ITT: Share how you differentiate your generic fantasy species

>>52290134
Most people in my campaign are differentiated by culture/national origin, not species. Doesn't matter if you're dwarf or human, if you come from Volcanic-Ireland, you're a little crazy, exuberant, hairy, fear the fae, and wear kilts. If you come from the Lands of Oil and Spice you're either a filthy nomad or a desert dwelling warrior-poet-noble. If you come from the frozen north, you're Ned Stark.

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I play them straight, cause my players want to play D&D, not my terrible fantasy fanfiction.

Where the interesting parts come in are the characters and NPC's I can craft, not the races.
Good characters and standard races=good campaign
Standard characters and good/original races=at most mediocre campaign.

>>52290432
I definitely agree with that. I only use my homebrewed races when playing with a few friends (they helped make the world/races), and characters are of huge importance - world building only goes so far.

>>52290134
pls no frogposting

My Orcs are basically a green version of Imperial Russia.

My Elves are landless Vikings.

My Humans are really artsy Romans.

My Dwarves are hermaphroditic, and lay eggs.

>>52290134

My humans are a minority, they don't have a king and their stat modifiers are -1 WIS and +1 CHA.

My elves sleep a lot (15h a day), because they live longer and they stress their minds a lot. They can't get sick with human diseases, and they only suffer from melancholy once they turn about 300 years old.

My kobolds are doglike and ugly, but they are a legit playable race. Their lives are very short, but they live them to the fullest - or die in thousands for their people, only to be replaced by a 3-6 puppies brood.

My dwarves can learn arcane magic, they just usually don't like it. They get sick and anxious after a full day outdoors, and can't stand long journeys on foot if they are on the surface or on a sea route. They're digging to the center of the earth looking for their promised land, but there's so much in the depths they often lose their way and settle. Their religious ways strongly condemn this behavior.

My dragons are all neutral, metallic and chromatic alike. There are only a few, and are hunted by adventurers and alchemists for scales and teeth. No way you can reason with a dragon, though, he's going to eat you whole as soon as you approach the vicinity of its lair.

My orcs are not inherently evil, but they're not warcraft-like noble savages either. Sacrificing war prisoners it's just part of their religious customs.

>>52290432
>>52290599

I never really understood why these two things have to be mutually exclusive. Why can't there be good characters in a good homebrew setting?

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand that there are people who get wrapped up in lorewank and inundate their players with boring unimportant shit, but that's a matter of delivery, not necessarily a characteristic intrinsic to self-built worlds. I say this as someone who has played in-- and enjoyed-- other GMs' homebrews.

>>52296040
There can be both obviously, but if one side needs to give or be unprioritised it should be the setting, as it isn't nearly as important. Some people only have the time or skill to devote themselves to one aspect after all (aka me) and so for those people characters should be the priority.

Orcs were created as slave warriors by a sorcerer warlord, and were ultimately his downfall. Their main differences, beyond external features like thick skin and large teeth, are their unusual endurance and an elevated "us vs. them" mentality. The "us" is flexible enough that a given group of orcs might be fiercely loyal to any culture or organization, though most live in (and fight for) their own city-states.

Some kinds of dragons are huge and powerful. Some kinds of dragons are highly intelligent. In this age, none are both. Dragons come in as wide a variety as, say, birds, or mammals. They're usually easily identifiable from reptiles because of their six limbs.

My humans are dominator type. They hate other species and only tolerate elves. Conquering everything they see.

My elves are relatives to humans. They can interbreed and have an offspring though it will be member of one of those races only. Also they live slightly longer than humans. Other than that every elven aspect is applied to them

My dwarves are smelly unhygienic miners living mudhuts. Extremly secretive

My orks are cursed humans/elves, that were corrupted long time ago and now seeking redemption

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My orcs are forest dwelling fae people, with love of nature and affinity for the trees

My elves are subterranean mountain people with love for drink and a hearty thirst for life, gold and honor

My halflings are marauding bands of 9 foot tall cow men, who gore their enemies on their horns as they smoke some pipe weed.

>>52296301
That's fair. I agree that it's better to choose a preexisting setting and craft complex characters than phone in the NPCs especially if your "homebrew setting" is mostly just a series of arbitrary changes to the old formula in the first place .

>>52296401
I think I can get behind the first two if done well.
Are the cow men called "halflings" because they're half cow, half man?

>>52290134
My elves, due to divine shenanigans, have everlasting youth but die within months of hitting a hundred years old. So an elf can be 22 or 87 and look like that go to the same school.

Also, all elf parents make elf babies. Momma's give birth to elves and daddy's put elves into everything.

I'm thinking they're the survivors of divine servant race.

>>52296572
No, they're called Halflings because they're about half as tall as Humans, who are some real motherfuckers in my setting

>>52296676
I like it. Carry on.

>>52296558
If all the effort put into the setting is just a few simple twists on the standard doesn't that leave more time for fleshing out the individuals?

>>52292734

Are your Dwarves anthropomorphic albino whiskered sea slugs?

>>52290134
Orcs are gypsies mixed with Germans and want their own ethno-state.

Elves are French that occasionally go back to their roots and practice Gaulish Druidism.

Pure Dwarves are almost extinct, but their society resembled that of the ancient Greeks and they built numerous temples, monuments, and cities that now lie in ruins, scattered across the known world.

Goblins have fungus based technology, which allows them to literally grow everything they need. They're also more isolated from the rest of the world due to living on isles in the middle of the Ocean.

Humans almost always have at least one elf/dwarf/orc ancestor, which typically has a minor affect on their appearance. Various human ethnicity's base much of their culture around emulating one of these 3 races.

>>52290134
Why do /pol/ posters insist on spamming their frog memes here?

My Orcs are creations of Orcus, made from profaning the flesh of men, dwarves, and pigs. In the current age, they're a mongrel race.

My Dwarves are like maggots or lice to giants, and there is usually a kind of dwarf for each kind of giant. Dwarves are defined by their relationships with giants.

My elves are beings with chaotic hearts. They're not a dying race or breed. Excuses of low reproduction rates or weird pregnancies aren't valid. Excuses of autism in elves for why they aren't better than you at everything are also not valid. They suffer ennui easily, so an elf will be constantly trying new things, rarely mastering any. Same with relationships, elves live too long to be tied down to any one partner, so serial monogamy is the most common form of relationship, leaving elven families full of half-siblings. I also like them shorter than humans, a bit silly, and not using beds as they don't sleep.

I don't use Halflings, I use Gnomes.

Fuck off, frogposter.

Pepe posting is the new BBEG meme

My humans have masive penalties to all manner of leadership based actions.

They are genetically compatible with everything, from Dwarves to demons, which is a feat unique to their species. Their main racial stereotype is being whores.

Dwarves are all the same guy at different moments in time, thanks to a freak time warp accident involving The Last Good King under the mountain.

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No humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, lizardfolk, magic critters, dragons.

Multiple alien species only. Is that so hard?

>>52290134
My humans don't do the whole "most adaptable," schtick; instead they have the most endurance. In terms of how this stereotype translates, it goes approximately thusly: you'll never spot the elvish ambush, find the dwarvish door, or outrun the human bounty hunter.

Most of my dwarves are mountaineers and have their cities partially in a mountain and partially atop it. They're also about five to five-and-a-half feet tall, because I don't like the horrifically stunted dwarves.

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>>52291064
Bow to your god.

My Kitsune have secondary vaginas in their tails.

>>52299032
>>52300577
>>52300668

my god the "take our memes back by making idiots think it's raciest" stratagem was to effective.

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If I feel the need to change things up for some reason, my orcs are cave-dwelling ape men.

Tall and lanky, arms down to their knees, hairy, like chimps little visible musculature (bodybuilder orcs pls go) but they'll fuck you up

Beady, sunken white eyes with no irises, fixed pupils make them sensitive to bright light. Big bat ears. Monkey lips, baboon teeth.

Live in caves and dark ruins and come out at night to waylay travelers and raid small villages. Eat humans.

Not really orcs, just alternate savage humanoid race.

I prefer porcs to greenskins to ensure nobody mistakes them for noble savages (though do to orc breeding/enslaving habits, they can come in an extremely wide variety of appearances), and use goblinzees (which I play as little sadistic torture chimps which like human sacrifice), as well as ugly lizardbolds which I play as vietcong cranked up to 11 (which like to eat humans if they can or simply to scare them away if they can't).

>>52290134
Why do you keep shitposting your /pol/ fursona?

My orcs are green men of Barsoom, but usually without the extra arms. In one setting I had green, red, black, white, and yellow orcs with the corresponding Barsoomian cultures, but all like green ones in form instead of being recolored humans.

I try to avoid making my humans the baseline race or giving them the same generic "traits" that really mean nothing. I've made them known for having the best endurance, best aim with ranged weapons, an innate aptitude with mechanical devices that other races lack, or a resistance to magic in various settings. In one of my favorites I really played up the "adaptable" and "versatile" cliches and gave them about two dozen subraces with different attributes.

>>52302246
So they get another one every hundred years, for ten in total?