Alternative races

Based Tabaxi

Beast races are still fun though.

It's best to make them up, ogres by any other name and all that. It can be tough though.

In one setting I tried to make had a variety of different spins on various races. It was based on the fact there was a race of humans that were basically a race of god kings ruling over a country, but had just disappeared one day. The god-king humans made things like cliquish undead coral merpeople, scholarly crystal and rock faries, weird abomination creatures that look human but arent't, and more. There's also down-to earth but gruff badger people and roman legion styled cutebolds.

It turned out that the tropes were so jumbled that my players didn't know what the fuck was going on and it took forever to communicate things.

i like mutating races. in the setting im developing, most of the humans left the continent a thousand years ago. those left behind fled to the mountains to get away from getting killed for being humans in the genocidal war that forced the other humans to leave.

in that mountain there was a peaceful and rather small field. in this field, there grew blue flowers with red thorns that was poisonous to the other races, yet it was perfectly fine to humans. they settled in this mountain range and began cultivating the Flowers and used it in everything. clothes, tea, bread, etc etc. it was so prevalent that as the civilization grew, they converted the mountain into more places to plant the flowers. what they didn't know was that it was infused with astral magic so deeply and so potent (in setting astral magic is generally speaking mostly harmless and difficult to control, but the more that you gather the more it acts like radiation) that it mutated them and they developed a symbiosis with the plants and super charged the latent astral manipulation that humans could do. now they roam the mountains on what are basically mind flayer horses spreading the Blue Flower. the mountain ecosystems, due to the expanding Blue Flower (really have to come up with a better name) have also mutated, creating a unique biosphere. there are whispers that they plan on eventually spreading it to the rest of the world, but there are just rumors

sounds like infinity blade went full on high sci-fi fantasy instead of high sci-fi low fantasy

Loxodon, Satyr and birth-Vampires

I need races for my magical relam semen dimen game
Aside from succubi, elves and slime, what are good choices.

Ghosts.

When you dont want beast races or normal races youre pretty much stuck with Ayy Lmao races.

Which can still be fun, but you have to make up a lot of stuff yourself, their physiology, their culture etc.

Yeah, it kind of turned into a hugely different setting to the typical fantasy thing. The setting arose from the studies I did into anthropological linguistics, and so the cultural bits were a combination of early chinese and classical mesoamerican. A lot of the ideas were just hard to grasp in the medium I had to communicate it in. It could actually work quite well for a book, but trying to act it out and make characters in it was pretty difficult. Not because I'm good at being creative or anything, but because having to think about all the different parts and how it wasn't what was usual didn't work that well with Pathfinder as a system.

Like the central conceit of the setting is that power was derived from authority. There were "Demesnes" which were pieces of magical power connected with a section of land roughly equivalent to a country. These Demesnes were just part of the world and could be tapped into to create spells and such. However, they would bestow a great amount of power on a specific people living within their boundaries whenever a people showed aptitude for rule. This power usually turned them into a race of demigods who would rule the country until they got displaced in favor of a stronger people or fucked up and removed themselves from existence or the like. By the time the game happened, the rulers of the Demesne it takes place in had been gone for a few generations. Enough time to remove first-hand knowledge of the rulers and have a number of wars happen and stop without a true victor. It's still close enough that their holy cities have remained vacant and mostly undisturbed due to superstition and the fact that their traps are still working.

I probably could get it working if I used a different system or wrote some intro pieces that could help people understand how the setting goes.

none of these races are overdone. the problem is that they are usually not well done.

Most 'common' races boil down to something + human = exciting new race!

Clockmen. Catfolk. Wasp-centaurs etc. That's fine if you want that.

What I personally prefer are the race that are as far from humans as possible. If you want to make a new race, why would you make it anything like humans? It's supposed to be new and different!

Lovecraft's old ones are a good example. Phillip Pullman's Mulefa are another. I suggest that if you want something truly new, you ditch everything you know of how a race 'should' be and instead make something up from nothing.

Straight up animals.

Beast races are overdone and, quite frankly, creepy.

Bipedal animals, blown up to human size, make great fantasy races.

mouse/rat/bunny (rodent) girl in the long grass/forest edges
hyena plainswomen
swan harpy/false angel
goat women in mountains

in my babylonian-indian setting best alternative races are:
- shapechanging sand people, descendants of desert spirits
- rakshasas in indian style, not tigerpeople
- vanaras, humanoind intelligent monkeys a la Hanuman / Son Wukong
- undead, Dark Souls style (revenants)
- scorpion people from Epic of Gilgamesh

I like the idea of The Sky Titans from WHFB fluff. They were driven near to extinction by the ogres and ended up as the giants.
Maybe something based on the Sky Titans then, where they are an isolated but wise race with a kind of Tibetan feel to them.

Well only certain beast races are overdone in my opinion like cat people and lizard people but I don't see that many bird people and cow people. Fungus people are also a great alternative, I especially love how the dark souls fungus people look. Also the arabic idea of djinns are really cool, they live in the same world as the humans but are invisible to humans because but they can still interact with the humans and the human world.

How horrifying are you allowing this to get?
Enough for angler fish and bedbugs?

>cow people

Someone hasn't read enough h-mango.

Horsedicked minotaurs, knotty werewolves.

>Straight up animals.
Yes.
>Bipedal animals, blown up to human size
No.

Futa gnolls, it ain't pedo if it is halflings, permalactating cow women, futakuchi-onnas

Barbarians.

Frogmen.
Short, look like Frog from Chrono Trigger, brave, but not too smart. 90 IQ would be average, maybe, so not too dumb, either.
Lots of paladins.
Can swim well, have long tongues, can breath underwater, high jumps, lightly poisonous skin, so they won't get attacked for food by monsters, and can put it on arrows.
Live in swamps, and worships gods of water, of plants, and, for the evil ones, gods of rot.

>tfw didn't read the last sentence of the OP
Sorry, OP.
I just wanted to write about frogs.

Hyperintelligent shades of the color blue.

Yeah but in h-mango we just see them as big titties I'm talking about something more complex with culture and shit. Like a civilization that is agriculture heavy maybe something with sumerian aesthetics.

I will never tire from my spiderbros.

>Implying Zeus totally wouldn't turn a dude into a fox-thing on a whim, when he himself is known for turning a guy into a woman, killing a fellow god because Hades threw a fit and turning into a goose and fucking a man's wife.
>Implying Athena wouldn't turn a woman into a fox-thing like when she turned Arachne into a spider.
It's almost like you don't even Greek.

Well all the dorfs are ded in the setting, so there's that

Most of the monster girls are explained by modified lycanthropy disease in the water, not sure if it's lazy or not.

Only short stack race I'm allowing is Gobbos because I'm the only writer and planning to keep it that way until game is complete.

No guro pls

I think Slablands was austically restrictive with not allowing "furry" characters.

These should go well with horny lycanthropy fucking shit up theme.

Also having 3-4 shortstacks is too much overlap. Might as keep thebone that's the most exotic.

Answer to not having too many short stack races is to have one race of them and another race of dfc lolis.

Nymphs, Dryads, Ghosts, Spirits, Changelings, Demigods, Abominations, Mutants, Asians, Eldritch Civs, etc.

I'm not making a korean mmo tho

But why this split?

I'd look at Brandon Sanderson's races. In Mistborn there was good old fashion classism in the form of literally magically engineering an underclass, Ethereum had a magical race that pretty much anyone could be randomly chosen to join. Undying, magically powerful and amazing in all respects until some shit went down and they basically just became the living dead who would feel every injury eternally until they went mad from a hundred years of accumulated papercuts, bruises and scrapes.

>stub your pinky toe
>THE PAIN NEVER STOPS

No wonder they go insane

Rubber gimps.

They come in two subraces: Dom and Sub. Subs automatically listen to Sims and have higher constitution or whatever. Doms have higher charisma/strength and like to boss pretty much anything around.

Penciloids.

A race of sentient, intelligent, human-sized pencil people.

give it some time and it'll probably be a thing in dwarf fortress

I think the standar is:
brute race, magic race, stealty race, thought race, medium race, odd race.
Find a setting and a nice folklore or theme. For example: animals, dinosaurs, aliens, mutants, indian-asian-african legends, minerals and metals, etc. Bas-Lag has some nice ideas en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas-Lag#Known_races

Do kitsune count as beast races?

Yes, they're also a weaboo race.