How to decide what races to use for a setting?

[Superfluous Crow]

My attitude to races is that they should either explore some concept that would be hard to bring forth in a group of humans (how a blind race of aesthetics see the world, how a race that tries to become human would work) or that they should simply be creative experiments that differ vastly from humans; the warforged of Eberron, the Simulacra of my setting, the om-beh-ral of LC, the cestoids of Steerpike etc. etc. (we have plenty of these races in various settings).
Elves, halflings, anthropomorphic animals and so on are as previously mentioned pretty much just humans with a few slight alterations and are considered cliche by many, and classical by many others. There should be nothing keeping you from adding one of these races -  as long as you add a twist of some kind! We have plenty of settings filled with aloof forest elves and gruff mountain dwarfs; if you want elves and dwarves you need to at least modify them slightly so they belong to your campaign. If you might have accomplished the same with humans then there is no reason for elves. Let's use Eberron as an example. Dwarves are somewhat standard, but their fairly isolationist nature could not be done in quite the same way with humans. Elves are necromantic death worshippers or horseriding marauders so that's a pretty big step up. Halflings ride dinosaurs so that's... something.
Anyway, if you want to copy an element you'll have to at least make it your own copy in some way.
To choose races, you might start by looking at themes. If your world is falling apart it might be appropriate to add a race that is falling apart/dying. If not, you could look at the following racial "classes" to see whether any of them should be filled.
Servitor races: The Servitor races were subjugated by a major race (probably humans) and even the free ones are looked down upon. In this category you might find manual labor races like orcs, or you could even have twisted experiments doing the bidding of their masters and creators.
Outsider races: Outsider races fill the slots of those who are distrusted or simply unknown. Think gypsies/nomads or some super-rare race.
Antagonist races: The enemy. If your setting is based around a war, or a conflict of some sort, inhuman enemies might add another edge. Inhumans do work best for hostile invasions with little mercy; monstrous barbarian pillagers rather than civilized armies.  
Cosmopolitan races: This a decision you should make early: are you going for a cosmopolitan/star wars cantina feel where the crowds are made up of a dozen races? If so, you should have some non-humans to help enhance the tone.
Otherworldly races: if you have more than one plane, you might consider having creatures from different planes be occasional (playable) visitors.
Wild races: Jungles and deserts might have more sentient dangers than random critters; wild races are those races who live far from civilization but might get in your way anyway.
So these are the primary slots to consider when picking races. And yes, all of them could be filled with humans if you wanted to. But you can fill them with something else and get away with it just fine :)
I hope this made sense somehow... i tend to make it up as i go along...

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Cosmopolitan races: This a decision you should make early: are you going for a cosmopolitan/star wars cantina feel where the crowds are made up of a dozen races? If so, you should have some non-humans to help aid this feel.

This is the big reason I include non-human races (aside from just hating humans for various reasons).  Although it has a lot to do with two other things: playing a creature physiologically different from humans to imagine being in a different kind of body, and exaggerating appearence differences to the point where I can understand people caring about them.  The latter is one of the reason why I avoid "humans with funny foreheads" and all-human settings: other than gender differences (and maybe not even then) humans are all alike to me, and when they decide to draw on physical differences for prejudices I'm left clueless.  (Please no one try to explain it to me: I don't want to know.)  Heck, I have a hard time with any prejudice, it's just easier to grasp the more obvious (and comical) it is.

[Ghostman]

If your world is falling apart it might be appropriate to add a race that is falling apart/dying.

That theme can work just fine in a world that isn't falling apart. It could be that a race was too weak to stand up for itself in competition for living space, and due to this it was driven from it's natural habitat to a different environment where it cannot thrive. Being unable to adapt to the changed conditions, the entire race is doomed to extinction. Every member of it is now malnourished, sickly, and looking at a drastically shortened lifespan. As generations pass, the population gradually diminishes due to infertility, illnesses and violent deaths resulting from clashes with other races/monsters.

The world itself goes on just fine, but this one race is going the way of the Dodo.

[Superfluous Crow]

@Ghostman: of course. It was just an example keyed together with a common theme. There is nothing keeping you from exploring concepts outside the scope of your themes with your races.

[Acrimone]

I can't say it any better, so I'll just repeat what Vreeg said:

"First off, some perspective. [Calisenthe] has changed and morphed quite a bit in it's time as an active setting. The hsitory of the races was there from the beginning. I chose to take on many of the trope races due to player input, but specifically fit them to the needs of the historical narrative.
(Mark that term in your memory banks. "The Needs of the Historical Narrative".)

I am a big believer that the history of the setting must be well thought out before deciding what races exist. True Creation myths (seperate from the creation myths that the pcs are told, normally) must be thought out in conjuction with the feel of the fluff."

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I am a big believer that the history of the setting must be well thought out before deciding what races exist. True Creation myths (seperate from the creation myths that the pcs are told, normally) must be thought out in conjuction with the feel of the fluff."

And what do you do if there's a good reason you don't want to go through all this?

[Acrimone]

I am a big believer that the history of the setting must be well thought out before deciding what races exist. True Creation myths (seperate from the creation myths that the pcs are told, normally) must be thought out in conjuction with the feel of the fluff."

And what do you do if there's a good reason you don't want to go through all this?

I'm not sure what a "good" reason for not having at least some sketch of the world's history would look like... no time, maybe?  Players are just colossally uninterested, perhaps?

In either of those cases, it seems like you're pretty much wasting your time building your own setting in the first place.  Just pick up a module and play.

Now, there's another issue that you might raise, which is that this sort of begs the question.  After all, if the history dictates the races, then surely the races dictate the history.  "In the beginning Tegroth the Just created the race of the Komori..." pretty much establishes that there will be some Komori in your world.  "The Komori civilization was destroyed by the Gratani" introduces the Gratani.

So what made you choose the Komori and the Gratani to put into your history?

The easy -- and I think correct -- answer is "Because it's all in my imagination and that's what I imagined."

Like I said earlier... if you're bothering to create a setting you've already committed to dreaming some stuff up.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I'm not sure what a "good" reason for not having at least some sketch of the world's history would look like... no time, maybe?  Players are just colossally uninterested, perhaps?

The problem is that I experience a loss of creativity when I explain too much.  I do the big explaining thing and then feel done.  Not done in the sense that I've accomplished something: done, as in the entire rest of the process is suddenly a useless waste of time.

In either of those cases, it seems like you're pretty much wasting your time building your own setting in the first place.  Just pick up a module and play.

Sometimes it's easier to say how you hate something in front of you than to say what you like about something you've never seen.

Now, there's another issue that you might raise, which is that this sort of begs the question.  After all, if the history dictates the races, then surely the races dictate the history.  "In the beginning Tegroth the Just created the race of the Komori..." pretty much establishes that there will be some Komori in your world.  "The Komori civilization was destroyed by the Gratani" introduces the Gratani.

So what made you choose the Komori and the Gratani to put into your history?

The easy -- and I think correct -- answer is "Because it's all in my imagination and that's what I imagined."

Like I said earlier... if you're bothering to create a setting you've already committed to dreaming some stuff up.

At the same time maybe race means nothing to history.  "The Komori civilization was destroyed by the Gratani" implies that they were very separate.  But you could have a setting where race is just a way of describing how someone looks.  You can still think it's important to know what looks exist in the setting and how common they are, but not think the difference impacts the long view of history.

[Steerpike]

I can imagine the sort of setting you mean, Silvercat.  What comes to me is a utopian sci-fi sort of setting where grand collectives of species and civilzations have integrated themselves so thoroughly that they now exist in a homogenous culture; or, to look at it differently, race and culture could become utterly distinct, since most racial differences are mostly cosmetic.  Creation stories aren't necessary because the default answer is "they evolved on planet ____"; old racial histories are such ancient history that they no longer seem relevant ("so what that our peoples were deadly enemies ten thousand years ago?  We've been friends ever since the accords that ended the war, living side by side!").  Thus you'd have a series of creatures living in very cosmopolitan settlements, where prejudice is almost unknown and where physical differences are really the only differences between major races.

Where you and I might perhaps disagree is that creatures of radically different physical designs can still have the same sorts of brains, but I think I could stretch my suspension of disbelief considerably to accomodate the sort of world I think you're envisioning; after all, if all the races coexist peacefully in the same culture, the cultural influences acting upon them would change how they think as much or more than their biology (potentially).  Some creatures might reproduce sexually and others by fission or whatever (as I ranted about above), but in this hypothetical melting pot/mosaic these differences would elicit rarely so much as a shrug; complete acceptance would be the norm.

Now personally, I'd be inclined to make such a world a transhumanist future, where humans (and other species) can basically change their race and modify themselves more or less as they please, but I could see why some would probably want to avoid such a future, since it opens a big can of worms about all sorts of things like identity that would remain more-or-less closed and out of sight otherwise.

The big question for me that would remain in a setting like the one I think you're imagining is conflict.  The creation of a peaceful, totally non-prejudiced collective of sentient species living together in close proximity and relative harmony suggests to me not only a civilzation that has overcome even the last vestiges of racism but one that's dealt with most of its political (and possibly economic) problems as well, since it necessitates the coming-together of large numbers of different species who after all must have been separate civilizations originally.

My thoughts on this would basically be:

1) Have other civilizations of comparatively less prejudiced natures come into contact with the hypothetical civilzation described above.  Conflict (not necessarily war) results, almost inevitably.

2) Have unfathomable intelligences be the baddies, like the Borg, or the aliens from the Alien franchise, or the bugs from Starship Troopers.  These make the perfect "endless Nazi" bad-guys in a pulp-style game since they usually aren't fully fledged-individuals as typically defined but glorified organic machines (to steal your term).  They don't have families or friends or feel human love, empathy, emotion, etc, even if they're not mindless per se. I could see why you'd potentially want to avoid this option (given your distaste for unfathomable intelligences), but I think when we were talking about "alien minds" before were were talking in terms of playable races, or races within a central civilization, rather than villains.  I think you also imagined a sort of Evil Emperor villain in one iteration of your sci-fi setting, with endless henchmen; this amounts to the same thing, really.

3) Run an exploration-based game set in the abandoned planets of defunct civilizations.  Combat would be with dangerous wild animals, extremely primitive tribal creatures, or mechanical guardians.

4) Run a very low-conflict game as typically defined, more like a drama/soap opera/campus novel than a typical DnD game.  The game would revolve around personal relationships, romance, subtle political struggles, and the intricacies of life in the utopian super-civilization.

Or, of course, mix between all 4.

Hope that was somewhat helpful.  The more I talk with you the more I come to comprehend your particular tastes, I think.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I can imagine the sort of setting you mean, Silvercat.  What comes to me is a utopian sci-fi sort of setting where grand collectives of species and civilzations have integrated themselves so thoroughly that they now exist in a homogenous culture; or, to look at it differently, race and culture could become utterly distinct, since most racial differences are mostly cosmetic.

Actually I tend to think of it as a setting where either they got integrated and then lost contact only to reemerge as distinctive cultures that are each integrated enough that their conflict differences are culture/nationality, or a universe where racial integration does not have to mean utopia.  And if your universe is big enough you can have both.

Where you and I might perhaps disagree is that creatures of radically different physical designs can still have the same sorts of brains

It's probably idealism on my part to get everyone to stop looking at differences because we don't have a good track record of what we do with that information.

The big question for me that would remain in a setting like the one I think you're imagining is conflict.  The creation of a peaceful, totally non-prejudiced collective of sentient species living together in close proximity and relative harmony suggests to me not only a civilzation that has overcome even the last vestiges of racism but one that's dealt with most of its political (and possibly economic) problems as well, since it necessitates the coming-together of large numbers of different species who after all must have been separate civilizations originally.

See the first part of this post.

The more I talk with you the more I come to comprehend your particular tastes, I think.

Understanding me is easy: I see so many things people do in their quest for whatever it is they're questing for as utterly absurd.  Pretty much any conflict falls under thing, as do the people who create that conflict.  So stories make more sense when they portray this absurdity: people get into conflicts when they're being stupid, people who want to get into conflicts are insanely stupid, and conflict gets resolved by rationality.

It's allegorical truth rather than realism.

[Superfluous Crow]

A bit off topic, but i was wondering Silvercat, what do you work as/with?

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I realize "I'm just curious" might be an answer, but why do you want to know?

[Superfluous Crow]

Curiousity for one, and you seem to have a rather specific worldview so i was wondering whether it was influenced by your choice of work :)
And then what job would influence you in that way ^^

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

It has nothing to do with my job.

I actually wouldn't be able to work out for you what influenced my worldview from any real life.  It's one of the reasons I prefer not to talk about that part of myself: my mentality is more "me" then anything outside.

[SDragon]

With (at very least the starts of) two all-races settings, one human-only setting, and one most-races setting under my belt so far, I'd have to say that flavor, as well as whether the setting is divset or ethoscentric, is a major part of my process. If it's divset, all-races is go. If it's echocentric, I'm going to be a bit more selective.