Race possibilities
I have a few suggestions for races. I know that this was discussed and consensus seemed that there would be no races but the decision was still up in the air. I had worked on a number of races for my homebrew world and thought that I would put them up on the sacrificial pyre of the Shared world.
Years ago I tried to create a world with races distinctly different than Glorantha, but wanted to have much of the same feel. I liked the way high fantasy races that people were familiar with were taken, given different names, and then fleshed out in unique ways. I did not want to use the same races Glorantha used though, and wanted them to be unique. The problem was Glorantha had somewhat muddied the water and used many of the high-fantasy type names and races already: trolls, elves, dwarves. Orcs are far too Tolkienish. What that left me with was Goblins (I know the name was used in Glorantha but not seriously fleshed out the way the other races were). I then stretched this race name as far as I could and used goblins as my major non-human race. I always envisioned them as more realistic than fantastical more like Frazetta than animie.
Well, I called the race Trogod, goblin is simply the human slang term for the race. Trogod evolve very quickly based on their environment and there are a number of different subspecies (different parts of the shared world can have different types of Trogod as fits the writer, originally I had trolls as species of Trogod). The premise is that by nature goblins tie themselves to different animal totems and their features and magic are all highly influenced by the totem they adopt. This would leave a lot of options available for writers while keeping to a single racial theme.
In my world many of these Trogod were gathered up and enslaved by a group called the Azchirgnoth (more on them later, but basically Rurik’s Akershule gone bad), (I was shocked by the similarity of the names) these slaves lost many of their totemic ties and live on the edges of human settlements. Others ran to the hills and forests to hide and adapted to their environment.
Anyway, I began writing up the Trogod races for mrq. I am going to attempt to post them on the wiki as it is a little long to put in posts here. I am hoping it can be easily modified or deleted from there as it is just a suggestion and only in rough-draft, mrq, and totally unfinished form. (Much of the later stuff is just notes and random musings). Also, the first bit was written to tie the Trogod into my homebrew world but I left it in as it may inspire ideas in others. If the entire bit is rejected out of hand I will understand as a purely human world has its charms.
Goblin notes here:
http://basicroleplaying.com/forum/sh...ns-trogod.html