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[Mephisto]

Forbidden Lands calls most humanoids "kin". Works as well as anything else.

Note that, while kin means family, this does not necessarily mean that the races get along like they're related. Unless your family is particularly prone to violence, I suppose.

[Kagus]

Note that, while kin means family, this does not necessarily mean that the races get along like they're related. Unless your family is particularly prone to violence, I suppose.

Well, I mean... Whose isn't?

[Digital Hellhound]

I favor 'folk' as well as a term for all intelligent species. It sounds natural in a fantasy setting, unlike more sciencey words like 'sapients'. Kin (and Pillars of Eternity's 'kith') are also fair options. I wouldn't worry about the use of humanoid, humane and so forth too much, though - you can always assume that the characters are actually using some term in their own language that's just translated into ours.

[Jimmy]

Being a long-term Star Trek watcher, I've long ago made my peace with the term 'humanoid,' no matter how speciest it might be. Since I'm a human, and the source material was written by a (presumably) human, I have zero fucks to give about any slight against non-humanoid labeling.

[Gentlefish]

Yeah just take the most common race and assume they have the academic power tbh. But not goblins. Goblinoids describes a buncha things already.

[Egan_BW]

A buncha things which basically all deserve to be counted as humanoid but arbitrarily aren't.

[MrRoboto75]

All goblinoids are humanoids but not all humanoids are goblinoids

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Dragons control academia, but secretly. They have a working orthogonal knowledge of genetics and so termed "humanoid" because humans carry the most versatile genotype of the genus. They included dragonborn as humanoids for propaganda reasons.

The elves are furious, even if they don't know why. All of their resentment ultimately stems from events where dragons outdid them as the font of knowledge and culture.

[Digital Hellhound]

So one of our group decided to get a commission of our characters and it turned out rather swell. Behold, the... uh... Fam of Five, apparently. We don't tend to introduce ourselves, people just sort of recognize us on sight and immediately start groaning and sighing. The world never appreciates genius before it's gone.

The artist is Lakkapeliitta/Leprapotilas, all credit to them!

Spoiler: Behold! (click to show/hide)

From left to right:
-Miles Venture, noble son, layabout and sorcerer of no small collateral damage. Left his home city to flee his responsibilities and headed out into the wider world, only for us to almost immediately return to said city. Stands out for generally being nice, friendly and understanding in a party mostly composed of assholes. Generous with his trust and his money, but it all tends to work out in the end. Catchphrase: no real one; unconcerned half-smile?

-Ileryn, grumpy, aloof and all-around surly Elven arcane archer who hates all paladins with a burning passion. This causes some tension when there is, in fact, a paladin in the group. Getting backstory out of this guy takes effort, but is so rewarding. Recently took a side job behind the party's back to assassinate someone the party was trying to help; naturally nearly died in the city sewers to gelatinous cubes in a series of events which went down as one of my best tabletop experiences ever. Somehow survived despite being reduced to 1 HP, completing the mission against all odds, and never breathing a word to anyone else about it (meaning if he'd died, we'd never even have found his dissolved body!). Catchphrase: *angry glare*.

-Naella, ancient goddess of the sun imprisoned for millenia by the other gods and now trapped in a mortal body. We discovered this after finding her tomb and having paladins try to kill us - a bonding experience, though Flint and Augustus (below) remain a wee bit uneasy about all that. Trying to find her brother, god of the moon, also imprisoned by the gods. Hilariously ignorant/indifferent to most social norms and mortal foolishness. Probably will doom us all and the world if she gets what she wants - I mean, the gods probably knew what they were doing when they locked her up, but no, nobody ever listens to me... Catchphrase: 'These mortals are so stupid/uncivilized/prudish/etc'.

-Flint Hillhammer, poor Dwarven paladin tormented by constant nightmares courtesy of a god of nightmares. May have killed his mother and sister and all sorts of other nastiness besides. Made from a random-generated character idea by the DM (Dwarven Paladin from the Wastes with Daddy Issues). His father is a respected and powerful paladin, who appears to see his son as an useless layabout. Just trying to make the nightmares stop, with potentially disastrous consequences. Has formed a very close relationship with Augustus, a subject of much speculation by the rest of the group. Really, just tries to be friends with everyone, even the paladin-hating Ileryn. Catchphrase: 'Oh no... not again...'

-Augustus Krash-Raag, played by yours truly, Half-Orc barbarian actor with a flair for the dramatic and an... unclear moral compass. Joined a traveling theater group in his youth, tired of life in his savage tribe, and discovered a passion for the stage. Met the others after creative disagreements with his usual acting troupe and sort of just... stuck around. Harangued by the disapproving ghosts of his ancestors whenever he rages (aka, Path of the Ancestral Guardian). Very close with Flint, shares role as group matchmaker with Naella, and is the self-proclaimed Herald of Miles Venture, announcing his glorious return wherever we go in the city. Frequently makes suggestions of highly questionable morality - but always, he's 'merely jesting' - maybe. Has partaken in both human flesh and magic mushrooms during the course of this campaign. The trees were talking to him under the influence of the latter (and suggesting he try the former), so I'll prolly multi-class to druid soon. Apparently, a master tailor, relationship therapist and cook, since I keep rolling super high when I really don't need to. Catchphrase: 'I was merely jesting!'

Together, we blew up a mountain, solved a murder, failed to prevent a ship from blowing up while onboard, insulted high nobility to their face by accident, surfed on a literal slide of shit, and for our latest trick, unleashed 9000 ducks on a poor unsuspecting city through misuse of a magical artifact. Three people died, but those ducks will feed thousands and we are under siege, so all in all it balances out. The latest session ended with some rather intense inter-party conflict over the theft/reclamation of a pooossibly evil sword used to imprison Naella for millenia from her by Flint, and lots of ominous shit that followed. We're somehow supposed to save this city from an endless horde of undead, which must keep the city authorities up at night. We're all going to a gala next session, where shit will no doubt go down like it has never before. Fun times!

I really recommend getting commissions of your characters - it's great for the whole group for any kind of longer-running campaign. This one I feel captured the characters really well and it's certainly spiced up this campaign in itself. Now to buy ones of our other campaigns and characters, too...

[Cruxador]

And since it's Monte Cook, it'll somehow manage to be bizarre without being interesting.

Having read the preview, that's more or less what we've got: it just throws weirdness at you until you go numb to it, then brags about how cool and surreal it is, but it never quite hits the mark because there's nothing normal to contrast it with. It's all so alien that it becomes boring -- and that's a huge problem in an RPG, because it means the players are deprived of common reference points to figure out what they can do in the game.

See, if you were to sit down at my table and I handed you a sheet and said "You're playing an archer. There's a dragon attacking the town you're in. What do you do?" you have at least some existing sense of what you can do; there's buildings to take cover in, the thing flies and breathes fire, and your best bet for fighting it is probably with a bow. It may not be clear mechanically how to take cover or draw a bow, but there's at least a clear starting point for what you might want to do in the narrative. If, on the other hand, I tell you you're playing a vislae who's had their vertula kada misaligned from their Crux Qualia by the !8'^_^'@#-287 [a dozen other new terms] you're going to need explanations of all of those before you can figure out if that's even good or bad, let alone what to do about it. That's going to suck up time like crazy, and the explanations here only raise more questions -- which sounds great, but it's still just me talking. There's no gameplay yet.

Yeah, this is pretty basic as principles of narrative design go. Throwing someone off the deep end is a very risky tool to begin with, and there needs to be relatable elements that resonate with the audience to form a foundation for deviation. Although in my opinion, Monte Cook's settings also have the issue that his changes and details just aren't that emotionally engaging to begin with. Like, I peaked at his "How to Play Invisible Sun" video (which takes twenty minutes to tell you anything about how to play Invisible Sun) and his path of suns concept is cool, the idea that the sun changes the nature of reality, but then he describes it and it's basically just planeshifting, and they're all generic, even from the first most foundational one sounds basically like just the city of Kekkai Sensen (Blood Blockade Battlefront) with the numbers filed off. And that was only ever supposed to be an almost cartoony backdrop to a very street level type story. Compare it to something like the Tattered Realms (Song of Swords setting) which is basically opposite; on the face of it, it's a medieval type setting but with elves and dwarves and stuff. And then you look at every detail and every detail is strange. From little things like the dwarves (They drink a lot. Why? Because it dulls the sound of the drums. What drums? The drums in the deep. The drums that call them to dig deeper and deeper, even setting aside food and sleep as they get deeper and it gets louder. Who plays those drums? Why does it pull the dwarves downward? How did dwarves get here in the first place, since they're not chaos and they're not offshoots of the basic human/elf race? Those are all questions to explore in play, all from the basic idea that dwarves drink a lot.) to the fact that the Sun, who is a god, takes a day off every month to hang out at his Ziggurat in the not!Roman empire with his paladins, who are saintly dudes that respawn and then his divine light isn't protecting the world and things can get in. Of course, that's a setting that was a labor of love for over half a decade, but still, something that's going to be heavily weird and interesting needs that solid foundation.

EDIT: Incidentally, the physical version costs $252. It has a statue in it. I have no earthly idea who needs 30 pounds of stuff to play an RPG. I also don't want to know who needs to spend $216 more to have a campaign written for them (well, "customized" for them.)

Yeah, it wouldn't be a terrible price if it was the pie in the sky collector's edition for people who want everything. But as the lowest level of potential buy-in, it's ridiculous. Even by the standards of board games it's ridiculous; that physical version is a hundred bucks over Gloomhaven, itself already criticized for a high cost at launch, and that gives you a similar number of tokens and bits of paper, and far more models and handouts, the only thing it has less of is required reading, since Monte Cook apparently couldn't sum his rules up in less than 600 pages. And that's for a board game, RPG players are accustomed to be able to buy in at a minimal level and spend on improving the experience or not as they go along.

Kin (and Pillars of Eternity's 'kith') are also fair options.

I don't really agree. Kin would normally refer to someone you can draw a clear line of blood to, not someone as distant as being a whole nother species, even if you share ancestry from a phylogenetic perspective. I guess it can be used in a metophorical sense ("that race is kin to ours" but that's the same way that you might refer to a country next to your own as a neighbor; it only makes sense in specific usage cases) and "kith" just means people you're close with in a non-blood sense, so if you have enemies or rivals of your same species, it wouldn't apply to them, and even in a sense of everyone banding together against the world, it really doesn't make sense to include all sapient races together in this regard. I like "folk", especially if there's some reason to contrast it to critters or inanimate things, but just going with "people" seems the most straightforward choice.

Hey, in a world where there are goblins, elves, dwarves, and kobolds, but humans don't exist, what words would they use instead of "humanoid", "humane", Etc?

[race doing the classifying]oid, presumably. Elfoid, dwarfoid, etc.

Seems a bit too close to slurry memery in my opinion. Words like "whiteoid" may mostly be used banter in real life but they're still edgy enough that I wouldn't be surprised to hear about people getting offended by them. It's also not that far from the old pseudo-biological classifications of "negroid" and "mongoloid", which have a more substantial history of discrimination.

Hey, in a world where there are goblins, elves, dwarves, and kobolds, but humans don't exist, what words would they use instead of "humanoid", "humane", Etc?

That's not what "humane" means. It means similar to humans specifically in the sense of having human decency or compassion, it which regard it is opposite to "bestial" or "animalistic" but perhaps most directly opposite to "ogrish". One of those common errors, like confusing "moral" with "morale".

[scriver]

Kin (and Pillars of Eternity's 'kith') are also fair options.

I don't really agree. Kin would normally refer to someone you can draw a clear line of blood to, not someone as distant as being a whole nother species, even if you share ancestry from a phylogenetic perspective. I guess it can be used in a metophorical sense ("that race is kin to ours" but that's the same way that you might refer to a country next to your own as a neighbor; it only makes sense in specific usage cases)

It's not used in the sense of "that race is kin to ours", it's used in the sense of "those guys are kin to each other".

[Trekkin]

Seems a bit too close to slurry memery in my opinion. Words like "whiteoid" may mostly be used banter in real life but they're still edgy enough that I wouldn't be surprised to hear about people getting offended by them. It's also not that far from the old pseudo-biological classifications of "negroid" and "mongoloid", which have a more substantial history of discrimination.

That's certainly a concern. It doesn't strike me as particularly bad to say that, for example, in this humanless world the word for "has a head, two arms, two legs, etc." has its etymological roots in something that literally means "elf-shaped" or similar (thus, elves/dwarves/goblins/etc are all elfoid) but I'd certainly not extend that beyond one blanket term for all of them, like humanoid is.

Come to think of it, though, humans in a standard fantasy world probably wouldn't use humanoid either. Bimanual, maybe.

[pikachu17]

Hey, in a world where there are goblins, elves, dwarves, and kobolds, but humans don't exist, what words would they use instead of "humanoid", "humane", Etc?

That's not what "humane" means. It means similar to humans specifically in the sense of having human decency or compassion, it which regard it is opposite to "bestial" or "animalistic" but perhaps most directly opposite to "ogrish". One of those common errors, like confusing "moral" with "morale".

Yes... How did I cause you to think I did not know what humane meant? After all, you are right now admitting that it has roots in the word human, so why would a world without humans have that exact word?

[IcyTea31]

Apparently, a master tailor, relationship therapist and cook, since I keep rolling super high when I really don't need to.

Oh yes, a fighter in a past campaign I played had this happen as well. Despite having only an average intelligence, she kept rolling twenties in all sorts of "lore" rolls, knowing intricate details about the many magical beasts we met in our journeys. The player wrote this in to her backstory by saying that she owned a creepy mask that only she could hear talking in her childhood and it told her "bedtime stories". Apparently, a hag had decided to be her godmother for Oghma knows what reason.

[pikachu17]

Hey, if he had a magical weapon, could a 20th level Path of the Zealot Barbarian lose against the Tarrasque? It seems to me, if the Tarrasque doesn't flee, the barbarian is guaranteed success.