What DF races have towns?

[Anders]

Originally Posted by WhiteLily

DFRPG doesn't really have a defined setting. Therefore, I feel the answer to the question depends on what fantasy world you are seeking to emulate.

Indeed. So how are things in your DF world?

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

And then you have places like New York City and who knows what the dominant race is

I would think diversity would be the norm for cities, with individual villages being more homogeneous. If there's no market or inn, there's far less reason for outsiders to visit a settlement, and the lack of a market defines a village so much that we have to prefix "market" to those bigger villages that have one. A possible situation would be like pre-war Eastern Europe, with many ethnicities having dedicated villages, each a few miles walk from each other.

[DaosusLeghki]

I imagine there might be enclaves in large cities. Like today, you can get around Brighton Beach or parts of Hollywood by only speaking Russian. Or all the various Chinatowns. I imagine there might be a "gnomeburrow" part of town.

[Anders]

Although if you call the dwarven quarter "shortytown" you're liable to hobble home without your kneecaps.

[martinl]

I've always thought that making Town dominated by coleopterans, where most of the buildings were made from dung-based cement, would be fun. PCs are from "Squishytown," a small suburb of weird vertebrate types living inside of (gasp) wooden shelters who are willing to deal with disgusting stuff the Dungbeetlefolk won't touch.

[WhiteLily]

Right now my DF worlds are borrowed from other people's IPs.

In my Ravenloft setting:
- Demihumans exist in the shadow domain of dread ruled by the local domain lord, often in secret.
- These proto-nation-states of horror have radically different rules regarding demihumans.
- Some treat them as slaves to be forced into labor by the state or private citizenry.
- Others will allow the demihumans to settle into their own racially divided boroughs as long as they submit to the human authority.

My other setting is Golarium, which has a lot of steampunk nation states. Some are along racial lines. I believe there is even a kingdom of the undead who seek equal treatment under international law.

[Black Leviathan]

Anthropologically the larger the Social Stigma a race has the more insulated they would be. A -1 Social stigma would probably make most members of that race congregated in a not great part of the town or city. More than -2 and your people are likely in a group of buildings outside of the walls, maybe at the edge of the limits of the town.

There are other factors about a race that would impact their living arrangements. If a race has Intolerance as a racial disadvantage they would isolate regardless of how other races felt about them.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

My own experience is that if racial packages are on order, they're taken...so enclaves of isolation are a bit odd when your adventuring party is a schmorgasbord of "wait, WHO got together to make you? And HOW?"

It's always important to remember that adventurers have no requirement to be statistically representative :D It's the only sane way to look at a party full of neurotic, heavily-armed and -armored, dangerous people... or "people".

On the original topic, as someone who finds weird racial templates to be my catnip, I don't really expect to find villages and towns of trigerfolk, or minotaurs, or fiendish-dire-feral-dragonfolk with 3 heads. That last one would be pretty fun to visit, but only in the heaviest of Dwarven Plate armor.

Trigerfolk are explicitly one off "A Wizard Did It"s, so even a little village of Trigerfolk would be One Heck Of A Surprise, and they're probably all complaining about the wizard that cursed them and could you please go release them from the curse?

The half-races aren't necessarily in the same situation as trigerfolk as they aren't sterile. Half-orcs in particular are described as a self-sustaining population of general mutts, and could easily have villages or towns. The other half-races commonality is a campaign-dependent thing - I wouldn't be inclined to have a community entirely of the half-spirits from DF:3 (in DFRPG or in DF) but YMMV.

Minotaurs are so crabby and violent that I really can't see them living in groups successfully. The racial template that Kromm posted here for DFRPG highlights the problems. At least Bad Temper doesn't lead to forcing Berserk in DFRPG, but you still have to roll for it, and with Bad Temper on all sides, someone's going to loose it on a regular basis.

I don't have a problem with any of the other playable races having a community of some sort, and they even may count as Town. Whether any of them get big enough to count as a small-t town rather than a village or encampment matters less, and can be judged on a case by case basis. Same with whether they're settled or nomadic - draft animals, carts or sledges, and portable houses like Yurts are definitely good enough to make a nomadic Town for me.

Side note: suddenly I'm thinking "nomadic Town" = circus. Which would be surreal to run into in the middle of nowhere.

[Tinman]

I pretty much agree with WhiteLily on this.

Originally Posted by WhiteLily

I feel the answer to the question depends on what fantasy world you are seeking to emulate.

That being said, I usually set my DF/DFRPG games in Banestorm, so I follow what they have there.

Therefore, the only major races without big settlements listed are the Elves & Orcs.
The Orc's by cannon are nomads in the Orclands to the west.

The Elves have mostly small villages but a few much larger. I see them much like Fiest describes Elvandar in "The Magician" & elsewhere in his series. (I'm also, thinking of running a DF/DFRPG in that universe setting.)


Also, while I follow the lands, races, cultures for Banestorm I'm now running a DF/DFRPG Steampunk campaign.
Demolishers, Musketeers, & some Artificers have access to black powder firearms.
The Steampunk parts of the world are a group of renegade Dwarves helping the Ocrs (like in Orcslayer), some Dwarven communities & a some settlements in Aratare.

[Michael Thayne]

In my homebrew setting, the main civilization is predominantly human but cities often have neighborhoods that are predominantly some other race. Mining settlements might be predominantly dwarven, but they resemble real-world human mining settlements appropriate to the tech level, not Tolkienesque underground metropolises. One you get away from "civilization", you'll find encampments of goat-herding giants, goblin-kin cattle-thieves, elven foragers, and so on, but these aren't really "cities". Now that I'm thinking of it though, I should probably drop a mid-sized coleopteran town or something into the barbarian lands—I've been meaning to add more slightly weird stuff to the barbarian lands.