"I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own!"

In which I discourse on the remainder of the available races and, perhaps more importantly, show my working as to why some more traditional choices have been shunned from my world.

Trolls: The descendents of the mountains themselves, born from the great rocks struck from the cliffs by magic in time gone by. I have a soft-spot for Trolls (ironically, as they have literally no soft-spots. This stuff writes itself.). As mentioned previously, they have no spirits and are essentialy immune to spirit magic and cannot interact with the spirit plane at all. By this I mean things such as disease spirits cannot possess them or directly interact with them, but ice spirits (for exampe) can still affect them indirectly with their icy spells. A nice little touch I think, that should make them interesting to play. Obviously, strength is a plus, but dexterity suffers as they have a lack of fine motor skills. Lack of a spirit also means POW is a bit below average too, so expecting these to be fighters mainly with the odd priest of the Trollgod thrown in. That said, camoflage abilities in natural/stone-based environs might make highwayman or thief a viable option?

Pixie: Having thoroughly examined the stats from as many angles as possible, this is one race that I want to include as it brings a completely different perspective to the playing field. However, it is going to be pretty much limited to magical classes due to small size and thus low strength, and crucially tiny weapons. So she's going to get a load of extra points to buy common magic with and probably get a free starting sorcery/divine/spirit skill too. Still can be specialised to either out and out combat (although not a front-line character, with an average of 2hp per hit location...) or infiltration and espionage fun.

 Myrmidon: Ant men (but not from Mars)! Minor telepathic abilities? At least something akin to aura sensing or similar will feature in this race as a unique ability to represent the hive mind. Otherwise, they're essentially centaurs but with mobility and armour instead of strength and speed. The myth behind the name is excellent too: they were a group of Greeks who were (reputedly) descended from a princess who was seduced by Zeus in one of his lesser known forms, an ant. It must be true because you couldn't make this shit up. Cannot exist in chaotic society for too long, needs the security of a daily grind once every six months or so. Patroling guard is an ideal occupation for these guys. Can only interact with lawful spirits and deities.

Which brings the total to 8, including humans. I think that's enough to be going on with for now.

Now the rejects:
Elves, Dwarves, Halflings. I just can't justify them being there. Dwarves still exist in my world but are vicious and bestial in their pursuit of shinies. Only just tipping the scale to 'sentient'. Halflings are just depowered dwarves and I don't see any advantages to that. Elves are boring. Actually that applies to all these in their Tolkienesque forms, they've just been so overdone that they're pretty much just caricatures now. And the associations with a single class are too great as well. Elves are just really old people anyway. All the traditional bonuses to magic and archery are cultural rather than innate. Strip them of their high-and-mighty attitude and they don't really have any interesting or unique quirks of their own. Play an albino human with pinned ears if you must, but there'll be no elves in my land...

Grotaron. I really wanted these to be playable. I really did. But I can't do it. They're just too big and too good at what they do. And frankly I couldn't stop laughing long enough to write stats for them. They worship a Wooly Mammoth for goodness sake. So no, they're not going in I'm afraid. I doubt there'll even be any in the world to be honest.

Yes, those are eyes. Delicate sensory organs on your grappling limbs, what could possibly go wrong?

Slarge: Glorantha's Lizardmen. A nice, if a little overpowered, race by all accounts. But it seems redundant with the Dragonewts. Especially as the Dragonewts are a bit more variable rather than wanting to smash everything. Oh and Slarges are hated by every other race because they have a reputation as backstabbers so it'd be more trouble than it's worth. Especially as the town must be safe.

Satyrs, Goblins, Orcs, Assorted humanoid generic evils. Boring and more to the point, wouldn't be accepted in most societies so pointless anyway. I did try statting out some gargoyles but they were just insane. At base they have 5d6 strength. Even massive compensations didn't change how broken that was when combined with natural claws...

That concludes the selection of playable races. Any good suggestions will be noted and possibly added. Probably take a break from this world for a while as I work on the map for the PCs area.

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