fantasy races

[ipnoom]

I know I am getting to this topic late, but I would like to throw in a thought about monolithic culture for non-human races. In many settings, humans are an enormous percentage of the total sentient population, and often the non-humans (each group, whether it be elves, dwarves, etc.) are a very small part of the population. This could be what keeps them similar, that there aren't a lot of them and they all have their own centers of population where the are almost all concentrated. If you were to take all of a small group and isolated them away from everyone else and they lived closely together, it is likely that their culture will evolve as one unit. Of course, if there is an external pressure (rapidly reproducing and resource using humans), then teamwork and cooperation may be neccessary for that one group to survive which would also discourage "people" that go their own way.

often in these settings there is an "orphan" who is raised in a different culture (usually a human one) that then identifies with the culture that raises him/her rather than his "original" culture. That is not to say that their are no connections to the "original" group after all someone of Irish origin that was raised in the United States may wish to visit his "homeland" and may ape certain aspects of Irish culture, but that is not to say that he is more "Irish" than a "US".

In a world where you have races with much greater numbers, that don't all live in a small area or without the same type of external pressures, I would expect a certain amount of cultural drift

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Bill Cameron

If it hasn't already been mentioned before and while it is a sci-fi setting, the many hominid races from Larry Niven's Ringworld series are very easily adapted to fantasy settings.

The fact that each hominid race has an ecological niche makes using them even simpler.


Bill

I believe Chris McCubbin said that he based the Ghoul Race from Fantasy folk on the Ghouls from Ringworld.

[pawsplay]

Originally Posted by Fish

That may be a signal that you're over-thinking that one race. If you can't fit all of your concepts into one seamless whole, then maybe you've got too much stuff crammed in there.

If you can fit all your concepts into a seamless whole, you have a potentially dissatisfying race. Planet of Hats, and all that.

I subscribe to the "untidy is realistic" concept. Athena is the goddess of the city, military defense, wisdom, olives, and owls, and is the keeper of Zeus's thunderbolts and Perseus's Aegis shield. She is also a hundred times cooler than most Forgotten Realms deities. Why? Because she has hobbies.

That's why Prime Directive Klingons are better than canon Klingons, and Next Generation Klingons are better than TOS Klingons. Variety is the spice of life. Coming up with a good "hook" is a good way to start a race, but the best way to flesh them out is to keep adding ideas and figuring out how they would work together. That's how you end up with a coherent race. Seamless races translate into "races who are so homogeneous and concept-driven they must all suffer from a personality disorder that makes them compulsively boring."

[Mr_Sandman]

Originally Posted by Widowlander

Cat people, dog people, rat people, danish people, no matter how you spin it ARE NOT COOL.

(emphasis added)

I disagree.
Some cool Danish people:
Viggo Mortensen
Hans Christian Andersen
Niels Bohr
Tycho Brahe
Victor Borge
King Canute

Cool fictional Danes:
Hamlet
King Hrothgar

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I do tend to play fantasy races as variant humans myself though.
One campaign of mine had dwarves as neanderthals.

[b-dog]

Originally Posted by ipnoom

I know I am getting to this topic late, but I would like to throw in a thought about monolithic culture for non-human races. In many settings, humans are an enormous percentage of the total sentient population, and often the non-humans (each group, whether it be elves, dwarves, etc.) are a very small part of the population. This could be what keeps them similar, that there aren't a lot of them and they all have their own centers of population where the are almost all concentrated. If you were to take all of a small group and isolated them away from everyone else and they lived closely together, it is likely that their culture will evolve as one unit. Of course, if there is an external pressure (rapidly reproducing and resource using humans), then teamwork and cooperation may be neccessary for that one group to survive which would also discourage "people" that go there own way.

I think that trying to think of dwarves, elves and such as being like humans is a big mistake. I tend to think of them as mortal faeries who are sort of beyond the ordinary world. The culture of these races is linked to the faerie realm more than the mortal realm so they seem very odd and obsessive by human standards. Trying to have their culture evolve is sort of silly. On the other hand races like cat folk, reptile men and other mundane races are much better suited to acclimate to their environment. An orc or ogre is sort violent and brutal because that is what they are, violent and brutal mortal faeries while a reptile man is violent and brutal for mundane things like teritory or mating rites.

[ipnoom]

Originally Posted by b-dog

I think that trying to think of dwarves, elves and such as being like humans is a big mistake.

This is, of course, something that must be determined by the world creator. I am just going by standard gurps thinking that everything is basically a human until you start twisting or changing it. If you want Dwarves and elves as being less related to humans and closer to faerie folk, then that is fine, though I don't see how having a race more closely related to magic neccessarily makes their culture less likely to evolve, just perhaps that they might not evolve as a non-magical race might, after all, what if the state of their magic changes, etc?

I think this mostly misses the point of the original topic, which is to look at making fantasy races less like classic thinking of them. If a GM wants them to be monolithic, that is of course his choice or to make them brutal and violent, or peaceful and magical or any combination, they are welcome to do that, I am sure that it would not be too hard to find real world or at least a semi-logical reason why anything is the way you would like it :)

[Fish]

Originally Posted by pawsplay

If you can fit all your concepts into a seamless whole, you have a potentially dissatisfying race. Planet of Hats, and all that.

I subscribe to the "untidy is realistic" concept. Athena is the goddess of the city, military defense, wisdom, olives, and owls, and is the keeper of Zeus's thunderbolts and Perseus's Aegis shield.

I get what you're saying here, and I understand why ascribing a race or culture with a single, monolithic stereotype is usually not a good or desirable thing. Human beings, to name the most conspicuous example, don't believe simply one thing, or even two, but an entire multitude of attitudes, concepts, superstitions, religions, and we speak more languages than we can even count, across as many ecosystems as the world offers.

However, I stand by what I said — because that outline I posted began from a race's biological differences, examined in isolation, without trying to tie them into anything else. If the people are non-human, begin with that and extrapolate into the various sets of beliefs and cultures that might stem from their nature.

Coming up with a good "hook" is a good way to start a race, but the best way to flesh them out is to keep adding ideas and figuring out how they would work together. That's how you end up with a coherent race.

I absolutely agree. I think the mistake that was being made was in trying to cram too much in at the same time and make it all fit, without fully understanding each individual facet.

[Tommi_Kovala]

My fantasy campaign world consists mostly of small islands in an immense freshwater system. Early on, I made the decision to have no non-human cultures in it. There's a saying that limitations are great for creativity, and it certainly gave me incentive to flesh out the civilizations that inhabit Lakeland.
When you start with the assumption that humans = boring metapopulation, you're off on the wrong foot. If you can't make humans interesting, you can't make your blue-skinned dolphin-men any more so. Once the first five minutes of cosmetic novelty wear off, your players will want to move on.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Just because a race is physically non-human, doesn't mean the author is incapable of making them mentally or culturally non-human and is therefore lacking in all skill. It doesn't mean everything the author writes is automatically boring.

As I said, unless you have a cosmological or plot reason that only humans/humanoids can be sapient (or are making a movie/tv show and need human actors), outlawing sapience in every other type of lifeform makes no sense to me.

Frankly, I use fantasy and science fiction for escapism. If it is too similar to the real world, I simply won't enjoy it.

That doesn't mean that I prefer non-humans out of a failure of creativity or a deficit of skill. To assume such things is unfair. It's like assuming a priori that if something resembles a bipedal animal, it must be a furry with a completely human psychology and culture.


Generally speaking, the less human I make a race, the less human they are in all ways. My least human race I've come up with was probably the one with racial memory, who were going extinct and turning into trees. Their psychology was very non-human. They weren't humanoids, they were aquatic octopus-like things.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Fish

I get what you're saying here...

I just re-read my previous two posts and realized that they seem to say opposite things. After writing that outline in the first post, I didn't go on to say everything I had intended to.

The "born as twins" shtick is most likely a biological quirk of the race. The "studies the stars" thing is a cultural quirk that may or may not belong to the same race, or even overlap to multiple races. After all, it isn't just people of Arabian descent who are Muslims; it isn't just people descended from the Israelites who are Jewish. The "studies the stars" culture could encompass part of every race... or none of them, if you analyze the concept and find it lacking.

My point about fitting things into a seamless whole: each concept has to stand on its own without struggling to force it to fit seamlessly with every other concept.