Saturday Worldbuilding #8

Saturday Worldbuilding is a weekly project wherein yours truly builds a world from scratch in a disorganized bid to express what I think makes a world useful and interesting.

This week we’re talking ancestries, the fantasy races that populate so many fictional settings. I know I certainly considered these to be an essential part of fantasy when I was a teen, and it seems like that’s a prevailing attitude in online discussion.

Nevertheless, as I’ve matured as a writer, one of the first things I consider when worldbuilding for a story is whether other sapient species are actually essential to the story and if not, whether their additional aesthetic adds to or detracts from the story. Origins, ancestries, species, races, whatever you call them, they’re a complicated subject.

The history of that concept in fantasy fiction is inextricably linked with our own sordid history of racism and xenophobia. Handling it with care is important because it’s easy to slip into old tropes that are harmful and belittling of very real people. As a white dude on the Internet, I don’t think it’s my place to speak on that subject overlong, but I will recommend James Mendez Hodes’ articles on orcs as a starting place.

As I’m building this setting for a TTRPG, probably Dungeons & Dragons, I’m going to be forced to reckon with the concept of ancestries at some point. The fantasy of playing a dragonborn or an elf is obvious and alluring to me. One of my most enduring homebrew creations is a species of pangolin-folk.

Dungeons & Dragons features dozens of sapient species, so we’re going to have to take a long, hard look at what’s essential and how we want to present it. If you took the time to read the articles linked above, I hope you’ll agree that the pre-built lore needs revision. I would do that regardless, since we’re building our own world. You may also be interested in a reworking of the 5e race mechanics. There are several third party options, including the much-discussed Ancestry & Culture.

One common bit of advice I see in Dungeon Master spaces is to make sure every ancestry in the Player’s Handbook has a place in your world. With humans, dragonborn, dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, half-elves, half-orcs, and tieflings already in play, we’ve got nine mechanical ancestries plus orcs. If we extend this approach to the Monster Manual we add a huge variety of creatures including aarakocra, centaurs, giants, gith, gnolls, goblins, bugbears, hobgoblins, bullywugs, thri-kreen, trogodytes, trolls, and yuan-ti plus a metric ton of sapient aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, and fiends.

For the record, I think there can be (and usually strive for) a distinction between creatures like humans, orcs, and dwarves and things like devils, angels, and genies. The latter group tend to be representations of ideas like law or nature, and consequently, there’s a difference in how we present them. But that’s a subject for another time.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking the “everything in the PHB” approach, and in fact, I think there is an interesting project to be had doing a ground-up overhaul of 5E lore featuring all the same creatures with fresh lore. But that’s not what we’re doing.

You can have fun playing Dungeons & Dragons (or any other fantasy TTRPG) with only humans, but players like variety. I think it’d be interesting to create this setting without humans at all. So that’s what we’ll do. I’m not going to build any new ancestries. I’ll just draw on the Player’s Handbook and the Monster Manual, although the lore will obviously be different.

I think the people of Deira are orcs, and I think the people of the autocratic regime across the water are elves. It’s tempting, based on that bit of distinction to start lining up ancestries along typical “good vs. evil” lines just for the sake of spinning that idea. Orcs, goblins, and gnolls on one side and elves, halflings, and dwarves on the other could be cool, but I’d like something a little more unique. In a fully-fleshed out world, I’m also not going to feature just one culture for each of these ancestries.

I do think I’ll stick a major dwarven power in as an ally for the elves, but halflings are on the democracy side of the equation. I don’t know what to do with gnomes so they’re out. If someone just really wants the gnome abilities, I don’t see a compelling reason not to give those to halflings. Tieflings are cool, but they’re unique individuals, not a separate culture. I’m also not sure what to do with dragonborn so I’m going to scratch them out. If a player were to have a compelling reason to play a dragonborn in this setting, I could easily bring one in as something akin to a tiefling.

There are still quite a few unchecked boxes in terms of things like dragons and giants, but we’ll tackle that next time when we start to pan out and take another look at the bigger picture.

Until next time!