[Atgxtg]

For starters just wanted to say that I do agree with most of you post here, just to show that we do agree some of the time.

Originally Posted by Nightshade

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.

Tell me about it. Good artwork. I even met the artist once. But coming up with lots of variants of elves, dwarves, whatever is easy-especially in such a simple system.

Originally Posted by Nightshade

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.

Oh, I agree that it doesn't matter to some people, and I think having some sterotypical fantasy write ups ala Magic World makes sense if BRP is going to be a generic RPG.

But, while some don't care, and some GMs don't enjoy world building, some do. If they don't spend some time working out the details, then they will lose those customers who do care about that stuff. Considering the nature of past BRP products, the fanbase for BRP is probably more into the caring department.

I think some detailed non-generic races would be nice, and wouldn't hurt those who don't care about races or worldbuilding. Giving GMs some new races that they may or may not use doesn't force them to world build. More like the opposite. Right now, BRP has nothing out, so any GM is forced to either start worldbuilding, or buy a setting and convert.

Given the nature of BRP in the past, and that there are going to be many setting books, I would except and probably prefer that most non-humans races be written up in said setting books. For instance, I could see satrys and nymphs being written up for an Ancienct Greek sourcebook, but not necessarily being in the core book, or in a generic bestiary. I could see Dragons being universal though, since most cultures (historical or fantasy) seem to have them. We could have both Celtic and Norse Elves (Tuatha de Daann and Alfar) written up for their repsective settings.

I just don't want to see BRP turn into yet another LoTR clone. Lots of other RPGs do that already, and one more isn't going to make a big splash. Besides the BRP rules aren't geared toward "high fantasy" anyway. I think it's better suited towards historical or mythicic historical settings or "dark & gritty" fantasy worlds.

Originally Posted by Nightshade

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

Yeah, I got to play DarkSun once. It was quite a bit different than the typical D&D campaign.

Originally Posted by Nightshade

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.

I think that was partially due to a lack of options. If all you owned was RQ, and you wanted to run some sort of elf, all you had were the RQ3 elf stats. Considering just how xenophobic most RQ cultures are, including the non-human ones (more like ESPECIALLY the non-human ones) it's no surprise that non-humans didn't get a lot of detail in many original RQ settings. I think CoC's Deep Ones probably made the top 5 list for "friendly to humans" in BRP! Race relations in RQ were not nearly as good as in most RPGs.