What real world nationality would you most associate your fantasy characters Veeky Forums?

I create brown people like myself mostly. My first character was Mayan inspired

My character is a fighter/sorcerer from not!mongolia.

So I guess Mongolia.

You are at least SLIGHTLY aware there are people out there who play in real-world settings, right?

Finns, for the autism and alcoholism

and? He's asking about fantasy settings.

This. Unless the setting is clearly somewhere that is not vaguely european, I go with germans. It doesn't really show up in any other way besides the name though. It's not like all my characters are punctual, beer drinking control freaks who speak like they are trying to politely tell the emperor that pissing in soup is not appreciated.

Fantasy can still be a thing while using real-world setting.
I mean fucking Shadowrun, one of the most popular things around, combines real world, cyberpunk AND fantasy and you are posting some bullshit instead

Greek, Polish, Irish, Italian, Danish, Spanish.
They're different enough to not be generic GERMAN/FRANKISH KNIGHT but still fit the era.

United Empire of Autists

I'm german but my characters in modern or scifi settings are typical murrikans
In fantasy settings it's either german or some form of nomadic asian character like a chinese-ish wanderer

...

Scandanavian or Eastern European.

Celtic or Germanic, normally.

Although I did play a Roman Paladin once.

Not my own. Anglo-saxon, probably, or vaguely french.

I have the distinct advantage of being British and specifically English.

Makes my life easy for a lot of fantasy, weirdly for Scifi and modern settings I assume American.

Also weirdly I do different voices for all my characters, I have had very few characters that just have my voice and they are always apprentice wizards.

Germanic origin names always seem the most legit without sounding corny as fuck.

Blackwood or Mason or Fletcher, all sound like they are trying to hard even though they are legit names.

>not Slavs
I am ashamed of all of you

Largely that of my ancestors.

Exalted and nationality/ethnicity is wierd, but I suppose the next character I'm planning will be a duelist, so maybe something vaguely spanish or italian.

But I usually play white guys of some variety and no specific nationality unless it matters, but over the years I've played others as well as the situation demands, or just seems more appropriate. My L5R characters are asian because they have to be, of course, but I don't care. Likewise I didn't have to make an old vampire character of mine from Nepal, but playing a Ghurka was fun and interesting.

Depends on the setting.

To clarify what I said, Celtic or Nordic. I'm just your average Joe American, but I love reading about where my grandparents and gray grandparents came from and trying to piece together the heritage denied me by the realities of the melting pot. I know I'd never succed, and that if I went to said countries where my family is from, they'd laugh there assess off and call me a stupid american, but I still do it. Incorporating what I learn into my roleplay, and into my world building when I gm, is fun. It adds interesting dynamics and it helps me feel closer to my roots.

>pic
well meme'd

>be danish
>dad's family is from hungarian nobility who basically lost everything 800 years ago and had to flee to surrounding countries
>has been danish for several hundred years
>mom's family is danish/faroese but probably also partially barbary coast rape babies from raids on the faroese islands
>tfw part horse raiding ugric nigger, boat raiding sandnigger, and boat raiding snownigger

You could easily be all kinds of shit.

>weirdly for Scifi and modern settings I assume American.
That's probably because of all the sci-fi and modern media coming out of the US.

Seriously, it's to the point where kids start assuming that high school's going to be like in America, and I live in fuckin' Sweden. Shit ain't anything like that here.

Yes, yes I could. And if I learn about that I'll research it too. For now, I'll look into what I know. Like I said, I know it's kind of silly, but I enjoy it.

4 - English
1 - Scottish
1 - Russian
2 - American
2 - Japanese

Denmark has a neat history. I've been thinking about incorporating the story of Valdemar IV into a campaign setting.

Greco-Roman, generally

Well, I've only ever been the player of one game of D&D, and I'm playing a drow in the Forgotten Realms who was born on the surface and raised by a good human man in Ulgoth's Beard, a small coastal town near Baldur's Gate.

So...ethnically Korean (north, specifically, though there isn't actually an ethnic difference between South Koreans and North Koreans), but in terms of nationality and culture, Bostonian. Baldur's Gate is Boston. Drow culture is North Korea.

Or possibly Italian, if we go by Salvatore's statements that he based the various Drow houses and their interaction with each other off of the Mafia. But for the most part I've seen drow as North Korea.

...뭐라고? 난 한국에 샀는데 북한이 너무 너무나 나쁜 곳이라도 drow와 비슷함이 없어.

I didn't say I could READ Korean, just that I view drow elves as being analogous to North Korea.

Google translate is barely helping; would you mind translating that to English, please?

My characters are, roughly:
1 - Arabic/Egyptian.
2 - Irish/generic Gaelic
3 - Scottish
4 - INCREDIBLY English
5 - Icelandic/Nordic
Guess where I'm from

One of my homebrew races is somewhat culturally similar to Finno-ugric people. I've played two, which is more than other things.

New England or New York.

Then again, I've been to Irish bookstores. A more self-obsessed people I have never encountered.

It reads

"...what? I lived in korea, and yeah north Korea is a really really bad place (bout as close as I could get to fucked up, there isnt quite a way to say that in korean that I've found, though you can insult a guy like you wouldnt believe), but it has no similarities with the drow. "

To be fair I suppose there are some similarities. It IS a shit hole after all, but the culture is entirely different. Further more I don't recall the drow having starvation as a serious issue, which it really is in North korea.

>Further more I don't recall the drow having starvation as a serious issue, which it really is in North korea.

Two part answer, as I've put a lot of thought into this.

The thing is that we've only ever seen things from the perspective of drow nobles. I doubt if there's a serious starvation issue among the military elite of North Korea, either. But the Underdark has been flavored as basically being a room-temperature desert in Realms lore. Water is in short supply; cities form around oases.

Further, Menzoberranzan, for example, is in a cavern only a few miles wide, and all of their food supposedly comes from only a small subsection of that cavern, the area referred to as Donigarten. Yet the population of the city is 20,000 drow and thousands more slaves of various races, according to the most recent source (Out of the Abyss). There is no way that that area produces sufficient food to feed that many beings, and certain vital nutrients and vitamins will be lacking simply due to the limited types of food available (mostly mushrooms, lichen, and insects, one imagines, with the nobility able to access rothé meat - there's no way the herd of rothé on that island is large enough to be available to the common drow).

Also, seriously consider drow culture for a minute.

1) The drow tell a story about how in ages past they fought a war with the surface elves and then chose to live underground, leaving the horrible surface and the burning sun to the elves.
2) The war is still going on and the drow could totally win it if push came to shove.
3) Lolth created everything; she is the only goddess and could easily defeat everything that came her way.
4) All other races are subdrow scum.
5) Glorious raids are occasionally made on the surface where the drow show off how powerful they are to the surface world, which then cowers in fear.

That's pretty much just a reflavored version of Nork propaganda about how the Korean War went down.

A little bit of all the Medieval European ones.

youtube.com/watch?v=aCR8xV7fb5w

Part two. By the way I should mention that rothé are an animal unique to the Forgotten Realms; basically imagine a yak for the closest real-world equivalent. The underdark variety are smaller than their surface cousins, standing about 5 feet tall at most.

Basically, as near as I can tell, if you're a member of one of the Eight Great Houses, you eat well and live well, albeit constantly fighting for your life against the other Houses. If you're in one of the lesser Houses, you're...okay; you can afford access to the best food from Donigarten and probably even occasionally have some rothé meat.

But every other drow? The commoners? They're malnourished and undereducated, and what education they do receive is couched in propaganda. They live off of lichen paste, mushrooms, and insects. They've never tasted real meat like rothé in their lives and their diet is severely lacking in most other nutrients. This explains why drow elves are usually stated as being notably shorter than their surface cousins, with even the better-fed-and-bred females topping out at five feet: their diet sucks.

(For the record and based on this logic, my aforementioned drow character is actually a *giant* by drow standards at 5' 5'' tall, since as the daughter of an innkeeper in a small but prosperous fishing village she benefited from a robust human diet growing up, plenty of meat and vegetables).

Anyway, that's my justification for thinking of drow as basically being North Korea. While I'll grant that it doesn't necessarily EXCLUSIVELY refer to or apply to North Korea, the comparison is close enough for most purposes.

If it was New York there'd be some Jews in there.

You raise some very fair points user. And I suppose if we consider only their perspective on the war, and the cult of spider bitch as a parallel to the personality cult of the "glorious leader" I could see it. But that disregards the sadism of the drow, for which there is not necessarily a paralel. Men's second class status could be seen as a reversal of women's place in the culture, but it's not that extreme. We would also be missing a lot of the veneration of ancestors and tradition, along with respect for elders and family piety, which exists on a base level if nothing else.

Fair enough. I undestand why you would think that way. I just got hung up on sadistic spider bitches for a moment there, and it didn't compute.

Replace "sadistic spider bitch" with "sadistic basketball fan" and you're not fundamentally different from Fatboy Kim.

Pretty much every Valdemar was awesome.

Prussia based fuckiing hard militaristic prussia

>You could easily be all kinds of shit.
This!

My father's side of the family landed in Canada 400 years ago as French peasants, and stayed pretty common ever since, but have also fucked everyone who ever got off a boat in Nova Scotia, as well as a few natives.

My mom was adopted but apparently her father was Italian (which would explain my back hair), and her mother and her family came from a large saxon clan.

All of this has got me thinking of a thread a while back about slav drow, that had a few good pastas. Anybody have those?

My fighter/rogue, a consummate bounty hunter and mercenary is a Romani Gypsy

My rogue investigator turned mutant alien wizard is unmistakably Victorian English.

My paladin of the crown, heir to an occult noble family is polish, with just a drop of dragon blood for fluff.

Giving your characters a patron culture to be from, I find, adds a great amount of life without thinking too hard about it. Just use clichés of that culture. Because outgroup homogenization.

American

Early Germanic with a Nordic ancestry

I kinda wanna see fantasy Americans, or any modern culture that doesn't have a medieval equivalent.

Player characters? Usually Bedouin or Turkish names.

NPC's, Spanish and Greek names.

Our first campaign was essentially a low key post-apocalyptic fantasy California.

So my first character was basically a Jewish-American Cleric of a water god that married a fox girl Alchemist from Disney Land. Pretty much my only character that had a "real world" nationality.

Probably the weirdest campaign we've ever done, outside of our train wreck of a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon campaign.

Aleut but whiter.

The USA was based primarily on the Roman Republic. The founders (the ones who won the argument) read Machiavelli and contemporary Roman literature to guide them, along with more recent enlightenment philosophers. So a fantasy USA would be a colonial state that eclipsed the Old World with a system of government inspired by ancients. Kinda like the black people in Pillars of Eternity's backstory.

My point of reference is as an American, so everything ends up ranging from gross estimation or over the top stereotype.

Half orcs are black
Tieflings are italian
Dwarves are Russian or Scottish
Halflings are LOTR halflings
Humans range from British to typical transatlantic sounding whites

Every now and then I throw in a random Jamaican accent.

Communist international

...

Somewhat related, but I fall back on my own nationality of being Welsh and knowing the Welsh language when thinking of names. Lots of Tolkien's language was inspired by Welsh, so I have an advantage with creating fantasy names by just using sounds in my own language and playing with them.

my main campaign is set to the south of the empire. The entire area is based on Moorish Spain, so you have Middle-eastern,Black and Spanish. My secondary campaign is set to the north of the empire on the Howling sea. Lithuanian/Finish in culture.

>The USA was based primarily on the Roman Republic.

I mean...sort of? There are some rather notable and important differences.

primarily =/= 100%

Eh, it's close enough to set a campaign in.

Someone should cap this. It makes a lot of sense

My current character is a noble from about UK, but he has flashbacks to ancestor shit which happened in not!north-Africa.

>Kinda like the black people in Pillars of Eternity's backstory.
Eh, not really. Pillar's black people are slightly more progressive than the all encompassing generic empire but in the end, are fairly insignificant islands that haven't even began to truly compete with the mainland. Plus, a true fantasy America wouldn't be a pack of merchant cities ruled over by Doges who're just as apathetic to the plight of the common folk as their aristocratic contemporaries.

>WE WUZ PREZEDENTS

Fuck, I dunno. Italian maybe? What nationality is "silly and friendly person that's way into /out/"?

>just as apathetic to the plight of the common folk as their aristocratic contemporaries.
Sounds like the early United States to me. Mass deportation of loyalists, continued slavery, war taxes, plutocracy, decentralized states only truly "united" in times of war. The big reason the colonial leaders wanted the right to settle west was to get their sons to fuck off.

I mix stuff, but a common theme is Japan, Norway, Swiss and Brazil.

>mfw I basically do fucked up characters with a dream of a better tomorrow

Ireland and Mexico.

Saharan nomads.

That'll work, he's spent a chunk of his life in the desert travelling learning shit

Canadian?

>Scottish
>Russian
>Brazilian (Tupi)
>American redneck? (mountain man of True Grit)
>etc

I don't think I ever repeated a nationality.

Early 1500's german petty kingdoms.

Largely because that's literally where Gele's from; she's from a town a bit north of where Switzerland would be if it had existed there, and works mostly in the North East due to some Pomeranian Vampires who haven't yet realized they lost against the Teutonic Order.

Polish/Russian or any Slavic
I'm from Poland

>Implying all Slavs are Muscovity Russians

My TTRPG characters can be usually described in single word. Their job description. So I play as "merc" or "spy" or "wizard" or "noble" or some other shit. I don't care for role-playing, making background story and stuff like that when playing tabletops. It's no use and serves no real purpose - I just want to get shit done, by rolling dice.

On the other hand, I create complex charactrers for PBFs, because there is literally NOTHING else to do than developing your PC's character.

And yet in both cases nationality is completely skippable, just like basing on something from RW.

I like to imagine most of my characters as Dutch, mostly because making pseudo-Dutch fantasy names is just so much fun

But you don't need to change anything in Dutch names to make them sound like stuff from fantasy...

Slavs besides Poles and Russians are irrelevant

Which is funny because German surnames actually follow damn near the exact same conventions, it just sounds better because you don't recognize the word.

...

Yep

Pole, please, stop being delusional.
Not a single Slav matters.

I don'n agree with you, all slavs have very good history, and slav nations are very interesiting. Expecly south slavs (old yugoslavian countries + bulgaria) have history which could be after rebuilding for fantasy a good setting (for example few valley in montenegro was never taken by Ottoman Empire). (I'm not south slav, i'm Polish)

The Reptillian elite.

White.

Serbia

Ethnicities amongst my characters:
>French
>German
>Greek
>Italian
>Swedish
>slav
>'strayan
>Chinese
>Japanese
>Filipino
>Hispanic
>Native American
>Arabian/Egyptian
>one girl who's predominantly African, but also a bit Scottish

The one that matters.

Bohemia is cool.

and don't forget about Count fucking Dracula