More BS for My RPG

Been putting in more thought on playable races for my TTRPG that is never going to be finished.  Since I cannot think of a single other thing to post about right now, I’ll share a slice of those thoughts.

My creatures were going to be categorizable by plane of origin, like elves are a kind of faerie from the Deep Wild, the first dwarves lived in the mountains under Heaven and could be considered holy.  What about creatures that originated on Gaya, my gay-ass world?  Humans of course, and halflings, some funky animal people…  I didn’t have a lot of ideas.  But lo, I have had a few, and they amuse me.

Halflings are humans.  Inspired by one of the weird cartoon adaptations of Lord of the Rings where Gandalf said hobbits are turning into humans, I decided fuck it, they just are humans, like the populations of real life people who share some form of dwarfism.  I was pondering, should other types of humans exist?  Same base stats but a notable feature of the local population hobbit-style?  And that turned to our cousins in the real tree of life, neanderthals.  I don’t want to get into fronting on realism with it, but why not draw some inspiration from that?  So…

Humans have variations, and a population can have more than one.  Halflingism for shorties (like the irl Twa), Gauntism for tall thin people (like the irl Dinka), Hairyism for people with ape-like body hair, for the fantasy vibes (hence not using the term for the real condition of hirsutism).  These can occur in isolated tribes anywhere in Gaya.  Sasquatchy type guys could have gauntism + hairyism, por ejemplo.  Hobbity guys could be from a paler northwesterly human tribe with halflingism.

I had two ideas for animal people.  One was animal-headed people, like the minotaur, but they can have almost any kind of animal head (ok, bit of bullshit, i’m thinking just tetrapods, to avoid questions about fish and bugs).  This is from ancient magic curse bullshit.  I didn’t think this would satisfy the furries tho, as much as I favor it, so I wanted to have some more animalish animal peeps.  What I had decided about halfling humans put some new notions into my mind.  So…

Naturally evolved humanoid animal people with some regional variation.  Dog people, cat people, lizard people, velociraptor people, and afrotherian people.  Dog people could look like different dog breeds or be muttley, cat people likewise.  Lizards I wanted to have more variety than would be feasible if I stuck within a species, so different regions could look like varanids, chameleons, iguanians, whatever, with some grading between.  Velociraptors could be inspired by irl birds, or differ in size like from microraptor up to utahraptor maybe, no strong opinions right now.

The afrotherian one came to me because I was thinking of animals I like and sengis / elephant shrews jumped out, but they seem so specific and odd compared to the others.  Then I thought, what if the baseline for them is something like a humanoid hyrax, but subpopulations could shade toward different members of the afrotherian clade?  Like some look more elephanty, some aardvarky, some sengi-ish, some dugong-like.  Hyrax is, to my eyes, the most morphologically conservative one.  As these are all the same species with an unreasonable range of local appearances, like the lizard people, they could have intermediate forms you wouldn’t see irl.  No living creature halfway between a sengi and an elephant, right?

The whole of aquatic life should also have a few examples of more humanoid intelligent animal guys, with similar collapse into a smaller number of species with a large variety of physical appearances possible.  I don’t care as much about marine zoology so I was kinda punting notions around, some obvious and some less so.  Gotta have crabs for the carcinization jokes.  Whatever.

This is when I remembered nymphs.  I had so many ideas for how nymphs could work in my setting that I could rename my game Nymph: The Nymphening.  The basic idea is they’re embryonic divinities born by spontaneous generation.  In my initial conception, they looked like morphologically conservative humans – not too tall or short skinny or fat or buff, etc.  But now, if dog people cat people etc evolved naturally on this world like humans, why wouldn’t nymphs just as easily look like one of them?

And so the idea of nymphs just became a lot more baroque.  They can look like lizard people or hyrax people or whatever.  In keeping with the morphological conformity of human-like nymphs, I think no sengis or borzois or sphynx cats or chameleons.  Animal people nymphs should look like shorthairs, wolfish hounds, hyraxes, fence lizards, whatever – but you know, with an internal glow and ineffable nature and nascent divinity, etc.

Then I remembered my crab people, and envisioned a 19th century painter like Bouguereau doing the whole “flying swarm of scantily clad youths in celestial light,” but as a bunch of crabs.  I hope you can imagine it as well.

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Race in High Fantasy

A lot has been said about this subject, and I’m not ambitious enough to even give a proper tour of the topic at the moment.  Of course some shit has been said or done that is various degrees of messed up, and some shit has been done that is very cool.  I bring it up because I have ambitions to make a high fantasy ttrpg, so I need to give it at least some thought.

Race & Racism in High Fantasy

Realism.  Physically diverging appearances within a species are a result of genetic isolation, drift, etc.  Shared ancestry with a lil fork in it.  This suggests that any types of elves and dwarves and orcs should have the same apply to them, in a world where humans have those qualities.  But for long-lived species with half or less the length of a human generation, wouldn’t that process move slower than it does for us?  Also, wouldn’t the existence of black elves suggest strong convergence with humans in a given area?  Melanin has obvious enough geographic selection going on, what about eye shape?

Much like the race-blind casting going on in some stage productions these days, major video games striving to sell the public what it wants have found the path of least resistance is to offer human-like racial variety in all the fantasy creatures with no explanation given.  Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dragon Age 4 had a lady dwarf and elf respectively, with racial features of real life East Asian people.

Nice to just say fuck it and play nice with a broader pool of customers, but it does sit a little odd for me with no explanation given.  I can see why they wouldn’t bother.  Racial discourse is so fraught and complicated almost any reason could bring controversy.  Better value to just roll with it.  But I’m not an international business conglomerate growing IP and maximizing profits.  If I’m canceled, it’s lower stakes.  I can just get off the internet and enjoy more personal time.  So I think about it…

Sun in the south makes people get darker skinned, some less obvious factor out east makes people to the east get interesting lookin’ eyes, and something out west makes people lose pigment and go ruddy pink with weird noses.  People in between grade into each other, appearance-wise.  Explained more than the video games did, good enough for me.

What about immortals like elves who might have hundred+ year generations?  What about nymphs who can be born by spontaneous generation?  Ehh, maybe the elves mutate faster between generations?  Maybe the nymphs just look like the local humans for reasons?  I dunno.  Would it be better to have the fantasy races have fantasy racial variations like they did with the moon/sun elf biz in older Forgotten Realms products?  I don’t think so, because the point is for a black person to not be made to feel weird for wanting their elf to look like a black person.

The difference between this and the non-explained approach of BG3 and DA4 is your character’s looks do say something about where their ancestors are from, instead of being totally random.  Feels more realistic to me.  If you have opinions on how those video games handled it or what I’m writing on this part of the article, I’m probably only interested if you’re noticeably non-white IRL.  I’ll take your word for it, not asking for a picture, just saying it’s trivially easy to get honky opinions – why, this article for example.  🤡 honk honk.

Monster Races.  Ah, the dark skinned powers of darkness, brutish and muscular, out to pillage the fair-skinned noble people of inherent goodness.  The sheisty secretive cabal of big-nosed swarthy wizards with strange beliefs who are the power behind the throne.  The nomads who look human enough to walk among you and steal your children.  Fantasy is coming from a white place innit.

There are many who say the tainted origins of this stuff mean there is no good way to use them – the kind of SJWs who would boycott Wicked and Spirit Halloween stores.  Innocent child of folly that I am, I love wacky out of control monster people who are up to no good, and don’t think those images influenced me the way they were intended by the anti-semites who originated them, scaring their children racist for centuries.  At the same time, saying “everybody who looks like this acts like that” is bad business, and I don’t truck with it.  I’ll navigate my own honkey path here, hope it’s not too problematic.

So, like, goblins as silly faerie creatures, no rossetti->rowling scheming bankers.  Orcs as big buff barbarians but no more evil than humans who are big buff barbarians.  The barbarian thing raises the issue of cultural stereotypes that don’t hinge on race.  I give that a nod here to say, yeah, like races, avoid saying all the people over here act like that / do that.

Unlike D&D, I’m not hobbled by needing an alignment system.  It’s so baked into that game it wouldn’t be easy to extricate, and that ties it back to its history when orcs were an entry in the Monster Manual that said “Alignment: Chaotic Evil.”  In trying to excise the racism from that in new products, they came up with a vision of orcs that was just bizarre.  No Warhammer waaargh in them at all.

Now were Warhammer‘s orks also a racistic stereotype of barbarian marauder?  Yes, but humans in those games also spent all their time choppin’ heads, so it felt a bit more even-handed.  They were really popular to play.  Outsider view on the UK, I feel like wargamers from lower class backgrounds, in a place with a much more blatant class system than we have in the US, may have identified with the violent punk-rock / metal take on the green guys.  Orks winning the board against humans or elves is like sticking it to the aristocrats, right?

So ungluing the cultural archetype from the race, showing more variety, but keeping a place in the world for players who want to waaargh, that’s how I’d like to do.

Colorism.  The very concept of black magic as evil?  Not great.  On the other hand, what’s a fantasy game without hexing diablos riding thru the night like the demons in Fantasia?  Just gotta try to shake off the stank of this stuff.  Again, I’m far from the scholar the subject of colorism deserves, google that shit if you are unfamiliar.  It’s an aspect of racism that isn’t always strictly drawn on racial lines.  People with darker skin are treated more poorly, to the point they are victimized by a skin-lightening cosmetic industry in some places.  Ill.

Anyway, here’s how I handled dökkálfar/ljósálfar in this other post:

Light Elves.  In an unknown eon, the law of Heaven and chaos of Hell infected the shining host, sowing division.  While high elf rulers remained more or less the same, their subjects divided between light and dark elves.  Light elves can be dark skinned in the south, even very dark skinned, but have some particulars in common.  They tend to live exclusively in settlements, sometimes full cities, and have a society with some sense of law and obedience to hierarchy.  They have skin tones in the local human range, and hair that ranges to lighter, less natural colors.  Light colored eyes?

Dark Elves.  Dark elves have something of the chaos of hell, most notably on their skin, where they have a great variety of hues – all of them unnatural for humankind, whether light or dark.  Their faces are much more expressive than light elves, sometimes lined from big smiles or wacky eyebrow moves, despite their eternal youth.  Some live in settlements but many are nomadic, and they mostly prefer the most rustic places, far from big cities.  Despite the influence of Hell, few would enter into pacts with or worship beings from there.  Mostly their hexing magic takes agnostic forms.

So you can have a light elf much darker than a light-colored dark elf, etc.  Most of these fantasy races don’t have that kind of color-based division built in, like orks is green, any shade.  As far as depictions in the game’s art, just making a point of having the prettiest gentlest people sometimes be the darkest.  If 99% of media 5ever must have dark-skinned people be brutes or bad attitudes whenever they are allowed depiction, people like me gotta counter that when we can.

I’m not drawing any grand conclusions or advancing a big thesis, just considering, at least briefly, how I’ll handle these issues in a game.  Have at thee.

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Yahtzee to Hit

Some RPGs will give you a fistful of dice to roll, and when they’re 6-sided, adding up the pips fast is a useful skill.  Back in time before time when West End Games had the license to make a Star Wars RPG, that was based on d6, and I got pretty good at it.  Conversely, the guy I know with the worst ADHD couldn’t do it for shit.  They call that dyscalculia, I’m told.

Another time I was playing that wild west RPG, but like, the post-apocalypse version, and you could reroll max results.  My gun only did 3d6 damage but I scored like 52 and insta-killed a kinda tough enemy.  Memorable occasions, those imaginary victories.

I’m inclined to make my own TTRPG, if I ever finish it, d6-based like that.  Somebody put up an “open game license” type deal for the old WEG d6 system, which could be a thing to use.  But still, what about those with dyscalculia?  Rules lite is big in the indie space for a good reason.

Have I ever posed this question before?  Don’t know if I have.  How do you prefer to roll, if at all?

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Cootie Catcher

Remember paper fortune tellers?  It’s a basic piece of origami schoolkids have made since who knows when.  You put your hand inside and open it one way and then the other, a much more elaborate way to reach a binary result than flipping a coin.  I dimly recall one being used to see who you’d end up falling in love with, but more clearly I remember a funnier use.

Instead of alternating on some kind of counting system, you alternate with the pincers down on the top of somebody’s head.  One of the results was left blank, the other one had a bunch of weird bugs drawn on it.  If you got the bug result, well, you had cooties, son.  That’s just science.

Hey, that wikipedia article is fun.  Give it a look.

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Typeset Your Transphobia

I recently discovered I’m missing an important piece of gaming history on my bookshelves.  Once upon a time, Palladium Books – not just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as has been reported, but various of their lines of TTRPGs – included transvestism, homosexuality, and pedophilia on their random insanity tables.  Every edition I have of those games do not have those dubious entries (altho arguably some transphobia lingered).  Let’s take a trip back in time…

Palladium Books is basically one guy’s baby, Mr. Kevin Siembieda, some kind of Rust Belt boy with a head full of fantastickal dreamz.  He did some work on other people’s RPGs, mainly as an illustrator, but like so many of us, he was not satisfied with the systems as written.  He had his own ideas, and eventually, he made his own games.  The big early flagship of all this was the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  Compared to D&D’s equivalent products at the time, this was lavishly illustrated – mostly by the man himself.  Every race and character class and monster had high-effort art beside it.  I believe his medium was the humble pencil, but there were no sloppy lines, nothing left unshaded.

I don’t know how he came to be in this position, but he had his own press.  Palladium didn’t just slap a file together and send it to a printer; they made their own books in-house.  Back in the day, there was a profession called “typesetter,” a person with inky fingers pushing little metal blocks into arrays for the printing process.  The typesetter for Palladium was Maryann Siembieda, who I think was Kevin’s wife?  These days I doubt there’s a single RPG publisher who prints their own books, unless it’s some turbohipster that distributes deckled parchment pamphlets inked by ostrich quill for five hundred bucks a pop.

One practical aspect of typesetting was that it strongly encouraged one to recycle material, so if there were systems that could be shared by multiple books, the pages that were already laid out would just have a few minor details tweaked and appear almost the same.  The majority of Palladium’s books used the same font, whether they were fantasy or sci-fi, because that was the font they had in the press.  I’m not clever enough with that shit to tell you what font it is.  Nothing exciting, but still, when I saw it on the advertisements for Palladium’s books in Dragon magazine, I used to get some weird kind of satisfaction from the familiarity.

So.  Random insanity tables.  These were included near the beginning of most Palladium books as an optional way to add character to a character.  They’d be more likely to see use if your character, in play, suffered from a magic spell or circumstance that forced a roll.  And when these rules were first rolled out, they included “transvestism,” wherein you are compelled to wear the clothes of the “opposite sex,” homosexuality, and pedophilia.  I believe homosexuality was phrased more like orientation reversal, so you could roll that twice and end up where you started, or if you started with a gay character, be scared straight.  The idea of randomly contracting pedophilia was somethin’ else.  Aside from the fun-times ableism of this stuff, it was a creepy mess for all the reasons you can deduce with your 2026 bewokenment.

I was first introduced to RPGs by Try-Anything-Once Todd, whose fundie mother and stepfather allowed Palladium Books because technically they weren’t D&D.  Weird times.  I borrowed his books for a few years before I finally started to collect my own, and by the time that happened, all the current editions of their books no longer included these results on that chart.

The insanity chart was still there, for fun-times ableism flavor, but no longer would transgender and/or gay people be so pathologized, or pedophilia be used for a laugh.  This was the early nineties, so good job, Kevin!  Genuinely.  I’m sure you have faults galore, but that was cool.  Starting with Heroes Unlimited and subsequently copied into Rifts, however, characters with “multiple personalities” could have an “opposite sex” personality, which raised its own foolish questions.  Hey, the youths of today what claim they have some flavor of multiple personalities do say those personalities can have different gender identities.  But still, this was in a chart where every other result had some character – hardcase, jokester, wildman, etc – and this one had no trait except being “trapped in the body of” whatever.  Why can’t a trans Sybil also be a hardcase or a jokester?  Hmmm, Kevin?  KEVIN?

If you partake of the art of the past, you will have some things to deal with.  Personally, I’m inclined to give Mr. Siembieda a pass on all of this.  Obviously, this article is using it for a laugh.  Enjoy your genders, people, and deal with your random insanities neurodivergences in whatever ways you see fit.  Game on.

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FtB Vaulderie

I swear I’m gonna stop blogging so often, any day now.  Try not to think I’m dead when that happens.

One of my all-time favorite ttrpg mechanics was “vinculum” in Vampire: The Masquerade.  It was a variant on the Blood Bond™ by which sires would wield cruel power over their childer.  Seems I gotta back this thing up and start over from the beginning.  Lessee…

In that rpg, you create vampires not simply by biting a victim and leaving them alive.  You create a vampire by draining all of somebody’s blood and giving them a little of yours at the end.  I get the impression this was how it was done in Interview with the Vampire?  Sexy.  In this rpg, that set you on a path to a kind of mind control.  Once you drink blood from the same vampire three times, you are blood bound to them.  This is something like being hopelessly in love with them, but worse.  It’s dramatic, but pretty heavy to RP.

The core rulebook is about the most populace political organization of vampires, The Camarilla, who have a quasi-feudal system that is sometimes enforced through blood bonds.  The rival organization, The Sabbat, were formed by baby vampires in ancient times who wanted to escape from blood bondage, and did so by inventing the vaulderie.

I don’t know where the honcho at no-homo-styled gay vampire HQ was getting these names for things, but it was probably a badly abused thesaurus.  The meanings of the names of the big seven vampire clans are fuckin’ embarrassing.  Vaulderie itself sounds like nothing more than the chorus of Der fröhliche Wanderer, tho it probably takes its name from a comparatively peaceful christian sect that became associated with protestantism, the waldensians.  This could have been cribbed from some moldy “list of heresies” that an ignorant modern goth was imagining as bad-ass and evil, even tho heresy against medieval catholicism was usually a brave and good thing at its outset, whatever it became (lutheranism por ejemplo quickly becoming quite vile).  This reminds me of when my sixth grade teacher went on a fundie tirade claiming the peace symbol was a broken cross for pagans, and I mashed it up in my mind with the goat-head cultists in that ’80s Dragnet movie to imagine peace symbols were badass and cool.  It’s laughable.

Anyway, ridiculous terminology accepted, the vaulderie is a magic ritual where the members of a pack of Sabbat vampires all pool their blood in a bowl and get their drank on, replacing tyrannical blood bonds to sires with a mutual bond of a weaker nature, shared between all of the pack members.  This bond is called vinculum, a kind of “blood bond lite.”

Where this got interesting and fun was the random intrigue it could produce.  Vinculum scores were randomly determined, meaning the first time you partake in the vaulderie, you could get a score anywhere from one to ten.  One is a vague fondness, ten is not-quite-as-bad blood bondage.  This was enforced with dice in some way, like, if you want to influence someone, you get more or less dice depending on your scores.

This could make characters with mutually high scores natural allies, characters with low scores giving each other a lot of side-eye, and characters with asymmetric scores having a tyrant/subject relationship.  Since you don’t have an innate sense of what score someone has for you, this made for a lot of intrigue.  What if you know you have a high vinculum to another pack member who is the kind of person to exploit it, and you need to keep it secret from them?  Stuff like that.

For an example, let’s say all the active bloggers in the sidebar at the time I composed this were recruited into the Sabbat, and had to share our blood bondage through vaulderie.  What scores would we have for each other?  Top names show the power you have over the person in the side names.  (built the chart to look good in preview, lotsa variables will make it into gibberish, don’t vex yourself trying to parse it)

__________Mano__William_.__PZ___Adam___Bébé___Charly__/_HJ_._Yemisi
Mano__+____X__/___10______1______3______.6______-.7_____.8_____5
William_++___8______X______10__..__2___.___7_______1_____..6_____6
PZ_______.__5______2_______X_____6__.____2_______.6_____.5_____5
Adam__._.___8______9_______6_____.X__.___.8_______.9_____10__.__6
Bébé___.____8______9_______4_____.1______X_______.6_____.2_____2
Charly___;___6______5_______5____._5_____.10___.___.X_____.4_____6
HJ________._6______6_______4_____.4______1_______.4______X____.3
Yemisi___.___5___/__10_____._2___.__2______5____.___1______1_____X

William would be a shoo-in for pack priest, with so many people so powerfully devoted to him.  Makes sense, he actually wrote for the publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade briefly at some point in the past.  Of the lot of us, PZ is the most resistant to his charms – and William is a powerless thrall to PZ, so he could be the secret power behind William’s font of supernatural charisma.

Aside from William, Yemmy doesn’t like most of us as much as we like her.  I am also not very loyal, except to William and Mano.  Conversely Adam is very fond of most of the pack, no scores lower than 6.  Charly is my biggest fan and HJ has little love for me.  You see how it works.  Marcus escaped this orgy of soul bondage by getting embraced into The Camarilla.

I love random mechanics that produce results that are meaningful in game terms, and The Sabbat Sourcebook had another ace up its sleeve.  Not every pack would do this, but a common way for nomadic Sabbat packs to recruit people was at random – meaning you didn’t get to choose your clan, if your gm enforced this!  Your vampire clan influences your powers and weaknesses, possibly even your appearance.

The time I played this with some homies and self-insert characters, I ended up in the shadowy Lasombra clan.  Feel my inky black tentacles.  Muhahaha!  Wait.  Lemme hit these other guys up…  Wild, I just rolled Lasombra for myself again.  Guess it was meant to be.  Nobody ended up rolling Ventrue, Brujah, Gangrel, or Caitiff.  Keep in mind the Sabbat is the edgelord versions of the usual clans…

Our pack priest William is the dreaded homicidal artist Toreador clan, while his secret master PZ is of the sinister Serpents of Light.  Mano has magical powers of the sorcerous Tremere, Adam is a horrific cenobite-like Tzimisce, and HJ is the hideous monstrosity of the Nosferatu.  Charly is of the deeply ableist Malkavian clan, known for being twice as insane™ as their Camarilla counterparts, and having the power to infect others with MADNESSSSsss..™  Lastly, Yemmy is of the horribly racist Ravnos clan, which are stereotypes of Romani people, with illusion powers and inherent larceny.  I cannot believe that shit was ever acceptable.

Just on the back of these two mechanics -random vinculum and random clan- the Sabbat sourcebooks were my fave ever.  I also liked the paths of Dark Thaumaturgy and other corny edgelord shit.  It was a very good time.  If problematic as balls.

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Murdercat Management

I had a dream that was some kind of medieval fantasy scenario where two opposing sides of a battle had to alter the battlefield to make sure they did not get killed by roaming leopards, and to arrange it so that the other guys were.  Not sure if I was a character or an omniscient watcher, but as I reflect, it was definitely a video game or board game situation.

In fact, if you abstract the idea far enough, there are certainly video games that operate on the same principle.  There is a damaging / dangerous / deleterious presence on the playing field, and the opposing sides can, within constraints, change the barriers and openings on the field to protect themselves or harm their opponent.  I’m not an encyclopedia of gaming history, but let me know if you can think of one like this, in the comments.

And if you can’t think of any, and are fairly certain this is a new cool amazing idea that will get you a bank full of money, have at it.  I don’t care.  Throw me a farthing from the back of your lambo, or don’t.  Hell, I’ll let you have the name, tho it’s not very snappy.  At least it’s alliterative.

Murdercat Management, coming soon to an arcade near you.

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RP by Comment 00008

I will never be able to justify the number of zeroes in front of that number in the title.  This is a bonus post; see the adjacent articles for the regularly scheduled content.  You can still join this RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, or whatever.  This is an “urban fantasy” in an earth-like world.  The characters are students at the equivalent of a community college, for the usual reasons a person might end up there instead of a more prestigious school.  What are you doing here?  What’s your major, something mundane or something adventurous?

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~~~

At Magic Boots, the party was certainly going to burn through the night.  Yes, the prudish human conquerors of The City of Romance had set a two o’clock closing time, but the hearty revelers had literally inhuman stamina, and would simply take the party out into the streets when the bouncers shuffled them through the doors.

It felt like everybody in the building had, at some point, danced with everybody else.  Some debauched characters found dark corners to do a bit more than dance.  What sort of biz might your guy have gotten up to, and with whom?  One of the crew, or a mysterious third party altogether?  Or more than one of the above?

What of the Cortellire Hall freshmen?  Div and Racker were the biggest party animals, in their own distinct ways.  Div took the club for its intended purpose, sharing erotic energy with the masses, experiencing the release of reckless dance, drink, and drug.  Racker partook of his share, but was also getting into other kinds of hijinks, making the bouncers mad and always disappearing before the hammer came down.  At one point he surfed across the dance floor balanced on a folded “wet floor” caution sign, at another he took over the DJ booth and played a bunch of sexual groans and bellows from a soundboard.

The meatheads Tollison, Liu-gon, Markud, and Grundr all had good times and bad – one minute making time with a promising fella, the next finding out it was bad news, the next minute onto another.  Grundr was easy to lose track of at his height.  The tallest meathead was Humuk, which meant he was the easiest to keep an eye out for – and this was good, because he seemed the most out of his depth.  Still, his muscles helped.  He could hold his own when the bawdy got too ardent for his experience level.  He’d find out about himself at his own pace, tho that pace would surely be accelerated by the night’s foolishness.

Josh and Keires were the easiest to lose in the crowd and it was hard to see how they were doing, tho at some point after midnight, Keires used his elemental powers to dance above the crowd’s heads – a spectacle they appreciated.  Ilenka and Kaldonia likewise became hard to see, shorter than the main run of manly dancers.

But trouble was brewing.  The freshmen kept catching haughty looks and threatening body language from a large clique of guys.  A few wore garments or accessories that gave away the source of their solidarity – they were from The University of Romance.  Mostly human and well-off, they seemed to regard the community college kids as a contemptible vulgarian freak show.  The freshmen were holding their own, not letting the insult get out of hand, but as two o’clock drew nigh, it was harder by the minute.

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~~~

RP by Comment 00007

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~Next~

Your first night at community college, the day before your first classes – what a great time to go to a club and guarantee you’d make a terrible impression on your professors.  Magic Boots appeared before you, built into the hollowed-out facade of an old department store on The Boulevard.  Magic lights spelled the name of the business, with a pair of glowing boots beneath them that danced in an eternal animation loop.  This was an adventurer bar, full of men who travel the land getting into hijinks of sword and sorcery, and more settled guys that aspired to adventure themselves, or just liked the company.  Manly romance was entirely possible in this kinda joint (tho note: the GM will not ERP with you), and there were also a few girls or variously gendered people who liked to dance or to watch the story unfold.

Ilmardan the aspiring Illusionist had come from the dorms with a very manly cohort indeed.  The muscly young meatheads included Div the silenus party animal and grappler, Humuk the orcish sportball player, Grundr the dwarven warrior, Tollison the human sports fitness major, Liu-gon the angelic man, and Markud the leopard-headed fencer.  Div had said he didn’t want to show up til after nine, but couldn’t resist the social energy of going with the others.  They’d walked from Cortellire Hall up the hill and south several blocks to find the place, arriving at about eight.

Also along for the ride were some softer types, the roguish human Racker, the A/V nymph Keires, and one human woman, a rough-skinned waif named Ilenka.  Ilmardan expected to meet the lizard madonna Kaldonia and the feyish swordsman Josh in the crowd somewhere, but hadn’t clocked them yet.  Keires looked nervous.  Would their lack of experience cause them to get pushed around by the boisterous men within?  To what extent was being pushed around what he wanted?  Everybody should have limits.

Conversely, Racker was Mr. Cool, and Ilenka was shifty-eyed and smirking.  Div was hard to pin down, weaving out into the crowd and back multiple times, but was always very friendly when he came by.  He said, “This place is great!  Tuition well spent.  Who needs the U of R when your major is partying?”

Tollison said, “Living down to stereotypes, buddy?”

“It isn’t a stereotype.  It’s my culture to be a party animal.  You stiffs need it, don’t you?”

Keires stopped levitating, shrinking away at being pegged for a stiff.  Ilenka wrapped a supportive arm around him.  “You will not be stiff for long.”

Racker said, “This is alright.  I’m gonna find the bar.  Who wants to come with?”

The meatheads pointedly smiled at Ilmardan, who had promised to buy drinks.

Grundr said, “It only needs to be tall and thick!”

“That’s what he said,” said Ilenka.

“Hey-ooooo!,” said Div.

The building was thronging with party people, bustling past each other with intoxicants in hand, getting ready for the proper dancing to begin.  At this point it was head-bobbing at most.  The volume was gonna get cranked before long.  There was a balcony area upstairs, close to the level of the lights and glittering balls, and the downstairs was mostly dance floor, with a bar and restrooms off hidden in darkness.  Was there a kitchen as well?  A few people had snacks.

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Monster People

In my last post on this topic I meant to go deeper into the non-player creatures of the setting, be they animal or monster, but ran out of time.  Life is hectickal.  But I’m just gonna move on.  So.  Playable races.  Gonna run thru some thoughts on them.  First, some other elements of character design that can have relevance to playability and fantasy race design.

LGBTQIAism.  The first book was conceived as being the gay male chauvinist RPG, just to be an old school shock jock.  But also because Frank Frazetta buttocks, the extent anything sufficiently macho wraps around to being gay.  It’d be a bit of artistic fun.  My in-universe excuse was that people think of adventurers as gay, which becomes self-reinforcing as gay dudes flock to adventuring, like IRL with men’s choirs.  When done with that exercise in exclusion, what atonement should I make?  There are already lesbian TTRPGs, like Thirsty Sword Lesbians, f’rinstance, but I’m like, might be fun again, artistically, to re-do the book with more or less the same content, same universe, but turn it into the lesbian chauvinist RPG – and ditto with the transes and aces and so on.

It is a serious risk of getting stepped on by hostile discoursers, but it’s probably a non-issue because this game is very much unlikely to ever happen.  To facilitate my spectrum of foolery I had it something like this:  GayDude RPG The Cockatrice, Lesbian RPG Les Puissantes, Bisexual/Pansexual RPG The Amphisbæna, Trans/Queer/Questioning? RPG AsYetUntitled, and A-spec RPG AsYetUntitled 2.  The in-world stereotypes that result in milieus dominated by given orientations / genders / levels of attraction etc are as follows: Adventurers are gay dudes, Champions of settled places are lesbians, Courtiers in the halls of power are bi, Stars in the performing arts are trans, and Mystics who have the magickalest pursuits are ace.

The Old, the Young, and the Disabled.  It’d be cool to have rules that accommodate playing children or the elderly or people with significant disabilities.  Some games address some of these things, but the rules are often absurd or inadequate to purpose.  Some general thoughts:

Giants are too big / buff to be reasonably balanced in a game, and I once came up with rules to play giant children, as a solution to that.  I liked the idea enough I used it as a core concept in a book I’ve begun for the Les Puissantes setting – a lesbian couple adopts a giant baby who gets into misadventures.  But outside of that, young characters can be cool because everything’s new for them, they have stories inherent to where they are in life that compel people of any age, make us remember being young.  And if one was compelled by horrible dark secrets in their past that nobody wants to hear about, to play young sorcerers in an educational setting, that can be forgivable, as long as literally everything about it in no way shape or form speaks to that player’s unspeakable personal history with such subject matter.

I recall some edition of D&D handling old people by subtracting from their physical attributes and adding to their Wisdom scores.  Don’t you wish that’s how it worked?  In fantasy it can, why not?, but I’d still like to see it at least a bit more realistic.  Particularly an issue of age is that we all become unbelievably frail.  I don’t wanna tell people they gotta do it like that, but having adventures that speak to the challenges of that part of life, while also feeling empowering and having cool drama, well, it can be done.  Likewise disability in general.  Some games give you bonus points for making your guy have one eye and take a penalty on shooting guys, but I think this could be handled better than what I’ve seen thus far.

Immortals.  D&D doesn’t have elves as immortal, just having them live for hundreds of years.  What would be the material difference between that and just having them be immortal?  OK, immortality requires a bit more thought, but I’ve put in the thought, and I think my take works.  Of main player races, elves, dwarves, and nymphs are all going to be immortal.

Demigods.  I had a notion people aiming for high-powered play could run demigods as characters.  They could be related to gods, have inborn divinity like nymphs, or just be a different kinda cat.  Able to do the impossible, at least in some limited way.  Choke the Nemean Lion.  Clean out some stables like Sgt. Slaughter in that one GI Joe episode.

Hybrid children watch the sea, pray for father roaming free.  Why only half-elves and half-orcs?  Come up with rules to mix any and everything.  I don’t love everybody coming up with the most specialest freaks ever, so the party looks like a pizza with anchovies broccoli and marshmallows, but it just makes sense to allow it, so there it is.  I had ideas for two heavily mish-mashed races that became their own thing: Goblinish, who combine human, halfling, and various goblinoid ancestries, and Feyish, who do the same thing with faerie ancestry.

Half-Undead?  My husband was coming up with a character for a fantasy game and I mentioned dhampirs / half-vampires as a possibility, and he came back with half-mummies.  That is brilliantly ludicrous and I loved it a lot, so I’m gonna include them, plus half-zombies, half-skeletons, and half-ghosts.  The fun is in trying to make it make sense.

Changelings.  This idea that a weird enough person might be a substituted faerie child amuses me.  Not sure how I’d play it.

Straight-up Animals.  It’s fun to imagine what an animal thinks like.  You can get good at it, too.  Well, if an animal has thoughts and feelings and agency and ability, why couldn’t it adventure?  I’m not about giving creatures with baby-level intelligence character classes, and thereby burdening myself with adapting a ton of rules to account for non-humanoid form and lack of speech, etc etc, but they could gain levels and travel with a party, sure.

Anyway, the playable race big list as it’s taking shape thus far, with more random thoughts on some:

Humans (Human, Gayan, Mammal).  If I was in a prickish mood and had groveling submissives for players, I might insist on everyone playing humans, so the magical races could seem more interesting and cool by comparison.  Like, to enforce a sense you are the normal person in a world of exciting strangeness.  Mostly no.

Halflings (Halfling, Gayan, Mammal).  D&D genericized this epithet for hobbits to avoid trouble with the Tolkien estate, I’m sure.  I like ’em.  They’re in.  I despise how D&D 3e made them skinny.  Guess what?  They’re all fat now.  Skinniest one is as fat as me.  Put on some weight Frodo.  It’s a race of Samwises.

Dwarves (Dwarf, Celestial, Mammal).  Here is where I come to a challenge, which is establishing the aesthetics of the supernatural in my world.  Fantasy dwarves ain’t just humans with diminutive stature from a congenital condition.  In the fantasy genre some conventions have been established, and one is that this is a race of beefy warriors.  This is a very popular idea now and I’m not one to buck the trends that completely.  There is also an image I like of them from older mythology, as gnarled and wizened blacksmiths.  I suppose if you’re built meaty and you lose the meat, you’ll end up with knobby joints.

On the other hand, I favor making these guys closely associated with giants and gods like they are in Norse mythology, and that, to me, says they should be immortal.  How to be wizened without senescence?  I think… they do get old, but not infirm – just weaker and wrinkled and wise – and that it takes a few thousand years to happen, and that it does not progress unto death.  So in kingdoms that have had a very long time in safety, much of the population will be lil knobbies.

Bearded women?  That was me yesterday at work.  I used to not be hip to the queerness so much, but now i’m like, bring it on.  So, dwarves.  The aesthetic as established by shit like Warhammer.  Done.

Giants (Giant, by Race, Celestial, Mammal).  Lot of issues as to whether or not these should be playable, but they should at least be present.  They are so bound with gods and angels in Western mythology that I make them the Celestial type.  Giants of a scarier nature will be called ogres.  D&D has a dozen or so types of giant.  I don’t want that many, but there’ll probably be a few.  No strong ideas, except that the smallest should be around ten feet tall, largest over twenty feet tall.

High Elves (Elf, Faerie, Wild, Mammal).  Elves present the biggest aesthetic issue of core races.  Should they just look like humans with pointed ears, as they did in most of the painted art from D&D past, or should they look like the Communion alien with knife ears from 3e, or the bulb-headed stick insects with weird horizontal ears from anime, or what?  I do not want them to look like humans.

But my husband insists they should be capable of looking sexy, and too inhuman is a dealbreaker for the likes of him.  No monsterfucker he.  OK, ears are less important to the extent one looks human, so he’s more flexible on that, tho not down with total fennec fox ears.  I was thinking, narrow frames, largish but not inhumanly large eyes with long lashes, and my dude said maybe they could have deer or cow -like eyes.  I sez, if they’re full on like that, they will look creepier than you’d prefer.  Compromise in intraspecific variability.  Elves will have eyes that range from lashy human to fully cattle-like, ears that vary from region to region but are at least a bit large and pointy.

Lastly, on subject of bod and build.  I like the idea they can be fat, but it’s on a narrow frame.  If you have a practiced eye for the details of human anatomy, you know what I’m talking about.  Some people are genuinely large-boned, some narrow-boned, and people of either type can be slim to muscular to fat – it just looks different.  Most elves will be spindly but some can get beeg as one pleases.  However, I will brook no broad-bodied elves, like Halsin in Baldur’s Gate 3.  That was bullshit.

My husband sez they should be short, many prefer them tall.  My compromise is that the “royal” populace of high elves are as tall as tallish humans, while the rest are short.  High elves would be nearly the rarest and exist in mixed population with other kinds.  Essentially the royal family from time immemorial, they do blend with other races and gradually fade from the world, but still exist, usually as leaders of other elven kinds.  As many modern people lose interest in inherited authority, some have become isolated in small communities of their own –  sometimes among the wealthy of humankind.  Skin color range from human-like to greige, ears longer and pointier than some.  Probably I’ll have more specific ideas at some point.

Light Elves (Elf, Faerie, Wild, Mammal).  In an unknown eon, the law of Heaven and chaos of Hell infected the shining host, sowing division.  While high elf rulers remained more or less the same, their subjects divided between light and dark elves.  Light elves can be dark skinned in the south, even very dark skinned, but have some particulars in common.  They tend to live exclusively in settlements, sometimes full cities, and have a sense that society requires some sense of law and obedience to hierarchy.  They have skin tones in the local human range, and hair that ranges to lighter, less natural colors.  Light colored eyes?  I’m undecided.

Dark Elves (Elf, Faerie, Wild, Mammal).  Dark elves have something of the chaos of hell, most notably on their skin, where they have a great variety of hues – all of them unnatural for humankind, whether light or dark.  Their faces are much more expressive than light elves, sometimes lined from big smiles or wacky eyebrow moves, despite their eternal youth.  Some live in settlements but many are nomadic, and they mostly prefer the most rustic places, far from big cities.  Despite the influence of Hell, few would enter into pacts with or worship beings from there.  Mostly their hexing magic takes agnostic forms.

Garbage Elves (Elf, Faerie, Wild, Mammal).  At some point, certain populations of light elves spent so long living in squalor at the fringes of other race’s cities that they developed their own characteristics.  They look slightly more human than other light elves, with more pronounced noses and facial features, and can develop male pattern baldness in their early hundreds.  Inspired by Einstürzende Neubaten, they are interested in art and radical politics.

Murder Elves (Elf, Faerie, Wild, Mammal).  Some faerie folk live to murder the innocent – mostly by drowning but sometimes by knives or fists or poison or strangling.  Murder elves may have bred with these beings in the past, or just developed a cultural affinity with them.  Were they originally light elves or dark elves or even high elves?  Unknown.  Skin shades slightly unnatural / greyish sometimes, unique among elves they have hairy legs.  They have a talent for looking beautiful to victims up until the moment of truth.  Also unique among elves, they live like solitary predatory animals.  No tribes.

Glamer Elves (Elf, Faerie, Wild, Mammal).  A few tribes of dark elves went hard for magic, turning themselves into more magickal creatures than most elves.

Goblinoids (Goblin, by Race, Faerie, Wild).  I am fairly undecided what my goblinoid races should be.  I don’t wanna just crib the D&D set.  Minimum there’ll be goblins and orcs; no idea why D&D felt the need to not have orcs be goblinoid.  Warhammer FRP had a tiny race called snotlings that were kinda fun.  Again tho, there’s an aesthetic issue.  Gotta commit to some particulars.  Well, orcs have, like dwarves, become hard codified by geek culture.  Gotta be buff, have a fanged underbite, small but pig-like nose maybe.  I could probably consult with some dorks about what look is the most fuckable and run with that.

As for goblins, they should look silly.  A lot of depictions these days have mini-noses, but what about long noses?  Not like that jowling kowling antisemitism that was inherited from Christina Rossetti, but like human-faced tengu from Japanese art, or Cyrano de Bergarac?  I like it, but it does make them look less like relatives with orcs.  I’ll work it out later.

How about spriggans or red caps, other naughty faeries?  Goblinoid?  Maybe.

Goblinish (Faerie, Goblin, Human &/or Halfling, Wild, Mammal).  Some goblinoid communities are very open to breeding with whoever, and end up blended with humans and halflings as well.  This is the “goblinish” race, which has extremely varied appearance, but a shared culture wherever they are found.  Usually on the smaller side of human height, gangly, unusually colored, and fangy.

Feyish (Faerie, Human &/or Halfling &/or Elf, Wild, Mammal).  Likewise some faerie communities are mixed up, becoming the “feyish” race.  Like goblinish they can range from very short to very tall, lots of low-key unnatural skin or hair colors, but unlike goblinish they almost always have pointed ears and no fangs.  Often on the shorter side of human height, but well-formed.

Faeries (Faerie, by Race, Wild).  What of leprechauns, clurichauns, brownies, banniks, domovoi, pookas, pixies, sprites, gnomes, etc etc?  I’ll include at least several, probably by less culturally specific names.  The key issues of these weirdos are:  How magic are they?  How small are they?  And keeping their flavor distinct, that no two races would be overly similar.

Murder Faeries (Faerie, by Race, Wild).  As I said before, I don’t wanna make two hundred variants of murderhorse, but I do want to cover at least some amount of the faeries that live for murder.  Kelpies, rusalka, whateva.

Oread (Nymph, Earth, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Nymphs get into that question again of aesthetics.  I was really really torn on how to make them different from humans and elves, still feel special and distinct.  Like the makeup crew on Star Trek: The Next Generation making up new aliens and always putting a lil putty on the bridge of their nose.  It’s rough.  Settled on some ideas.  They are shorter than human but proportioned like young adults (try to get away from pedo fantasies which the original nymphs, to some extent, were), and can grow thin facial and body hair, unlike most elves.  Low key self-illuminated, where light and shadow don’t affect them as strongly as they should.  Usually they have one or more additional strange features by type, and odd supernatural properties.

Their flesh is meat-like and bleeds, but is much less internally distinct than mortal tissues, not driven by the furious pump of a heart – thus they bleed weakly.  Their blood is considered magic and they are poached for it.  They have less body variety than humans, never getting very large from muscle or fat, never getting very thin.  They do not require food or water, only consuming it for pleasure.  This allows them to be even lazier than other immortals that can die of starvation, and sometimes they go dormant for centuries at a time.

Most are born from spontaneous generation though they can reproduce the usual means.  When they do, it’s usually because of the desires of a mortal lover, so not true nymphs at that point.  Being able to appear in the middle of nowhere and possibly never be found by other nymphs, they have no true culture of their own except that which they improvise when they are fortunate enough to meet.

Oreads are born out of stony terrain, usually mountains or valleys, and look something like living marble – moreso the closer you get to their hands and feet.  Their hair is in earth tones.  They have the ability to slowly sink into or move through earth and stone.

Aurae (Aura, Nymph, Air, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Aurae are born in the sky at random, usually from high clouds in blue skies.  Then the babies fall with no parachute and grapple with Patrick Swayze until he pulls the ripcord a little too low, and they land hard, and then Patrick calls them a “radical sunuvabitch.”  They aren’t the only nymphs born from the sky, but they are the floatiest, drifting over the ground more than they plant their feet on it.  Their hair is white to blue and always seems to be moving in a stiff breeze.

Dryads (Dryads, Nymph, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Dryads are strongly associated with trees.  Rumor has it they’re bound to a specific tree, that their life will end if it’s cut down, but that’s more a matter of habit.  They can pass through wood and often take residence in a favored tree.  They can be mistaken for human more easily than many nymphs, but when encountered in groups their similarity heightens the subtle oddness of them.  In the right light, whorls can be seen in their skin like wood grain.

Naiads (Naiads, Nymph, Water, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Naiads are spontaneously born in streams, rivers, lakes, and tide pools.  This has them more exposed than some other young nymphs, and they are sometimes eaten by predatory animals before they can grow.  Their ability to move through the water is not properly swimming – water moves around them, pushing them where they want to go.  This ability also lets them walk on water.  Naiads have pearlescent sclera and teeth, tho in some it is more subtle than others, and their hair seems perpetually wet, floating in the air as if they were underwater.  Some have fish-like coloration in skin, hair, or eyes, but more often they are conventional human colors.

Lampades (Lampades, Nymph, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Lampades are spontaneously born from artificial fire, especially very large furnaces, ovens, kilns, or fireplaces.  Very rare, but often born in groups of two to five, which makes up for that a little.  They are often favored as pets or assistants by unscrupulous sorcerers, and so are culturally associated with magic, tho they aren’t inherently more magic than any nymph.  Lampades are elementals of the night itself, and the fear which fuels the fires mortals use to keep it at bay.  But the ones born to bakers are just happy muffin-makers, so it’s a mixed bag of goths and foodies.

They are immune to fire.  They are very pale or very dark for the area where they are born – no in-between – and have hair with no highlights, just a black void.  When exposed to fire their hair can collect embers which take a longer time to burn out than normal.

Hyades (Hyade, Nymph, Air, Water, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Hyades are born in the sky like Aurae, but only on the greyest and rainiest days.  They quickly wash to earth, collecting in puddles, which makes them vulnerable again to predatory animals.  Born in groups of three to seven, this balances that mortality somewhat.  Hyades are elementals of tears, loss, and inescapable emotion.  Their happiness is always bittersweet.  They can move like water over the land, sliding or rushing, and have shining grey eyes.  Many favor sleeping in lakes, a few in mixed flocks with Naiads.

Maenads (Maenad, Nymph, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal, Wild, Vice Elemental).  There are places where the elemental planes and the outer wilds intrude on Gaya, and through these the vice elementals (such as satyrs, sileni, and centaurs) of the Wild acquire more human-like company.  Maenads are born into the wilderness wherever vice elementals pass into the material world, and are adopted into the party.  It’s a strange existence.  Because they look very much like regular humans, vice elementals develop an unfair reputation for kidnapping or tempting children to join their drunken revelry, but these creatures are far from human.  Not every satyr is a vice elemental, a member of the rampaging bacchanals, but every maenad is.  Their minds are possessed, and they can be very violent to any who stand in their way.

They are born of Gaya the same as all Nymphs, but corrupted by birth in the borderlands of the Wild, and can travel freely between those worlds when in wild places.  A large gathering of maenads has the power to transport a whole group of revelers into or out of the Wild, even from the heart of a city.  They have typical human colors, those with fairer skin often flushed at the cheeks.  Often have heavy eyelids and bits of debris stuck in their hair.

Hesperides (Hesperide, Nymph, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Hesperides are born from agriculture, from the most perfectly cultivated plants bearing the most perfect fruit.  While this could lead to them being adopted by poor families, far more often they are stolen and hoarded by the rich – to the extent their culture is bound up with royalty and the halls of power.  They are held as prizes by humanity, sometimes as mates but more often as living works of art in the castles of kings.

Hesperides can move through wood like Dryads but are less accustomed to it.  Their hair is the color of wood but glossy like it was deeply lacquered, almost always perfectly coiffed.  Their sclera and fingernails have a golden or silver sheen.  The golden hour has a special lure for them, and they can be seen late in the day in silent communion with the sky.

Asterides (Asteride, Nymph, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Asterides are born to clear night skies and fall to earth as shooting stars.  Like Hyades this is in groups, which offsets the high mortality rate of being exposed to predatory beasts.  Their hair is the color of night sky, black but sometimes colorful with nebulae or aurorae.  Motes of light like tiny stars develop in their hair.  Sometimes they drift free, moving like cottonwood pollen in the breeze.  Their eyes are very deep black and very sparkly.  They can float and fly, but less adroitly than aurae.  They enjoy the parties people throw to while away long nights, rarely becoming swept up with maenads.  Mortals like to claim them as spooky night guardians, especially sorcerers, but they are seldom caught as young as hesperides, and are more willful and vengeful.

Heliads (Heliad, Nymph, Gayan, Divinity, Mammal).  Heliads are born from morning sunlight, which falls most fully on broad surfaces like cliff faces and large walls and houses.  Those that dwell in nature like to visit roads and break bread with mortals there.  Those that are born to the habitations of mortals are often adopted and held like prizes.  Something about heliads seems more powerful or commanding to them, and so their bondage is usually less like gilded cage slavery than that of some other nymphs.  They can levitate less adroitly than asterides and aurae, but doing so also causes their skin to glow brightly, near bright as the sun the longer they keep it up, so they only use the power when they’re ok with blinding bystanders.

When heliiads go dormant it is often on the rooftops of lofty human structures, among gargoyles.  They are never pale, and the darker skinned have a thin golden sheen wherever their melanin is the most dense.  Their skin has more internal light than other nymphs, which can still seem subtle in bright daylight, but at night makes them stand out like animate candles.  They cannot be blinded by light, and find solace looking directly at the sun.

Animal-Headed People (Mammal-bodied, by Animal-head, Gayan).  Animal-headed people are said to be cursed humans, and their bodies more closely resemble those of humans than of elves or orcs, in proportion and variety.  Those with the heads of animals that are typically giant are taller than humans by a few feet, but not so huge as a buffalo or elephant.  They are a true race, breeding easily with each other regardless of animal type, and, oddly, their offspring can be any animal type at all, only a slightly higher chance of being the same as one of their parents.  When they breed with other species of humanoid, the child will always have some features of the animal-headed parent’s animal type.  Scholars argue about it all.  Culturally, while they mostly keep to their own, they act much like humans and have much cultural exchange with them – more evidence of ancient kinship with them.

Animal Races (by Race, by Animal types, Gayan).  I like the idea of more animal-like species existing, but each being more consistently this or that type of animal.  I drew a scribble of a lizard dude I liked once, put me in mind of a lizard species where all the members could look like different types of lizard.  Another idea I liked was a lizard race of viviparous lady clones, I called lizard madonnas.  Cat people and dog people have an obvious appeal.  I dunno.

Lycanthropes (by Race, by Animal types, Cursed, Gayan, Demonic).  Had some notions on werewolves, werehawks, wereserpents, weregoats, and werejackals.

Talking Animals (by Animal types, Wild).  Emeffs on some Narnia shit, hang out with faeries.  Maybe I should do a Pliny and have cranes be at war with dwarves.

Magical Animals are not a playable race, or at least, unlike everything in this list, cannot have character classes.

Ogres (Ogre, by Race, Demonic).  These are demonic mirrors of the celestial giants.  Generally not as large at the upper limit, but more likely to have strange or monstrous features and savage demeanors.  One type of ogre are the læstrigons, which have scaly torsos, black serpent-like hair, one to three small horns, and goat-like legs with black hair from about the mid-thigh down.  They are renowned for smelling bad, but if one has decent hygiene their strange reptile musk is tolerable, even pleasing to a person who holds affection for one.  However, no small amount of them are nightmarish unlovable cannibals, so that makes such affection rare.

Lamias (Lamia, by Race, Demonic).  Demonic mirrors of the various animal people of the Wild, lamias are a host of chimerical monsters that sometimes share cities in the Screaming Realm with ogres.  They are usually human sized or larger, but not large for giants.  Most of them are female, and as immortals who are capable of giving birth, they are known to regulate their population by cannibalism of their own children.  The main run of their cultures are cruel and brutal, but there are outliers and escapees from that world who seek a better life.

Cambions (Demonic, by Race).  The first generation children of hell’s demons with mortals, usually the product of a succubus or incubus.

Nephilim (Celestial, by Race).  The first generation children of heaven’s angels with mortals, usually the product of fallen angels who are at odds with their former masters.

Bastards (Demonic, by Race).  Subsequent generations born to cambions are closer to being mortal, with few obvious tells of their ancestry.

Perfecti (Celestial, by Race).  Subsequent generations born to nephilim are closer to being mortal, with few obvious tells of their ancestry.

Draconics (Dragon, by Race).  Some few dragons are shapeshifters that like to get with mortals.  The offspring that aren’t killed in infancy by horrified midwives grow up scaly, and in rare places, there can be entire communities of such people.

Silver-Eyed (Astral, by Race).  People who lived on the Astral Plane or those descended from them, who may have had ancient ancestry among the greys or other astral weirdos.  They mostly look like regular Gayans, but with moony silver eyes and a psychic powers.

Hybrids (Grey, Astral, by Race).  Alien-human hybrids!  Buzzing implants!  The government doesn’t want you to know that the greys sometimes intentionally have children with mortal races, producing these weirdos that lurk on the fringes of their societies, or are taken into the astral plane to serve unknowable purposes of their alien parents.

Greys (Grey, Astral).  Greys are big-eyed but otherwise weak-featured bipeds from the outer reaches of the Astral Plane, who sometimes visit Gaya in shining silver vessels to scare humans with light shows.  Play those big notes.  Blow out the glass on your pickup truck.  Hide your cattle, and watch for the probe.

Satyrs (Satyr, Wild, Mammal, Human, Goat).  Goat people.  Like pipes.  Many join the roving bacchanals and become vice elementals, but not all.

Sileni (Silenus, Wild, Mammal, Human, Ass).  Donkey people.  Many join the roving bacchanals and become vice elementals, but not all.

Centaurs (Centaur, Wild, Mammal, Human, Horse).  Horse people.  Some few join bacchanals as vice elementals, but more live in small tribes with slightly less rambunction.

OK, I’m running out of time to do this anymore.  I’ll just list out some more shit, ask me if any of it sounds interesting.

Koneira, Crowten, Shroomen, Fleurs, Nightshades, Rudewood Golems, Cactals, Half Vampires, Half Ghosts, Half Zombies / Ghouls, Half Mummies, Half Skeletons (sans undertales lol), Undeen, Sylpheen, Salymeen, Gnymeen, Molecules, Shellbound, and Robots.

Jellies (no idea).  I’m given to understand this is a popular internet fetish, so maybe I should include ’em.

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alright i go sleep now