Shifting From The Standard Tropes

[tnjrp]

In the case of my RPG world of yore, the only twist I came up with was that the three traditional metahuman fantasy races (dwarves, elves and orcs/goblins) were in fact different subspecies of human.

So dwarves could be seen as a somewhat more robust version of Homo floresiensis (in hindsight, since the setup was conceived some 20 years prior to the discovery of that Homo) and orcs/goblins (this was just a single species and not two) were pretty much straight-up Neanderthals. Elves were predictably slighter and a little taller than regular humans so AFAIK there isn't really an equivalent in the IRL genus Homo. Unless you count supermodels as a different subspecies

I would've liked to go in a much wilder direction with the setting but as the setting kinda sorta continued from our HeroQuest games (the game mechanic was actually dubbed Beyond HeroQuest) there were certain tropes I felt obliged to adopt -- albeit stretched to the very breaking point.

[FramFramson]

One other thing I'd done a long while back and keep contemplating for a minis game is a bit more scifi in setting mixed with a lot of more fantasy stuff had another major take on the Elf, Goblin, Orc, and Troll thing.

Namely that they're all the same species.

The elves are pretty much the females and tribal leaders, they tend to have some powerful magic and/or psionics.

Goblins are the younger males, tend to be in a frenzy and unleashed wave of them into the mess, the survivors eventually grow into the adult "orc" form. Some of the Orcs eventually mutate into the even larger, regenerating Trolls. Of course they breed like rabbits and the majority of them don't survive to breeding age, meaning that the "best" of the males survive to reproduce while the females are cared for due to their relative rarity.

Half-Orcs are more from people captured and bred...

The setting started out with me trying to create a universe that kind of came out of the mix of Paraworld and more fantasy, with two human factions (Locals who had villages on the backs of large migrating sauropods) and a military force from a near future world that has started building up, another faction was scifi raptors with energy weapons...

The orcs were exceedingly tribal and managed to creep the hell out of the players of the Spycraft campaign I ran in that world. The Trolls early on when they realized that the reason the trolls got so much harder to kill as the tribes adjusted to the soldiers by way of relying on their regeneration while the elves essentially cut them open and implanted armor plates and letting it heal up on top of the worn armor...then they realized that the goblins were essentially their toddlers given sharp objects and pointed at the enemy as expendable shock troops.

And the elves "ethereal" beauty, well, that was largely caused by pheromone and mental manipulation, which combined with a more fickle and nasty nature due to politics that faced them off of each other.

It was largely due to their lack of technology and more confrontational nature that they were beaten.

Sure, some of it was based off of the "Basement" and "Long Stair" concepts that popped up a decade or so back on RPG.net (I believe), but it was a fun and nasty twist on things.

Someone mentioned the Elder Scrolls universe, well, in that game all the non-human races are essentially of the same stock - orcs, elves of various kinds, and dwarves, are all "mer" (orsimer, altmer, etc.), so there's technically only two major species groups, mer and men (even though the mer are technically subspeciated).

[Connectamabob]

Someone mentioned the Elder Scrolls universe, well, in that game all the non-human races are essentially of the same stock - orcs, elves of various kinds, and dwarves, are all "mer" (orsimer, altmer, etc.), so there's technically only two major species groups, mer and men (even though the mer are technically subspeciated).

The Dwarves (Dwemer) are interesting. They've been extinct for thousands of years as of the eras of the games, so there's a lot of legends and misinformation about them in-universe. They were actually regular elf/human sized, and the "dwarf" appellation is the result of a corrupted translation of the old Giantish name for them (because to giants*, "normal" sized people would be dwarfs). Thanks to the "dwarves" nickname, your average peasant thinks Dwemer were a race of little people in the standard fantasy template, whereas more educated people know they were just an earlier Elf civilization.

The Dwemer were nasty too. They had an empire that was essentially post-industrial revolution technologically, but treated it's subject races in ways that would make the Aztecs blush. They oppressed one other race of elves so hard (after "conquering" them via leonine alliance) that it physically bred them into morlocks (the snow elves, aka Falmer).

Eventually they screwed themselves trying to exploit a particularly exotic sort of black magic/demonology, and went extinct. Thousands of years later, the Dark Elves (Dunmer) sort of look up to them and model parts of their own society on them, similar to how the USA took formative inspiration from the Roman empire.


There is more than two species groups in ES though. There are the "beast races" which is not really a species group, but rather just the human/mer name for anything that's not man or mer. Kajit and Argonians (cat people and lizardmen, respectively) are the most common in the main setting. Both have really weird biology and life cycles, to the point where the cat/lizard aspect is almost purely superficial, and they are actually more like aliens.

They also both tend to have really mellow, likable personalities, in contrast to standard template cat or lizard men. Kajit kind of have a "friendly pothead" thing going on, and Argonians come across as the sort of super-stable type-B people who make good coworkers.