Hey fa/tg/uy's. I'm looking for some discussion in the world building category...

Hey fa/tg/uy's. I'm looking for some discussion in the world building category, particularly alternative human races/ethnicities.

Often in fantasy humans are just blonde white people like the Norse, black Africans or Asian with some changes like Nordic Samurai or African vikings if the author is being more creative than not at all, though in this instance i'm strictly speaking of genetics though culture is important too.

I always liked the idea of alternative human races, for instance an ethnicity with differing hues of blue or purple skin and black or white hair is common. Maybe they look like a race of brown skin Asians with blonde hair or a mix of caucasian and African where white hair and blue eyes is the most common.

What do you think? Does your scifi/fantasy setting have alternative human races? I suppose it could be looked at as superfluous but still.

You mean Star Trek aliens but in fantasy?

Every setting should have delicious water tribe brown.

HEY Veeky Forums WHY DON'T YOU COME DISCUS RACIAL POLITICS IN MY POORLY CONSTRUCTED BAIT THREAD!????!!!!???!!111///

Yeah I have a race of tan skinned people with dark culry hair and blue eyes. They are inspired by Sumerians though, so not entirely fantastical (although Sumerians probably didn't have blue eyes).

OP here, yes.

Please leave. This isn't a politics thread, unless it involves fantasy politics.

Fucking cool and Sumerians are underappreciated as fuck.

>water niggers

No thanks.

Dark skin and light hair combination seems to be pretty popular in weeb shit, although I don't think it looks good IRL (google Melanesians).

>I always liked the idea of alternative human races, for instance an ethnicity with differing hues of blue or purple skin and black or white hair is common. Maybe they look like a race of brown skin Asians with blonde hair or a mix of caucasian and African where white hair and blue eyes is the most common.
These are the most banal and superficial details I can imagine. Perhaps most don't bother with them because they're below the threshold of what makes for interesting setting detail.

You're basically going to look like this:
>"The Altrusi are like regular Asian people except they have blue eyes"
>How does this affect their culture?
>"It doesn't!"
>Oh...

I'm a fan of it and a weeb. I dunno why I like it.

Blue eyes can absolutely affect a peoples culture, you don't seem to understand how important something as seemingly inconsequential as hair, eye and skin color can be. It affects the art, the culture, beauty/exoticism, maybe even the history.

It can affect the way other races and cultures see or interact with them.

>"The Dwarves are like regular wwhite people except they are short"
>How does this affect their culture?
>"It doesn't!"
>Oh...

The point of fantasy is to have things that are different from real life, dumbass.

Well yeah, I think it looks good when it's drawn, I;m not a fan of it IRL. Neither in populations where it occurs naturally, nor when it's dyed.

Dude, it's just a nice detail, just like other details. By your logic we shouldn't describe appearances at all. How do elf ears affect their culture? How does straight black hair affect the culture of your not!Japan?

Define 'race'. Are they supposed to be an entirely different humanoid species, or just another human ethnicity?

If they're A, then they probably can't interbreed with humans AND they're probably competing for the same environmental niche. They're enemies.

If they're B, I'd like to know what barrier is keeping them from either absorbing or being absorbed into whatever flavor of human is considered the baseline for your story.

If it's not meaningful, it's not interesting. It may still be fantasy, but why should I care about shit-tier fantasy?

OP here, B.

The idea is to come up with a variant ethnicity.

Blue Eyes in particular has fucking major implications, considering the whole light sensitivity thing

>Are they supposed to be an entirely different humanoid species, or just another human ethnicity?
How about they're supposed to be a race?

>If they're B, I'd like to know what barrier is keeping them from either absorbing or being absorbed into whatever flavor of human is considered the baseline for your story.
I mean yeah, we're living in a world where all humans are the same race because one race absorbed all the others, but this is fantasy, okay?

>race
Race isn't a very well-defined term.

>Tolkien
>Howard
>shit tier

Wew lad.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

ARE YOU TALKING SPECIES OR ETHNICITY

And what's the problem, exactly?

Throw some human physical traits into a blender.

I'm talking about large ethnic groups that have certain characteristic traits that evolved as adaptations to the living conditions in which said groups appeared. Ethnicities are a narrower category, and species is a much, much wider category.

This is assuming our modern understanding of biology and genetics still apply in fantasy land.

If I tell my players a certain tribe of dark-skinned people has that skin because a cultural hero of theirs was blackened by soot while stealing fire from the gods, that's exactly why they're black. Not because of some biological adaptation to large amounts of sunshine.

You could have told us beforehand that you would be pulling a new definition out of your ass.

>Ethnic group and ethnicity are not the same thing
It's fine if you want to redefine some things for the sake of your question and the subsequent discussion, but fucking tell us so we're all on the same page.

This is not a defense of his point at all, you already know that dwarves encompass more than their stature. The correct way to meme arrow this would be
>"The Dwarves are like regular dwarves except they have dark skin"
>How does this affect their culture?
>"It doesn't!"
>Oh...

I'm not OP.

>Ethnic group and ethnicity are not the same thing
By a large ethnic group I mean a group of ethnicities. Come on, everyone intuitively understands what a race is when races are discussed. Personally, I don't like the term race at all, precisely because everyone defines races somewhat differently, but at least the baseline is pretty clear. If we have a "white" race, then it includes a lot of indo-european ethnicites and some non-indo-european ethnicities, it's wider than an ethnicity. But it's more narrow than a species, obviously.

Wisdom.

No, he's right. There's genuinely no reason for Tolkien's elves to have sharp ears or his dwarves to be short, and these things have influence o their cultures. They're just little things that make the world more fantastical.

But Dwarves and Elves aren't just a different ethnicity of human in Middle-Earth.

That's a cartoon, not a human.

...And? Their shortness or pointy-eary-ness still has no real reason to be there and nothing to do with their culture.

Neither does, say, Dejah Thoris' peoples' reddish skin. Or the blue eyes of It's fine for stuff to just be fantastical in fantasy.