Fantasy Races

[Thinker]

So how do you look at races in fantasy worlds? Do you think it is acceptable or even expected that a world will have multiple intelligent creatures? I feel that there are only a few ways for this to have come about in any world:

1. The gods did it. The gods all got together (or did it apart) and decided "hey, this world needs more pointy eared folks and folks with green skin.
2. Evolution due to isolation. All sentient creatures have the same ancestor, but due to complete isolation some of them evolved differently over several hundred thousand years.
3. Extraterrestrial origins. Once the creatures were at a sufficient level of development they were thrust together by merging planes, visiting spacecraft, etc.

How do you feel about multiple races? Should they be present and should they generally be there as adversaries of the protagonists?

[tainsouvra]

While your DM can, naturally, determine that the races evolved the way they are...that just doesn't seem likely with the level of magic being thrown around in the D&D universe. I just go with the idea that, at some point in the past, any particular race was created--gods, wizards, magical accident, whatever.

[AKA_Bait]

A wizard did it. ;-)

[tainsouvra]

A wizard did it. ;-)

A spooooky wizard. Living by the coast?

[Morty]

As for origins, I never really thought about it. They're just there, created at the same time by whatever or whoever created the world. But I do have firm views of how races should look like. For example, each race needs to have its purpose. No cannon-fodderish races like goblins or races that are just there like gnomes. Such races need to be either modified or deleted. Also, no races should be diversed within themselves, which means that all for example elves aren't the same.

[BardicDuelist]

A spooooky wizard. Living by the coast?

Acutally, a spooky wizard living by the coast paid to copy out of the spell book of a dragon....

I beleive the giant put it best in some thinly veiled alegory in Dragon 358.

Even still, I generally have the gods create the races, but then the races evolve over time in to regional subraces.

[Krellen]

I think a traditional view is gods create races in their image; since there are multiple gods (and multiple pantheons, generally), there are multiple races.

That's sort of the view I took. The mortal races in my world are all children of the gods (quite literally, actually). I have a much smaller pantheon than "standard" D&D (even ignoring all the "racial pantheons" being introduced, and especially compared to Faerun) though, so this means less races overall.

[bosssmiley]

A wizard did it. ;-)

Q: Where do half-elves come from?
A:

Spoiler

Show

A wizard hit it.

As for where the various fantasy races come from, that's very rarely an issue for me and mine. We just take the various racial origin myths at face value...and then time travel into the distant past to fight dinosaurs and aboleths anyway.


Logical consistency? Where's the fun in that?

[Thinker]

I think a traditional view is gods create races in their image; since there are multiple gods (and multiple pantheons, generally), there are multiple races.

That's sort of the view I took. The mortal races in my world are all children of the gods (quite literally, actually). I have a much smaller pantheon than "standard" D&D (even ignoring all the "racial pantheons" being introduced, and especially compared to Faerun) though, so this means less races overall.

But does this satisfy how the races have coexisted for so long, even when competing for so long?

As for where the various fantasy races come from, that's very rarely an issue for me and mine. We just take the various racial origin myths at face value...and then time travel into the distant past to fight dinosaurs and aboleths anyway.


Logical consistency? Where's the fun in that?

The traditional origin myths often include alternate worlds for other creatures.

[Jayabalard]

it depends on the game world.

For example... in GURPS Banestorm, The elves, dwarves and orcs were native to Yrth. All other races were brought to Yrth by the banestorms, the result of the war between the orcs and the elves. Pretty much any fantasy or Sci-fi race can be worked into that setting.

[drawingfreak]

Unless the origins of a race become a focal point in the story, it shouldn't matter.

[OverdrivePrime]

On my worlds I generally have evolution responsible for most of the creatures. A rare few are aliens from other planes, but I generally like to have as few sentient races as I can get away with.

As for the gods, I envision them as being created by the cultures that worship them.

[ranger89]

I really like the fact that their are multiple sentient races primarily because it's what I want out of my fantasy world and because it makes the game much more diverse. So I definitely think they should be present (except for gnomes ) and can used for whatever (hero, villian, fodder, etc.).

For the record, my group developed its own cosmology which has the various gods creating the various races, etc., etc., etc. so we're in the "gods did it" camp. I'd have no problem with some sort of evolutionary explanation but UFOs are right out.

EDIT: After thinking about this some more, I realized that my group is actually a combination of evolution and gods-did-it since all the races were created a long, long, long time ago in our game world.

[Thinker]

On my worlds I generally have evolution responsible for most of the creatures. A rare few are aliens from other planes, but I generally like to have as few sentient races as I can get away with.

As for the gods, I envision them as being created by the cultures that worship them.

Evolution is cool, but how do you explain how distinct the various races are? That is my main stump it requires a severe degree of isolation or a complete change in required resources to limit competition to foster such evolution.

[Merlin the Tuna]

I enjoy having a variety of sentient races -- but not a veritable flood of sentient races. Human-only fantasy of course works fine, and I don't have a problem with having a couple of standard races - PHB + orcs, a few goblinoids, maybe kobolds, ogres - being around and having civilization and culture, but being unable to walk through the woods without getting talked to by 30 different species irks me. I mean, take Worgs - do we really need talking wolves, or no? Do Cloakers need 14 Int?

Unless a race has a pretty good reason for existing -- Warforged or Shifters, for example -- I'm not a fan of "So here's some Kenku, some goat people, and oh yeah, dragons are hyper-intelligent and are as likely to kill you with mind-exploding lectures on quantum physics as they are with fire breath," and so on and so forth. Sometimes a troll just needs to snarl and eat people, y'know?

[goat]

In the beginning, the infinite planar universe was a slightly bigger infinite planar universe, with a multitude of co-existent, parallel material planes. On each of these planes, the primary sentient species that evolved sprang from a different creature, resulting in a range of thinking, curious creatures.

Then the gods thought it would be a good laugh to stick them all in the same place and watch them fight.

[Durendal]

I once had the idea of creating a fantasy world which was actually a post nuclear winter earth many many years in the future. Small mutations among the few survivors caused by the radiation, amplified by years of isolation, caused the eventual evolution of the different "races" present in the world. There were humans (uneffected survivors), dwarves, elves (who were only slightly off from humans), half elves (some elves weren't as isolated as the rest), gnomes, halflings, and orcs (no half orcs, I never really liked that idea). I also was going to allow some of the numerous elven subraces, based on different environmental evolutions.

Other than that, I generally fall into the gods created the various races category.

[Kaelik]

Durendal, that sounds similar to Shannara, by Terry Brooks. Never read past the first couple books, but that is sort of what I gathered happened. I might be wrong.

Also, I generally speaking limit sentient races to PHB, goblins/orcs/kobolds. But then I occasionally bring in a small community of some other race as part of a plot device/encounter/whatever.

I have one major exception to this rule though. Anything goes for PCs. They want some crazy assed race I will find a way to make that race fit in the campaign world and I will usually do so in a way that helps give them the character they want.

[Krellen]

But does this satisfy how the races have coexisted for so long, even when competing for so long?

A couple things. First is a common enemy. My world is young, so it's still in the "Morgoth" stage; there's one evil God who wants to destroy the world. The other races have little choice but to cooperate* or be overwhelmed by the force of the Dragon God.

The second is the fact that they have not been "competing for so long". Only one race is native; the other three (there are only a total of four species, although there are multiple races) are outsiders - one the servants of the Dragon God, one called specifically to fight the Dragon God, and one fleeing in exile from a ruined world. So two of the races coexist by purpose - the natives and the warriors - and the other coexists because they've got no land of their own. And the fourth doesn't coexist. It's trying to kill people.

*Cooperate in a general sense. There are, in fact, inter-racial conflicts - and in fact one of the racial divides is so extreme that two races that are the children of the same gods barely even talk to each other (and it's not a clichéd elf/dark elf thing, either. Neither side is clearly the evil one.)

[Talya]

Durendal, that sounds similar to Shannara, by Terry Brooks. Never read past the first couple books, but that is sort of what I gathered happened. I might be wrong.

You aren't wrong, except for elves. The other Shannara races (Dwarves, Gnomes, Trolls, etc.) are mutations after a nuclear apocalypse thousands of years in the past, but the elves reappeared after the appocalypse. They were magical creatures of fey origins that had been in hiding through the age of technology. The same apocalypse that mutated so many, also damaged them to near mundanity--stripped of most of their magics and their near immortality, they became far less different than humanity than they were previously.

[SurlySeraph]

I was at one point working on a homebrew approach that used evolution, with the races living in sporadic contact with one another but living in different ecosystems. Humans evolved on the plains, elves in the forests, halflings on mountains and in isolated valleys no one else ever reached, dwarves underground in the mountains, orcs on plains way the hell off in the east, separated from the humans by mountains and rivers. Gnomes were dwarf-halfling hybrids, from when dwarves and halflings allied (halflings hunt for food on the surface and trade it for materials the dwarves mine, and take refuge in dwarven tunnels when humans or elves invade; dwarves temporarily move to the surface when they stumble upon buried Balrog-type things).

[SpiderKoopa]

... Gnomes were dwarf-halfling hybrids...

Ugh. Reminds me of the Dragonlance gullydwarves. Only I think those are the offspring of dwarves and gnomes.
-Shudders.- That dwarf must've critically failed a fort save and got hammered.

[Turcano]

Evolution is cool, but how do you explain how distinct the various races are? That is my main stump it requires a severe degree of isolation or a complete change in required resources to limit competition to foster such evolution.

Two words: convergent evolution. Simply put, species that occupy the same ecological niche often develop the same features, even though they have no (or a very distant) genetic relationship. Particularly striking examples include New World/Old World vultures and the various Australian marsupial analogs to their placential counterparts. This goes a long way to explaining radically different humanoid species (kobolds, catpeople, thri-kreen, etc.), although it isn't often exploited by writers of speculative fiction for some reason.

[TheOOB]

In my D&D campaign setting, most other humanoid races are human with some magical influence. For example elves are tied to their sacred forest, and an elf born outside the forest, even if both parents are elven, is only a half elf. Half elves can breed true for awhile outside of the forest, but they get more human out generation. On the other hand, the child of two humans in the forest could very well be a half elf, eventually becoming an elf several generations down the line.

Dwarves are similar to elves, but instead their race is dependant on their clan. A dwarf stripped of their clan title can no longer have dwarven children, and so on.

Halflings are just short humans in the first place, and Orcs are from the magical wastelands.

In my world many humans can trace their linage to another race, in fact there didn't even used to be humans.

[OverdrivePrime]

Two words: convergent evolution. Simply put, species that occupy the same ecological niche often develop the same features, even though they have no (or a very distant) genetic relationship. Particularly striking examples include New World/Old World vultures and the various Australian marsupial analogs to their placential counterparts. This goes a long way to explaining radically different humanoid species (kobolds, catpeople, thri-kreen, etc.), although it isn't often exploited by writers of speculative fiction for some reason.

You took the words right outta my mouth, Turcano. Or off my fingertips, in this case, I suppose.

Additionally, you can have separate lines from a common ancestor exist in separate regions. For a historical example, look to the Neanderthals, living in Europe while what were to become modern humans were living in Africa and Asia. Seas, ice ages and nasty mountains can help this along nicely.

[CrazedGoblin]

A random occurance beetween two coliding means of thought combining to an idea which instated itself as reality through the means of a medium (the medium on earth being that of Humans) and bam a race is created!

[Crazy_Uncle_Doug]

There's plenty of variations to the ideas listed as well. Some I've seen:

Super-Evolution: A cataclysmic event causes rapid change amongst various species, resulting in some of the present-day known races. For example, I remember a few years ago, it was Warhammer canon (not certain of its validity today) that the world was originally peopled by the Old Slann race, a species of reptiles. The Slann screwed up and opened a couple nice big gates to Chaos, resulting in the end of their society. The Chaos that spread through the world resulted in the change of non-sentient species into elves, dwarves, and humans at different times. Another example could be taken from an apocryphal work in the World of Warcraft game, where it suggests a tribe of trolls discover a strange power source and are forever changed by it, suggesting the night elves came from trolls. The destruction of the first elf society also resulted in the sudden creation of the naga race.

Non-native: There are species that come from the world, and some that came from a different world altogether. Again, taking an example from WoW, this would be the Orcs who now call Azeroth their home, but hailed from a different world altogether.

Made-To-Order: The races known today were created by a much older race, specifically to be servitor races. After a time, the creators were supplanted by the created. The original Neverwinter Nights hints that may have been the case in the FR setting -- although the games are not considered canon, and I found the information given on the "Creator Race" to be contradictory within the very story they are introduced.

Devolved: The race or races were once something much greater than they are today, but somewhere in their history, they regressed or fell to the low state they are now. The race as it exists today perhaps has no inkling of what they once were. Or perhaps they know all too well and regard with disdain the "lesser" races they once surpassed which may very well surpass them someday.

Origins, in the long run, are difficult to map out. Heck, humans are still confused about our own, Earthly origins to this day, and we're the only sentient species on our world as far as we know. A fantasy world has a myriad number of sentients, semi-sentients, and perhaps even a handful of super-sentients. It's possible that there's a myriad of different origins for varying species, some we even haven't come up. Best advice is: get creative.

[Matthew]

You aren't wrong, except for elves. The other Shannara races (Dwarves, Gnomes, Trolls, etc.) are mutations after a nuclear apocalypse thousands of years in the past, but the elves reappeared after the appocalypse. They were magical creatures of fey origins that had been in hiding through the age of technology. The same apocalypse that mutated so many, also damaged them to near mundanity--stripped of most of their magics and their near immortality, they became far less different than humanity than they were previously.

I recall putting the books down in disgust once I read that part. That was pretty much a convention too far for me.

Yeah, 'the Gods did it' is my usual answer, though I don't particularly like the idea of 'Racial Deities'. I prefer to use a more Tolkien style model.

That said, Spelljammer and Planescape pretty much make everything and anything possible in terms of genesis stories.

[Thinker]

That said, Spelljammer and Planescape pretty much make everything and anything possible in terms of genesis stories.

Yeah, that's why I like those settings.

[Matthew]

Heh, one reason amongst many. The Grand Imperial Elven Navy always makes me smile.