Creating Races: More than Humans with Pointy Ears

[ArcanistSupreme]

Most fantasy settings put a lot of work into building distinct and unique identities for each race. But when you peel away the superficial differences of minor stat bonuses, in my mind you just end up with humans but different. These people love the woodlands. These ones can fly. These ones are short. These ones are even shorter. While this can be fun, I either want more out of my fantasy races or I'm gonna call it what it is and exclusively use humans in my fantasy setting.

There are two things I'm setting out to achieve:

1) Unique beings with fundamentally different outlooks than human beings. This goes beyond mere culture; I'm looking for mindsets that simply wouldn't work for human beings. An inability to see could lead an aquatic race to rich textural art and forms of communication. Knowledge exchange with such a people would be difficult at best, and could lead to conflicts of misunderstanding unresolvable by traditional forms of communication. A race of rock people greet one another by pounding on the other's head. This acknowledges the strength of both individuals, and any being refusing to do so is weak and/or cowardly. Any being that expires during this ritual is perceived as weak and deserving of death. Only the mighty should endure.

2) Accomplishing objective 1 without putting a straight jacket on players. I don't want an always evil race. I don't want a race that must complete a complex, hour-long ritual each morning or perish. I'm more concerned with providing different paradigms that must be followed than with providing different actions that must be followed.

How do you set out to achieve this in your campaigns? How have other GMs you've played with done it? I'd love any and all examples from gaming tables, books, movies, video games, and anywhere else you might encounter such a thing.

[BowStreetRunner]

I'm not entirely certain that what you seek is truly possible. In all of the games in which I have played or GM'ed, I would have to say that characters who were members of even the most 'alien' of races ultimately stood out not for how alien they were, but how entirely human. In each case the player inevitably focused on some quality of the character's personality that was designed to distinguish them and it was the humanness of this quality that stood out in the end.

If someone were to successfully play a character that was not built around some human quality I would think it would come off as truly incomprehensible. But once we understand the creature's motivations we are able to empathize and then it becomes, while not necessarily a human with pointy ears a human perhaps with a more severe set of differences. A human with a carapace instead of an internal skeleton who is a member of a hive race with differentiated warrior and worker castes that uses pheromones for communication and possesses tremor-sense instead of hearing would differ from a human with pointy ears merely by a matter of degree.

Personally, I like to see each player find something around which to build his/her character and focus on that. Whether it is one character's sense of honor or another's light-blindness really matters less that whether the player is able to fully develop the persona of the character as distinct and believably real.

[AmberVael]

... or I'm gonna call it what it is and exclusively use humans in my fantasy setting.

I suggest you just do this if you find it unsatisfying. While I do think its possible to create truly alien beings, its incredibly difficult to play them properly and not very rewarding to do so. At best you can make them a piece of a world rather than a good player option.

I've tinkered with making really alien characters a few times, but every time I've done it, I've actually distanced my roleplay from the entity that was ostensibly my character. For example, I was once creating a far realms style being who guarded truth so terrible that it could shatter minds. In order to maintain that distance and strangeness, the being itself didn't really communicate much or in a comprehensible way. To make things actually interesting and give me some chance of interaction, it had a large number of bound servants (vestiges, actually) who would make commentary on and somewhat interpret its actions and more readily converse with the more normal party members. Similarly, when I made an entity called the Voice, a bodiless sentience that was something of a hivemind, it interacted with the party through one of its human components, allowing me to give a more human lens to focus its actions and nature through.

[TheifofZ]

Most fantasy settings put a lot of work into building distinct and unique identities for each race. But when you peel away the superficial differences of minor stat bonuses, in my mind you just end up with humans but different. These people love the woodlands. These ones can fly. These ones are short. These ones are even shorter. While this can be fun, I either want more out of my fantasy races or I'm gonna call it what it is and exclusively use humans in my fantasy setting.

There are two things I'm setting out to achieve:

1) Unique beings with fundamentally different outlooks than human beings. This goes beyond mere culture; I'm looking for mindsets that simply wouldn't work for human beings. An inability to see could lead an aquatic race to rich textural art and forms of communication. Knowledge exchange with such a people would be difficult at best, and could lead to conflicts of misunderstanding unresolvable by traditional forms of communication. A race of rock people greet one another by pounding on the other's head. This acknowledges the strength of both individuals, and any being refusing to do so is weak and/or cowardly. Any being that expires during this ritual is perceived as weak and deserving of death. Only the mighty should endure.

2) Accomplishing objective 1 without putting a straight jacket on players. I don't want an always evil race. I don't want a race that must complete a complex, hour-long ritual each morning or perish. I'm more concerned with providing different paradigms that must be followed than with providing different actions that must be followed.

How do you set out to achieve this in your campaigns? How have other GMs you've played with done it? I'd love any and all examples from gaming tables, books, movies, video games, and anywhere else you might encounter such a thing.

The issue here is that, by its very nature, a creature with Blue and Orange morality is comparatively incomprehensible to a player use to the norm.
If you can abandon entirely your human sensibilities that you don't even notice, it might be possible, but that's the core of the entire issue.
Personally, I always liked alien races that are so very distinctly alien because of how inhuman the little things are, while still being something that can be portrayed with mostly human-esque sensibilities.

[Unusual Muse]

Another perspective: Have you ever stopped to think about how alien various *humans* really are? It is not so much our physiology that makes us alien; it's the staggering variety of cultures and *mindsets* - ways of perceiving and interpreting the world - that often make me wonder how we as a species manage to interface with each other at all. Look at the range of "truths" that you see projected by people on social media! Even within any given culture the range of values, the ways of interpreting stimuli, are so incredibly different. If you want to create "alien," you could do so entirely with humans by diving really deeply into cultures and the social determinants that shape them. Approach your humans like an anthropologist, and you'll have plenty of aliens to work with! :)

[ArcanistSupreme]

To clarify:

The other races would obviously need to be relatable to us as humans. We simply have no other frame of reference, and playing an unrelatable character could be unsatisfying for many players and make it difficult to mesh with other party members. But while there are so many almost examples of what I'm looking for among real-life cultures, I'm looking for something more fundamental and ingrained. A gnome raised among humans should be something other than a little man with a +2 bonus to Craft (Alchemy). Like a race mentally incapable of deliberately lying or comprehending the idea of saying something that is not a fact (kinda like Galaxy Quest). Or a race that feels physical pain whenever plant matter within a certain radius is damaged, and thus view vegetarians as anything from brutal sociopaths to monsters who must be eradicated at any cost.

Does that make sense? I'm looking for that one thing that, no matter how much time is spent among their people, will prevent humans from truly integrating with these other races. They can get along with one another, they can be friends, but there is always that barrier to true understanding (and true love is right out).