Fantasy Races

Originally Posted by soltakss

One thing that has bugged me for a while is this. Why are non-humans normally all the same race? Sure. Glorantha has different types of elves, but they are more of a sub-species than a race. Most other settings have elves, dwarves, orcs and whatever but no races within them.

Maybe they do ... it's just that they all look the same to me.

[Sorloc]

Originally Posted by Trifletraxor

Wow! Sounds like a cool setting!

Sverre.

Thanks! My players sure seem to like it; probably because I add all their ideas in there somewhere - ok, not ALL, but it's been built upon bit by bit...

Originally Posted by soltakss

What, no Orc societies? You mention enslaved orcs, so why don't they have a society? Not bugging you, just interested
...
One thing that has bugged me for a while is this. Why are non-humans normally all the same race? Sure. Glorantha has different types of elves, but they are more of a sub-species than a race. Most other settings have elves, dwarves, orcs and whatever but no races within them.

Truthfully, I didn't give Orcs a lot of thought in the first continent - they weren't encountered, ever.

On the next continent, where the story moved to...
(backstory: in another game (dnd ), the GM was trying to get us out of the city and back into the hole in the ground. We didn't want to go, but the NPCs were telling us rumors that the Orcs had gotten a charismatic new leader... We left the game soon after (or I got kicked out, I forget), but I always wanted to use that hook...)

...I actually had a PC paladin (read: holy warrior) of the night / moon / dreams deity who stumbled upon an Orc tribe who reacted with some hostility. She and the other PC (a mentalist) found that the Orcs were suffering repeated attacks by adventuring parties. The paladin managed to defeat the Orc Chieftain in single combat, and thereby became Chief, getting all his stuff, leadership of the tribe, and rights to his three wives.
When the adventuring party returned, the Orcs were ready. The surviving members of the adventuring party said that they were told about the Orcs having a charismatic new leader... also they were led to believe the Orcs had seized this location with a holy temple and untold riches, both stories completely untrue.
The truth was, as the PCs learned after sallying forth, that the Elves had been using adventuring parties in an attempt to stamp out their nearby enemies.
The paladin PC was trying to figure a way to extricate herself from leadership of an Orc tribe, a situation I chose to complicate by having several Orcs express a desire to convert.


Sub-species was something I touched on a bit, but not much.
Elves I have divided up into Fair, Gray, Dark, Aquatic, and Rustic.

One important thing in my world is interbreeding; half-elves cannot produce children between themselves. if they mate with either an elf or a human, the children will be of the race of the pruebred parent.
I created this rule after realizing that after a few millenia, there would be more half-elves than pure elves. This ruling made half-elves self-terminating.

[Aycorn]

Originally Posted by the Bromgrev

Maybe they do ... it's just that they all look the same to me.

What - have you forgotten the old AD&D elves? Wood elves, Gray elves, pink elves, beach elves...

[soltakss]

A Paladin being the chief of an orc clan. That's the kind of messing about with stereotypes I like to see.

[Sorloc]

Well, they DID say, "the Orcs have a charismatic new leader"...

In my world, paladins are not Arthurian chevaliers, they are the fighting force of a religion. Hence, they for the most part mirror the attributes of the deity and the deity's moral codes of cunduct.

The paladins of the Night / Moon / Dreams deity go out primarily at night. They have an elitist attitude, for they feel that they alone have the fortitude to go forth and hunt evil in its own element - the night. They are primarity stealthy; they are the ones responsible when you hear a noise at night, but by the time you get a light and go check, there's nothing there... they have already done their work.

Other paladins have other descriptions, other methods, but all are a martial aspect of their deity made manifest on earth.

[drohem]

I have always been a fan of bi-pedal and bi-manual anthrophomric animal humanoids. I loved a little game called Justifiers because of the Beta-Humanoid concept. This concept has been done in many other games system as well, whether it was a fantasy or sci-fi system.

I basically created animal humanoid races for my fantasy campaign, Thonkar, using magic as the explanation. There were only humans before the Ani-men races were created. The Pomperiian Empire had grown decadent and bloated (like Rome in the last days) and the mages created a slave-race of animal-human hybrids. One of the side effects of the magic was that some of the ani-men were fertile and could breed.

In the campaign, there was a slave revolt led by a gladiator (a la Spartacus) that freed them from slavery. The ani-men fled into the wilds and corners of the Pomperiian Empire to rule themselves and create their own society. They formed a religion based upon the concept of Gaia.

[badcat]

Ever played Fifth Cycle?

[drohem]

Unfortunately no, I have never played it. I own it and have read through it, but was not able to convince my gaming circle to play it.

[badcat]

I did, we played a campaign through. It works, with some things that take some getting used to as you can imagine. My wife's all-time favorite character was her Purrtier. Magic was very deadly. The mage in the group almost did a total party kill with a fireball. Overall, it felt a lot like BRP in actual play, even though it was missing some of the factors that make BRP what it is. I have often wondered if it started off as someones' homebrewed RQ game. Oh, and the gamescreen turned out to be the most useful one I have ever tried to use.

I haven't been able to get another group to try it, though. I bet you are not in Seattle, are you?

[drohem]

hehe...no, I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, CA. I currently live in Thornton, CO.

You are probably right about it evolving out of someone's homebrew game. I like military-esk campaigns and games, so I really like the campaign world because it showcased a military aspect of the game. War is a great story-driver.