Fantasy races?

What are some cool/unique fantasy races? Non savage beast races?

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frogfolk

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Humans.

Humans are the most unique, diverse and best fantasy race.

If you're not playing human you're either playing a dumb stereotype or an equally dumb subversion of stereotype. It is literally impossible to play nonhuman as well as human, they will always be special snowflake cancer.

Nonhuman races should be NPCs only.

Humans are literally the most snowflake race without being able to admit it.

>my character's race specializes in being "adaptable". That means they're good at everything and can do anything the other races can, and often better!
>human prodigies will be better at any other race's specialized magic, craft, or fighting techniques than even the ones who created and practiced it for their entire lives
>and they die younger, so it can be so tragic when the non-human characters end up outliving them.
>oh, and they still conquered the entire world, and are the most populous and generally successful race
>and everyone thinks they're hot and totally wants to have sex with them! they can have magic hybrid babies with anyone! elves, orcs, even dragons!
>and destiny and prophecy, and all the Gods except the weird racist ones love them the best, which means they're the ones destined to be the real heroes
>even if a plot didn't start as being specifically about humans, it will mutate into a story about the perseverance and survival of mankind, or mankind saving the day for everyone else

See? Humans are just cooler.

I can't, because if I do I'll be accused of being an optimizing minmaxed roll-player

This but unironically

High there samefag

Nope that's not me

No joke I made kobolds into intresting society, by making all kind of different tribes.

They all live in small or giant cities underground where everyone do what they do best. So I have kobolds who train and ride giant spiders as cargo beasts, blind bunch of undead hunting fanatics, a group of kobolds with magical cybernetics that make warforged and even small group of druids who act as farmers and sometime doctors and midwifes.

And all this started with a bunch of small draconic people who work underground

>unique
The only way to get a truly unique race is going to be to effectively write out an encyclopedia article for your new OC species and, if you can vaguely art, draw them. It will be cool and suited to your campaign and table, but whether it has a larger audience is going to depend on a combination of factors, including whether or not the creator even shares it beyond the confines of their group.

If you want to develop fantasy races, I highly suggest reading through the Wikipedia page on Humans and taking detailed notes. Figure out where a race could diverge, why they would, and what other effects such a divergence might have. Even if you're going for a "beast" race, start from human because that will ensure that you're focusing on the actual aspects of the sapient creature.

Pay careful attention to the parts on the brain, psychology, and thought. The temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex have increased in size disproportionately over the course of human development, so understand what those areas relate to and then explore your options for the encephalization of other species. The parietal lobes, for instance, could be disproportionately enlarged in a fantasy race, giving them a greater emphasis on the integration of sensory information and object manipulation.

Remember that your goal with a race should always be for its members to showcase as wide a range of personalities and idiosyncrasies as humans do. And, yes, that means that some individuals will be highly atypical--just as is the case among humans. But that should not be presented as a binary thing, but as a continuum. And, yes, sometimes that will mean that the exact same character could be played as a member of multiple species without changing dramatically. It's just that, in each case, the character would be at a different distance from and angle to the race's "average."

>Remember that your goal with a race should always be for its members to showcase as wide a range of personalities and idiosyncrasies as humans do.

This is false though. All non-human races should act the same.

t. falsflagging hfy shitposter
You already shitposter one thread into the ground, isn't that good enough for you, you contrarian assmongers?

It will never be good enough for them.

I once made a race of deer/ungulate-people as a request from /pfg/, however the results were incredibly autistic, so I'm not sure if it's cool at all

Amphibians

>Non savage beast races?
Found the furfag. If you're going to make races that are literally humans in every regard but with animal characteristics, why don't you just play as a human?

>non-human races cannot be civilized

Because I think it's fun?

Because humans are the most savage race of them all. Sorry I don't want to play a genocidal Mary Sue HFY race just because some internet memer still gets triggered by furries.

It's fun to explore the culture of a beast race

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How is that an amphibian? That's a snake.

Savage beast races speaks of a lack of imagination. Just because humans have indoor plumbing doesn't mean everyone else has to shit in a hole in the dirt.

>races that are literally humans in every regard but with animal characteristics
The thing is, most people never bother to fully explore this aspect of it. People rarely bother to think of what kind of technological, clothing, or other needs a civilized, but distinctly non-human being would need due to their physical or mental differences. People rarely think of how they might develop tools or other technologies that mimic what humans or other races made, yet were clearly designed by an inhuman mindset, where the thought process to even come up with it is different. Savage beast races are the laziest shit ever because there's no speculation or world building involved, you just slap the beasts with identical vaguely caveman, native, or other variety of barbaric aesthetics with no further development.

Kobolds should be purged

It has a fish head but breathes both in air and underwater.

No, those who are triggered by furries should be purged, because for fuck sake worse of anons are like that. Terrible furries are too, but by now we got more terrible anons.

Why does he have a coconut?

He's making the most of his penny-a-pinch

Was this post made by a very triggered and very furry yoda or something? It's barely readable

furries are retard who live their fetish like it was something above the other fetish, like a way of life
It's just something that make your dick hard, no need to put it everywhere, imagine if femdom or tentacles were doing the same, we'll end up with character either being unable to talk to a woman without wanting her to beat him to a pulp or with lovecraftian races who rape whomever they see
Fetish should stay in the bedroom, around the table you play a character, not a fuckdoll so no fetish

Dunkleosteus is a fish you mongoloid.

Well the threads been shat up already so lets try to make the best of it.

For one, beeing inhuman in character is not a requirement for a beast race.
Visuals are just as good a justification as any other.
I tend to find the best way to do a beastrace is to think in terms of what is familliar vs what is not.

If they are too simmilar to humans they become boring. if they are too different they are unrelateable and not suitable as player characters.

One example of a good beastrace, also one of a beastrace that has been ruined by furfags in its own game, are the Charr from guild wars.
Non human body sturcture, their culture makes sense within itself but is still relateable to some degree. They still act like humans individually.

On the contrary we got Argonians with their very human body structure and seemingly human outlook on life who upon closer inspection are far more alien than anything else in the world.

If you want civilized beastraces the Lizards from Divinity could be up your alley. They are simmilar to everquests Iksar in the sense that they are civilized LE Lizardmen who have built an empire on the backs of slaves, beeing unapolegetic about it.


Either way i think the key to a good beastrace is to strike the balance between Inhuman and human, aswell as having an interresting body structure that isnt too close to human but not the "talking animal" variety.

Monkeymen.

HFY fags are cancer

I haven't seen an RPG with mole-people yet.

Having the ability to burrow around while being a horrifying freak of nature would add a whole new dimension to gameplay.

I'd like to see a race of star-nosed molefolk who exlusively manipulate tools with their nasal tendrils.

Bird people are always top aesthetic imo

>mfw the stars are right

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huh, smoking would be especially bad for birds

but he's a bad bird user

He's a nazi, I say let him suck on tar for the rest of his days

bad bird trips confirms bad bird

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>What are some cool/unique fantasy races?
Filipinos
>Non savage beast races?
Oh, ignore my suggestion.

REEE

Some races can be similar but other races can have dynamic range. Like gnomes.

In my campaign, there are zones belonging to certain races and others where it's a melting pot. Each with its own goal for their nation and how interactions from them affect each other.

Post more monkey men

God damn furry thread!

I like deer people.

Otters

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I really liked the undine race pathfinder had. They had neat racials. The air one was cool too.

Hmm, I'll allow it.

Space cat girls.

Otters are top-tier.

The Bizarro Warhammer Fantasy Skaven, and Orcs

>Sun Worshipping rats that live in Monestaries of Shaolin/Polynesian Orcs

I personally like the idea of a race of inanimate objects that gain sentience. Like years of being used by sentient life, all that energy rubs off on the object until it begins to feel and think, and even manifest a physical form to carry itself around, taking on the personality of whoever used it most .

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redwall series. LOVED the otterfolk

I'm putting together a setting where the races are normal vanilla humans, humans with ancestry of fiends or celestials, amnesiac non-reincarnated soul people, and a handful of vermin people, including beetle shoguns, crab slaves, and if dothraki were cockroaches.

After 1500 hours (I'm not proud) of Guild Wars, and reading the lore in the run up to GW2, I was really blown away by the way they handled the charr.

They start as kind of a generic antagonist on the other side of The Fantasy Giant Wall That Keeps Us Safe (tm) in the beginning area, but over the course of Guild Wars Prophecies (the first campaign), you gradually learn more about their culture.

They're split up into four "clans", which are dominated by the priest clan. The priests worship these big fire entities, which give them their magic. At the beginning of the campaign, they basically set off a magic nuke that destroys the Wall, the castle, and kills off the entire countryside. It turns out those big fire entities are actually dicks, and the charr have been double crossed by this human cunt who's a doomsday cultist, kind of.

The PCs are busy on the other side of the world cancelling the apocalypse and all that. The charr are busy slaughtering the priest caste for fucking up their homeland with the collateral damage. During the next campaign on that continent, the charr are having this massive civil war.

In Guild Wars 2, 250 years later, the charr have gone full atheist and are now a dominant military power in the world, because once they stopped being religious fucks and constantly in-fighting, it turned out that they were actually insanely good at big war machines.

Also, they turned me furry.

It's bizarre to me how Guild Wars 2 can have the Charr and Asura, but also have the Norn and Sylvari. Charr are such a well done race with a great backstory, a great culture with varied people, and a well defined silhouette that is distinctly non-human. Asura, while not on the same level of the Charr are still neat with their whole underground colleges that almost worship the sciences as a gods and are also distinctly non-human. Then you have the most uninspired "Skyrim" audience race with the Norns that are literally just big humans that live in the snow. And I don't think I have to elaborate on the nightmare that are the Mary Sue-vari.

Skaven are coolest and fairly unique.

I've asked myself this same thing and it's something I've considered a lot because I've been working on a no humans fantasy setting for a while now. The problem I've run into is that I still have like 4 humanish races. A capital issue I'm having is that I still want the races to be humanoid. I don't want a situation where I create this truly alien setting, but nobody wants to spend any time in it because everything is some weird form of multidimensional jelly coral creature that uses time travel as currency and sustains itself off of dreams and mathematics.

So I have humanoid races, but I don't want the setting to have humans. I thought, sure, one human/elf type race to ease folks in, but now I'm in a situation where my 'ease them in' race might as well just be called humans. Sure they've got some distinct features that make them slightly alien, but they're still fairly human in culture and shape. The worst part is that I have some, what I think, are pretty unique races, but they're so alien that I don't really believe they can lead the setting.

I've been having this exact same issue with a race I created. I thought about how they would evolve and become a sapient race on an alien world.

My main problem is that I keep getting stuck on bipedal humanoids with beast characteristics. Not like a wolf man, but shit from all sorts of different animals stuck on a humanoid.

Unfortunately my imagination is lacking on how to make them far more unique then "head, torso, two legs, two arms". A part of me wants to make the humanoid cause I can work of that, but another part of me worries they are just another beast human.

Holy shit I wrote
And posted it then read yours. Guess we are both having the same problem.

It sounds cool enough. I'm interested, at least.

Derek?

Its why I have no characters in GW2 that aren't Charr.

I like them. They do have the "race of hats" syndrome in the sense that they are all assumed to be backstabby, cowardly and evil with very little variation allowed between individuals in terms of personality. On the other hand it's nice to have a beast race that is something other than the 'noble tribal warrior' stereotype.

my nigger

Here, the Wendiabe: the result of a dickass Fey who wanted a race of murderdeer, then got bored halfway through
>docs.google.com/document/d/1A0q5DEoX2fNWVSNVUaheeFOAjtBN0NQoS85s5SbZN-Y/edit?usp=drivesdk

Really, it's not just deer, but can be used for most Artiodactyla

>Unfortunately my imagination is lacking on how to make them far more unique then "head, torso, two legs, two arms".
Fuck with proportions. Humans are typically eight heads tall, half of which is the legs. One head for the pelvis, two for the torso, and one for the...well...head. The arms are roughly two heads each, with a hand measuring something like three-quarters of a head.

Sketching out truly inhuman proportions can give you a good starting place on making a race look alien without having to flip through a bestiary.

That is a very cute ratgirl.

"Large humans" is a difficult enough concept to bring across as a distinct player race. It's why Goliath have that uncanny place in my heart where I wanna play nothing else, but then again I feel why bother with gray ooga booga humans when there's shifters and half-orcs if I wanna play a ferocious and strong character, various beastraces to fill that savage role, dwarves for that mountaineer flair or just plain woodelves for "such nature" characters.

You mean like Greeks did when they invented harpies, centaurs, satyrs, medusas, etc?

Or the ancient Norse (or whatever germanic savages) when they invented elves and dwarves?

>implying beast races themselves are not laziest shit ever
Slapping various animal heads on a human body is the pinnacle of creativity. It would be the fantasy equivalent of forehead aliens, except even forehead aliens are often more thematically/culturally thought-out than beast races.

no the laziest shit ever is to just take humans and copy a human culture from real life.

For some reason people think this is ok.
Guess what, because it is. Just like animal people.

Sure i could draw a fucking hexapodic slug beast with a bird beak and spend 3 years coming up with a fictional language but that doesnt make it appealing.

There is nothing wrong with things that arent exactly reeinventing the wheel.

There is no intrinsic value in novelty if the novelty is shit.

The laziest shit ever will always be the human, dwarf, elf trifecta.

Oh hey, you actually delivered!

Race looks neat. Bulk of the text could use an editor to deal with typo/grammar errors but other than that 9/10 would use in muh setting.

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Post more gryphon.

Gryphons are the cutest mythical beast.

Your fantasy race can domesticate gryphons like horses.

Besides hauling, flight feathers work well for fletching, and you can make coats out of the down feathers.

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How does Veeky Forums prefer their gryphons' cat-bird ratio? I personally like more cat than bird, around 4:3.

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I'm with you. I'm essentially a cat base with bird accents kind of boy. Beaks and bird eyes are standard easily, but everything else is up in the air so long as cat is more prominent.

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Would you go so far to say that gryphons are flightless? You could easily have something à la , where the shoulder muscles are nowhere near strong enough to actually cause lift. Perhaps something like a chicken's pseudo-flight?

You're looking for tsukumogami, Japanese spirits that arise in household items (most famously umbrellas and paper lanterns) after a hundred years.

fluff

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