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Dear messageboards,
(Disclaimer: I am both drunk and fresh off of watching "The Hobbit" trailer for the umpteenth time.)
I guess this idea has been stewing for a while, but I am damn sick of humans being the center of attention for most fantasy worlds. Humans have all the great kingdoms, and compromise the bulk of adventuring parties while the other races are stuck on the fringes: under mountains, in forests, or relegated to great empires of the past.
Well I say no more!
Never minding Goblin-centric mini campaigns, I say its about time one of the "lesser races" steps into the limelight. I've picked Dwarves for this conversation because I believe they have the most to gain from it. They have a reputation for being ale-swilling, mountain-loving, greedy, short Nords or Scots, but I think they have the potential to be much more, with a deep appreciation for beauty both natural and crafted, and emotions deeper than any human could ever feel.
No longer should races be pigeon-holed into certain roles while humans get the "well damn, we can be anything and have so much potential" label. In my next campaign, Dwarves will be the de-facto race, while humans shall be mere barbaric tribes with the chiding nickname of "Tallcousins".
Dwarves aside, what other races should get a makeover?
EDIT: Note that I understand that most gamers are indeed human, so I guess playing one has a certain "average Joe" appeal.
I wrote on a world once where humans thought excessively about conquest and curiosity, that the half-breeds became the largest denomination. Cities were filled with half-orcs, half-elves, aasimar, tieflings, changelings, and the elemental-kin. Pure humans were a rare breed that resided in a place similar to Kyonin. Either that, or they were sold as expensive slaves to orc tribes, which became more industrial and were usually led by half-orcs. Also, due to the human trait of cross-fertility, complex hybrids were showing up like aasimar half-elves.
I agree completely. Waiting as patiently as possible for the massive races book in April. Pathfinder could easily visit non-human parts of the world more often for adventures (I think its built a lot less human centric than it looks), and I hope they do more of that. Visiting exotic human cities and farmsteads is something I can and do do in real life on a regular basis - no need to fantasize about it over the gaming table.
the half-breeds became the largest denomination. Cities were filled with half-orcs, half-elves, aasimar, tieflings, changelings, and the elemental-kin. Pure humans were a rare breed that resided in a place similar to Kyonin.
That sounds pretty cool. Got a link?
In my own homebrew campaign, two of the largest nations are non-humans (a communist empire of Dwarves, oddly enough) and a massive, expansionist empire of Orcs.
this all sounds like dwarf-propaganda do me. They are all longbearded nogood, drunken brawlers with the name Grabthroat Shinkicker (congrats if you know where that name is from).
No seriously, it's the Gms fault, in my games the gnomes (I still have the 3.5 version of them) run most of the banks, with a few left to the dwarfs, who mostly do mining and building. City elfes are often snob bastards who think they are better because they have a few hundred years more than the rest and halflings are mainly entertainers or thiefs having their own underground society.
I must admit that those are the cherries on top of the cake full of humans. But it hards to compete with something that spreads like a disease, has no morals whatsoever as a race, and still think that fighting is the most important part of civilization.
Anyhow, it could be worse, dwarves could live in sewers and have food rests in their wild beards *looks angrily at first D&D movie and sheds a tear*
I agree completely. Waiting as patiently as possible for the massive races book in April. Pathfinder could easily visit non-human parts of the world more often for adventures (I think its built a lot less human centric than it looks), and I hope they do more of that. Visiting exotic human cities and farmsteads is something I can and do do in real life on a regular basis - no need to fantasize about it over the gaming table.
the half-breeds became the largest denomination. Cities were filled with half-orcs, half-elves, aasimar, tieflings, changelings, and the elemental-kin. Pure humans were a rare breed that resided in a place similar to Kyonin.That sounds pretty cool. Got a link?
Nah. didn't post it online. I'll have to search my archives though, and it'll take a while.
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I guess this idea has been stewing for a while, but I am damn sick of humans being the center of attention for most fantasy worlds. Humans have all the great kingdoms, and compromise the bulk of adventuring parties while the other races are stuck on the fringes: under mountains, in forests, or relegated to great empires of the past.
Dwarves and Elves seem the two easiest of the standard core races to expand in this way.
A more 'points of light' style campaign, with smallish human settlements and fortified city-states, surrounded by wilderness filled with beauty and danger (and dominated by elves and various monster races) would be one way to go.
Alternately, if the millenia-old elven society, dissipated and jaded, brought civilization to the world, they could be the 'Taldor' of the setting, on the brink of obsolescence, but still a dominating world power, even now at the nadir of their power. The full-blood elves could be the sickly inbred (explaining the Con penalty) ruling caste of the nation, while endless generations of half-elves, born and bred to be the diplomats and go-betweens and 'house slaves' of the purebloods, could be the more common authority figures seen by the human populace of the Elven Empire. Elves who go adventuring could be anywhere from nobles indulging their jaded desires to see something other than the inside of a palace, to outcasts and ne'er do wells who have been politely invited out of elven high society, to the occasional (by elven standards) rugged individualist who longs for a day when elven military might and arcane craft was rightly feared, because they accomplished more than hide in their capital cities and throw parties for each other, instead going forth and taming the world and forging the greatest empire it had ever seen, beating back foes the like of which are just now starting to re-appear in the setting (without anything like the elves of old to oppose them). Indeed, even the 'full-blood' elves might be pale shadows of the heroes of elven legend, who would have stats more like those of Noble Drow. No matter how 'pure' an elven noble might claim their blood to be, all have suffered decline, and might be more accurately called 'three-quarters elves.' Any reminder of this, such as an *actual* pureblood elf being discovered (having been petrified thousands of years ago or something, and rescued from that state) would lead to the current race of 'elves' finding that reminder of their own fallen state so demoralizing that some would try to have the 'throwback' assassinated, or tarnished, or painted as fiend-blooded or something...
Dwarves can also become setting-important, without much change. If dwarves are assumed to have fluff that backs up their mechanics, as master craftsmen and innovators in the fields of weapons, armor, etc. the dwarven nations could have better armor, better weapons, better equipment, aqueducts, waterwheels, mining operations, special alloys, etc. that surrounding nations would envy. The mechanics can be further tweaked to support such assumptions, changing the mental stat bonus to Intelligence (and that of Elves to Charisma) to justify why the dwarven peoples are always at the forefront of innovation and industry, and not just mechanical advancement, but perhaps also *magical* advancement (more like the dwarves of Norse myth, powerful shapeshifting spellcasters and crafters of magical artifacts).
Green Ronin's Mindshadows setting of Naranjan is an Indian-style setting in which the dwarves were the first great empire, for reasons like this, being masters of both craft and magic, fielding weapons and armors more advanced than their subject races.
If dwarves are the only craftsmen capable of making masterwork armor and weapons, or even the only ones who know 'the Riddle of Steel,' with all others limited to bronze or iron weapons, or if rules for 'beyond masterwork' weapons exist and only dwarves can learn the feat that allows them to craft 'dire' weapons or 'legendary' armors or whatever, that could help justify a dwarven-dominant setting.
Similarly, a simple bonus to appraise checks or a racial trait that allows buying and selling of gear at dwarven markets at 10% bonus, would help craft a setting where an otherwise equal human or elven merchant simply could not compete with a dwarven merchant in the long run, as the dwarves have 'fixed the game' in their favor, with their market dominance and exclusive monopolies on certain ores and alloys and crafting techniques. If certain dwarven-monopolied minerals are also the source of dyes and pigments, or necessary for the inks used in arcane script, or if dwarven aqueducts bring water to communities far away from other sources of water, etc. then entire classes and communities of people might find themselves utterly dependent upon dwarven-owned resources to survive and thrive, and utterly at the mercy of the dwarven land-owners and resource-holders to control the prices of the commodities and resources they rely upon.
For Golarion, my first choice would be to utterly remove the Shoanti and Ulfen ethnicities, keeping their distinctive cultural flavor, but making them half-orcs and dwarves, respectively. Varisians would similarly be originally a halfling ethnicity, not a human one, although, Varisians being open-minded, entire communities of humans, half-elves and gnomes (and the occasional oddball elf or half-orc or goblin) would be 'Varisian' as well, and would be entirely possible to encounter a Varisian caravan with not a single Varisian halfling (although most Varisian communities would still be majority halfling).
Elves are trickier. Fitting them into Taldor as a dissipated nobility, as in the above idea, could work.
Replacing the Mwangi ethnicity with elves entirely, retaining the culture, language(s) and even pigmentation, but changing the race, shouldn't be any more (or less!) controversial than replacing Ulfen with 'viking' dwarves or Varisians with 'gypsy' halflings, but opinions will vary on that. If anyone looks at that and thinks, 'get rid of all the black people and replace them with elves in blackface,' then, yeah, best to tread carefully past that notion.
Replacing Osirioni humans with animal-headed folk, such as mixed-race cities (or more-or-less racially-segregated city-states scattered across a great river / delta) of Catfolk, civilized Gnolls, Lizardfolk, Aaraokocra, Minotaurs (a Lamashtu-as-Hathor-worshipping Minotaur matriarchy! Ha!), etc. could be a funky nod to ye olde Egypt and it's animal-headed dieties, but that starts to go past 'less human dominance' and more towards 'Star Wars cantina.'
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The Earthdawn game plays with this. Humans live scattered around in a number of cities and villages, but most of the major cities are controlled by non-humans. You even have the Dwarf Kingdom of Throal as the major power in the region. The main "bad guy" kingdom was an elven-ruled kingdom with a huge number of humans as military support.
Check out Talislanta. I think it's got its own system, but you could most likely easily just steal the setting for Pathfinder.
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I once read a Turtledove story called 'When the Last Elf is Dead', refering to a prophecy that the Tolkien Style BBEG would win when that came to pass. In the story this comes to pass.
I thought, okay, elves are recently or apparently extinct, but what about using half elves or the very last elves as the focus of a campaign? It's still a humanocentric world crapsack world, but not really.
I've always found that humans are used primarily as adventurers because of that extra feat. Many character builds require that you have two feats to get something working.
Take an archer (or even a bomb thrower) for instance: Point Blank Shot and Precise Shot. As a first level character it REALLY sucks having to take a -4 for shooting into melee and then an additional -4 for shooting through soft cover. By taking Precise Shot you eliminate half of those penalties.
Tripping characters anyone? Combat Expertise (which no one really wants to take as a first level feat) and Improved Trip.
The hulking barbarian with the great sword? Power Attack and Cleave. If your GM uses a bunch of smaller creatures with low hp chances are you will auto kill any single one of them every time you hit (which will be often).
Feats are such a vital make up of your character and they come so few that none of them can be made in poor choice. That given the chance to (not only pick your stat of +2) jump start your character's 'trick', most people will go for it.
I think its high time for humans to lose that extra feat and start getting something pretty awesome but not "why would I ever play any other race?"
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Check out Talislanta. I think it's got its own system, but you could most likely easily just steal the setting for Pathfinder.
I'm a big fan of the idea of attempting to create a fantasy world with unique races other than 'elf, dwarf, hobbit,' but I simply couldn't get into the Talislanta races.
For better or worse, it's a tough climb to make a non-Tolkein fantasy race that stands out.
The gnome, for example, has been almost-dropped multiple times (the Forgotten Race of the Forgotten Realms, left out of Scarred Lands, originally, left out of 4th edition, originally), and, really, it's only sin, is that there weren't any in Lord of the Rings. Paizo (and, to a lesser extent, Eberron) has taken that 'disadvantage' (few existing preconceptions) and turned it into as amazing advantage (we can do anything with this race!).
It's a quirk of D&D history that the Paladin from Three Hearts & Three Lions has had such traction (as well as that book's interpretation of the Troll!), while the Gnome has not.
My own campaign world has different countries that are dominated by different races. The most powerful country is a human-led country, but with heavy elf involvement, but the second most powerful is almost totally elf led. One country is a mixed-race country (currently led by a half-elf) and there are countries dominated by dwarves, gnomes and halflings. (Not to mention orcs, goblins, kobolds and ultimately, dragons).
Depending on where the adventuring party wants to start, they could find humans to be common or rare or anything in between.
As far as the bonus feat giving humans an adventuring edge, I think that's a shame actually, and it is both a relic of the old humano-centric approach of original D&D and an example of the developers sort of throwing up their hands and saying "humans are sort of by definition the generic race, all the other races get some 'racial bonuses' so we have to give humans something." The end result is humans remain the most common adventurers, especially for optimizers who need that extra feat.
Thinking about my own campaign world, I am sort of disappointed with myself. As creative as I like to think I've been, I don't actually have any custom race populating my world in any significant way. I think I'm going to have to rectify that oversight...
I was tinkering around with a replacement for the human bonus feat once. Never came to much, but I figured it should be something like those Destined line of feats. Some bonus they can call upon in bad situations multiple times per day type thing. Or just a simple re-roll of a bad roll? My group wouldn't go for it. Even though I said everyone would get two feats starting (Three if Fighter).
I'm a big fan of the idea of attempting to create a fantasy world with unique races other than 'elf, dwarf, hobbit,' but I simply couldn't get into the Talislanta races.
I don't like them either (I do like Humans), but it's a moderately well known setting famous for not having elves or even "true" humans.
Figured it'd be worth a shot to check out.
I liked Eberrons approach, while most of the countries are human controlled there were several ruled by other races. Ogres, goblinoids, halfings and dwarves had nations on Khorvair. Elves and dragons controlled nations on other continents.
Even in human ran lands the role of the other races was well defined. There where Dragon Marked houses which were like huge racial multinational corporations that had a virtual monopoly of certain parts of the economy. The halfling house ran the hospitality industry (such as inns for example).
If my players wouldn't revolt, there'd be ONLY Humans as player races in my campaigns. In fact, there'd be no Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings, anything. Humans, baby. Humans.
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If my players wouldn't revolt, there'd be ONLY Humans as player races in my campaigns. In fact, there'd be no Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings, anything. Humans, baby. Humans.
Heh, my games ended up not having any new races for the opposite reason. Most of my players would play human, human, human, human and, rarely, halfling.
Elves were insanely popular choices in 2nd edition, but in 3rd edition, it's been all-human, all-the-time.
That's the main reason I don't spend much time pondering new PC races (other than to fill niches, like lawful and chaotic planetouched, or 0 HD serpentfolk to use as adversaries for low-level parties), because none of my players are into that.
One of the funnest games I ever ran was set in a unique world I called 'The Empire'. Yeah, I was a new to DMing. Humans were in charge, and EVERY other race was either a 2nd-class citizen, a slave, or a barbarian (in the Greek sense, not the class).
Of course, most the players played humans, but I had this one who played a Kyrnn minotaur. Game went on for almost a year, but the group fell apart when half graduated and moved away.
And on the subject of gnomes: they are lawn ornaments, not a race. Down with the smurfs of D&D! lol
Master Arminas
What the . . . ? why do I have the picture of a blue, blond, cartoon character next to my name? WHY?
Master Arminas
I can't say for 2nd Ed, but for 3e and 3.5e we had a pretty good range of races (more so as more content was released, but those were non-standard races). We have always used point-buy system when creating characters. In 3e and 3.5e many players found that the slightly higher stat was worth not having that extra human feat, since in those editions Humans didn't get any stat boost.
With Pathfinder, I find, since Humans get a +2 to any stat they choose, players often go with that extra feat and the benefit of the single stat they need. Pathfinder made a lot of the Multiple Attribute Dependent Classes have less dependency on many stats (most notable is the Paladin) the choice becomes clear to grab that extra feat and get that boost to your specific attribute you need.
Oh smurf, its happening again!
Holy smurf! (Oh no, a smurf-centric campaign?)
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I am too.
Oh, you meant humans as the dominant character race in RPGs! I see...
Maybe. But bear in mind that humans are it; they are the be all, end all of races in Golarion. The other races are, psychologically speaking, less alien to the human experience than Ed Gein is. They're all, dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, basically human. Even orcs and goblinoids are basically human. They all have a basically human psychology, adapted to the relatively tame variations of their physiology and lifespans.
I have a Tengu PC in a campaign I am running. How do Tengu breed? I don't know. Do they breed like humans? Do they lay eggs? Are Tengu females the larger of the two sexes? I don't know. This is about as alien as it gets, and I could fill these details in myself. But the more alien I make them, the harder it is to explain their integration into human society. The less alien I make them, well; then they're humans-in-funny-suits, like the rest.
That is what they all are; they're convenient in that humanity is a reference point used to make them all understandable. In the real world, we anthropomorphize things all to time to make them easier to relate to - it's a facet of human psychology. Without turning this into a psychology seminar, there's evidence to indicate that other mammals like cats and dogs behave this way as well.
I like having different choices for character races. I'm all in favor of making campaign worlds that are dwarf-dominant, or giant-controlled. I especially root for the orcs to win; they seem like they really got the short end of the stick. The truth is, though, that those worlds are literally only cosmetically different from human dominated worlds; truly alien worlds are much more difficult to come by due to the inherent limitations of human psychology, the pressures of conformity, and the difficulty in achieving a believable versimilitude in such an endeavor. I encourage any and all such explorations, they make for fun games and also make for stronger thinking habits. I only bring this issue up because it's important to understand why a human-dominated world makes sense from both a design and a psychological point of view.
Before we recently switched to Pathfinder, I ran my group with homebrew rules and setting. The basic premise of the setting was that in the past it had been your typical human-centric fantasy RPG world. But the humans grew ever more numerous and powerful, until they completely subjugated the other races. Some were turned into slaves (dwarves in the mines, elves in the pleasure department), others, especially the more monstrous ones, became victims of genocide. I like to think of it as the logical outcome of the status quo most fantasy settings present. Anyway, eventually mankind completely vanished from the world (A plague? Slave uprising? Angry gods? Crazy magic experiments? No one knows for sure, since civilization went down the drain, no one's even sure how long ago it all happened, they're all just very sure they hate the humans and hope they're gone for good.) and the other races eventually recovered. Resulting in a points of light setting where "human" is a grave insult.
Since my players were all new to roleplaying at that time I checked if they'd be okay with that, or if it felt too weird and they'd be more comfortable being able to play humans. They looked at me like I was stupid, told me "humans are boring", and made a first party consisting of a centaur, a faerie, a bearman and a shapechanger. Good times.
You should have joined my Wounded Earth pbp, Hodge Podge. In the Iron Marches, the dwarves rule and humans are serfs, toiling the land for the benefit of their bearded masters.
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Yay for dwarves but seriously halflings need the love they always end up living in someones shadow.
My campaign has Elves and Dwarves as the dominant species... but they're both evil as heck, having been abandoned by the gods and turning to the Abyss or the 9 Hells for the means to survive and thrive.
Elves bind themselves to demons in exchange for the right to use and learn arcane power... all thanks to a permanent global aura created by a city-sacrificing ritual. Now, to even use wizardry (without being immediately dragged to the abyss by angry demons) one must be a demon or be bound to one as a servant.
Dwarves worship devils, and are rewarded with clerical power. This is due to arch-devils feasting upon a misfit god, who nobody cared for. The infernal dukes consumed his power and divided it up, and now offer divine power to Dwarves in exchange for worship and servitude.
Humans are simply one of many oppressed or refugee peoples, who only recently started building small, weak kingdoms in the new world.
Gnomes are mysterious and powerful newcomers. There are very few of them, only a few thousand. They discovered this world after exploring the Far Realms, and have brought some of the madness with them. They've claimed a massive area of savage lands (about half the size of Russia) and use it as a "testing ground" for abberations they create, unleash, observe, and take notes on via scrying and invisibility. The poor, backward people who still live in the area (humanoids of various types) are all crazy and inbred and fearful of the "things in the hills".
It's kind of a fun world to make stuff up for. Lots of history and customized tweaks.
Thank you.
I am sick of humans, too.
Long live the goblins!
I was thinking of a world where the central races are replaced by goblinoids. I wouldn't know wether to make it a campaign world or a setting for some creative writing though.
It would have goblins as the human equivalent and hobgoblins, bugbears, gremlins and maybe orcs and imps as some of the other "core races" (which would mean breaking away from the established pathfinder races, where imps are devils, orcs a different type of humanoid and gremlins are a subtype of fey); humans and all their stretched or stunted variations with our without funny ears would be the marauding barbarian tribes that get killed in droves by overzealous adventurers.
I have been toying for years running a game based on Narnia. Depending on what era potentially few humans. Lots of magical creatures.
Years ago I had a doc now lost to the ages that was an attempt to convert real world cababilites to stats. I was going to have people play themselves transported to Narnia. If you have read the books it talks about the world having an effect on people, they felt stronger more alive. Thus the players would get a stat boost to two realavent abilities based on their own existing abilities. Those that did wanted to play something other than human would "not survive" the intro and be reincarnated into what they wanted to play, or those who were adventurous would roll random and potentially have some cool options on the chart.
As it is our current campaign world is a hybrid mash of elements regions and cities that we have borrowed from other settings over the years. One such section is Narnia.
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lets be honest, humans as written in the rules are better than the other races. It is as simple as that. Frankly before i played pathfinder i hated human races in my fantasy game, but now due to their sheer mechanics power to keep up with people who make powerful builds its almost essential to use them.
I would LOVE to play a halfling in a lot of my games but halflings are probable the worst race ever. There small stature gives them horrible run speed and they gain far to little and have to many negatives compared to humans.
It would be nice to give the other races some much needed love, especially halflings.
I love playing halflings and gnomes. I know that there are times that it would be nice to have a little more speed or a strength 2 points higher but with gear frankly all things are possible.
I was thinking of a world where the central races are replaced by goblinoids. I wouldn't know wether to make it a campaign world or a setting for some creative writing though.
It would have goblins as the human equivalent and hobgoblins, bugbears, gremlins and maybe orcs and imps as some of the other "core races" (which would mean breaking away from the established pathfinder races, where imps are devils, orcs a different type of humanoid and gremlins are a subtype of fey); humans and all their stretched or stunted variations with our without funny ears would be the marauding barbarian tribes that get killed in droves by overzealous adventurers.
I saw something just like this online almost 20 years ago. It was called The Horde, and humans were the only non-"greenskin" race. Humans were actually some kind of thin-blooded gremlin as I recall. Each Goblinoid race and its society was described in some detail. It was pretty cool. I don't remember them being statted out, it was more of a history and ethnography than anything else.
In my group we pretty much use damn near every race just about as equally as one another. Sure, every group seems to have at least one human, but no special advantages are given to them. Also the home-brew campaign I run has a main city thats a HUGE hodge-podge of races. We seem to like it that way.
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My campaign world's history is based on cycles of civilization based on the rise, dominance, and slow (and sometimes not so slow) fall of the world's dominant species. Other species orbit the civilizations of the dominant, and sometimes are included in them, but for the most part the world is run and owned by whichever race is on top at the time. Starting with the fish-men, then the frog-men, then the lizard men, then the elves, and now finally man.
The current age in the gameworld is roughly 700 years after the fall of the great human empire. There are "young kingdoms" that have sprung up where the empire once ruled, and humans are nearly always the dominant species (there is a kingdom of civilized goblinoids created and run by the descendants of tribes that were conquered and "tamed" by the empire, and a dwarven kingdom founded by the dwarven equivalent of the Zionist movement... returning to a homeland they lost long ago and all that), but humans are on their way out as the dominant species and have not noticed it.
They also have not even begun to notice that there sure are a lot more halflings around these days than they used to be...
I've set campaigns in other time periods, including one far to the future of the current timeline where elves are extinct, humans are rare, and halflings rule the world.
I saw something just like this online almost 20 years ago. It was called The Horde, and humans were the only non-"greenskin" race. Humans were actually some kind of thin-blooded gremlin as I recall. Each Goblinoid race and its society was described in some detail. It was pretty cool. I don't remember them being statted out, it was more of a history and ethnography than anything else.I was thinking of a world where the central races are replaced by goblinoids. I wouldn't know wether to make it a campaign world or a setting for some creative writing though.
It would have goblins as the human equivalent and hobgoblins, bugbears, gremlins and maybe orcs and imps as some of the other "core races" (which would mean breaking away from the established pathfinder races, where imps are devils, orcs a different type of humanoid and gremlins are a subtype of fey); humans and all their stretched or stunted variations with our without funny ears would be the marauding barbarian tribes that get killed in droves by overzealous adventurers.
i should try to look that up. Thanks for the info. Though with a name like that a simole google search might not be quite enough.
Read Steven Brust for an elf-centric campaign setting. And of course Moorcock's Elric and Corum books are about elf-dominant settings giving way to human-dominant ones (or, if you're feeling particularly anti-human, check out The Eternal Champion, in which
Oh yeah, Steven Brust rocks.
Eberron is also a good setting for reducing human-centric affairs. There are entire civilized nations of goblinoids,elven continents, halfling barbarians; humans are just a small part of the whole thing.
While still human-o-centric, check out Daniel Abraham's The Dragon's Path for a new spin on playable races!
I am damn sick of humans being the center of attention for most fantasy worlds. Humans have all the great kingdoms, and compromise the bulk of adventuring parties while the other races are stuck on the fringes: under mountains, in forests, or relegated to great empires of the past.
But it's hard to compete with something that spreads like a disease, has no morals whatsoever as a race, and still think that fighting is the most important part of civilization.
The hard-to-compete part is the main obstacle to creating a setting in which humans are a minor character race.
I once created an NPC adventuring party of only gnomes. Alas, gnomes are an overspecialized race. I had few options for making a plausible adventuring party of gnomes.
Gnomes get -2 to Strength and weapon shrinkage due to small size, so they serve poorly as melee-based characters. Gnomes get +2 to Charisma, favoring bards, paladins, sorcerers, and oracles. However, the gnome's chaotic fey nature means that few qualify as sufficiently Lawful Good to become paladins, and oracles are rare in my version of Golarion. Gnomes get +2 to Constitution, but only Barbarians care strongly about that stat. Their racial benefits are minor: the stealth and perception bonus aid scouting, the +2 to a craft or profession might help a non-adventuring town gnome, low-light vision and gnome magic are only an occasional benefit, and the defense training and racial hatred serve mainly to explain why gnome communities on the edges of civilization are not overrun by non-civilized races.
Thus, a gnome adventuring party would be a bard and a barbarian as the front line, a sorcerer as the arcane spellcaster, and a sub-optimized cleric or a rare paladin or oracle as the divine caster. Or the gnome party could be optimized for stealth, with Ranger, Rogue, Bard, and Sorcerer, and avoid melee combat unless cornered.
Since the same limits apply to gnome kingdoms, it is clear why the gnomes of Golarion form small communities either protected by larger non-gnome kingdoms or on the undesireable fringes of civilization.
I can imagine a dwarven world empire, in which high-wisdom dwarven clerics are supported by the gods. They would say, "Our industriousness built civilization. The charismatic races are too frivolous. They should stick to dancing and playing music to earn our pennies." I can imagine an elvish world empire, in which long-lived elves maintain their supremacy by having more class levels than the short-living races. "Certainly, many humans are natural-born fighters, but they never live only enough to gain the centuries of experience that a true warrior needs." My wife played in a campaign in which high orcs, a species resembling half-orcs, had built the first Bronze Age civilization. But other races were moving into the Iron Age.
Civilizations change with time: Bronze Age, Iron Age, Magic Age, Technological Age, etc. A single specialized race might have the advantage with one type of civilization, but the generalists, the humans, will always be somewhere near the top.