Design Thoughts & Preview: Races (and Ages)

Races are fun.

I've managed to rebuild the database spreadsheet of the races, and improve it significantly over the lost version.

THE FUNDAMENTAL DESIGN PRINCIPLE BEHIND RACES

Being called a clone is not the most positive appellative in creative media, even though originality is something that doesn't truly exist in any art form, and in any case, art is a subjective interpretation of a reality.

Having said that, the starting principle when designing these races is to not take any fluff nor crunch from the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) universe nor any already established franchise. I would take directly from mythology or empirical reality, whenever this was possible and reasonable.

"Whenever this was possible" because some concepts have already been introduced by D&D, such as deep gnomes. So besides the own creative input that demands an RPG system conversion, the only source sometimes is D&D's interpretation of its own mythology.

"Whenever this was reasonable" because in some cases the real mythology would clash with the one established by D&D, and that, for better or for worse, has been so widely popular that alluding to the real mythos would have been confusing; take dark elves, for instances: drows vs. dökkálfar of Norse mythology (the latter being another name for the dwarves in this cosmovision). Whenever this has happened, I've tried to avoid the bullet and play it neutral with the race stats and aspects, because, at the end, the entry the player will see for each race is 90% mechanics, the fluff is up to them.

STANDARD RACES: CLASSIC AND NOT SO CLASSIC ONES

As you can see in the spreadsheet, there are many well-known races of the typical high fantasy settings, but there are others that are not so popular. This decision was not meant only to fill some voids within the variety of race builds, but to wider the possibility of choices by using creatures of not so popular mythos.

Ebu Gogo are humanoid creatures from the Indonesian folklore that are known for their savagery and swiftness. According to the legends, they live in caves and have monkey-like appearances. You may picture them like a savage counterpart of dark elves.

Menehune are small people from the Hawaiian tradition who live far from society, deep inside the forest and hidden valleys. They are known for their craftiness and resourcefulness. You may picture them like forest dwarves.

Even though Samsaran as a race name is introduced by PF, the concept of saṃsāra comes from Indian religions. This race represents individuals who have achieved mastery in this way of existence.

BEASTFOLKS CONCEPTION

To come up with the beastfolks builds, I took some tropes from the D&D and PF SRDs, although they have been generally vague and conflicting with empirical facts about certain creatures; when that happened, I used my own judgment.

I also recurred to Shawn Tomkin's assets and took many ideas from there, not only from the companions, but the bind asset from which I took set array for the animals listed there. This ensures thematic consistency and compatibility with his work.

Regarding names, most beastfolks don't have a particular animal designation ("feline" instead of "catfolk", or "rodentfolk" instead of "ratfolk"); this reason obeys to two principles:

• To wider the player's option when choosing their character race and not limit them with the narrowness of a particular species. If you would like to play a werelion or weretiger, for instance, the pantherine race applies, as pantherinae is the animal family of both associated animals.
• To add thematic consistency to dark settings. Whether playing with beastfolks or werebeasts is your thing or not, we can agree that "ophidian" is more abstract and open to interpretation than "snakefolk", and "kitsune" is more evocative and linguistically appealing than "foxfolk".

That being said, you can notice that I did not achieve to use neutral names for all the beastfolk since many taxonomic terms are too obscure for a role-playing game due to them corresponding to a scientific jargon.

ELEMENTAL RACES CONCEPTION

These races came as an epiphany when looking for inspiration.

Each of the four classical elements represents a stat, two in the case of air.

• Earth: Iron.
• Water: Wits.
• Air: Edge and shadow.
• Fire: Heart.

Each elemental race not only has an array of stats according to their element, but their general builds reinforce a play-style that corresponds to the concept they represent, especially with a ritual-like attribute to control their element with the associated stat.

MARRYING RACE AND AGE

As you can see with the current version of the rulebook, I've been toying with the idea of using the character age to modify the stats, but none of my attempts have satisfied me. Just recently, taking a look at the Forbidden Lands, the idea came like a muse kissing right in the nose, with a formula to make age and race stats matter in the most compact way.

With this, I'm also countering some min-maxing tendencies I've encountered during playtesting with other players; murder-hobo and munchkins cousins, for instance.

NON-HUMANOID RACES 

As you can see in the rulebook, companions will have race cards too, but these will only be 9, to just make them compatible with the Shawn Tomkin's assets.

The age mechanic won't apply to them, and their aspect blocks won't be as boosty as the humanoid races.

SEEKING BALANCE

No stat array is the same across all races. Each one of them has different compositions. This is without taking into account that neither the build of attributes and additions are the same.

In the Kobold Guide to Game Design, Monte Cook truthfully admits that "in the sense of roleplaying game rule design, game balance is a myth". Yet, he said that "a game that’s balanced gives every player/character a moment to shine and that these moments are about equal in time, importance, and fun". I've applied this principle when designing these races, giving an option to every play style.

YOUR INPUT

So far I've come up with 46 races, but I've probably missed something. You can take a look at the database spreadsheet of races, and let me know if...

• You find a balance issue. 
• You notice something that is not consistent.
• You are $3+ patron that would like to see a race come to fruition.

Please, feel free to comment on this post or on the races spreadsheet, use the Ironcrunch Discord channel or message me. You can also now comment on every document on the Google Drive playtest package folder.

In the meantime, I will be converting this spreadsheet into race cards.