Today’s topic is the approach to races that I’ve developed recently. Well, first off, I looked at this from the viewpoint of how to incorporate race into the game, numbers wise, and so forth. I have decided this is bad, and that keeping with my usual approach, it would be best to start extremely broad with this, and let the weeding out happen during later processes.
In general, I want the usual fantasy-fare for races, as well as some completely unused creature types. Of course, humans are a given, because they always are. In keeping with usual fare, we also have modified humans, which Ive called strongmen and the ancient ones for now, which are, in essence, humans specialized for magic or martial purposes. With those out of the way, now we must address the non-human fare. At the moment, I feel we want to create a sense of uniqueness, so we’ve avoided the usual elf/dwarf/gnome approach. Instead, our first non-human race will be that of the beast folk. I know it’s not actually very unique, other games have had lizard and tiger and oxen races. I think we’ll be different through sheer number, however. We can use a large number of different possibilities, with little differences here and there. Race itself isn’t meant to comprise the majority of a character’s identity anyway. A more unique branching of this that I decided I wanted after playing Shining Force is Tauric races. These are races that are part human, part quadruped. The typical example of this is the centaur. This gives us something very unique in an action rpg setting, not so much in a strategy rpg setting, but that’s OK. Since we’ve done a good deal of animal people, incorporating plant people shouldn’t be much of a problem either. The specifics of plant people is something that needs to be discussed, however. Departing from the organic side, I’ve taken a page from Eberron and decided that some sort of construct race would be cool as well. Almost forgot, we’ve got to include a dragon race for a friends sake. Finally, I just thought I’d like to have some insect-inspired races as well.
The list ends up being:
- Humans
- Strongmen
- Ancient Ones
- Beast Folk
- Tauric Folk
- Dragon Kin
- Plant People
- Construct Race
- Bug people
Now, a final thought. I think this list is very much acceptable, however, I don’t think character creation will stop at this. In my intended method, the choice of race will supply an initial set of biological traits. However, after this, a character must choose an “upbringing” as well, which will complete the character creation process. So, in the end, a character at level one is a function of race, upbringing, and the interaction of race and upbringing (some races react differently to certain training). I totally stole that idea from Kurt Lewin, but its a good idea, so why not. Now, in order to apply this, we need to decide how each race lives, as well as the level of xenophobia present in their culture. We need to figure out who lives in giant cities and little villages, even though most of the races will probably have both. Also, the culture a character is brought up in will probably have a direct correlation with which power type is used.
belkorin
aquilivur
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