Have you ever given generic fantasy races in your setting a personal touch to differenciate them from the classic depiction?
for example:
in my current setting, elves are depicted with dreadlocks or mohawks, wear tattoos and tribal piercings, believe in shamanism and spiritualism. they are also one with nature on such a level, that they can get mutations like animal eyes (goat, eagle, frog, cat are the most likely ones), wear antlers, grow fur or even wood.
Halflings, elves, and giants are all the same species just at different points in their lives.
Oh yea totally. I even made a PDF for it for my players.
i've read everything and that sounds generic as hell.
French dwarves.
How so? I do believe i made quite a couple interesting twists here and there.
>b a i t
you just made slightly feral wood elves.
Seriously im not baiting. Also they arent feral, i made them like nomad native-american tribes local to where i live.
But i must admit of all the races, elves are probably the least changed races overall.
Back when I had dwarves I tweaked them a bit.
>Long thick arms, evolutionary they are not far from walking on all fours, and still rest on all fours today
>Large beefy hands with long stiff-jointed fingers that are not built for intricate manipulation but for digging and gripping the sides of mountains and cliffs
>Proportions and movement like Trolls in Skyrim
>Grow long thick beards which they dread and weave into a thick mat over their chest, providing insulation and armor
>Far greater senses of hearing and smell than humans (real life humans actually suck at both), used to sniff out roots and mushrooms, and later on, to find ore
>Did not develop the elegant soft high-ranged voices of humans, their voice requires a lot of force to push out and sounds very forced, gravelly, deep, and a bit like how words are vocalized in overtones/throatsinging
>Guttural Mongolian-sounding language with Hebrew script
>Noses like saiga antelopes evolved in high altitude
>Long history of stonemasonry, and while the details of their work are often crude, they are of impressive size and scale
I based the elves on a blend between Anglo-Saxons, Norsemen, and the Goths. Elves are skilled craftsmen, sailors, hunters, and merchants. They also tend to lust after human women and are notoriously petty over slights.
Dwarves are on average about 5'4 tall, olive skinned, skilled in healing, sexually perverted, excellent craftsmen, and turn to stone if exposed to sunlight.
Fairies are parasitic sentient plants that infect humans/elves/orcs/any sentient species and live deep in their forests until they die and become full trees, dropping more seeds that infect more victims
They don't tend to have a good relationship with the rest of the species, on account of the whole bodytheft
I kept most of my races pretty generic, but gave them some traits to differentiate them from generic fantasy setting ones. Dwarves have some Chinese influence; they've got those terraced rice farms on the slops of their mountain-holds and their goverment has a complex bureucratical system with large amount of different ranks of officials differentiated by their manner of dress. Also, they have golems that look like dwarven terracotta warriors. Elves are pretty typical wood elves, but naturally adapt to their environment so elves living in the cold north will look very different from elves from hot and dry areas. They also have strong animistic/druidic traditions and dislike arcane magic. High elves only really exist in a single city-state and rarely interact with anybody but their wood elf cousins, except when they send elite operators to retrieve artefacts they don't want to fall into wrong hands or to asassinate potential threats.
Dark elves got a major revamp, though, since I've never really liked the drow and felt they didn't really fit my setting anyway. So I just went with dark elves being evil elves and replaced them with my own kind of evil elves. They're cultists of strange and eldritch gods who want to "elighten" (read: enslave) all the lesser races and remake the world in the image of their deities.
Humans are products of elven/dwarven/orc magical bullshitery.
The world was created by two god's who intended to live inside the planet. The elves were born directly from trees, ice, water, and the elven god's flesh. Dwarves were born from rocks, magma, sand, and the dwarven gods flesh.
Each had an affinity for that element in terms of arcane shit and druidry
As a new born planet, magic was pretty wild so different forms of life sprang from anything. Some other deity gets jelly and wants the planet for themself, invades, gets wounded, and then his blood creates orcs, goblins, and other monstrous shit. The elves and dwarves go to battle against this new race and flood the field with mixed blood and magical energies and boom, humans.
Humans are born with random magical specialty.
I'm running a setting where the most populous race is Halfling (they just call themselves Men or the race of Man), with smaller forests full of Gnomes. The plains are inhabited by nomadic Goblin warriors and the mountains infested by ferocious Kobolds.
Recently bizarre giants on a massive wooden ship landed on a beach across the plains and the entire population of the continent shit a collective brick.
literally Bosmer
My gnomes are nomads that sell their little inventions where they go because they almost Dwemer'd, but the gods got off their asses in time. They cursed(lore in progress) them, decided to have more presence in the material world.
That's why clerics and paladins can cast spells.
Dude, the humans are colonists. Not colons. The colon is part of your ass.
That's pretty cool user, is the normal Humans aggressively settling or are they just peaceful, but the short races are assuming they're there to destroy all they hold dear?
Every single time I read one of those stupid "totally unique spin on a classic fantasy race" it's always ~super savage elves~ and every single time I'm surprised by how awful it is.
Yea im planning on fixing that. sorry.
My elves have chaotic hearts, they're not the stoic tolkieny types, they suffer from ennui easily, so the change their focus often, and so that's why they master few things, but know a little of many things. Relationships are also impermanent, with serial monogamy being common, meaning elven families are full of half-siblings. Also they don't have beds or high furniture like chairs. Furnishings are rugs, cushions, blankets, and low tables that are incredibly elaborate in design. Also, males can have facial hair, but it doesn't grow wild.
My Dwarves come from Giants, and so there is a kind of Dwarf for every kind of Giant. Those of Fire Giants lived as slaves, and have taken the warring nature of their masters. Those of the Frost Giants gained their independence and sealed themselves in to hide from the Giants. Those of the Hill Giants are the most common, and killed most of their progenitors. They now live like halflings mostly. Those of the Stone Giants consider their progenitors as demigods and live contemplative lives deep underground, forsaking the surface. Those of the Cloud Giants have adopted the ways of their masters, being haughty and cruel hoarders of wealth in their mountain-peak keeps or sky castles. Those of the Storm Giants were largely abandoned by their masters, and so live along the coasts and islands searching for them. They have strong naval power and a reputation as pirates.
I don't use Halflings, I use Gnomes. Rock Gnomes are Forest Gnomes mutated by the influence of a strange meteor that compels them to invent and innovate despite any consequences. Forest Gnomes are fey as fuck. There is a whole Ferngully gnome war going down somewhere in my world.
My elves live in cities as dense s they can manage with their tech so as not to disturb nature. They only live to be about 120, which is twice the average lifespan of a human in-setting, but a lot of that extra time is dedicated to figuring out how to build higher, or dig lower/faster.
They also live on a archipelago and have developed quite the navy to fend off human fleets coming to steal their beaches. The royals are working on a magical ironclad that will keep them effectively impregnable for a generation, or so they think. In actuality, it'll be stolen by pirates and used to fight orcish ninja for their jade on the other side of the continent.
So rather than tree-worshipping hippes, they're super-urbanite tree-worshipping sailors/pirates. They also are in a continual diplomatic struggle with the humans for trade with the dwarves, who have a lot of Sulphur and coal and shit and so make some damn fine gunpowder. The elves seek to trade their most popular whale produce, while the humans try to tempt the dwarves with more iron to fight goblin raiders with.
They also speak French, because I wanted a language that bespoke of entitled smugness and French was the best fit. So they're French dwarf-hugging tree-worshipping pirates.
My orcs are really offensive Russian stereotypes.