So, instead of real progress for my Campaign Setting, some questions:
- How do you handle racial diversity?
- How do you explain it? (going with DnD core books, you have a dozen intelligent species, living in the same world.
how did they get there?)
- What's the point? (More player options, race define the setting, etc...)
- Forced alignment yes or no? (what makes a whole race completely good/evil)
For myself, I like to use fewer races, but make them really different from another. The non-player races should define the tone of the setting and be more than just hings for the PCs to kill.
Quote from: ScholarSo, instead of real progress for my Campaign Setting, some questions:
- How do you handle racial diversity?
- How do you explain it? (going with DnD core books, you have a dozen intelligent species, living in the same world.
how did they get there?)
- What's the point? (More player options, race define the setting, etc...)
- Forced alignment yes or no? (what makes a whole race completely good/evil)
For myself, I like to use fewer races, but make them really different from another. The non-player races should define the tone of the setting and be more than just hings for the PCs to kill.
I'll answer this instead of doing quotes for clients.
1)- How do you handle racial diversity and their origin? With flair. The racial matrix is one of the core pieces for a FRP game. You don't have to have different rces, but since most do, that is a statement in and of itself. In Celtricia, the races were all created for certain pruposes, but the direct uses they were made for are long past, so actually, every race is a leftover. The Hobyts and Orcash were never supposed to become the most populous race...it just happenned that way after the Gods agreed to all stop directly interfering on the 'Waking Dream'.
Also, one of the primary conflicts/themes we deal with is the acculturation/integration vs tribal systems. Included in this is that most collected culture groups (states, countries, etc) consider it a sign of barbarism to put race before 'God, Guild, or country', whereas the tribal outlands put a very high importance to their racial identity first.
2) What's the point? 2 major reasons why. One deals with personal preference, one with game design. The personal prefernce issue comes out of the fact that most of the players who were around when Celtricia started (back in the early 80's)were all fantasy fans, were all big tolkien nuts (we had a 2 semester tolkien class in our high school...no kidding), had all played D&D together, etc. I won't bore you with the minutia, but 25 years ago, I need to say we had racial diversity for the wrong reasons, at least in terms of setting design. The players required it, so It was included in the game.
However, as the game developed, the differeing races became a a way for us to address racism and stereotyping in the same way that many better fantasy and SF series have. Many of the best Star Trek episodes deal with the triumph of racial intergration over insulated, xenophobic discrimination, and at some level, I grabbed onto that and grafted this conflict onto the Celtrician setting. The most enjoyable races to run, at least to me, are the races that are really in the throes of this acculteration.
(Now, Bugbears in my setting have an incurable sarcastic streak, but we can go into that later.)
3)Forced alignment?--Never. I can see racial and cultural tendencies, such as a cultural tendency towards callousness due to hardship, or a tendency towards organization or disorganization. Even dragons in my setting do not grow a color until their personality starts to set. A gold dragon can have a bratty black dragon.
I have always felt that it takes the role playiong out of the game. Players in Celtricia that run into a tribal band of Orcs, ogres, and Bugbears out in the wild will normally (depsnding on where they are) have to find out who they are before attacking, and if they don't know, will normally converse first.
Quote from: LordVreegA gold dragon can have a bratty black dragon.
That's just darned cool.
In my world, I have multiple races, but they are all humans deep down.
Why?
For some reason, I like the idea of having humans are that physically very distinct from each other, and "race" is the concept from game design that comes closest to capturing that idea. At the same time, I don't like the idea that race defines culture or sets different groups entirely apart from each other, so I elected to have them all spring from the same basic stock. Different races can cross-breed, if they want to, because of this common heritage, although viability can vary.
So I've got a lineage of short humans, broken into different cultures. Collectively you might call them "dwarfish" races, but of course they tend to divide themselves along national cultural lines, just as the "Tall Ones" do. So you've got the mountain dwarf, hill dwarf, and field dwarf lineages, each with their own distinct cultural heritage.
I've got a few races of furry humans, generally called "beast men" by outsiders. These are the least human in appearance, most of them being quite different from other humans in their body proportions. Because of this, outsiders tend to classify them according to some imagined similarity to the body proportions of other animals, but in reality they are fully human.
One primitive race has larger ears and a spare, rangy build. They live in forest tree houses, are expert hunters, woodsmen, and trackers, and tend toward animistic nature worship. You might call them "elves" if you want - that will give you the picture of reclusive, nature-worshipping forest dwellers, but beyond that they don't really correspond to either the Tolkien or D&D concept of elves.
Some of the races are quite similar to "normal" earthly humans in size and appearance, but often with some variant, such as a piebald appearance or hairlessness.
The goal is to create a sense that just over the next range of mountains, you might find just about anything. Cultural differences can be quite extreme, but even so there is an underlying commonality between even the most diverse inhabitants.
In the more established one, Tera (linked to in my signature) I took a sort of everything and the kitchen sink approach. I own a lot of D&D books. If I just about never run published settings, then the easy way to get something for my money out of a product, like the Red Steel boxed set, is to incorporate game mechanics bits into my homebrew world and races are one of those gmae mechanics bits, so my world has Rakasta and Lupins.
In terms of in-game explanation: there's very little. THE PHB races have a bit of explanation: humans and elves come from somewhere across the sea; dwarves and gnomes were native to the game's main continent; halflings are invaders form an alternate prime material plane. Exotics, like Lizardmen, Saurials, Rakasta, and Lupin and enemy humanoids (goblinoids, gnolls, bugbears) get just about zero explanation.
I'm against forced alignment for PCs, even if they are, as a for instance, an Orc as made PCable in The Complete Book of Humanoid. In general, NPCs will conform to the monster book entry for that race, except for the exceptions. On the other hand, just because someone's evil is no reason to not play nice; so Smashfiste, the Half-Ogre gangster may be Evil in alignment, that's no reason he can't be apotential employer of the PCs.
As for those who find the proliferation of humanoid races implausible: it is, just a little, but consider that for at least a little while (in geologic terms) Homo sapiens sapiens existed at the same time as Homo sapiens neandertal.
For my new one (http://thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?47476.last), I've pretty much jettisoned that whole approach.
I have numerous races because I have a hard time not treating humanoid monsters as races. I feel humanoid monsters become deeper when they're treated as races. Most of my races stem from the mythology of my world (which required elemental balance), from filling in the roles players "expect" to find (like little people), and a good amount of stuff that I think would be cool.
At first I tried to do my own thing a little too much (made changes to elves, dwarves, goblins, and orcs), but I've recently come to the conclusion that if I'm going to use a classic, recognizable name, I shouldn't drift too far from the source material (I'm looking at you bad movie adaptations .... *grrrr*).
- How do you handle racial diversity?
It exists... Not sure what else to say. Only Humans are a "PC" race, however.
- How do you explain it? (going with DnD core books, you have a dozen intelligent species, living in the same world. how did they get there?)
In-game, I don't explain it. The plethora of intelligent humanoid species in Reth Jaleract is just another of the alien continent's illimitable mysteries.
Meta-game, they are there to give embodiment to the sense of the "alien" against which humanity is pitting itself, and also, in many ways, to be representative of a certain environment or type of situation.
For example... You are running a game in Reth Jaleract, and the party is going on an adventure in the forest. Along with the various other woodland perils and obstacles, they will encounter the Faelen, a forest-dwelling species. It is not that the Human PCs are in the forest, and the Faelen happen to be as well, but rather that the Humans are in the forest, so they will encounter Faelen. They are as much a part of the forest as the ferns and the squirrels - possibly even the trees.
- What's the point? (More player options, race define the setting, etc...)
See above...
- Forced alignment yes or no? (what makes a whole race completely good/evil)
My setting is not designed for use with any specific rule-set, so it is entirely possible to be playing in Reth Jaleract using rules where "alignment" is a wholly foreign concept.
If I, personally, were to run a Reth Jaleract game, I would not use a system involving alignment, however others are free to do so if they wish, and make their own decisions about whether or not any particular species should have a "forced" alignment.