[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

Some yes. But a lot of that depends on what effort (if any) is made towards fleshing out the species and culture. Traveler, and most of it's spin-offs, did a great job of making aliens seem, alien. On the other hand, Taslanta used to boast about all the races it had, and NO ELVES, yet had something like a dozen elf clones.

Yeah, that advertising campaign always made me roll my eyes a bit. They tried to make their societies different, but in the end, they didn't strike me as significantly different than the high elves/wood elves model.

What I don't like is for every world to have "high" evles, who worhsip Corelleion Latherian, are proficnent with swords and bows, are a dying culture, proficient in magic, live for 600 years, etc.

I understand your attitude, but like I said, sometimes that part just doesn't matter to people that much; they want something vaguely like typical high elves for some background reason, so why bother to spend time thinking about the details when the extent will do?

Its always a good idea to remember that for some GMs worldbuilding is not that fun; its often a chore.

Is there one D&D world, where the Evles are an expanding culture? Or where the Orcs aren't evil? Nope.

while not quite fitting that, DarkSun actually had rather different takes on many of the races than was typical as I recall.

That's what I liked about RQ and the other BRP games. Aldrymi weren't the Tolkien (token?) elves, Trolls weren't evil, just different, and neither appeared in CoC or Stormbringer.

On the other hand, people use Gloranthan style non-humans in a lot of theoretically original RQ worlds for much the same reason; the work is already done for them. I've even seen people import Gloranthan religions for that reason; it saved them the trouble of working out a cult, even though the context often seemed odd without Gloranthan backhistory.