Interesting fantasy world

[Tom Mazanec]

https://www.valsalia.com/ depicts an interesting fantasy world with original races.
The Yinglets are particularly well developed and interesting, if not exactly imposing.

[Inky]

Hey, I read that, or the early chapters of it, on DeviantArt ages ago! It's not easy to come up with a fantasy race that's not a usual one and is still interesting, but they did it. (And then some more. I liked the insect person.)

[Tom Mazanec]

Welp, just got done binge reading.
How would you GURPSify the yingling species?
1) They are adults at age one or two, but can live to be up to about forty years old. What point disadvantage would that be?
2) They do not sleep more than humans do...maybe even a little less...but they have to nap frequently. Instead of being up for sixteen hours and then sleeping for eight, they run around for three or four hours and sleep for one. To stay up a day and night would be like you staying awake for a week. What does this cost?
3) They are about three feet tall and have hollow bones. A toddler can kill one by accident playing with it (they are very afraid of human children).
4) Sex ratio is about 80% male, 20% female. Affects their society considerably.
5) They are not creative or as intelligent as humans. Rare inventions tend to be bizarre contraptions that are usually worse to use than not. Most have personalities like an ADHD adolescent. They mostly live by scavenging stuff off human society (racial slur is "scav").
6) They are mutation prone...for one thing, if a female mates with two or more males the offspring (laid in eggs, even though they are mammals...with some avian characteristics) will combine traits of all parents unpredictably. For another, they have a lot of "sports"...mutants who look like they came out of a post atomic war world. BTW, they are carefully selecting favorable mutations for preferential breeding...in a few more centuries they may be considerable more imposing (they have been documented by human society for less than two hundred years)
7) World is fantasy standard Euro-Medieval with magic restricted to "artifacts" of a civilization destroyed many centuries ago. Fantasy races are usually very nonhuman...some don't even correspond to our animal phyla. Yinglets are at least tetrapod vertebrates.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Welp, just got done binge reading.
How would you GURPSify the yingling species?
1) They are adults at age one or two, but can live to be up to about forty years old. What point disadvantage would that be?

Per Bio-Tech, Early Maturation is a feature (worth no points). 40 years is about half a human lifespan, so Short Lifespan 1 would seem to apply.

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

2) They do not sleep more than humans do...maybe even a little less...but they have to nap frequently. Instead of being up for sixteen hours and then sleeping for eight, they run around for three or four hours and sleep for one. To stay up a day and night would be like you staying awake for a week. What does this cost?

Per Sleepy (B154) the actual schedule is a feature. The schedule (as you presented) maps to about between 4.8-6 hours of sleep a night. This is about 2-3 levels of Less Sleep.

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

3) They are about three feet tall and have hollow bones. A toddler can kill one by accident playing with it (they are very afraid of human children).

SM -2, low HP.

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

4) Sex ratio is about 80% male, 20% female. Affects their society considerably.

Feature, possibly social stigma/regard

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

5) They are not creative or as intelligent as humans. Rare inventions tend to be bizarre contraptions that are usually worse to use than not. Most have personalities like an ADHD adolescent. They mostly live by scavenging stuff off human society (racial slur is "scav").

1) Hidebound, possibly low IQ.
2) Short Attention Span
3) Social Stigma probably

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

6) They are mutation prone...for one thing, if a female mates with two or more males the offspring (laid in eggs, even though they are mammals...with some avian characteristics) will combine traits of all parents unpredictably. For another, they have a lot of "sports"...mutants who look like they came out of a post atomic war world. BTW, they are carefully selecting favorable mutations for preferential breeding...in a few more centuries they may be considerable more imposing (they have been documented by human society for less than two hundred years)

Feature

[Tom Mazanec]

Thanks, TGLS.
There are other details that I knew would be features, like they (almost all) cannot eat dry foods like bread, and if they eat their preferred foods (like raw oysters) they get an endorphin rush that is almost intoxicating for a few moments.
Can be highly addictive. :-)

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

3) They are about three feet tall and have hollow bones. A toddler can kill one by accident playing with it (they are very afraid of human children).

That's an exaggeration. The kids Kass was afraid of were probably somewhere around 10 or 11 years old, a far cry from a toddler, and from the fight that occurred shortly thereafter I think the Yinglets are both stronger and more resilient than indicated elsewhere. I think ST and HP appropriate to their size (so probably ST 5 as a racial average) works alright. Their stick-arms are indicated to be pretty good at thrusting attacks but not a lot else, so it may be appropriate to have them suffer reduced sw damage - a quirk to not have sw damage (instead using thr where sw would normally be used) might be appropriate. A lot of Kass' fears can probably be chalked up to the fact he's gone from being a human male of above-average strength with fairly decent combat skills, to (from his perspective) a tiny, weak female with a body plan that his old combat skills simply aren't compatible with (he has to use an entirely different posture, and given how important legwork is to combat, well...).

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

5) They are not creative or as intelligent as humans. Rare inventions tend to be bizarre contraptions that are usually worse to use than not. Most have personalities like an ADHD adolescent. They mostly live by scavenging stuff off human society (racial slur is "scav").

As noted by Matriarch Vizlet, they aren't truly less intelligent than humans, they just lack the educational history. Conceptually, this is more akin to them having the Low TL Disadvantage (likely putting them at TL 0 as opposed to the setting's TL of 3 or 4*) than low IQ. Combined with low Starting Wealth (they're likely primarily Dead Broke or Poor, with a few at Struggling Wealth or higher), this makes a Yinglet unlikely to have a lot of useful (EDIT) intellectual skills. That said, given how GURPS IQ works, it may still be appropriate to give reduced racial IQ (although that also implies TL 0 humans should have lower IQ than TL 8 ones, at least if the former is in a TL 8 setting, and I think a lot of folks would disagree with that).

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

6) They are mutation prone

This results in the Yinglet template being a bit less binding than typical racial templates - the player can justify quite a bit of deviation, although if the deviations are useful enough it may be appropriate to buy up things like Social Regard**.

*I suspect the setting is actually an "After the End" one, and probably set on a former colony, given how... alien most non-human life is (except the Yinglet, but given how an apparent precursor artefact turned a human into one of them, I suspect they're something the humans brought with them, in one way or another). However, it's sufficiently far After the End that it's probably fine to apply normal TL rules.

**I think modifying this as per Reputation is appropriate, as I feel generally only Yinglets will care about you having a beneficial mutation that gives you breeding rights. When a Yinglet sees Patriach Poak, even if they don't know who he is, they're probably likely to defer to him - he's quite literally the tribe's "Big Man." When a human sees him, he's probably just a Yinglet of Unusual Size (I don't think they exist) - again, if they don't recognize him (messing with a Patriarch of the Enclave that has an alliance with House Ivenmoth is a Bad Idea).

[Tom Mazanec]

Good points, Varyon.
They also have reduced dexterity…three fingers and a thumb and the fingers have one less joint.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Their stick-arms are indicated to be pretty good at thrusting attacks but not a lot else, so it may be appropriate to have them suffer reduced sw damage - a quirk to not have sw damage (instead using thr where sw would normally be used) might be appropriate.

Other Quirks for critters with relatively thin and brittle limbs:

Limb crippled if they take more than 1/3 HP damage rather than 1/2. Extremities are crippled by greater than 1/4 HP rather than 1/3.

-2 penalty to HT to resist temporary or permanent crippling injury to limbs from crushing attacks.

There's also the possibility that the art style emphasizes the "cartoon-like" elements of the species and that a more realistic version might have thicker arms with more functional fingers.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Good points, Varyon.
They also have reduced dexterity…three fingers and a thumb and the fingers have one less joint.

This could be modeled by Bad Grip or Ham-Fisted, but that's a relatively serious disad. If you allow it as a racial disadvantage Missing Digits seems to be more appropriate.

Alternately, fewer and shorter fingers might translate into Poor Grip or reduced Arm/Hand ST.

[Tom Mazanec]

Wonder if this could be put in an IW campaign. The nonhuman races could be ETs who had been visiting Earth just before The End, perhaps? A TL12 civilization several millennia ago would require quite a divergence though.