Favorite fantasy race?

apparently, "only humans" fantasy settings are a vocal thing in Veeky Forums

Why not?

Because some people want fantasy elements without the unnecessary baggage associated with other races.

I'll take Illumians. I'm a real sucker for letters above head and mysticism around them.
Also because aeshkrau is awesome.

Gnomes.
Because they're weird and silly.

My favourite race is the humans in my setting because I'm vain.

As far as races not made by me go, it would be goblins in general. I like their look. I like the ways they are typically portrayed (the crafty little shits, the shamanistic little weirdos). I like them best when they're not implicitly evil, but still like them when they are.

curious, what is the fictional race you personally made up?

Gnolls. Back when I was a kid and my friend was getting into D&D, he bought a bunch of miniatures. One of them was a gnoll archer and I thought it looked really cool. So my first D&D character was a gnoll ranger, and ever since then I've always liked them.

Dwarves, my enjoyment for them got really started by DF. I enjoy them because they're strong, hard working, craftsmen and axes and hammers are some of my favorite melee weapons

>humans, so as a second choice...

Elves. The kind of elves that are taller than humans, though.

Lizardmen. Easy to make my games stand out as "unique" by just tossing them in instead of orcs.

In unrelated, I wish I had smarter players.

Well, other than the race I made for one of my settings, I'd have to say Kobolds

Not just any kind of Kobolds but authoritarian, militaristic Kobolds

Undeground North Korea tunnel system shit

Or Goblins that are complete idiots on their own but capable of extreme feats of engineering if they get some direction and someone with a speck of intelligence leading them

Goblins/Kobolds of that nature

Tengu, not sure why. I just like the bird guys, they're fucking cool. Crows and ravens are cool.

If I gotta pick a second it'd be......dorfs. But that's obvious an self explanatory so Halflings. I have fun thinking of ways they'd compensate for the size difference when dealing with Tallfolk

>Favourites?
Goblins, Ratfolk and Naga. I don't know why, but I identify with them a lot, and if i can play as one I typically try to.

>Honourable mention bro races
Centaurs, Ogres, Dorfs, Birdpersons

Why the fuck do you need elves dwarfs gnomes halflings orcs goblins hobgoblins bugbears gremlins kobolds tieflings aasimar gnolls ogres trolls etc etc. A human being is so incredibly varied that you will never meet two the same save for twins. There are giant humans and tiny humans, humans of all shapes colors and sizes. Any story ever told with a retarded escapist fantasy race could've been told with humans just as well or better.

Half-breeds. Half-Orcs, Half-Elves and the likes, not half-dragons but half-breeds in general. The duality of them, able to have a foot in either world but not belong to either.

because fun, user. It's fun.

Besides, you can say fantasy races are just another variety of humans.

Elves? Lithe gazelle like humans with pointy ears.

Orcs? Uggo as fuck humans injected with gorilla testosterone.

Halflings? Short, humans but not as fat or as stocky as dwarfs and can only grow beards on their feet.

Dwarfs? Half pint humans who grow massive beards.

Fantasy races are basically incredibly varied humans.

Don't be racist, user. Fucking bigot against imaginary race....should be ashamed of yourself.

Elves.

Because they go well with classes and archetypes I like to play. Well, I guess that's the reason, but there is probably a fascination beyond that.

Orcs

The human kind, but not noble savages.

Basically Peter of the Jackson Uruk-Hai.

Azog is my bishie

Elves. For the reasons outlined in , plus the fact that I'm a fan of the organic aesthetics usually associated with the "Wood Elf" versions, plus their harmonious relationship with nature. While usually ill-explained and done pretentiously often, I feel like there's a great potential in that idea that merits a deeper exploration than is usually offered.

They also play off dwarves very well, either as antagonistic or rivals, or as grudging but mutual allies.

You mean my humans? They're unique, in that all the other peoples of the setting occurred naturally, as in meat space, over millions of years, in either Earth's Plane or the Prime Plane (fey plane).

I'll try to summarise, but I'm drunk as shit right now. Humans were made by a god only 4000 years ago, as 10 to 12 foot tall, statuesque people. The god made them, and assigned an avatar to rule them. The avatar's right hand man (the human paragon of the king) killed and ate him which gave him and all the humans magic and immortality. The god was angry and cursed them with infertility and a second sun which hung, ever shining over them and destroyed their crops and dried their fresh water. The humans sustained themselves only on sea water for years, until starvation, sea water and everything else drove them mad. Eventually, the other paragons of humanity (the fisher, the soldier, the scholar and the craftsman) rose up and beat down the paragon of the king and they escaped the island and the second sun with around 1000 other humans. They found the mainland where the natural people were and found they could breed with them, and did so with gusto. Now all the original, pure humans have died out (being immortal, they had to be put down by force as their insanity grew over the years), and only their descendents with varying ammounts of elf, halfling, and especially orc and dwarf ancestry remain.

I'm skipping and forgetting some shit, but that's the gist of it. Due to the first humans propensity to bang the other peoples, the orcs and dwarves still think of humans as sluts. The dwarves term for slut is an "iron woman", because they call humans "iron men" because humans famously came to the mainland wielding outdated yet powerful iron weapons. The fertility god of most orc tribes is depicted as a human woman.

Azog deserved that victory, and if it weren't for bullshit plot armour, he would have gotten it. He worked so damn hard.

>humans are SLOOTS lololol XD
>in any way unique
Whatever you say, kiddo

Well, that's not even remotely what I said, but whatever.

I always liked gnomes, but the potential of giants and giant-likes still remains untapped in great part.

Drow.
I like spiders, and confidant, slightly fetishy women.
The underdark is also alien enough that it seems interesting.

Merfolk. I'm all about the fish people.

Well, I can't say human.

Tieflings kind of work best with what I like to do when I'm not playing some variation of paladin or warrior - I like to be some sort of warlock, or vaguely sinister wizard or sorcerer. Maybe a spellsword if I can make that work.

I should also include gnolls to, but I like them more as NPCs and fun cannonfodder.

>confidant
... Someone you can trust and share your secrets and feelings with?
That's not like the drow at all.

No, someone who can get shit done without supervision. Someone who will not back down. Someone who can gut an ogre and strangle it's children, without flinching. None of that lolrandom Harlet Quinn crap either, I want a professional. A sadistic flair for dispatching enemies is just an extra turn on.

Tieflings are my favourite, because I love it when everyone expects me to play the edgiest characters ever (I pick stuff like warlock for classes) then play them as naive people with an unfortunate affinity for dark power who are just trying to do good in the world.

Beast races, but they're hard to get right. I feel like they should be physically adapted to sapience and being bipedal. Just like we adapted to being bipedal and sapient. We don't look exactly like gorillas so we? A wolf person wouldn't look just like a wolf.

Because

>your fantasy elements just become nonsense with nothing to contrast it to
>to a lesser extent if everyone is a weirdo then no one is
>juxtaposition has its own appeal

>some people feels fantasy elements only matter as allegories or in doses instead of what's 'cool'
>in other words, some folks feel they need to serve a purpose
>this means if the races aren't symbolic or serving an overall narrative purpose they're just 'bloat'

>arguably like saying why play a martial when you can be a caster? It's fantasy, right?

I don't feel it's bloat, but that is an opinion that has been thrown around a lot. Personally I do love to compare and contrast. Also human doesn't mean median age everything 1st world westerner accountant. Humans in fantasy should have some cool cultures and maybe some adaptions. Doesn't sound better when you say you play a Breton, Nord, or Imperial instead of just human?

I'm a big fan of the trolls from Shadowrun and Earthdawn, especially as drawn by Jeff Laubenstein

Favourite... Elves. I usually prefer the high elf archetype of the elves, the ones with glittering armour and huge cities.

Varags are an underappreciated gem. They look cool and are half-feral beastmen (beastgoblins?).

Too bad they're crippled by racial HD and LA :'c

I would follow this pompous helmet.

>Orcs
I had gotten into fantasy because of Warcraft and my introduction to that world wasn't even through the games. My cousin lent me Lord of the Clans and I fell in love with Thrall and Grom. Then I read Rise of the Horde,Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal and I loved how the orcs all varied in personality. The dindunuffin Frostwolves, bloodthirsty clans like Blackrock and Warsong and then were warlocks like Gul'dan who are manipulative little shits. I just like the fact that Warcraft you can easily have orcs as bloodthirsty warmongers or noble shamanistic savages.

High Elves, The taller, nobler, more beautiful, and more magical, the better.

I also think Half Elves and Halflings are nice, if not done for comedy.

>Half Elves
>done for comedy
What?

This.

I like Warforged.

I meant Halflings, although I suppose Half Elves can be funny in a cosmic sort of way.

Probably Thri-Kreen. I like that their sourcebook talks about really practical stuff like how they express emotions without traditional face anatomy (antennae) and which sounds are just impossible to replicate with their vocal cords.

>Too bad they're crippled by racial HD and LA

Have you tried playing them in something other than D&D?

While not my absolute favorite race, I'm pretty fond of goblins too and I have them as my homebrew's short race.

I can't fucking decide. It actually kind of makes me mad, I like so many fantasy races that I literally cannot figure out which ones I am going to include in my game world, which ones I am going to leave out, which ones I am going to create or change.

All I can tell you is that my least favorite are elves and dwarves, and my most liked are trolls and goblins when they aren't 'hur retarded I was born evil hurr'.

Humans, otherwise aasimar and tieflings. Something about being God's chosen and a half-breed of one of His chosen and one of the other two is just kind of neat to explore.

Elves, because they're the easiest for me to roleplay. People my age have always looked to me as the older, wiser friend. I often lose track of time when I'm invested in something. I move quietly and carefully, to the point where I started keeping keys on me so that I jingle and don't accidentally startle people. I also enjoy archery and lounging about in nature.

>mfw my friends talk shit on elves

Your setting is giving me the crawls. Not in a good way.

I've only ever heard "the crawls" used to describe heroin withdrawal. Did I really fuck up that badly?

I like castle-folk.

Are they castles on the inside too, or is it just superficial?

You mean like statting them out for PF? I have not.

I only tried playing a varag once and she was complete deadweight (I was also kind of new and not so good at optimization yet) so I never tried again.

Oh wow I forgot my blogpost in this theread about how I have a deep affection for the underdog race of orcs bla bla bla

Srsly I love orcs and orc aesthetics because they are predators.

Sure, I started out like many other orc fag - By sucking thrall's and grom's virtual green niggerdick because of MUH HONA and BRETHREN when I was fucking twelve. And boy was my orcfaggotry strong, it basically made me hate the LotR films the first time I saw them because orcs were those ugly wartfaces. Only the FIGHTING URUK-HAI were kind of cool, but they still were soooooo unlike my heroic, misunderstood noble savages that I pouted and made up fanfiction where there's Uruk-Hai who join in to defend Helm's Deep and shit.

Cue forward a few years after getting up to my fucking tripplechin in history of tribal cultures and I realised: Being a noble savage means nothing if you're no survivor. And that's when I started sucking up to orcs of the middle-ground calibre between beastial monsters and good natured notHumans. And that's when i became completely absorbed with the ambivalent nature of the orcs that lies at the core of their LotR nature and, by extension, in many other fantasy settings.

Being an orc means to get shat on by both allied and enemy parties because they all believe they can outsmart you.

And they probably can.

But us orcs would love to see them try and outsmart a bunch of knivestabs to the jugular.

And yes, Azog deserved it. He deserved to be crowned King of the orcs of Moria, Gundabad and the Misty mountains, conqueror of Durin's People, Besieger of the Lonely Mountain and Dale, First and Only of his name in all eternity until Morgoth Bauglir returns to swallow all the skies above Arda.

is it because in his setting, female humans are universally known as sloots to every other fantasy race?

Well I for one have no strong opinion about it either way. Meh.

Orcs. I love bad guys the PCs don't have any qualms killing.

Sssnake people, snakes are really cool creatures but they're usually depicted as evil because most people are idiots who think a talking snake caused all the world's problems.

Fucking this! In every sophont there is something human, and this isn't the argument why you throw them out, it's the reason why they are applicable in the first place.