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What is the best version of El? This poll is closed. |
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| Elminster |
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20 | 6.45% |
| Elmara |
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20 | 6.45% |
| Entwine |
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13 | 4.19% |
| GURPS |
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99 | 31.94% |
| El Kabong |
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153 | 49.35% |
| Elves |
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5 | 1.61% |
| Total: | 310 votes | ||
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Speaking of fantasy races, does anyone remember reading a thing from here about redone orcs? It basically described them as a constantly reincarnated race, birthed from a mysterious waterfall in the mountains. Since they have no concept of true death, they settle most of their conflicts violently. The realization that all the other races suffered true death was massively upsetting to the orcs. Is this ringing any bells?
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Aug 18, 2014 03:16
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 11:35 |
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Tollymain posted:new idea: elves of any flavor don't exist, and we come up more interesting fantasy species than longlived pointy-ear humans Look at this mortal! __/ _/ / 
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Aug 18, 2014 03:16
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Tollymain posted:new idea: elves of any flavor don't exist, and we come up more interesting fantasy species than longlived pointy-ear humans Okay, but hear me out on this: Fantasy Vulcans
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Aug 18, 2014 03:18
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Aug 18, 2014 03:21
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 Amazingly this was not a quote. I am just slow.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:25
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Isn't that a pretty standard "fish-person" design? (No elves. Just  ,  and  --Jagged Lagoon, a game about vacations in paradise...with hot guys! And dictators! And guns! And hot shirtless guys who shoot dictators with guns! Yes, I have been hooked on Jagged Alliance recently, why do you ask  )
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Aug 18, 2014 03:26
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Davin Valkri posted:Isn't that a pretty standard "fish-person" design?
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Aug 18, 2014 03:28
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Replace elves with Elvises.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:29
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Tollymain posted:new idea: elves of any flavor don't exist, and we come up more interesting fantasy species than longlived pointy-ear humans The thing is that humans are gonna be playing these things so writing something completely alien is certainly cool but it's not going to attract the same amount of attention as things that're easy to relate to.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:29
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E:^^^^^ basically.Zurui posted:Okay, but hear me out on this: This, but unironically, also they are asian-people with pointy ears, and culturally based on three kingdoms era china.*  Yes, I'm actually doing this, yeah it's hackneyed as gently caress, but I think I might be able to make something cool of it. 
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Aug 18, 2014 03:31
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Like hear me out, what if there were Senegalese elves and Chinese elves and Dutch elves and Brazilian elves and not just some stupid fantasy monoculture
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Aug 18, 2014 03:33
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Tollymain posted:new idea: elves of any flavor don't exist, and we come up more interesting fantasy species than longlived pointy-ear humans OTOH in light of stuff I've been reading lately I kind of want to rethink the whole concept of races in my games and deal more with cultures.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:38
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"Elf" is just shorthand for any fantasy race that thinks they're better than you, but can't prove it by sleeping on a pile of gold.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:40
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Swagger Dagger posted:Like hear me out, what if there were Senegalese elves and Chinese elves and Dutch elves and Brazilian elves and not just some stupid fantasy monoculture Well yeah, there'd be this big empire but several local cultures alongside the dominant one. Everything would be predominantly chinese in theme but: You'd have Persian/Byzantine elves in the west, Japanese-styled elves in the east, Mongolians/Snow Elves to the north, and Indian styled elves in the south.  Edit: vvvv You can do a real quick summary type of thing in your main book with the promise of a "book all about your setting's elves" to come later. It's lovely to make something like that a core part of a game, but there's definitely people who like that kind of stuff and constitute a market. Error 404 fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 03:43
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Swagger Dagger posted:Like hear me out, what if there were Senegalese elves and Chinese elves and Dutch elves and Brazilian elves and not just some stupid fantasy monoculture I think the problem in general is that you can't have fifty thousand pages to devote to exploring elven cultures (culture in general, too), so you kind of have to end up only focusing on a few of them. And I don't think there's actually a way around this beyond limiting the scope of the game (like, say, Dark Sun), which is obviously something that's not appropriate for every game.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:43
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Swagger Dagger posted:Like hear me out, what if there were Senegalese elves and Chinese elves and Dutch elves and Brazilian elves and not just some stupid fantasy monoculture That's literally Shadowrun.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:45
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Swagger Dagger posted:Elves are cool, just say they come in a variety of skin tones like literally everything else that exists Technically, 4e did this, as every single race in the first PHB except Dragonborn came in all the skin tones that humans did (plus reds for tieflings). Unfortunately, the art rarely followed up on this.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:47
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:That's literally Shadowrun. Shadowrun elves are like the single most stereotypical elves in gaming. They're all smugly superior racist pricks who love nature and are good at magic it's just that some of them have cyberarms.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:47
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Fantasy monocultures are a thing that has tons of momentum behind it, probably because anthropology isn't as interesting as polearms or hit tables or harlot charts and because it's a lot easier to wrap your head around ELF PEOPLE TALK LIKE THIIIS instead of thinking of them as an entirely separate people
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Aug 18, 2014 03:48
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Darwinism posted:Fantasy monocultures are a thing that has tons of momentum behind it, probably because anthropology isn't as interesting as polearms or hit tables or harlot charts and because it's a lot easier to wrap your head around ELF PEOPLE TALK LIKE THIIIS instead of thinking of them as an entirely separate people I don't know, like I said above, the problem is that you hit a bunch of roadblocks when you're writing the actual book. You're limited by word count, you're limited by what you're writer can actually put out, you're limited by how much your writer can put out and still stay fresh, you're limited by everyone else in the process dealing with the writer's output, you're limited by the reader's willingness to put up with 1000 words of elves, all that. It is pretty flatly impossible to put enough words into a bunch of different cultures to make them all fleshed out, particularly when you have a bunch of different races, even if you want to.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:52
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-Elves are low-G spacers who spend most their time in cryo while they slowboat between destinations. They claim to have long memories but that's just a bluff. If one's claiming to have been there, done that or seen it they're probably going off archived material or information from another spacer who actually was there, passing along the stories to look impressive. -Goblins, gnomes and dwarves are genetweaked to take up less space and use up less resources, freeing up more instead for "practical" purposes on their ships. Dwarves in particular are adapted to handle the strain of their huge-engined ships. -Cyclopes hacked apart and rewired most their visual cortex to make room for alternate sensory options and other cybernetic interfaces. They didn't need to give up an eye to do so but it became a mark of commitment or something. These are all dumb names earthbound baselines give to the pusthumans hanging around in orbit and beyond. And as far as I got with some halfassed "fantasy beings relocated to a sci-fi setting" brainstorm. Or maybe elves are Martians colonists embarking on a centuries-long terraforming project, driven to see it's fruition with their own eyes. They pursue longevity and ecological research with equal fervor.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:56
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A picture is also worth a thousand words, and some things can be better said with art anyway.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:57
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Tulul posted:I don't know, like I said above, the problem is that you hit a bunch of roadblocks when you're writing the actual book. You're limited by word count, you're limited by what you're writer can actually put out, you're limited by how much your writer can put out and still stay fresh, you're limited by everyone else in the process dealing with the writer's output, you're limited by the reader's willingness to put up with 1000 words of elves, all that. Yeah, as much as we might want things to be fully fleshed out there's essentially no way they'll ever be aside from either token differences or no-really-they're-alien differences. This isn't really bad, it's just what is, because no one's really going to read what amounts to an anthropology textbook on a race that still won't encompass the same amount of diversity found in humanity. So for the sake of playability things sort of need to be framed in generalizations.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:57
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Everything wrong with that particular sort of nerd can be summed up in "finds charts of medieval european weaponry more interesting than the study of how we came to be humans."
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Aug 18, 2014 03:59
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Funguschat is from like a page ago, but I'd like a setting similar to the Ambergris series, where a mysterious race of fungus people lives underneath a big city and everyone is horribly racist to them and then they rise up and kick everyone's rear end.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:00
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Zurui posted:Everything wrong with that particular sort of nerd can be summed up in "finds charts of medieval european weaponry more interesting than the study of how we came to be humans." I dunno, charts of weapons are a lot easier to look at and go "Woah that sharp piece of metal on a stick is pretty cool looking" than the entire history of the entirety of humanity
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Aug 18, 2014 04:01
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Tulul posted:Shadowrun elves are like the single most stereotypical elves in gaming. They're all smugly superior racist pricks who love nature and are good at magic it's just that some of them have cyberarms. Those are just the ones from the elf nations and that's because fantasy elves influenced their society so they would be stereotypes. The Tir's are pretty much cyberpunk fantasy Israels. The nature thing also describes most of the Americas outside of the UCAS, CAS, and Aztlan. EDIT: Those fantasy elves are Earthdawn elves btw, so literal sword and sorcery elves who have been alive for close to 10,000 years. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 04:02
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FewtureMD posted:Speaking of fantasy races, does anyone remember reading a thing from here about redone orcs? It basically described them as a constantly reincarnated race, birthed from a mysterious waterfall in the mountains. Since they have no concept of true death, they settle most of their conflicts violently. The realization that all the other races suffered true death was massively upsetting to the orcs. I remember this and I thought it was awesome, but I don't remember where I read it exactly.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:03
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I mean you can say no one will read an anthro textbook, but I shelled out cash for the Guide to Glorantha because I am a huge nerd. Also, let me sell you on Glorantha briefly if "fungus elves" didn't already do so: Every year, one of the mightiest empires in the world sends out an expedition of heroes specially equipped to kick the poo poo out of the god of cold and ice. How well they do determines how mild the following winter is. Sometimes they die and winter is especially lovely. I wish I lived in a world where the president could actually say "Well last winter sucked, so we're sending in the tanks this time around."
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Aug 18, 2014 04:07
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Those are just the ones from the elf nations and that's because fantasy elves influenced their society so they would be stereotypes. The Tir's are pretty much cyberpunk fantasy Israels. I... know that. That was partly my point. Shadowrun has a bunch of uber-stereotypical immortal elves running around that the designers loved to wank off. quote:The nature thing also describes most of the Americas outside of the UCAS, CAS, and Aztlan. That's because Shadowrun is the most blatantly racist mainstream RPG ever.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:08
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Benagain posted:I wish I lived in a world where the president could actually say "Well last winter sucked, so we're sending in the tanks this time around." We probably could do this in the real world, but nuking the polar ice caps is frowned upon.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:08
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Benagain posted:I mean you can say no one will read an anthro textbook, but I shelled out cash for the Guide to Glorantha because I am a huge nerd. I like that Glorantha isn't just a world full of myth, but one where the inhabitants actually deal with it directly.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:10
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Tulul posted:I think the problem in general is that you can't have fifty thousand pages to devote to exploring elven cultures (culture in general, too), so you kind of have to end up only focusing on a few of them. And I don't think there's actually a way around this beyond limiting the scope of the game (like, say, Dark Sun), which is obviously something that's not appropriate for every game. Elves, Orcs, Halfings, Dwarves, etc are humans with magic modifications. Every culture has them. BOOM.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:13
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Darwinism posted:I dunno, charts of weapons are a lot easier to look at and go "Woah that sharp piece of metal on a stick is pretty cool looking" than the entire history of the entirety of humanity "Woah, this Polynesian wind-and-wave sea navigation is pretty cool." "Dude, check out this period when we actually shared the Earth with other intelligent hominids." "Whew, braving those mountains to find a new home for our starving clan was really challenging." You're right, tables of falchion derivatives are more fun.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:16
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Elves, Orcs, Halfings, Dwarves, etc are humans with magic modifications. Every culture has them. BOOM. Then you're just trending monosubcultural, because writing out the reactions of every single culture to the different modified humans runs into the same problems. That's a cool idea in general, though. I think most fantasy settings implicitly "solve" the problem by taking the races as a part of a multicultural whole. If you have Appalachian dwarves, you don't also need Canadian dwarves, because you've already got poutine-swilling elves up north.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:22
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Tulul posted:Shadowrun elves are like the single most stereotypical elves in gaming. They're all smugly superior racist pricks who love nature and are good at magic it's just that some of them have cyberarms. They also took over Ireland, leading one of my friends to posit a violent IRA resistance to "those loving Keebs."
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Aug 18, 2014 04:33
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Elves are bad when they are smug perfect creatures who never fail. Elves are great when they are smug "perfect" creatures who always fail. Its great having a whole race of Theon Greyjoys and Pete Campbells.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:43
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In my (unfinished and mostly abandoned) setting, Elves were one of the few species that don't die of old age, and due to this they're terrifying isolationists. They're scared pissless of dying so any adventuring elves are seen as having a death wish, and the ones that stay at home do not let outsiders near them, those that attempt get murdered. People do not trust elves, and many rumors of haunted places are just hidden elf colonies.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:59
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All elves are Scooby-Doo villains.
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Aug 18, 2014 05:00
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 11:35 |
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Bongo Bill posted:All elves are Scooby-Doo villains. Quick, what classes and races would Mystery Inc play as?
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Aug 18, 2014 05:02
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