Hi,
Here's my present situation. I'm trying to slightly adapt the Golarion setting with the D&D4E/Exalted cosmology and add some other options for my players. I'm planning to use Savage Worlds instead of D&D/d20/PFRPG systems.
Now so far I've added origin stories and cultural background for several other races, like tieflings, shadar-kai, firbolg, goliath, shifters, etc. The thing is, I'm stuck with Aasimar/Devas.
Both Aasimar and Devas fill the same cosmological and thematic "niche" in the setting, but they are really very different, and besides I find both lacking. The former is born from human parents with celestial blood, and basically he's just a human with striking looks and a few spell-like abilities; to me that doesn't justify a whole "race". The latter are immortal souls reencarnating over and over again in adult human bodies, with a limited knowledge of his past lives and a very distinctive look; they don't really seem like an interesting concept to play though, since it is never clear how other people see them or what role do they play in the world. Neither of them really have flaws, foibles or defects, which is the heart of any good story.
So I'm looking for inspiration, ideas or advice on how to modify, fussion, eliminate or promote one or the other.
Thanks in advance,
Javier
The former is born from human parents with celestial blood, and basically he's just a human with striking looks and a few spell-like abilities; to me that doesn't justify a whole "race".
Well, tieflings are "just" humans with fiendish blood and have some "devilish" additions.
It's how you sell it. Just as Golarion's tieflings can have vastly different appearances (Bastards of Erebus is a great read on this: The adventure has quite a few tieflings, some with classical looks and some with wildly different appearance. And there's a support article about tieflings of Golarion, complete with variant abilities for something like a dozen different heritages, like devil, demon, rakshasa, kyton, and so on), so do aasimar.
They're not all just really pretty humans with striking colour schemes. An aasimar descended from a lillend azata might have feathery hair and snake-like eyes, while an archon descendent might have have an inner glow.
And just as tieflings aren't automatically evil, aasimar aren't automatically good. In fact, Golarion already saw an aasimar villain. Said villain had something like "anti-leprosy" - she looked angelic and good, and everything thought that her touch could cure disease and warts and stuff like that. She was actually a champion of a demon goddess intent on getting rid of her "celestial taint" by transforming into a demon piecemeal.
The latter are immortal souls reencarnating over and over again in adult human bodies, with a limited knowledge of his past lives
They stole that from my elan (psionic race from XPH) interpretation.
I had an ageless society of elans who would periodically go out into the world, gather experiences (i.e. advance to high level), and then "de-incarnate", i.e. let their experience be siphoned away into a collective storage of memories. Effectively, they'd pick a career (a particular class/ability/specialisation constellation, usually something they haven't done before), go to high levels, and then start over (without actually dying in between - they were ageless, as elans are, so they skipped the death-rebirth part and got back to business at once).