Part 3: Race to the Finish

So, here we are again, after so long. I hope you, my imaginary readers, have kept well.

Race. I am considering the matter of race for my little campaign world. Before I get into that, though, I am considering the history and nature of my world. Well, that's not true; I'm considering them side-by-side.

I know a few races I want to include, for sure.

First off, humans. Humans are everywhere, like cockroaches. Humans are the baseline races against which all others are judged. Mercifully, from at least 3.5 edition of D&D onward, there is actual benefit to playing humans, and not just exemption from an arbitrary and nonsensical level cap.

In my world, as in most others, humans exist as written. They are adaptable, which is good because it suits their origin in this world. Humans were brought here by an as-yet-unnamed superior race, in a starship (or several, but I like the idea of an 'ark' ship bringing them here as a slave race to their masters, possibly the 'wizard kings' of old).

Hmm, that Wizard King idea has merit. I like the idea that they came here in massive spacecraft that were powered by magic. Not like Spelljammer, though. Their ships were very sci-fi and hi-tech. They landed on this planet and likely dismantled their ship to set up their colony here. Their tech was powered by magic, and thus if any artifacts were found now, they would either be useless since magic is almost gone, and exists only in such a degraded state it wouldn't be compatible (although that doesn't stop ambitious DMs from coming up with a campaign to that effect), or the artifacts would be potential sources of renewed magic, or they could be used to power other tech magic-items. I don't want this kind of magitech focus to be prevalent in the game, though, so for now, let's consider these items to be all but lost, permanently.

So, right, humans were brought here by these wizard kings to be used as slaves. They are used to wage war on the indigenous races for several generations, to give a good enmity between humans and other races. Eventually, they rise up against the Wizard Kings in a massive rebellion that lasts for decades. In the end, they master some of the secrets of magic and are able to kill of the Wizard Kings, but not before the Kings can throw their doomsday plan into effect.

This brings us to a geographic feature (gimmick) of my campaign setting. The planet on which our campaigns take place has literally shattered. The planet is broken into six or seven major pieces, and a host of smaller floating islands in space. This revealed a major oddity of the planet's physical nature. The planet was never a natural structure. The destruction of the planet revealed that continents are interconnected by massive cables, tens of miles in diameter, and are all arrayed around a mysterious energy field at the core of the planet.

More on that stuff later.

In the end, Humans are left on this planet with no way to leave. The indigenous races, then, have harboured a major hatred for humans and their wizard kings for centuries, now. By now, humans have started to deal with some of the other races, but major antipathy still exists on both sides of the human/other divide.

What other major races to include? Elves. Now, I know elves have been done to death as nature-loving warrior mystics. They've been adapted into almost a billion different subraces so that if you want to play a winged, fire-breathing, aquatic, space droid elf, you can and will have three different subraces to choose from. I'd like to not do that. I want elves to be treated like humans, in that they are one race, with only superficial differences between them all.

So how do I keep my elves relatively unique without resorting to creating a whole new breed of demihuman? Like most thing, I look to role-play variations. We take for granted that elves are nature-loving mystics, near-immortal, and privy to secrets kept from humans. Almost always, this is the case. I think I prefer the idea of my elves being an imperial race, militaristic and rigid. They are more or less 'at one' with nature in that their technology is based on environmentally friendly methods of production, but they are cold and monolithic empire. I have this image in my mind that is halfway between the Roman Empire and the Kree of Marvel comics. They'll be long-lived, but not nearly the thousand-year-spanning lives of normal D&D elves. I think these guys live to maybe 250 years or so. This means, for them, the destruction of their planet happened in their grandfathers', maybe great-grandfathers' time.

Their nation was divided, I think, by the catastrophe. Thus, on our main continent, their numbers were drastically reduced, so their impending domination of human-held territories was no longer possible. They have been put in the awkward position of suddenly being in the weaker, defensive position. As such, they are only reaching out now to begin peaceful relations. They've seen their numbers halved and now realize that the humans were a slave race, so the difficult trek to truce has just begun.

I like that.

What other races to include? What's common these days? Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, Half-Orcs, Half-Elves. Well, I've already taken care of humans and elves, whom I imagine to be the dominant power on the main shard of this broken planet. I wanna skip the shorties and brutes and go to Half-Elves next.

No Half-Elves. There, that was simple.

Okay, a bit of explanation, then. Half-Elves never really worked for me. They are basically humans with some elven powers. Why would you even play a human? For that matter, why are there usually no other half-breed races other than elves and orcs. (I know about the muls of Dark Sun, but I'm not fond of that setting, so I'm content to ignore it for now.) The other thing is that there are half-elves everywhere, but they're still looked down on as a half-breed race in the sourcebooks only. No one really plays up this racial tension, do they? Basically, half-elves walk around with a chip on their shoulders for presupposed racism that never eve really happens in the games. That doesn't make them cool; it makes them jerks.

I think that human-elven relations are going to be unbelievably rare, and produce no offspring. They are different races from different worlds, despite superficial similarities. Besides that, I do want to limit the number of races in my setting. Maybe that's not alluring to some players but, and I hope this isn't offensive to any imaginary readers, I hope to deter players who are always looking for the optimum build. It's fun for some people, but it's not what I enjoy. I'd like to force more role-playing variation, as opposed to stat-tinkering and build maximization. I hope this doesn't backfire on me, either.

The next race on the list is going to be dwarfgnomehalflings. Does it strike anyone else that these races are largely redundant? Especially gnomes. Gnomes tend to be a half-halfling/half-dwarf and the presence of all three races creates some real homogeneity (aka. monotony). Where do I get my next race, then? And do I bother trying to fill a shorty role?

Tell you what. I have this idea shooting around in my brain regarding a shorty race that might furnish me some ideas. I imagine a race that is almost elemental in nature. These are short, hairless fellas who live in subterranean cavern systems that more closely resemble ant colonies or groundhog holes than the traditional underground fortresses that dwarves always have. These shorties are technologically useless, using the most basic of devices in daily life. They are earth-attuned, though, and have mystical or semi-mystical abilities over that element. They live off fungus and underground animals and bugs. They don't like fire as it's too bright for their subterranean eyes, so they eat their mushroom and cockroach pie raw. They are on neutral terms with all surface races, since they've only recently reappeared. These guys might have been surfacers once upon a time, but they've lived below the surface for a millennium, only returning a few hundred years ago in the wake of the catastrophic sundering of the planet.

They still tool around underground, investigating the mysterious lines that connect the planetary shards. They also have begun trade with elves and humans, thus making them available to players as a race. These guys are almost alien to the other races, though, so reactions to them would be diverse and possibly extreme.

The last question is what to call these shorties. For now, we'll call them dwarves, but they might be significantly different enough that I may have to create a new race... which I didn't really want to do. Maybe I'll just tailor dwarves to meet this new race in-between.

Having these shorties, I'm not so certain I want halflings and gnomes, who are largely used for comic relief, anyway. For now, my dwarves are the only shorty race.

Half-Orcs. Well, I want to get away from having an 'evil' orc race, so there probably won't be any half-orcs. I do want a brute race, though, since, even before the humans arrived, elves had to conquer someone. Maybe this brute race is a slave race to the elves, making them as bad as the wizard king/human invaders. Oh, let's say that in the wake of discovering the humans were a slave race, the elves realized that they were as bad as the wizard kings had been. They felt a wave of collective grief and banned the ownership of slaves in their lands. Some people still do, but it's purely an illegal trade. So who are these brute folk, then? Are they goblinoid? Lizardmen? Ape people? Cat people? (No, not cat people... sorry anime fans.)

How about this, then? Our brute race is a race of wolfmen? I don't mean lycanthropes. That would be seven different kinds of crazy. I mean a race of humanoids who resemble canines. They could very well resemble werewolves or other breeds.

No, this isn't working for me. I think I prefer a more arboreal species. The elves live in colonized forests, in military-like camps. They might use a monkey race to perform tasks to maintain the trees, swing through the forests to deliver message, do the cleaning and hang stuff to dry in the trees. Yeah, I think we need an ape-man type race. This might even be subdivided into menial monkey workers, and big, burly gorilla warriors (who were utterly expendable).

Cripes. Now I have another race to create. Not what I had intended. Still, I didn't want too much variety, so I think I'll stop for now. Next entry might cope with trying to mix and match races to classes, saying who can and can't do what.