how do you subvert your players expectations for a fantasy race without destroying what made it more than "humans with green skin/pointy ears/beards"? The more I try to be original with my take on the classics, the more I feel like I'm just making various shades of humans in cosplay.
Pic related was the inspiration for an attempt at making forest dwarves, which just ended up being short elves with beards and a grumpy attitude.
>>45719791
Why should I feel the need to subvert expectations for a race?
>>45719933
well, isn't it a little boring if every elf in every setting is the same?
>>45720009
That's the point of standard fantasy you mong. A standard setting with familiar peoples and themes and environments but totally undefined characters, geopolitics, and locations for the dm to alter at will.
>>45719791
Well one of the ways is to just change how the races interact, or change their status in the world than they are usually portrayed. For example in my setting, Elves are sorta like the Native Americans of this world. They're still heavy into nature and natural living, but this also led to them growing stagnant and get overrun by the technologically advanced humans and dwarves. Now they're all poor and living in cities, grumbling about the time when their people owned the land.
Alternatively give them like a single interesting trait that hasn't been done before. For example that screenshot of the guy who came up with Elven masked culture.
>>45720009
That would subvert every expectation I have.
>>45720009
If every member of each race is the same, you're horrible at making NPCs.
>>45720175
I didn't mean every member, I meant the race in general being the same in every setting, jesus.
I mostly just go with traditional depictions with some variations to make it a little bit unique.
So, for instance, Elves who don't hate technology and actually have stores of muskets laying about. Dwarves who won't completely strip-mine nature and actually like trees. Other times, I think it's just better to go with the classics. Completely rebuilding a fantasy race, with a new history and new social dynamics often just creates confusion for players, and rarely works out quite as envisioned.
>>45719791
I mostly focus on the politics of each race, making them distinct through history and culture.
For example, in one setting Eldarin and Elves were split into a caste system because of religious beliefs whole their governments were a series of warring Principalities (making it easier for the human empire to annex them, via inciting elven revolution). In another, there are no Eldarin, only Elves who are slowly being pushed out of their forest Jones by encroaching monsters. They blame humans for the corruption and are of a melancholy disposition.
While they are both elves (thin, pointy ears) they are distinctly different in their nature and history. They aren't crazy unique (I took the slave thing from Dragon Age and the corruption thing is a from Dark Sun) but their distinct enough that my players know the difference culturally between games. The word "Elf" just serves are a visualisation short hand, so I can describe more telling features (clothing, stance, expression). Everyone knows what an elf looks like (or can reasonably guess) but this elf is short haired, grim and weilding a battle axe, while this elf has a pony tail, smiles and picks at a lyre.
I can also recommend tagging on distinctive features and then figuring out why they'd have that feature. Dwarves with gills? Must be involved with bodies at water at some point (not necessarily the present). Elves can speak to horses? What God granted them that gift? Working backwards is a great way to test out ideas and fit then in!
>>45719791
Make a new race and let your creative juices flow. Naming a race that acts nothing like elves 'elves' is just as stupid as naming a race that acts exactly like elves 'Hgirbasir'. It's pointless. Either stick to fantasy conventions and maybe put your own spin on things, or make up your own shit.
>>45719791
You need to either look at what makes a fantasy race iconic and work from there, or write interesting enough history and lore.
Take Dwarves for example: short, stubborn, tough, greedy, etc. Look at things that are necessary for the character and which aren't. Dwarves don't HAVE to be the underground mountain race, they just usually are. But it doesn't feel like a Dwarf if there isn't the shortness, stubbornness, toughness, etc. As long as you have those, it'll still feel like a Dwarf, even if the rest of their fluff is that they all live in cloud cities and ride giant birds.
The bit is quality. Dragon Age's Dwarves were not new, but people liked them because of how they were written. Warhammer Elves are Elves, but they have an interesting enough history and character that people overlook that part.
Honestly, quality always beats trying to innovate. Play with it, but if its not good, people won't like it.
>>45720219
This. I prefer just making new fantasy races so I can control and create them without any baggage.
>>45720049
I still like the whole, Elves in perpetual civil war over things we can't understand.
Since elves are in most fantasy the most culturally inclined with the best poets, art and philosophers, I just see that working out pretty well.
It can also reflect their 'ancient' status. They have transcended the little stuff like economics but are instead warring over, in our eyes, trivia.
Don't listen to the autists. Do whatever feels cool to you and your players. All of these "races" are based on folklore so old and fractured you could justify basically any one of them being anything at all, and that's assuming you somehow feel obliged to stick to it. Grognards get seizures if someone dares show them a dwarf who isn't Gimli but they don't complain particularly vocally that the dwarfs of Morrowind were Babylonian steampunk elves. A good idea beats an old idea.
>>45720205
>elves
>muskets
DAVE ARNESON?
Made a few posts about that in another thread just now.
>>45719651
>>45719698
>>45719817
>>45719992
>>45720068
tl;dr make each “race” (really more of a species anyway) less homogeneous, and make them as varied as humans are in real life in terms of culture, civilisation, biology, ways of thinking, etc.
I've having my elves not have society that is very well understood by humans for several reason. To the average human when encountering an elf they find a weird wisp thin savage covered in their own shit and someone else's blood stabbing another elf with a sharpened stick. To those who don't know about elves they normally consider them dirty savages and attempt to take such areas known as elf woods. To those who do know elves they fucking stay clear of elf woods.
Elves do not have a need for the material, even in death they will merely reappear within a few decades, and as such the physical means nothing to them. Instead they build empires of thought and magic in the woods, metaphysical entities that glow like beacons to those who can actually see/sense magic.
Despite this when a human wizard comes to try and make contact with the elves, likely he is going to be stabbed to death by some elf covered in shit and blood.
Why do elves build such elaborate monuments?
So that they're really fantastic at murdering each other with sharpened sticks.
Really elven political games bare no resemblance to human ones, as essentially no speech in involved, and sometimes territory gained/lost is entirely metaphysical. Even if an elf is coerced to speak with a human it is predicated on the fact that the human is a cog in their greater scheme to grow their own relative power. That being said no elf would lower themselves to learn human tongues, or speech at all. Telepathy is the best you're gonna get.
>>45719791
this artist is so good i cum in my pants everytime i see a drawing made by him
What I don't get is why some people will desperately insist over and over and over again that all dwarves are 'the same'.
Usually they are idiots who have never even read Tolkien but think all dwarves in all fantasy settings are straight copies of his ones.
There are a couple of ways of going at this. First, you could make your non-humans be truly alien, having a bizarre biology and ways of perceiving the world and reacting to it in ways that no human ever would. But, then, you have the problem of not knowing how to play that. If it's truly unlike any human or human-like being, it will be damn near impossible to get inside that mindset and remember all that strange biology. The reason fantasy races tend to be like humans with pointy ears and some personality differences which can be explained merely as their culture rather than an entirely different kind of mind is that we absolutely must be able to relate to them, on some level, to be able to play them.
The second way is to just embrace that fantasy races are just humans with a few physical and cultural peculiarities. Instead of focusing on them, focus on humans. Get rid of the "human" label entirely and break them up into ethnic groups which see each other as exactly as different as they see themselves being different from elves and dwarves. Make a world where the major races are elves, dwarves, gaels, deutsch, and lizardmen, and make them all unique and all just as close or far from each other as geography and culture would realistically make them.
>>45719791
I'm lucky, in that my group is not aware of elf depictions outside of pop culture. There for:
Elves - Long lived barbarians that eat only meat. Including sentient meat, Because they worship the forest and plants, see? Bread is made from ground up crickets. Have bizaare names, because part of a tradition is that they are named for something they must accomplish before they can die - there for, having impossible tasks makes them live longer, so the tradition goes.
Such as 'Drink All The Sea', 'Pluck Five Stars From The Sky', 'Kill Five Million Women', and so forth. Aka, Drinks, Plucks, and Womens.
Dwarves are basically Dwarf Fortress dwarves. They live in incredibly crowded conditions, almost constantly pressing against one another to get around. Because they can't have any external privacy, they depend on internal privacy; Putting up fronts of exclusion to ignore people around them out of politeness, that can be interpreted as grumpiness. This also means they don't react when blood gouts or horrible things happen around them. They also believe they live on in their artifacts, and children are indebted to their parents - so having lots of children is a retirement plan, as they have to pay the parent back over their life time for their raising.
Humans are everywhere. All other creatues were diminished to make room.
Orcs be orcs. Beyond 'Berk the Berksherker' who has a lisp because he's half-orc/half-human - and human sounds just don't handle that lisp inducing canine very well - they haven't had much exposure.
Centaurs are basically native american tropes. Because plains, arrows, and nomads, yo.
Giants are to humans what Dragons are to lizard men. Titans are to humans what .. I dunno are to lizard men. Kobolds are to lizard men what gnomes are to humans.
Magic is basically radiation. When not controlled, it leaks and screws up the environment.
Did the forest dwarves seem interesting to your players? That's the important part. I hope to fuck you're not stuck with a group that sits around and nitpicks the various cultural traits of the peoples you describe looking for things they find cliche, or things that aren't well put together literary deconstructions of genre fiction. You're playing a game with collaborative story telling, not trying to outsell steven erikson.
Fill in gaps in preconceptions, small details that make them seem lifelike, what they eat, smell like, what they whistle to themselves, paint on their sails, rather than worrying about how they compare to tropes.
>sci fi setting
>create your own races or you're an uninspired hack
>fantasy setting
>there are no elves and dwarves? REEEEEE
>>45719791
>>45720009
>well, isn't it a little boring if every elf in every setting is the same?
Novelty plus familiarity equals interest.
Here is my approach to making them novel: I don't make them "humans with x".
That alone seems to make the races seem pretty novel from classic expectations.
I took the few traits that usually get tacked onto a human to change them into a dwarf/elf/orc and I kept those traits.
Then I crafted and entirely unique species of intelligent life that would make sense to have those traits.
Then, to add to the novelty, I make each community of that race different in some way, much in the way that the French are different from the English or people in upstate New York bear no resemblance to people from NYC. I usually make up each community as it comes along.
Forest dwarves are good, but wouldn't they be skilled woodsmen and carpenters who respect the balance of the forest life and it's impact on their woodcraft, rather than tree loving elf-types?
My two cents.
My elves could be called seal-people, my dwarves could be called mole-people, and my orcs could be called flesh-golem-beastmen.
But people call pandas bears because that's what they look like.
My races hit pretty close to the originals, but with jarring differences that remind you that they are not human.
>>45719791
You do not subvert. You build upon. Sometimes changing just one thing leads to a wholly new race.
>>45720413
the latter posts are super interesting, about making other races be as varied as humans are, instead of stand-ins for non western (WEIRD as you say) traits
>>45720576
I think they were alright with it, but I thought it was pretty lacklustre
>>45719791
You can't, because outside of expectations that's all the core fantasy races are: humans in cosplay.
>>45721054
You probably did fine then. There's always room for improvement, and there are some good ideas itt, but sometimes people are much harder on themselves than their audiences are.
Depends on what your goals are, but I've found it to be helpful to msg/talk to players individually and ask if there are things they liked, disliked, thought were missing from the game. It can give you a better idea of what to aim for.
By taking the elements that comprise them and rework them into different combinations. It also helps to look back into mythological and pop culture connections to these races.
>>45719791
Why would I try to make not human?
Fuckers have so many ideas, customs, ideologies, points of view, from the spontaneous to the bizarre.
Try to know more about humans instead.
>>45719791
copy everything about them but change one important thing. dwarves in the dark sun campaign setting were pretty dwarfy, but they were hairless. also instead of being metalworkers they were leatherworkers and miscellaneous craftsmen since there wasn't really any metal. they would have been metalworkers had there been metal, but they adapted like all of the other (non-extinct) races.
I'm rather partial to the mostly-outdoor dwarves who live as mountainmen and prospectors.
