Humans aren't actually native to the fantasy setting

How is it a could be real thing?

I'll vote for lame. It combines lightly obnoxious HFY with really spineless "unlike every other race, humans are really really diverse and flexible."

If you can play up the cancer aspect or give them genuinely alien attributes you might be able to make it interesting, but otherwise it's just a way to explain why your setting is more boring than it had to be.

its a skeleton. You better make that history pretty cool, or make the conquest of men the focus of your campaign

"and then, one day, the humans arrived"

Human were created by Elves to become a servitor warrior race to fight off the Orcs.

The Gods of the human pantheon were the original humans created

Nah, Originally only the Dwarves and gnomes were native to the Witcher world. Then the elves invaded and killed all the Dwarves and Gnomes that didn't retreat into their giant mountain fortress cities.

Then the humans showed up and fucked the elves to death. literally. Human + Elf = Pregnant Elf 99% of the time, but Elf+Elf it's a once a century thing. Elves ended up either intrebreeding with humans so much that they merged species, or getting slaughtered for not interbreeding with humans.

This is the Witcher setting.

It's pretty much the most basic way to expand on the "humans are the youngest race" cliche. I think it has a place as a jumping off point to use when fluffing the races for a generic fantasy setting.

A friend of mine's setting ended up something like this.

Or rather, our PC's actions led to this.

Ancient lore told us that the known lands were once part of a much greater world too large to imagine. In it, each of the Gods had a race made in their image. These were all, according to the old stories, useless, weak cowards, with a couple of barely qualifying exceptions.

Humans were the offspring of "The Father" a three aspect War god of Cunning, Fire, and Weapons. There aren't a lot of stories of what the Father spent his time doing, but the TL;DR was that he went around with his human vassals warring with other races and fucking ruining them. He got particularly worked up at one point fighting one of the only other war gods that existed, a goddess with aspects of Bravery and some other stuff, and actually killed her, which won't be important for this story but was significant for the campaign, because it provided precedent that gods could actually be killed. The Father was also particularly enamoured of The Mother for ??? reasons, a Goddess with the aspects of Wisdom, Healing, and Silence, I think.

Regardless, at some point, the tear opened up at the North Pole, and spilled forth armies of eldritch beings, pretty much elemental evil. The gods, the most powerful beings on the planet, stepped forward to oppose them. However, it was a losing battle for them, for so very few were suited to fighting. In collusion with The Mother, they got The Father to move all of his humans to the North Pole over several decades of marching, to help them battle.

Once this was done, the other Gods, with aspects such as Harvest, Songs, etc, things which could never really be used to defeat the darkness, fled to a distance and burned away most of their power summoning the Wall of Storms, a gigantic mountain range full of magical storms and other deadly barriers, trapping the humans in a cage match about the size of Libya, with a whole into some kind of eldritch negaverse in it.

>Elves and Dwarves not being sub-races of humans

I'm dissapointed in you.

>not making a setting where all humans died off or set sail to a mythical continent to the west

The Mother stayed inside with The Father out of guilt for her role in this, and The Father was so fuelled by the rage of his betrayal that he struck out in a great crusade at the darkness, slaying its greatest champions and pushing back some of the borders of the tear. He was fatally wounded in the process though.

As a result, somewhere between 2000 and 3000 years passed with the entirety of human civilisation trapped in this fucking awful, Diablo tier place. Nations formed, cultures split, but every single one of them had to fight for their existence against the servants of the darkness perpetually. Men and beasts corrupted into strange monsters in the icy wastes that kidnapped and ate children, slaying any unarmed man in their way. Elaborate, ticking magical nuclear silos that emerged from the desert sands every so often. A plague of undeath. The waning remnant of the earlier flood of incomprehensible outsiders.

The nations didn't like each other much, but had no time to use their armies to slay men in the face of such monsters. They literally cooperated in expeditions and research to discover new and powerful magical and technological weapons that would help them fight the darkness.

By the time the actual game began, the place was on the cusp of the industrial revolution. There were already steam trains running anywhere that there were enough pyromancers to operate them.

Honestly, for the most part, history had forgotten about the outside world. It was an unwelcome distraction to fighting for civilisation. It was difficult to even concieve of what precisely it was that was so great outside the wall of storms, because everyone had been freezing their arses off in this barren hellscape for thousands of years and genuinely though of a pine forest as "verdant and colourful" at this stage.

Also, the pine forests are pretty much all full of undead and manticore beasts so you wouldn't want to stay there long.

Anyway, in one of the most isolated areas in all the land, we found the iris.

It took a lot of figuring out. As far as we could tell, the iris was some kind of portal, or magical camera, that thousands of years back had been used by the gods constructing the Wall of Storms to spy on us.

With a bit of problem solving, we managed to hijack it, and fling ourselves into the outside world.

We'd never seen grass so green. Or flowers so big. There were colourful vegetables growing on the TREES.

Us, a bunch of mangy, absolutely filth covered musclebound types, up to our elbows in dried blood and wearing a combination of furs and steel inscribed with various arcane runes, one or two firearms between us, but for the most part people were wielding spears, and I had a rune infused full metal tower shield that I generally beat stuff to death with 2 handed.

We saw the tiny, rounded cottages with stained glass windows and the occasional puff of smoke rising from them. We saw the colourful dyes they had used to decorate their town with.

One of us drew his axe and began moving forward. But we held him back. "Not yet. Not until every man and woman can take part in this."

We nearly died getting back inside the Wall of Storms, but it turns out it's a lot easier to get in than it is to get out.

We went and told the King. Who told the other 3 kings. It was agreed. Railroads would be constructed. We would have our revenge on the things outside.

only thing is that Humans should have some sort of technology that did not originate in fantasy land, and that spreads to the surrounding cultures

like the mongols and gunpowder

That's literally the backstory of the Bydo in R-Type except with less time travel shenanigans.

As someone who just googled the bydo based on your post hoping to find a similar story, they really aren't similar.

Technology, like steel?

Yes, it's a good idea - the Witcher is a proof

This is actually how it is in the Witcher Saga. Pelor would be proud... Maybe he abused the conjunction of the spheres to spawn humans in the Witcher world.

That could be a cool campaign. Playing as humans on a grand exodus to a new continent.

Not-Europe are the colonizing people. This is pretty standard.

It's basically EVERY major fantasy setting.

Similar to the Elder Scrolls too, humans aren't native to Tamriel.

But didn't humans just migrate from Akavir, Yokunda and Atmora, rather than comming from a different dimension or planet?

I'd call it something like "Westwards" and make the entire story be an endless drive to the west, encountering islands, minsters, pirates, other pilgrims, etc. After enough time has passed the crew are starting to go mad from their time in relative isolation, innumerable atrocities have been committed against fellow crew members and the enemies encountered along the way (think FTL style decisions where you can basically steal from or fuck over innocents for no real mechanical cost), and those still alive are badass mofos with a pragmatic love for violence.

Then they encounter land. They find a grand civilisation of their own kind sprawled across the coast, truly unbelievable in scale. This civilisation is at war and the PCs are quickly recruited to fight in the war to the west. They travel onwards and westwards overland, seeing the marvels of the civilisation slowly decline in number the further west they go, until they start to reach the front lines. There they begin fighting the evil kingdom of elves/dwarves/whatever slowly progressing until they have destroyed/subjugated it utterly, but there is another hostile kingdom further west, and so on, until they come to a kingdom whose battle standards they recognise. Turns out they've circumnavigated the globe, and become part of the Great Eastern Threat that they were fleeing from.

Sounds time consuming as fuck to make but could make for a really great campaign. I'd shit my pants as a player character once I learned the twist.

Treasure of the Rudras. Every 2000 years, a representative of a new race appears and tries to kill everyone, though stragglers do pop up. It then populates the world with its new race. I think it went big-head elves, lizardmen, merfolk, giants and finally humans. Each race is intended to be stronger than the last, all with the intent that someday the newest race can break the cycle, which we learn was put in place to protect the planet from this extraterrestrial threat. If a race is strong enough to break the cycle, then they're strong enough to protect the planet.

Orcs by Stan Nicholls is like this. He's a shitty writer but you don't have to be, OP.

That's literally the Witcher-verse's history in a nutshell.

My personal take is that humans are actually hybrids, half elves and half dwarves, for example.

Basically, all these hybrid bastards were shunned by society, so over time they found isolated pockets along the borders of the various races, and eventually started breeding together.

Apparently after enough generations you get this generic as fuck race that has a few qualities of all races, but doesn't meet the standards of any one race.

And that's how you get humans. And that's also why humans are compatible with pretty much any race. Because in my personal realm only certain races can breed together and have fertile offspring. All races can interbreed with each other, but unless the gods themselves interfere then the offspring is usually a sterile deformed cripple.

It's not humans, but there was a fantasy series were what were basically elves suddenly flashed into existance as part of some big calamity. They didn't have any memories of their old world, though a priest's journal mentioned their gods, and they managed to piece back together their language.

They were also magically powerful as fuck, in some cases managing to bind the gods to their will. And they became dominant over the other two races (basically two kinds of humans?) and greatly changed the world they were in - politically, and in what kinds of magical stuff there is.

seems ok

GURPS Banestorm
Narnia
Witcher

tolkien and conan?

So, basically the GATE anime?

>humans were magical creatures from magical world
>they were forced to escape to some non-magical world due to some cataclysm
>they genocided native neanderthals and claim ownership of the world
>however they lost their magic because they had to adapt to new world

Make the humans genuinely repugnant, and it works. Like, they're incapable of committing, specializing, or devoting themselves to anything but banal pleasures and pointless rapine and conquest for its own sake.

Crashed spaceship?

Humans are late to the party in Tolkien's work.

There is so much shit going on in Conan before normal humans get to act they might as well be living as lab experiments who escaped after an explosion.

This is literally Warhammer Fantasy.

> Old Ones arrive with the Lizards
> Create life to fight Chaos
> Start with Elves; too long to gestate, no fear of death slows tech, inherently corrupt (Pride)
> Try to fix with Dwarfs; Techno affinity, magically blunt to remove corruption and hardy, but stubborn
> Try again with humans to get the best of both; kind of get it, but lack of willpower
> Try again with Halfling-Ogre tag team and absolutely nail it, but born too late to educate them properly

So basically how orcs are usually already done?

If they'd just had another millennium we'd have had armies of "master blasters" tearing chaos a new one.

Pretty much. Make humans the shitty, unlovable race.

Can't you do that in a way that's different from not!Orcs?

My setting sort of does this, in that 'humans' mostly aren't, having come partially from one of the four setting - native races and partially from the Forgotten Realms.
Long story short, there used to be shapeshifting giants like Oni that lived in the place before elves/orcs/etc showed up, and they took vaguely human to distinguish themselves from orcs and elves when the newcomers came.
Then FR humans showed up, and began mixing with the giants.
Then most of the giants lost their magic in a cataclysm, leaving them looking human but having a slightly different biology.
Fast forwards 5000 years and the difference is there, but hidden. So humans are technically not native, but effectively are.

Blah blah blah white genocide, blah blah blah the brown/yellow/black/flavor of the zeitgeist peril.

What?
The Bydo were a super-fuck you weapon that humanity accidentally pointed at itself and needed to reverse engineer it to stand a chance of fighting it.

as other have pointed out. this is actually a lot of fantasy settings

even faerun had one area where humans from earth were transported to the setting and populated some area although there were other humans already in the setting or something

That's how I did humans once before; they were the tir breaker between two creation dieties. One created elves to pimp the mystic, and the other created dwarves to pimp the material. Another told them that both could work and made humans to pimp both in an equal amount. Them continuing to argue is why evil happens in the world; they've literally had their backs turned to the material plane while yelling at each other, while their godtools have to play the role of actual gods until they run out of breath.

So Elfquest, but with "elf" replaced with "human"?

Make humans the lowest setting of the Brutemen slider, with trolls in the middle and orcs on the highest setting.

That's how I've been doing my setting. Have elves be the middle setting on the Feymen slider, and Dwaves be the highest setting of the Stoutmen slider.

Wasn't FR suppose to be like "Faerun is basically Brigadoon and every few hundred millenia, it gets close enough to IRL for humans to fall in if they wander around in the points of wilderness that match up to Faerun"?

>not having humans be elves who lost their connection to the feywild and are damned to live short lifespans like animals
>not having dwarves be halflings that are cursed to be cult-like warriors of the god of war and fire because their ancestors stole his forge once to make a powerful weapon for themselves
I'm more disappointed in you.

As I recall Humans were created fairly early in Tolkien's work, they just didn't really do anything of note for a while. Also, I think the Dwarves are newer.

humans and elves were made at the same time but put into comas in the earth

then dwarves were made and dicked around for like 3 hours and then they were also put in a coma

then elves woke and did shit for a long time

then humans woke

then dwarves again

You use these terms that I'm supposed to understand, but I don't...wait, are they just 'brute,' 'fey' and 'stout?' Did you just make those up for your own thing?

>Brute
Races that solve problems with war

>Fey
Races that use magic

>Stout
Hobbits and other short races

It was my way of streamlining campaigns where people were clawing through tons of supplemental books to find the "right kind of" something. I just rolled a bunch of races into three core races.

Everybody is talking about the Witcher setting and how it basically "that's how humans got there", but for the sake of that specific topic this is basically how and what happened:

-The Witcher's world is adjacent to a number of parallel dimensions and every 1500 years or so their world's orbit has them pass through these other planes very briefly.

-The Elves in Witcher's setting possess their own advanced, 'modern', society tucked away in one of these parallel dimensions. The Elves living in the Witcher's world specifically though can/could be considered descended from unlucky stranded colonists.

-About 1500 to 2000 or so years ago the Witcher's world passed through a parallel world containing Humans. Specifically, though; It passed through a world of Humans that may have been destroyed by Nechrophages as not only Humans were introduced, but: Vampires, Ghouls, basically all the undeady-monsters made the cross over as well.

-For that matter in the Witcher 3 this conjunction happens again (artificially) near the end of the game and besides the environmental chaos (fire falling from the sky, earthquakes, etc) we see frost giants and cyclopes being introduced from the cross over of their native dimension and the witcher world.. So.. yeah!

I'm working with a setting that does the opposite.

The world is originally human and primal. A variety of older species exist, such as Dwarves and Halflings, but Elves were originally a fervourous invader race that was split along clan lines once they came into conflict with human city-state nations allied into a global power.

Along with an all manner of magical slaves and thralls, the Elves also brought with them the knowledge required to master the arcane as the world knows it today, so following the break-up war of elven invasion (which split the invasion force into the more traditionalist She, and the primal force-worshipping 'wood' elves), the nations quickly fell apart as ambitious human practitioners ran amok in their search for power.

The Mage Wars devastated the known world for almost a hundred years, before the Sidereal Covenant was formed and the Empire was founded. As a result, countless races of monsters and beings were created or summoned into the material realm, to serve these wizards.

So the witcher's explanation is simply an inter-dimensional panspermia ?

That's pretty cool.

>So the witcher's explanation is simply an inter-dimensional panspermia ?
>That's pretty cool.

Yep.

As previous Anons have stated the only sapient species within the witcher setting that are 100% indigenous/native to the actual witcher's home-dimension are Dwarves and Gnomes (maybe Hobbits as well).
Elves, Humans, even certain fantasy creatures such as Nechrophages/Undead and Giants were all artificial introduced when neighboring dimensions collided with theirs.

During dawn migrating aldmer discovered
Topal bay and later settled in hearthland isles there were
Nede men already.
Don't buy into NordFY bullshit.

I do something like this, except elves made orcs to fight off the humans.

Also Eragon

Endless legends' vaultdwellers