How do you make humans interesting in your setting?

Easy. Elves are good at magic, dwarves at technology, Orcs at raiding, etc. But Humans? Humans are unique because they're uniquely brutal and uniquely "civilized". The other races balk at human institutions like serfdom and slavery, but human crop yields allow their population to far surpass everyone else. No Dwarven general would think of using men wastefully, but humans don't think their conscripts have worth, and thus are able to set up meatgrinders which other races cannot handle in any way. Elvish culture is wonderful, but is no match to human aristocrats, whose vast wealth is used to keep untold masses artists fed, housed, and clothed in luxury to produce their art. Orcs might be great raiders, but that doesn't compare to the sheer brutality of human chevauchée tactics. Humans are unique because humans are civilized, with all the horror that comes with it.

At least we didn't end up with mole people.

No need to hate the player, outlander.

Bump.

Make them greedy and zealots. Pretty much Jews

Interesting.

Mine's this one, but focusing on a specific section of it.

Humans are really... really the only ones who can into high yield agriculture.

Orcs are raiders and hunter gatherers, elves would never interfere with nature on that level (and despise the humans for doing so.) Dwarves have the will, but their space is limited. It takes too much labor for them to clear enough space for their underground mushroom farms, and their crops are ill suited to large farming areas anyway.

It's only humans who don't have racial agoraphobia, or an aversion to messing with nature and the low birth rates that would prevent them from taking advantage of the surplus anyway, or an institutional mindset that forbids that kind of innovation.

The orcs are the best shock troops and skulking raiders, living in the wildlands and the corners where there is not sufficient governance to root them out. The Elves have the longest honed and best strategies and rule the woods, moving like the wind through them. The dwarves are unbreakable in their resolve and backed up by superior tech when they venture to the surface world for a battle, and god help you if you try to follow them up into their mountains and tunnels, where hellish ambushes and choke points galore await.

But it is the humans who rule the plains, by virtue of numbers and the incredible mobility of their cavalry - surpassing even that of elves, on open ground. With the possible exception of a dwarf the average human will be annihilated by his equals in the other races, but there are enough of them that it's usually at least a two or three on one fight.

But it's only on the plains where they dominate, and geographic features and guerilla warfare and other force multipliers can't be leveraged to reduce or negate the advantage of all of those numbers.

Make them fill the roles of the elves.

Call them "humans" make them elves or dwarves. Give them appropriate stat restrictions. Make whatever race that they replace the standard human culture.

Have their cities be overrun with migrants from the other races, but the other races' cities are of racial purity.

Fucking this. Bias seeps in whenever anyone tries to ind a place for humans in their fantasy worldbuilding. So just make your races, make them as interesting as you can and then pick one to be humans(replace visuals as
necessary). Now you have humans filling a niche that isn't 'is great at everything despite not being good at anything on paper' or 'is the main race and rules everything'.

Same as any other fantasy race.
Rename them, give them a quick palette swap or reskin and slightly alter their surface traits.

This.

However, it stands to reason that what OP is actually asking for is what niche to let humans fill rather than the jack-of-all-trades-role they're usually given. The answer is, pretty much any you want. Just make all the other races worse at it.

For example, humans might procreate much faster than other races (especially if the other races are more long-lived), or they might be the merchant race with no other races having people among them who make a living simply from buying and selling goods, and so on.

When I decided to write a setting (which I am in the process of) I banned myself from using elves, dwarves, or halflings, I turned gnomes into more like garden gnomes, and I took a cleaver to most of the special snowflake races. I instantly noticed the quality of my writing improved because I had to put some real thought into what was left (mainly humans) to make them interesting, rather than treating them as the bread to hold together a sandwich of much more interesting ingredients.

My humans are uncommon and have very little sense of human racial identity, but tend to adopt the culture and ideals of the races they settle alongside. This usually ends up with them taking the other race's traits to the extreme and fucking everything up.

By excluding all forms of pop-culture references, Hollywood influences and millenial memes and taking inspiration solely from canon myths, historical cultures and my own donusteel novel ideas.

Humans can't use magic naturally like the other races can. The use of spells and formulaic magic is unique only to humans because they can't express magic naturally but they do have the unique ability to internalize it (i.e. warriors internalizing the magic to fortify their bodies allowing them to fight on part with magical creatures).

I don't know how this would actually work but it sounded like a cool idea of the typical wizard being an unnatural thing.

>This usually ends up with them taking the other race's traits to the extreme and fucking everything up.
Holy shit it's genius

>Implying we wouldn't fuck a mole-girl

Well in my setting technically there are no other races left other than humans, the thing is that due to the lore (basically superpowerfull demigods created the humans as literally a race to worship them and used them in all sorts of experiments) there's a great variation in the physical, magical and psychological atributes of each "caste" or "family", but they all have the "human soul" for lack of a better term. It's still a WIP and I plan on expanding this idea more.

That just shoves them into a niche and stereotype.

Humans literally genocided another race and now rule the continent as the dominant species. It's time for pogroms.

Every interesting person you've ever met is a human.

niche occupied by hobgoblins

Illwinter pls go and make better sprites for Niefel already

I depend on my players to make their characters interesting, and I make everything and everyone they meet interesting unless they ignore them. And then I make the ones they ignore the antagonists.

big fucking megacastles that protect them from anything outside. they tolerate man-like races like elves, dwarves or hobbits, but go full exterminatus against any evil outside their walls

the mountains belong to the dwarves, the forests to the elves, the steppes to the orcs, the marshes to the ogres, but man makes his own ecosystem