looks absolutely boring and overly simplistic. And besides, it kinda counters the whole 'racism' thing, when not ALL members of each species are evil. I mean seriously, you could walk around the main city as a goblin or kobold and no one would care. Oh, I think you could also play fairies. They could even wield staffs (which made them look like a floating weapon). Actually, all the races were allowed to use staffs regardless of their size. I think they did this primarily for one player who was quite well-known who played a halfling wizard. He inspired a lot of copy-cats, he even had his own little posse of comical and somewhat nutty characters (most were halflings, I think one was a gnome though, honestly he played his halfling more like a gnome anyway).

[hiryuu]

Race selection! I've run into the "animal people" problem, too. Even so, it's only an issue when you're building a setting and someone wants to use stereotypical animal behavior as a replacement for actual character development.

A fun exercise is to create a biological fact or a statement that is very different from human baseline. Something that would result in some unique feature of the environment they can utilize that other creatures can't - a lot of things in the D&D weapons rack don't take advantage of their unique features - you see torches in dwarf cities when really you wouldn't see them anywhere but places non-dwarves are visiting, as one example.

For reference "super tough" and "they're all min/maxers" are human traits for this exercise. Thus, you find humans in deserts and steppes and if you tell them they can't do something because reasons they will punch that reason until it sits down and shuts up.

A few examples:
1. Species A has no skin, just a thick layer of mucous
2. Species B sees in spectrums lower or higher than visible light
3. Species C doesn't have "hands," manipulates stuff with a field that extends about a foot and half away from itself.

Once you have that, start working out how that might affect a culture in three or more ways. Little rough statements. Once you have those, work out an opposing cultural fact - now it's starting to turn into a species rather than a culture of humans with pointy ears who like the woods.

Species A
Can't live anywhere but where it's wet, tend to avoid salt water. Swamps, prairies, lakes, bogs, etc. Very susceptible to diseases like colds. Probably makes weapons to use on each other that are sort of like big scoops. Not very susceptible to stuff that bashes them.
There's a culture that lives in the ocean and avoids fresh water like the plague - their religion says it's evil. Have a love affair with swords.

...stuff like that.

Other possible ideas involve other things that are already world-specific. Like, say, what if all the races were tied to a school of magic? What's the Divination race like? How about a race for each Outer Plane?

If you must use animals, use the weird ones nobody ever does anything with. Chitons - they're giant tongues covered in rocks with magnets for teeth and rocks for eyes! Crinoid people - the mysterious flower of the deep! The yeti crabman. Planarian people. Bryozoans. Anglerfish? - imagine a race whose males are all tiny secondary brains on the females' bodies. Leopard slugs. A race that's a hive of psychic beetles working together. Try giant lemurs that just look like werewolves (they existed!). Mosquitoes? There's lots of spec-evo to crib for animals, too - check out the animals from After Man: A Zoology of the Future, The Future is Wild, or Alien Planet.

I also submit the races from my primary setting:

http://orig08.deviantart.net/03f9/f/2015/083/b/d/tenraces_copy_by_mr_author-d8my6ab.jpg

[Knaight]

This sort of thing is extremely setting dependent. There are cases where elves, dwarves, et. all are just fine. There are cases where anthropomorphic animals are just fine. There are cases where humans and only humans are just fine (this is more or less my default, though I do use the other cases every so often). One option that hasn't been mentioned is to go for more alien aliens out of what is typically considered sci-fi, and transplant them in a fantasy setting. Then there are the various types of created species, such as golems, robots, etc.

Basically, there's a very wide palette out there. Figure out what works for you for a particular work and use it. Don't get too caught up on details like whether it's been done before or is original enough or whatever else. Draw creativity from wherever. If you're reading about thermodynamic cycles in heat engines and it makes you think of a fantasy dwarf implementation involving cultures centered around monumental architecture used for geothermal power, don't feel that you have to reject it just because dwarves have been done.

[Wartex1]

Try making something with an entirely different boy structure.

Like, maybe you have a carbon-fiber worm that integrates rocks and such into its body until it forms a complete shell. These can't speak, but they communicate by vibrating the rocks to imitate sounds.

[Silverscale]

Along the lines of different body structure, if you look back at Star Wars Episode 1 (I know not the best episode but....) the guy who kept harassing Anakin at the Pod Races, Sebulba, his race had evolved to have their arms coming from their "hips" and their legs coming from their "shoulders". Something like that could make for an interesting, playable race that doesn't require a lot of specialized equipment since it still has hands and feet and it's certainly neither elf nor dwarf.

[Everyl]

Race creation is always a tricky question. I find that it helps a lot to ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish with the setting, and who your audience for the setting is. For example, I would take a very different approach to races in a setting that I hoped to write and sell stories in than I would in a setting for a group of semi-casual gamer friends who aren't all that interested in reading setting materials cover to cover.

For a setting for short stories, novels, and the like, I'd try to keep non-human races to a minimum. Unless something about the race's non-humanity is important to the plot, it's unnecessary detail. Why have humans warring with neighboring orcs if humans warring with other humans works just as well, with less Tolkien/D&D baggage? Why include cat-people if it just puts you in the position of wasting pages trying to make "your" cat people interesting and distinct from overdone trope cat people in existing fantasy, anime, and manga works? I'm not saying to never use non-human races in writing, but if you don't have a good answer to the question, "Why couldn't these people be humans from a different culture than the other humans," you might want to consider your options more carefully.

For an RPG setting, you need to consider your audience very carefully. Odds are, your setting is intended for your personal use with your immediate circle of friends, hopefully people you know relatively well. Are they the kind of people who read setting books cover to cover and write character backgrounds that integrate elements unique to the setting? Are they the kind of people who skim the core books and expect setting to not get in the way of their fun? Different approaches work better with different groups. Many players expect to have a variety of race options in their RPGs, either because they like having race as a major variable they can use to tailor their character during chargen or just because they've always played games with half a dozen or more races. Some players might feel constrained if your setting excludes some core book races, while others are happy to work with whatever tools are available. If your players aren't the sort who really enjoy exploring the details of a highly customized setting, your best bet might be to stick with core races, modified core races ("Elves in my setting are nomads who live in desert and plains areas"), and familiar trope races (animal people). If your players are interested in your setting and ideas, you have a lot more room to experiment with giant sentient spiders, subterranean lithovorous slugs, insect people who are only sentient during their larval phase, or whatever other sentient races you feel like integrating into your setting.

Long story short, the same advice doesn't necessarily apply to every situation. Knowing your audience will let you optimize fun all around.

[Ormur]

Is furry hate still that strong, thought that was getting old now.

Anyway, you shouldn't worry to much about originality and more with making the races serve the needs of your campaign and your players. If they don't like furries then maybe anthropomorphic races won't work.

For my new setting there were a few issues about races I wanted to resolve. I wanted them to be familiar for the players so I based them on existing popular D&D races but I cut down the number and all the half-X ones to reduce overlap. So I ended up with Humans, Halflings, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, Gnolls and Kobolds. Most bases are covered but they aren't so many that they'll clutter up the setting.

Then I figured out what would make each physically unique, where they originated, to what conditions they were adapted and tried to have it more or less balanced. I also eliminated all mental stat variation because I didn't like the racist implications. Kobolds are small and lived on their own island, Elves and Orcs were isolated from the rest of the races until recently, Gnolls are carnivores and can't form dense agricultural civilizations by themselves and Dwarves are adapted to cold climates etc.

Along with the mental stat variations went out all the culturally-dependant bonuses like weapons proficiencies and bonuses against certain creatures or in certain skills. Both because the races aren't monocultures and also because they're a hassle to keep track of. My next step is to create cultural templates as a replacement.