Idea for the origin of elves, dwarves, goblins, trolls etc. in Dungeon Fantasy

[b-dog]

Originally Posted by trooper6

Or that have lots of players who enjoy killing things and not thinking too heavily about the background detail. Who aren't worried about crafting or economies or why there are goblins in a dungeon that has been sealed up for 100 years. That has been my majority experience with D&D. Sure that have been DM's that have done extra work. But most wanted just to go killing things and didn't worry too much about the details. It was fiendish traps and skeletons and loot. It was all dwarves having Scottish accents and drinking Ale and hating Elves. And all elves being a bit haughty and thin and lithe and vaguely British. It was characters with absolutely no backstory.

Can you do other stuff? Sure. But it seems the phrase "Dungeon Fantasy" is being used to describe that...and it seems that there is a distinction being made between Dungeon Fantasy, and Fantsy that has dungeons in it.

I think that DF is more a style than anything. It is combat heavy and the PCs are powerful. But that doesn't mean (at least to me) that there can't be explanations and actual thinking in the game. I mean you can have mindless adventures and settings in any genre but you can also have well thought out, intelligently desgned settings in DF as well. I think that players appreciate the background more than people think. At least the people I played with had stories for their characters and how they fit into the world.

So for me, I am thinking of giving the elves, dwarves, gnomes and others back their faerie ancestry to help them seem quirky and obsessed with things that seem beyond any practical reasoning. These races will be mortal faeries but they will tend to be freindly with "true faeries" as long as they have similar core beliefs. Things like lzard-men are more practical and are territorial in their aggression as opposed to orcs who are just sort of nasty by nature. Lizard-men would be more mundane in their origin as opposed to orcs who were created by or descended from unseelie faeries.