Musing: Races... I mean species, damnit, species!

The next few steps in our Design project involves placing the various towns, hamlets, towers, ruins, and lairs that make up any good fantasy land, basically places where the "friendly races" and "hostile monsters" hang out for the PCs to interact with. So, naturally that has me thinking about what creatures are going to show up not only our first area, but the world as a whole.

Firstly, we need to stop saying "Races," they're not races, they're species, they're biological different from one another, a race is a subtype of a species, so we'll be calling them species from now on.

The easiest thing to do is use the "player races" presented in the AEC as the friendly species, after all, then everyone can just pick up the AEC and decide what "race" they want to play and start making a character. However, that brings up some problems, one of which is that it can kill the uniqueness of your setting.

Also, one of tagline of Omniscient Projects is "A Little Reality in a Fantasy Setting," which may sound like an oxymoron, but hear me out. Sean and I are detail people and we don't like to settle with "because we said so," when we can take things apart and see how they work from the inside. Because of that, we tend to design stuff under the philosophy of having to have a plausible reason why it's there and doing what it's doing (granted the plausible reason can involve fantasy elements like magic and other plans, but there's still a reason).

I mention this because I have to call out one of my biggest dislikes in terms of species, half-breeds. The Half-Elf and Half-Orc just don't make sense! First of all, they're elves and orcs are separate species from humans, so genetically, it's impossible. And why does the mix only work with elves and humans and orcs and humans, why not halflings and orcs or dwarves and gnomes or humans and halflings? Also, if you argue that, maybe in the setting Orcs and Elves are distant offshoots of humanity (or the other way around), why do they breed true? When you normally get two similar species to mate, you normally end up with a sterile offshoot (like a mule), so why is it, half-elves and half-orcs exist (especially cause in most D&D settings, they're not related to humans at all, elves are fey for crying out loud)? So, for me, half-breed species are right out.

Now, I talked about making a setting unique, and one thought that tends to go through a designer's head is to take out all the standard fantasy troupes to really stand out. No humans, elves, dwarves, or anything, instead all weird creatures are the PCs, Lamia, Sphinx, Newly Made Up Crystal Thing, Three-Headed Sloth Species, etc. This can actually hurt you, more so then help you stand out, remember, there are certain elements of fantasy that are expected by an audience, you go too far out there, and you potentially scare people off. RPers have been playing elves and dwarves and halflings for decades now, to completely leave out all of them (or worse still, humans, the easies species to pick cause they're, well, us), and people don't want to give it a try because they don't want to learn how to play a brand new species.

So balance is key, we want to mix up a lot of elements to make the world unique, but we don't want to go so strange that no one wants to give us a shot. A good way to do that is to make familiar friendly species different a bit in culture but retain their core being, or pick a fairly common monster and make it a friendly species.

Of course, the more entirely new species you decide to use, the more new rules you have to write up and try to mesh into the rules already in place.

As of now, we haven't written off the final selection of either the playable species or even which ones exist as monsters. But, atleast you can see where the thought behind our choices is.