How do you make original fantasy races?

But all the enduring fantasy races WERE just slightly different people.

name a single real life human culture that lives in tunnel systems dug into mountains.

AND I HATE THEM FOR IT.

As far as DnD core goes, I only like elves, half-elves, and half-orcs. And the latter two for covering the same ground of being a free pass into social outcasts.

If the only diffetence between a human and a dwarf is lifespan, that's still a huge difference. Humanoid and/or human-looking is not the same as human

SIGNIFICANTLY different. No human can live as long as an elf, for example. The difference should be simple, but fundamental.

Pueblo Native Americans

10/10 missing the point. Classically fantasy races serve a few purposes, which is why they broadly are all people. Living in otherwise ordinary cities that happen to be underground, for instance. Basically, it's either a race that is "the enemy" such as lotr orcs goblins and so on, or it's "like people but not" which is where dwarves and hobbits and elves come in; they're all basically people with one or two character flaws exaggerated across their race, similarly with advantages.

Look at the fossil record or the animal kingdom. Find a species with a particular trait and take its evolution to a fantastical extreme.

>Chimpanzees hunt colobus monkeys for meat, which is used as a social currency
>Chimps also have large canine teeth
>Maybe there was another species of ape with even large canines
>Saber-toothed knuckle-walkers dominate the jungle, carnivorous apes that will brook no competition for their monkey herds

The problem with dwarves is that the absolute most they get out of their increased lifespan in the majority of settings is that they get to stew on "human characteristics" longer. Grudges or stubbornness or faith.

Elves tend to get much more mileage out of similarly being long-lived humans, there's a constant air of mysticism to them and the traits they emphasize usually involve an understandable sense of superiority or a connection to realms humans would struggle to understand. But in the case of dwarves, when people start to play around with it much it starts to ask the question of why they're even dwarves.

There's a strong argument that the concept of mystical "others" living in the woods or deep underground is the last remnants of oral traditions detailing early modern humans' interaction with Neanderthals and archaic hominids. Turner Mohan talks about it a lot in his Tolkien Sketch-Blog.

We definitely know for sure that Neanderthals and other early Humans sheltered in caves, it's not unfair to say this has Dwarves covered.

Dwarves are pretty hard to innovate. Problem is that elves have had enough minor variations to expand their scope of concepts to insane levels. You can have a sea elf or a sun elf and nobody would bat an eye. Dwarves haven't evolved since the day they crawled from Tolkiens asshole

>that
>ugly
fuck you hes beautiful

Nice reference, user

I just use random attributes and think about how they would exist practically. So like:

Tripedal, three legs for sturdiness. Third leg might even be a mutated tail who knows.
Humanoid torso, bit wide and generally hunched, made for carrying and strength.
Hands have three fingers and a thumb, two for strength and middle one for dexterity.
Head is more of a tall diamond shape, spine connects near the top under a plate of bone, not much of a chin.
Hair grows from the head bone plate down back, making a ring at the hips and down the upper leg.
Molars grow constantly but slow, sort of like a rodent. Good for chewing on harder plants and crushing bone chips.

So theres a creature. Strong, not very dextrous, and probably good at planning as their body would make them good for building structures, might rely on it instead of having to had chased prey in their evolutionary line. Bit of natural armor from thick hair/fur and the bone plate.

Traditional weaponry would be bracing weapons like spears and halberds, ranged weapons having ammo carried on their legs for easy grabbing even without the best hands. If ranged weapons were used it would be something simple that needed more strength to use like a sling or heavy draw crossbow.

So theres a race, made up on the spot. Not a traditional fantasy race, not based off any animals, so its kinda original.

>Third leg might even be a mutated tail who knows.
yeah thats what the third leg is. sure, lets go with that.

That's a total lie.

Not all Dwarves are mountain dwelling men who dwell in Moria clones.

There's the dwarves of Snow White, who live in an wood cottage in the middle of a forest as an example.

Dwarves are industrious, short, and swarthy. Sea Dwarves could be pirates or sailors who build magnificent ships in coastal cliff harbors.

>Dwarfs
>Water

I like porcs.

>Not a traditional fantasy race, not based off any animals, so its kinda original.
And I have absolutely no reason to care about it.

Here's my recommendation for the method of You can also steal interesting ideas from games, books and comics from the 90's. I don't know what the fuck was wrong with people of the twenty-years-ago, but it was wrong in many interesting ways.

Embrace the fact that there is nothing new under the sun and that contrarians will always be there to shit up your concept.
>My race is like Dwarves but different
>My race is like Elves but different
>My race is a different shade of beastfolk
>My race is from space
>My race is demons

All done already.

>what is Barak varr

They didn't have anything to jump off of and didn't know what sold/didn't go for things that are going to sell.

So many 'fictional' races are basically recolored/fuzzy humans because its easier to make viewers like them.

>furbolg
>original

Watch any movie about evil aliens. Now translate it into a fantasy race.

1.Start with human

2.Split it up into extrapolations of human personality and abilities that are complementary towards each other and root in some kind of evolutionary and cultural specialisation. Then maybe create some additional ones outside this pattern to fill ecological niches.

3. 3-4 Races are usualy well-balanced if you do not feel the need to include seperate "Evil" races

4.Variants and crossbreeds are usualy a nice touch.

5.Work with both good and bad aspects when characterizing a race. Idealistic design mostly ends up boring while only negative aspects are no fun either.

6.Make them Mechanicly interresting by giving them a natural ability amongst stat alterations. Here I like to use the Race in the place of a class.
Here you can use things that might exist IRL as well, such as an extremely powerful adrenalin rush, regeneration of bodyparts, poisons, very sharp instincts and intuition, metamorphosis etc.
going the lengths to make stuff like octopus people was never necessary for me to stay creative

You need to first consider the fundamental themes and motifs of your setting and then man's place in that world. Use humans as your baseline and only create new races when they symbolize something in juxtaposition to humans.

That web comic artist that made yinglets has some pretty strange and fun fantasy race designs. He even goes into autistic depth with their culture and everything. Its rather interesting if you can get over the fact that a lot of his comic is an excuse to indulge in his transformation kink.

Make them inhumane in body and thought. Give them obscure and weird rules that they must follow yet are very good at finding loopholes.

for the purposes of a tabletop campaign, originality is overrated. Attempts to be original usually just drives you into even greater depths of cliche

> step one: do half a pound of lsd
> step two: try not to die and remember everything
> step three: if/when you wake up, draw/write down all the shit you remember
> step four: ???
> step five: profit

Start with something you like, and work from there. Do what you'd like to do, but don't be afraid to bounce it off of others you know that will give sound advice. Ultimately this is your fantasy race and your chunk of writing that you're crafting, have fun with it.

Also, please know and accept that whatever you make WILL. NOT. BE. PERFECT. RIGHT. AWAY.
I've been writing for years, I've started with ideas that were just a base that I originally felt to be hollow, almost disgraceful with how little was there, and as time went on and I wrote more, I came to really love what I had made.

Also there's nothing wrong with them being bipeds

One of my prefered ways is to take a small main idea of something then roll it around until it becomes something. My personal favorite was when I was thinking that a game I was hosting needed a more giantish race, and also a race that could relate to elderish gods. Next thing you know I had four armed whale people.

I do something like this too.

Honestly, you don't. Everything's been done in some form already, or close enough that nobody's gonna appreciate the difference.

If you're making fantasy races, just make sure they have some aspects that might be interesting to the players, that they make sense and are internally consistent, and that they fit the setting in terms of themes, biology and culture. Don't bother trying to be original just for the sake of being original, because it will invariably cause more problems than it solves.

Easy. You take humans, you change some physical characteristic, you change their habitat, and you give them a special quirk.

For example, you could give humans pointed ears, make them live in forests, and make them in-tune with nature.

Or you could make them short, stick them in mountains, and give them excellent abilities to craft items.

See how easy it is?

>you change some physical characteristic
Check
>you change their habitat
Check
>and you give them a special quirk
Check!
Let me present you: Hoodling

I get it, but I ain't laughin'.

Make sure you smoke some weed while peaking so you can get all the alternate realities of yourself to help out on the brainstorming session

You joke, but a small race that wears hoods as a cultural quirk and has a very different idea on property would be pretty interesting.

Like Jawas.

>Kender with hoods

Honey Badger.

The answer is always honey badger. Plus aztecs.

When making an angelic type race in a high fantasy setting is ok to give them surnames? Should they just exist or actually be born from angel families? I'm at a loss here.

I thought they were imitations of drunk soccer hooligans.

Do it Kill Six Billion Demons style, and give them a descriptive name and a number that indicates how many times they've been reborn. Like "6 Juggernaut Star Scours The Universe."

Take a normal human trait and either remove it completely or take it to an inhuman extreme. Track that change through their culture logically.

The X species has no sense of individuality and their communities are more like a single organism than a group.

The Y are incapable of violating an oath freely given, and will sicken and die within days if somehow forced to. The entire race is sworn to the Villain's service by a cunning ploy and reluctantly marches against the world.

The Z's emotional spectrum is distorted. Fear, sadness, and similar negative emotions are blunted to the point of being barely felt, while anger, hate, contempt, and hostility are vibrant and nuanced. They have a dozen different kinds of hate: Hate for someone better than you, hate for someone weaker, hate for another race, hate for another tribe in your race, hate for an individual that burns so bright it becomes akin to love (And the closest thing they feel to grief is the void when they finally kill the target of their lovehate). Other races seem like emotionally stunted retards to them, and they have a special brand of disdain for that.

Thanks user, that's actually really fucking cool. I'm gonna be spending a lot of time on Kill Six Billion Demons now.

>tfw The Legend of Zelda is basically the only piece of media that still uses pOrcs.

good, soon they will be gone.

Slathering pig monster is better than "Black People, but Green: The Race"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaymakli_Underground_City

Not if you live in an area that has a lot of pigs and no black people.
Pigs are cute, fucker.

Don't forget hentai

Why not just play a sentient blob that communicates by fucking everything?

>pig farming rednecks like pigs over blacks
Sounds about right.

Decide why the gods of your setting wanted them there in the first place. Then create features for them to serve that purpose.

> nature diety decides that they need a better way to spread their living forest
> designs hufloa, sky jellyfish that float about and gather together seasonally to mate
> the small biomes growing on their skin can integrate during this season, allowing cross pollination across the world
> hunters who attempt to down the hufloa discover that they are largely empty inside, with only a webbing of sinue and a golfball sized brain directing the creatures that can vary from car to blimp size
> instead of trying to directly hunt them, intelligent creatures learn to track their movements and study their personal biomes to get an idea of the condition of the lands around them
> they can learn how the crops have been doing in neighboring kingdoms from a glance, and even predict weather patterns with a little patience

pulled that out of my ass. it's not hard, man.

Guess you won't have to worry about an orc invasion then, sounds like you've already been conquered.

Is it better or worse that the fantasy race I've been thinking up is literally 'humans with extra bits'
As in they're explicitly descended from humans who had some magic bullshit happen to them, and can actually still breed with humans, but the offspring is always that race because magic?

So Shadowrun?

I guess?
Ive never been a fan of Shadowrun
For some reason, even though I like fantasy, and cyberpunk, and modern fantasy, and urban fantasy, and science fantasy, and whatever Eberron was called (dungeon punk?), I cant stand mixing cyberpunk and fantasy

Methinks OP wanted playable races. But if you make a Hufloa sentient and modify them a bit they could work.
>Still spreading their living forest
>Still shaped like nature has overtaken a Hanar
>But now they have a bit more free will and brainpower
>Most still worship the religion of the nature deity
>Adventuring Hufloas modify their body biomes depending on their preferences (i.e. class)
>So you get city-living Hufloa rogues growing plants that are shaped like rags and garbage so they can ambush someone in an alleyway
>Or the Hufloa paladin who grows holy herbs and pattern them in the holy symbols of the nature deity
>Or the Hufloa wizard who cultivate spell components and mana-rich plants

Elder Things?

>DJ vampires mind controlling people with dubstep and vaped mutagenic drugs
That's not too far-fetched.
I once read a short story about that.
This is a cool concept for a creature.
This is not a cool concept for a playable race.

Shit bro, you just turned my example into a fleshed out culture based on the separation of identity through physical expression. They literally wear who they are on display at all times, and attempt to propagate what they individually see as correct in the world. Young Hufloa would probably start their living forest from what their parents present them and change it as they age to reflect their growing world views. Nude hufloa represent an individual who has lost their way, and are either pitied or seen as pariahs depending on how they lost their forest. There is probably a negative slang for them- "the barren ones," or something equally ominous.

Point being OP, don't think about form. Think about culture and the form will come to adapt to it.

>This is not a cool concept for a playable race.
Mind explaining why for a bit? Genuinely curious of your viewpoint, here.

The concept in that form to me sounded like "I can do everything a human can do... except it is all PLANTS!" There is no real difference in playing out the race, just the underlying mechanics. I can accept airborne jellyfish just floating around and spreading pollen wherever the winds may carry them. But I cannot suspend my disbelief about a creature of the rough size and abilities as a human that is also a jellyfish.

I read that as drunk sorceror hooligans

>tfw you really want to use a scaled down version of moblins as a race but it's just copying Zelda if you do.

>wake up
>read my notes
>all it says is "elf man"

>gods of your setting
The reason why ANYTHING in the real world is interesting is because of mystery. The reason why any fantasy setting is interesting is because of mystery. Confirming the existence or non-existence of gods is a surefire way to strip all mystery and coolness from your setting, because I doubt there is enough meat in your creation story for there to be any mystery.

Well, why not? Zelda is choke full of cool monsters, why not use Moblins and family instead of goblinoids? THey are more or less the same. Also I dunno why you guys obsess so much about originality, it doesn't translate to an enjoyable RPG experience for what I see, only more confusion and "Why-Should-I-care" from part of the majority of players.

Also to stay on topic, I really like the Yinglets. They are from an okay, if very magical realm (transformation specially) webcomic. They aren't your tipical "humans with a costume" monster, and have they own logic. In a table top they should be used very sparingly tough, they have a very high potential for being as obnoxious as Kenders, but in the comic they make me laugh.

I don't see anything wrong with that . T b h the only people I see bitching about "humans with extra bits" are usually furfags who get pissy that most fantasy doesn't Carter to them and they cry about uncreativity while posting uncreative shit as well.

As long as the lore is interesting I don't care. Sometimes trying to be creative for the sake of being creative doesn't work.

warhammer is autistic and so is anybody who pays any special attention to the "lore" beyond the surface stuff

the only thing it was good for was being a metalhead who listened to bolt thrower and played chaos back in the day

I would be less concerned about the transformation fetish and more concerned about the evolved homosexual 'accommodations'. What does that even mean? Self lubricating buttholes?

One of the characters (than is kinda of a biologist) explains it in the comic.
There are other interesting monsters than aren't that explored (yet),but the comic focus in the Yinglets.

Honestly, playing BotW I just kinda sat there and was like "What the fuck is stopping me from using Lynels and like, Tektites as monsters in my fucking setting? Fuck, halflings literally used to called Hobbits and wraiths were Nazghuls"

Like d&d has always been influenced by people putting in whatever the fuck cool fantasy/sci-fi they were reading at the time. Strange Tales magazine with Lovecraft and Howard, Lord of the Rings, and Veeky Forums salivates over cthulhu shit in their settings, why the fuck not put an OoT style fairy fountain in one of your adventures or something. Not everything you have to do has to be original, sometimes you just put it in cause you think fighting a barbarian snake cult sounds cool as fuck

Because it feels like you're stealing other ideas. If you take elves, which are a generic idea, and shift them around a bit and make them yours, it's more like you 'made' them then just ported them.

I will totally steal great fairy bulbs that require special material to upgrade your gear though. I love fairies that are helpful in games. And fairy magic just being inexplicably good and with less 'rules' then other kinds just feels right to me.

spoken like someone who's never climaxed from prostate stimulation

They might be slightly smaller or larger, y'know. And besides, Hanar did it well, why can't Hufloa? As I see it, Hufloas are less-inhibited Hanars that someone poured EZ-gro on.
And besides, it could be explained as their interactions with other civilized races caused them to 'mimic' the society they're in. Maybe they started as some barely tribal air jellyfish with plant dandruff, but then they see these people down below, and some start mimicking their way of life. Some stay because it is kinda better than just float around all day doing nothing but spread their plant dandruff, and thus they adopt the trappings of civilized society - modifying their personal biomes in the process.

To worldbuild is to see disrepancies and try to explain away how the disrepancy happened.

This becomes more cancerous the more i read. Its an excuse for someone to play god and make a race of very sexually active homosexual furies with the intelligence of younger children / early adolescence.

Crafting a race to be interesting and unique is one thing, but there is a reason the classic race formulas work so well universally and across many different stories. This shit though is just degeneracy.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N,N-Dimethyltryptamine#.22Machine_Elves.22

I get what you're saying, and I feel where you're coming from.

But at the same time, when exactly does something become generic? I guess it's hard to say with Zelda since the setting seems to be reinterpreted in a new way with every installment, but like, a lot of fantasy staples in D&D showed up because they'd entered the collective conscience of the gaming community enough so that people thought it was cool to see them appear in their game. It reminds me of character art from the art threads as reference or inspiration for how your character looks like. Some people only want works based on their imagination, some people love to use the art that gets posted there for inspiration. At the same time, say the art comes from a well known franchise or a clearly recognizable character, people will get really iffy about using it.

But man, sometimes I'll see some of the older Zelda art for LttP and Link's Awakening getting passed around and damn if it doesn't just make me want to sit down and keep working on a campaign.

Take a skaven rat ogre and give it actual ogre armour, pretend you know nothing.

simple, don't try to replace any of the "core" races.

I mean, we can tell.

Isn't that just what Zelda's Bokoblins are; scaled-down Moblins?

You described baboons.

>his fantasy race doesn't have gay sexpockets

Enjoy being a boring human fighter playing autist.

Make a race unrelatable and statistically they will be ignored and no one will play them.
Yes, then you get the very, very small minority of people who will play them specifically for that reason, and that might stand out more, but with everything considered it will show that they are actually largely ignored.

>You make a bad [anything] by trying too much to be original, complicated, or deliberately trying to buck every "trope".

Altered your post a bit to make it more comprehensive.

Don't worry about originality and just put races in your setting if you think they're cool and can fit into it well.