So I'm working on a new campaign setting - my last one was a sunken world as Umbralee had punched a hole into the elemental plane of water in a land-grab. The setting was high-seas adventures, with pirates galore and a very long and arduous trip through the plane of fire. Anyway, the new one is just slowly being built in one-shots but I hit on an idea about the diminutive folk that you find in most RPGs.
Halflings are just short humans, but also come with a different personality/culture. Informed by Tolkien, that is usually explained by saying they're content folk, who like a simple life and good meal - but is mechanically expressed by...making them burglars?
Gnomes are either more like diminutive dwarves or elves, depending on the setting. The art for Pathfinder certainly makes them look more elven than dwarven, but stuff like the Svirfneblin make them seem more dwarven, less elven (assuming that deep gnomes are somehow connected to land gnomes.)
Goblins can pretty easily be explained as the little-orcs, and I'm sure there's options for plenty of other pint-sized enemies. If dragonborn are present, kobolds are pretty easy to fit into that too.
So I was thinking about something in the history of the world to explain this trend - and of course, rewriting what it means to be those things, in general. Either I would introduce a deity who amplified certain creatures, or who shrunk them down and change their essence -
Dragonborn is a good example, because you can go from a glory warrior-based society of dragonborn to a greedy, petty society of kobolds.
Humans are ambitious creatures, prone to setting up shop somewhere and fighting tooth and nail to preserve it. Halflings are not so stubborn - their short frames and spry muscles give them nearly endless endurance, coupled with their contentedness, they are the primary frontiersfolk, running miles across open desert and setting up a new settlement the first place that has shade and fresh water. Even seafarers sometimes find halflings on previously unknown islands, lounging under palm trees.
Dwarves are inventive but perfectionists, redesigning the entry-ways to their mountainhomes a hundred times over, while gnomes are more willing to drop a project and move on - often resulting in half-finished and completely unsafe magical items. A dwarven stronghold is a mess of perfect right angles, design and redesigned into uselessness, while a gnomish stronghold is half-smoothed, has tunnels running to nowhere, and often littered with piles of ash or half-operational automatons.
Orcs like to fight, but have the mentality of a fighter/soldier - they consider fights as battles in a greater war. Goblins are more reckless, seeking a glorious death and fight like every fight is their last. Both can be appealing mercenaries, depending on the job you want done, and how loudly.
Elves? Well they ate their diminutive folk.
If I'm making a new setting, I'd also like to add some new twists on the "races", especially taking them out of the pseudo-scientific taxonomy we usually work with, and instead shift them more into fantasy or fairy-tale. Dwarves and gnomes aren't born, but are rather carved from stone and gems, for example. Any ideas or sources for this are appreciated.
I'm also reading the rulebook for
Gubat Banwa, and am fascinated by the use of violence as a divine force - violence being from the religious definition: extreme emotion spurring action. I might scrap the whole Law/Good/Chaos/Evil spectrum and just include violence - this fits well, already with my concepts of the differences between the full-size and diminutive folks.
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Topic: Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: COBRA!!! (Read 937737 times)