Oriental High Fantasy Races

Going through my character art folder to see if I can find inspiration or reminder of any notions you missed. I'm skipping anyting that's just "human with animal traits" since most of that falls under Hengyokai.

Friend of mine did racial variants for Oni based on color, though it's all 3.x.

Are you going to do playable Youkai or keep those as NPC's?

Anyone have any art that's not super anime style?

...

Depends on the species. Some yokai are good fits for PCs, like Rokurokubi, Todomeki or Futakuchi-onna. Others are not so much, like... whatever that giant blob covered in eyes is.

When I ran an eastern game I didn't bother coming up with a big list of races, just telling my players they could roll with whatever so long as it was thematically appropriate. The PC team included
>A kitsune who was sort-of-banished from the spirit world so that she could learn about the human world and earn more tails
>A skeleton samurai, cursed to wander the earth to make up for his dishonour in life
>An animated kabuki doll ninja
There was also an oni NPC and I planned to introduce tengu and naga NPCs later. Tengu I was going to have as a race of spiritually adept bird people rather than actual spirits/yokai, which is what they are in actual myth iirc.

Hecteyes?

I looked outside of Japan for Oriental races, and the most interesting one I found were the babi ngepet from Indonesian mythology. My take on them is in pic.

>Hengeyokai (if treated right)
>
That you still use the nonsense oxymoronic term 'hengeyokai' instead of just yokai, mononoke, ayakashi or mamono, already disproves your point of ' treating them right.'

I bet you think it refers to anthropomorphic Asian races and not a variety of spirits with and without animal features.

That you go on to add '''Spirit folk''' and Nazumi and Naga are doing you a further disservice. (They would likely be lumped under the Yokai banner...) Please, all of you do some research if you're going to borrow Supernatural elements from the huge wealth of Asian traditions.

>That you still use the nonsense oxymoronic term

Nonsense, yes, but it's not oxymoronic. It probably just comes from someone misremembering the title of Nihon Yokai Henge Shi.

An oxymoron is when you describe something with contradictory terms, like "bigly little" or something. "Hengeyokai" would more-or-less literally translate to "mutant spirit" (or apparition or phantom or whatever you choose to translate yokai as). It doesn't make a ton of sense in Japanese but it's not an oxymoron (anymore than, say, "moronoxy" is an oxymoron. It isn't, it's just misspelled).

>They would likely be lumped under the Yokai banner...

Yeah, if you're gonna pull that then dwarves should be a kind of elf since that's what they were in the original Nordic mythology. Trolls, too. But then things change over time. You don't have to make things perfectly accurate to the original folktales, and in fact I'd argue that you shoulnd't as it's frankly a bitch to try.

In the case of hengeyokai (from D&D), they serve a useful role of representing the many, many different kinds of shape-shifting animals in Asian myths - not just Japanese, either.

>spirit folk as yokai

I don't think so. Spirit folk are specifically half-spirit, half-human as D&D defines them. It's just that "spirit folk" sounds better (and more Asian) than half-spirit.

>Nezumi and naga

The Nezumi as D&D represents them would NOT be yokai, as they're not spirits or apparitions in any way, but a distinct ratfolk race. They're basically sane skaven. Naga, meanwhile, don't come from Japanese mythology, they're from India. Saying that naga are yokai are like 40k fags trying to claim that every magic in every setting is psyker warp fuckery.

So, this is my draft for a 5e Oni PC race. What's wrong with it, anons?

Oni
Ability Score Modifiers: +2 Strength, +1 Charisma
Size: Medium
Speed: 30 feet
Vision: Darkvision 60 feet
Powerful Build: You are considered to be one size larger for determining your carrying, dragging, lifting, pushing, pulling and dragging capacity.
Illusory Veil: You have Proficiency in Deception.
Windstrider: At 7th level, you gain a Fly speed of 30 feet.
Oni Tricks: You can cast the True Strike cantrip. At 3rd level, you can cast Fog Cloud as a 1st level spell with this trait. At 5th level, you can cast Suggestion as a 2nd level spell with this trait. Once you have cast either Fog Cloud or Suggestion with this trait, you must complete a long rest before you can use them again. Spells cast with this trait use Charisma as their spellcasting ability score.

>>Hakutaku-flavored Minotaurs

non-weeb minotaur fanatic here, what does this mean?

The Hakutaku, known in China as the Bai Zei, is a magical beast that resembles a nine-eyed, six-horned ox. It is a benevolent yokai that brings knowledge, wisdom and healing to those in need.

Minotaurs based on this creature, then, would be three-eyed ox-folk with a base nature as sages, focused especially on the study of battling evil spirits and the curing of the sick, giving them a generally benevolent nature.

yokai.com/hakutaku/

Looks fine, if a little plain. The only thing I'm unsure about is the continuous fly speed at 7th level, but someone with a better sense of game balance will have to weigh in there.

For the record, I think you're sort of going about things the wrong way, in that you shouldn't just dump a bunch of races with zero context. When I was toying around with making a fantasy Asian setting, I decided that the basis for the setting's races would be Journey to the West - the same way that Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings forms the basis for fantasy races (i.e., the standard fantasy races are human, elf, dwarf, and halfling because of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Frodo).

So from that I got:

Tang Sanzang = Human, obviously.
Sun Wukong = Vanara, monkey-folk.
Zhu Bajie = Babi Ngepet, as described upthread
Sha Wujing = Could be represented by either a half-ogre or a spirit folk. I went with the latter.

So from that I knew that the standard fantasy races for my East Asian setting would be humans, vanara, babi ngepet, and spirit folk. In 5e terms, they'd be the "common" races, the ones that do most of the legwork in founding kingdoms and ruling nations.

I had five subraces of spirit folk: bamboo, grassland, river, sand, and mountain, each one meant to roughly correspond to the Wu Xing of wood, earth, water, fire, and metal respectively.

Half-ogre (I went with "ogre" over "oni" because every mythology has big ugly giants, while "oni" is distinctly Japanese), hengeyokai (I actually really wanted a less-Japanese name, but couldn't think of one I liked), and koro-pok-guru (gnomes - D&D traditionally has them as dwarves, but they make more sense as a gnomish subrace based on how they're described).

>whatever that giant blob covered in eyes is.
Umibozu

This is a pretty cool and interesting party. IWouldWatchAnAnimeAboutIt/10
What system?

Hyakume! That's it.

I figured by level 7 it doesne't really matter, as by that time you should have access to fly spells, boots of flying, and other things that make it less the issue that flying 30ft at first level poses. Plus, it's a shoutout to the Ogre Mage PC race of AD&D.

I'm always shilling for Moonfolk. Magitech albinos with bunny ears and moon magic are rad as hell.

Yeah, they're basically a "monstergirl/boy" version of the Moon Rabbit, and that's one of the reasons why I listed Bunnyfolk in the OP.

We used FATE which I thought was pretty fitting for it. Because FATE's pretty fluffy it's good for just cut loose kung fu shit and dumb action.

There were also two human samurais on the team.
One was an Imperial samurai with a lot of pomp and a very high culture score, and the other was a ronin called Jetstream Jian with a sword possessed by a familial tiger spirit.