The Campaign Builder's Guild

Week 12 (October 23rd, 2009)
[note=Got an Topic Idea?]Send me a PM. Remember, we are discussing any topic relating to world design (but not system design), so fire away.[/note]
[ic=Philosophy Archive]
Week 1 - The Cost of Magic
Week 2 - Villains
Week 3 - Genre Conventions
Week 4 - Design Method
Week 5 - Characters
Week 6 - Theme
Week 7 - PCs in the World
Week 8 -  Politics
Week 9 - Government
Week 10 - Alignment
Week 11 - Magic Items
Week 12 - Philosophy
Week 13 - Races & Ethnicity
[/ic]

Races & Ethnicity
Some settings feature many races. Some of these feature many subraces (e.g. wood elves). What is gained or lost by the inclusion of multiple races? What about subraces?

Some settings do not handle ethnicity among humans. What do we lose by this choice?

What are your general thoughts on races and ethnicity in a speculative fiction setting?

Since I get really bored with humans I always have to have multiple other races/species for variety.  Yes, there's interesting stuff you can do with just humans, but for me interest consists of biological differences and humans don't have those.

Bear in mind before you continue reading: I consider lost of standard-issue fantasy literature concepts to be stand-ins for real and difficult issues. At some level, to some extent (and perhaps subconsciously), we are using fantasy to confront our shadows by proxy, to wrestle our demons at arms' length.

I tend to view fantasy races-- in most but not all cases-- as being an abstracted way to deal with real-world issues of human ethnicity, xenophobia, and prejudice. We use dwarves and elves and orks and goblins when we want to talk about People Different From Us. The stark delineations between fantasy races are the real or imagined differences between ourselves and other groups of real people, magnified and distorted and exaggerated, written out in great big letters with bright crayon so we can grasp them easily.

It's a useful tool! Much like a pair of pliers. Some tasks absolutely require a pair of pliers, and with other jobs, they'd just get in the way.

I use small flock of "humanoid" (what an awkward word for this topic) races in the Jade Stage, partly because when I was just beginning to come up with the idea of the setting all those years ago, it didn't occur to me that I had any other options. There have been times when I've toyed with the idea of stripping them all out-- there are certain things that just work better when you're only working with humans-- but I feel like they've put down roots and made themselves at home. I feel like I've leveraged them to powerful effect in some places, and that their potential is a bit wasted in other places.

LC, there's a certain beautiful irony in italicizing a word for emphasis, and then making a typo out of it.

Y'know, I could edit that, but I think I'm gonna keep it like it is.

Mare Eternus doesn't even have humans, likewise to several other settings (clockwork jungle for example). I am not yet sure how that will end up working in the end. I suppose time will tell.

From a gaming perspective, I think that the category of "race" or "subrace" can be very useful. It provides an easy way for players to draw a rough sketch of their characters. Though we don't want to rely too much on racial stereotypes, it is still an easy way of forming general categories of people, to give players a jump-start on their roleplaying. It seems like most successful game systems have a system of categorization like this. D&D has all sorts of fantasy races, of course; the World of Darkness has its vampire clans and such things, based on traditional conceptualizations of whatever supernatural creature the game is about, assigning a sort of "base stereotype" to each character; and even the open-ended GURPS has "racial templates" that can be applied to a character sheet to give some unifying traits.

This is not to say it's only valuable in gaming. In a literary setting, the same "stereotypes" can be leveraged to help the reader understand the world a little better. This is not to say that we necessarily want all characters of a certain "race" to act a certain way, but it helps understanding when the readers have some of the same preconceived notions that the characters in the story have-- both adding to the level of immersion as the reader understands the world better, and requiring less overt description.
 
In Crystalstar, I made it a point to make it a human-only (well, maybe pixies and demons skew this a little, but at least very human-centric) setting. So, to add these categories, I made sure to have a few clear cultural groups (Great Desert, Central Basin, Mountain, etc.), and within those groups, have a few specific sub-groups For example, a character from the Central Basin will belong to a specific caste. Caste isn't as important in the Great Desert, but there are a lot of tribes, and a character will have a tribal identity. Each caste, tribe, or whatnot has certain "roles" and specialties, but they are, of course, just general guidelines-- enough to give a boost to one's character concept without forcing the character into a specific, narrow mold.

Nowadays I prefer a mythology-esque take on races. That is to say, the distinction between "monster" and "race" is blurred, and non-humans are generally given the role of exotic and wondrous beings that stand out against the human-defined global norm. Ideally a fantasy race wouldn't feel out of place in a real (or constructed) mythology.

Now here is a perhaps controversial question: Should there always be made a distinction between fantasy races and human ethnicities, in a setting where both are present? Personally, I have no trouble conceiving a setting where fictional (humanoid) species such as dwarves are seen as oddball races of Man - or perhaps more accurately, that Men perceive their own ethnic divisions so stark that they consider foreigners as similarly alien to the "actually" separate species.

Quote from: GhostmanNow here is a perhaps controversial question: Should there always be made a distinction between fantasy races and human ethnicities, in a setting where both are present? Personally, I have no trouble conceiving a setting where fictional (humanoid) species such as dwarves are seen as oddball races of Man - or perhaps more accurately, that Men perceive their own ethnic divisions so stark that they consider foreigners as similarly alien to the "actually" separate species.

When you consider the fact that a great many fantasy settings include "half-" categories, from a biological perspective, it actually becomes not so controversial at all. Humans of all different races and ethnicities can still interbreed, so, if humans are able to also interbreed with some of these other races, they can't (biologically speaking) be all that different, either. Granted, this is trying to assign a realistic biology to something that is definitely not realistic, but it does at least make sense.

Quote from: Luminous CrayonI tend to view fantasy races-- in most but not all cases-- as being an abstracted way to deal with real-world issues of human ethnicity, xenophobia, and prejudice. We use dwarves and elves and orks and goblins when we want to talk about People Different From Us. The stark delineations between fantasy races are the real or imagined differences between ourselves and other groups of real people, magnified and distorted and exaggerated, written out in great big letters with bright crayon so we can grasp them easily.

I do find it interesting that this is done and then someone decides to give humans further diversity by culture.  As if even more possibilities for raising the issue need to come up, which is what sometimes happens when this is done.  So you have Human Cultures 1-5 and Non-Human Monocultures A-D and the non-humans become a sort of sad side-kick because we've got all the culture war we need in the human camp and.....well......what use are they besides LotR jokes?

In speaking for myself, I use monstrous beings (I hesitate to use the term "races" in Eschaton) because they are found in mythology. They are not intended to represent player options, nor as stand-ins for real world issues (though the original myths likely did represent a deep-seated fear of the Other, and I imagine people in world see them that way).

When you write fantasy (or sci-fi for that matter) you blend creativity and fiction with reality in an attempt to create a sort of surreality. Races are an obvious consequence of a process like this. Even in the real world we imagine that other worlds far away might hold intelligent life. Is it that unimaginable that a world could exist where more than one type of intelligent life would develop alongside each other?
In that way races are not just representative of cultures, but are representative of what intelligent life could be. We use races to explore our ideas in new directions.
Of course, you have to maintain a balance; too many races (in some cases even just having more than one) can ruin certain setting tones. Very medieval/feudal settings for example can't have anything much more extreme than elves and orcs.
In more surreal settings one might try to go for "the Mos Eisley Cantina" feel where races are numerous enough to make for a metropolitan scene of various absurd characters.

I agree with Crow's point.  In A Song of Ice and Fire, for example, an abundance of non-humans would ruin the world's medieval purity; in modicum a few non-human races (rarely seen, really only glimpsed) add an edge of the sinister or supernatural without overwhelming the work as a whole.  In Mieville's Bas-Lag, however, race functions in the opposite way: the more diverse, strange, and in-your face the better, since much of the point of Mieville's weird aesthetic is to familiarize the unfamiliar, make the unreal believable, even "normal."

I'm personally more of a fan of the latter approach in my own world-building because I like monsters, in particular social, intelligent monsters.  I'm generally not a big fan of elves/dwarves/orcs for the simple reason that I feel they've been overdone, though their presence in a setting doesn't necessarily ruin it for me, if they're treated in an interesting way; in my own settings (with the notable exception of the quick & dirty Goblin campaign I ran this summer, and which I still intend to finish writing up once I have time) I tend to favor the "go big or go home" approach to strangeness in race-design, i.e. anthropomorphic leeches, sentient orchids, beings of living glass, amorphous protoplasms that possess corpses, etc.

Quote from: Steerpikei.e. anthropomorphic leeches, sentient orchids, beings of living glass, amorphous protoplasms that possess corpses, etc.

Throw in four-armed angry cupcakes, metamorphic toasters, and sentient shades of the color blue, and we've got a setting!

The weird approach to the physiology can be fine, but when it extends into the psychology I always get confused.  When people try to make non-human psychologies the result has always felt to me lacking, lacking in some primal core and then a masking of crazy attempts to get this core to become the mythical "higher brain".  These "other" psychologies are too whole, too sane, no matter what the logic of their origin.