
Wevi |
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When it comes to your games that you run or playing in, how diverse is your NPC's? I'm talking about race, skin, gender, body type for NPC's. I think I do a good job on race, gender. I need to work on skin, but I fell on body type. I looked at my NPC's and say only 001% of my NPC's are heavy, but very little are paper thin too.
For race's I use what ever I think would be good or a race that I have not used in a while.
For gender I flip a coin.
For skin I just need to find a pic that's not white.
For body type I need to work harder to find pic's that are more varied.

Tarik Blackhands |
I'm pretty poor when it comes to racial diversity. I just can't give up that human bonus feat or +1 skill rank on the player end. Most of my other groups tend to be the same, mostly sticking around the core races (minus gnomes) and tieflings/aasimars rounding out the plane touched. Body type generally doesn't even pass the muster when playing since even a Str 7 twig is going to be in moderately good shape for the adventure day and skin color just matches the nation standard (be white if from not-Europe, black if from not-Africa, olive if from the not-Mediterranean, etc).
On the other end of the screen I'm pretty firmly in the same racial comfort zone as when playing although I do have my moments of having Baron Harkonen type baddies (bloat mage riding a permanent floating disc), plane touched who have an emaciated appearance (Daemon-Spawn tieflings), or the frail old cleric for body types but most revolve around either the fit/wiry/bulky norm of the genre. Skin still generally just follows the national norm since I rarely find diverging from that to be yield memorable NPCs without tossing on more legwork on my end unless they turned neon blue from a magic experiment.

Wevi |

I'm pretty poor when it comes to racial diversity. I just can't give up that human bonus feat or +1 skill rank on the player end. Most of my other groups tend to be the same, mostly sticking around the core races (minus gnomes) and tieflings/aasimars rounding out the plane touched. Body type generally doesn't even pass the muster when playing since even a Str 7 twig is going to be in moderately good shape for the adventure day and skin color just matches the nation standard (be white if from not-Europe, black if from not-Africa, olive if from the not-Mediterranean, etc).
On the other end of the screen I'm pretty firmly in the same racial comfort zone as when playing although I do have my moments of having Baron Harkonen type baddies (bloat mage riding a permanent floating disc), plane touched who have an emaciated appearance (Daemon-Spawn tieflings), or the frail old cleric for body types but most revolve around either the fit/wiry/bulky norm of the genre. Skin still generally just follows the national norm since I rarely find diverging from that to be yield memorable NPCs without tossing on more legwork on my end unless they turned neon blue from a magic experiment.
I set out to play ever class and race. My Human was used as a bard named Lin. I think if you stay with one thing it can become stale.

Tarik Blackhands |
Tarik Blackhands wrote:I set out to play ever class and race. My Human was used as a bard named Lin. I think if you stay with one thing it can become stale.I'm pretty poor when it comes to racial diversity. I just can't give up that human bonus feat or +1 skill rank on the player end. Most of my other groups tend to be the same, mostly sticking around the core races (minus gnomes) and tieflings/aasimars rounding out the plane touched. Body type generally doesn't even pass the muster when playing since even a Str 7 twig is going to be in moderately good shape for the adventure day and skin color just matches the nation standard (be white if from not-Europe, black if from not-Africa, olive if from the not-Mediterranean, etc).
On the other end of the screen I'm pretty firmly in the same racial comfort zone as when playing although I do have my moments of having Baron Harkonen type baddies (bloat mage riding a permanent floating disc), plane touched who have an emaciated appearance (Daemon-Spawn tieflings), or the frail old cleric for body types but most revolve around either the fit/wiry/bulky norm of the genre. Skin still generally just follows the national norm since I rarely find diverging from that to be yield memorable NPCs without tossing on more legwork on my end unless they turned neon blue from a magic experiment.
I hardly think the same way. Race on its own just means very little to me from a character perspective. I can craft a million different characters and motivations from a human and just pallete swapping it to say a...Strix doesn't make him more interesting to me. The feat and extra skill rank do loads more for me than "Has an octopus for a lower body" when fleshing out a character.

bhampton |
Interesting....I run my own world in our campaign so don't have all the races heavily featured. As for the NPCs, I do try to keep it mixed, I've tried to keep white 'european' to a single nation, and as such wanted my NPCs to reflect this, so unless they come from that country they'll be a different skin-tone, hair colour, etc. My PCs tend to be lacking when it comes to description on their characters, which is a big thorn in my side, I love to fill the description and background pages, but they usually just have a line maybe 2.
I am looking forward to introducing my PCs to some key NPCs soon, and I think so far they're my favourite NPCs, a blind flame Oracle with her travelling companion who is an Orc barbarian/elemental bloodrager. Mostly I'm interested to see how the party Dwarf (who actually made up a nice background story on how he hates Orcs) interacts with her.

Wevi |

Wevi wrote:I hardly think the same way. Race on its own just means very little to me from a character perspective. I can craft a million different characters and motivations from a human and just pallete swapping it to say a...Strix doesn't make him more interesting to me. The feat and extra skill rank do loads more for me than "Has an octopus for a lower body" when fleshing out a character.Tarik Blackhands wrote:I set out to play ever class and race. My Human was used as a bard named Lin. I think if you stay with one thing it can become stale.I'm pretty poor when it comes to racial diversity. I just can't give up that human bonus feat or +1 skill rank on the player end. Most of my other groups tend to be the same, mostly sticking around the core races (minus gnomes) and tieflings/aasimars rounding out the plane touched. Body type generally doesn't even pass the muster when playing since even a Str 7 twig is going to be in moderately good shape for the adventure day and skin color just matches the nation standard (be white if from not-Europe, black if from not-Africa, olive if from the not-Mediterranean, etc).
On the other end of the screen I'm pretty firmly in the same racial comfort zone as when playing although I do have my moments of having Baron Harkonen type baddies (bloat mage riding a permanent floating disc), plane touched who have an emaciated appearance (Daemon-Spawn tieflings), or the frail old cleric for body types but most revolve around either the fit/wiry/bulky norm of the genre. Skin still generally just follows the national norm since I rarely find diverging from that to be yield memorable NPCs without tossing on more legwork on my end unless they turned neon blue from a magic experiment.
I was going for more mechanical stand on saying it's stale because backstory can go with any race.

Tarik Blackhands |
I was going for more mechanical stand on saying it's stale because backstory can go with any race.
Meh. Class matters far more than race in terms of keeping gameplay fresh for me. A kitsune gunslinger is going to bore me to tears just as much as a human one just like I get no meaningful improvements over my oracle being a a fetchling rather than a human outside of gimmick builds that I don't gravitate toward anyway.

Wevi |

Interesting....I run my own world in our campaign so don't have all the races heavily featured. As for the NPCs, I do try to keep it mixed, I've tried to keep white 'european' to a single nation, and as such wanted my NPCs to reflect this, so unless they come from that country they'll be a different skin-tone, hair colour, etc. My PCs tend to be lacking when it comes to description on their characters, which is a big thorn in my side, I love to fill the description and background pages, but they usually just have a line maybe 2.
I am looking forward to introducing my PCs to some key NPCs soon, and I think so far they're my favourite NPCs, a blind flame Oracle with her travelling companion who is an Orc barbarian/elemental bloodrager. Mostly I'm interested to see how the party Dwarf (who actually made up a nice background story on how he hates Orcs) interacts with her.
I try to keep my games in a place in the world were people meet up, like
a main trading country.
Kiora Atua |
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For my current campaign:
For races my NPCs are dominantly human with human-hybrids (mostly aasimar and tiefling because it makes sense for the setting). That's mostly to reflect the area, though. I will introduce occasional core races (dwarf/elf/gnome/halfling).... other exotic races, I want to keep exotic, so I don't use them except once in a blue moon.
For gender I flip a coin. I think I've ended up with more women than men but that is kind of a coincidence. As far as nonbinary genders go... I have an intersex NPC that hangs out with the PCs. I don't have any nonbinary NPCs, I've been thinking of introducing at least one. I had a Raelis Azata NPC but I wanted to depict him as young and therefore predominantly presented himself as binary male. I also have a transwoman NPC that became a leadership cohort of one of our PCs :)
For skin color, I'm using the Inner Sea races. Because of the setting I have mostly kellids, chelish, and taldane (so basically, white) but I try to make a point of introducing non-white races amongst our NPCs. I think among my "main cast" friendly NPCs I'm at 33% PoC, which I feel is reasonable given the setting.
For body type, it is hard to find cool fantasy art of varied body types. I typically don't describe body types, also, so I think that is something I can work on. I do make a point of trying to have middle-aged women present in the world as competent fighters.
Sexuality-wise I've had gay, bi and lesbian NPCs. And a poly NPC. No asexual NPCs so far, but we have an asexual PC.
I make a conscious effort to have diverse NPCs because that kind of fantasy setting makes me happy when I'm consuming other fantasy media and it makes me happy to have a diverse world that I GM. YMMV, though.

Moonclanger |
There isn't much diversity in my group. I often wish there was more. Our only PF experience is with adventure paths. So far I've GM'd two and played in two.
We just don't have the time to write our own campaigns these days. The last time I ran a homebrew campaign it was for Fantasy Hero and the only sentient races were humans and demons, and the setting was of the sort Dave Justus describes.
So I'm inclined to think of diversity in terms of PCs. My group mostly play human males. I'm the exception - in recent years I've got in the habit of playing females. And our current party is the first to feature a non-core race (an Aasimar in WotR).
I don't think we're unimaginative, but perhaps a little conservative. When creating a character I craft every detail. Nothing is decided on a whim or at random.
Many of my character concepts involve a familiar component and an exotic component. Sometimes being non-human is the exotic component, e.g. I'm presently playing a Gnome paladin - having never seen a non-human paladin prior to this campaign. Sometimes a non-human archetype is the familiar component. And sometimes non-humanity is neither the exotic nor the familiar component, in which case adding non-humanity to the mix would over-spice the pudding.

Juda de Kerioth |
When it comes to your games that you run or playing in, how diverse is your NPC's? I'm talking about race, skin, gender, body type for NPC's. I think I do a good job on race, gender. I need to work on skin, but I fell on body type. I looked at my NPC's and say only 001% of my NPC's are heavy, but very little are paper thin too.
For race's I use what ever I think would be good or a race that I have not used in a while.
For gender I flip a coin.
For skin I just need to find a pic that's not white.
For body type I need to work harder to find pic's that are more varied.
I use core races and some of the half-humans (tieflins, aasimars, genasi, shifter (A.K.A. skin walkers), changeling (doppelganger and hag version), dhampirs, but the rest of the races i use them as monsters, and lore heavy (Kitsunes are female elven maids only who went cursed and are evil monsters known by Vulpines, catfolks are a kind of wolf-were, tengus are vicious and cruel beings (much like hobgoblins) and so on, still I don´t know how to make griplis work into my campaign.
If some player want to run a rare race I ask him why and work with him to make it happen but still, it won´t show often at my table, i´m guess its my fault since i do not promote all of them

Mykull |
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Having created my own world, I'll let the reader judge.
(1) Halflings are not roley-poley dumplings. They can be, but they're more industrious than laconic (being ruled by a dragon with an agenda tends to do that). They breed sexually, but do not marry. The community raises the child as it is rare for anyone to really know who their parents are.
(2) Male dwarves are the typical hirsute dwarf. Female dwarves are completely hairless (shamelessly ripped off from Deltans in Star Trek: TMP). They breed sexually, but it is, while not forbidden, definitely odd and frowned upon for a dwarf to marry OUTSIDE of the family. Cousins are good. Siblings are better. Dwarves do not suffer any genetic defects from these couplings.
(3) Elves. This is a Young World and Elves haven't split into their sub-races yet (actually, none of the races have). They breed asexually (shamelessly lifted from the Drak from the movie Enemy Mine). Every five hundred years or so, an elf simply becomes pregnant and produces a child. They may be feminine, masculine, or androgynous, but this is an aspect of psychology, not biology. As such, there are no Half-Elves.
(4) Gnomes. They are tiny, not small. There are your Garden Variety Gnomes, Tinker Gnomes, Thinker Gnomes and a few other variants. There are a set number of gnomes alive at any one time. When a gnome dies, spores are left behind, and, back in the Great Grove, a mushroom transforms into a gnome. If the spores are returned to the Great Grove, that gnome continues in the circle of life. First In, Last Out. So, when a gnome dies, the oldest (or earliest) gnome in the Great Grove is born. Each new gnome is unique, with their own personality. But as a gnome ages (every century or so) they begin to acquire memories and skills from previous lives. This explains gnomes' tendency to be a bit flighty.
(5) Orcs. Created by Dromar (AKA Orcus) Demon Prince of the Undead and sworn nemesis of the Elves. The Elves embarked upon a quest to the Abyss to eradicate Dromar and were successful. The last vestige, the idea of Dromar, could take root in his creation, an orc. Any orc. So the Elves had to exterminate the orcs. And they did. There are no more orcs or half-orcs. The player who played the elf that called the banners to march to the Abyss ended up in a different campaign, ten years later, playing the very last orc in existence that was slain by his old, now-NPC, Elf.
(6) Humans. It is a Globe of Lights world with city-states separated by thousands of miles. Using the settlement rules, there are a variety of types. Some have no city watch. Some have slavery for a set period of time, for some slavery is in perpetuity, some have none at all. There are monarchies, oligarchies, plutocracies, theocracies, and one magocracy.
Some are matriarchies, some are patriarchies, some are equal. One is divided. In Kembridge, "A boy is his father's son, of the woman there is no part. A girl is her mother's daughter, of the man there is no part."
Like the Magdalena Alpine butterfly of the Rocky Mountains is black to better absorb the sunlight and keep warm, so too are the humans of the Snowcrown Mountains dark black. Conversely, the not-Polynesian Olmen of the Isle of Dread are a pale white, to better reflect the punishing rays of the blue star, Cerulean. It probably isn't very scientific, but it's a magical globe and I wanted to turn something on its head. Residents of the other city-states also have unique skin tones.
Some, like the not-Asians of Jaquarta, have a rigid caste system. Others, none at all. All have unique taboos. In Wavewatcher's Bay, for instance, they take the saying, "The eyes are the window to the soul" very seriously and everyone wears mirrored glasses (which impose a -2 equipment penalty to Sense Motive checks).

Doomed Hero |

Setting changes this quite a bit. For the Midnight setting game I ran for years, we had an incredibly diverse roster. I wanted to be able to tell stories regarding all the setting's cultures so I made sure I had one of everything (except elves, I wanted them to be less relatable and humanized).
In the mythical ancient egypt game I'm running now, everyone is a dark-skinned human from Northern Africa or the Middle East.

bhampton |
I try to keep my games in a place in the world were people meet up, like
a main trading country.
For my trading ports, I do have much more diversity in people, I haven't got my PCs to a major trade centre yet, they are still fairly low level so keeping it local at the moment. That being said, they still come from 3 different backgrounds (2 of them trained together), so travelling to the place they started the campaign they would have encountered other folk.

PossibleCabbage |
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Generally as much as I can fit in there. When the game is going to be in a specific city or region for a while, I create rough demographic tables for the population so I can quickly generate a cross section of the society along a variety of axes just by rolling dice.
When I'm constructing specific NPCs I will often have a rough nickname for them as I sketch out the plot outline and the various factions and their allegiances. So in my head I might have been referring to "the king" or "the dread necromancer" or "the duke" and I might have a specific image of that person in mind, but when it comes to actually fleshing them out I make a point to consider if, perhaps, I like the idea of this character with a different permutation of ethnicity, race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. Just so there's not an endless parade of straight cis het white dudes who may or may not have pointy ears. Media in general is so saturated with the type that I need to stop myself so certain types of people aren't just represented because they're the default, as there's really no default way to be human, or an elf, or a dwarf... I suppose all the changelings are female at birth, but there's no reason you couldn't have one who is trans, genderqueer, agender, or anything else... hmm. Now I've got another thing to work in somewhere.
An important thing to keep in mind is to have your representation spread evenly across the hero/villain scale too. Like it's cool to have marginalized folks represented in your stuff, but you should represent any particular group as neither "uniformly heroic" nor "uniformly villainous."

thejeff |
I was in one game awhile back with a simple standard fantasy set up. All of the generic fantasy races mostly isolated on their own continents - elflands, dwarflands, humanlands, etc.
The elves had conquered everyone in the past and then been thrown out hundreds of years back. Plenty of trade, but no real cosmopolitan multi-species cities or kingdoms.
It was some months into the game, not having really thought about it before, that we decided all the humans were essentially black - never having spread from their initial homelands and diversified into what we call races. :)

SilvercatMoonpaw |
I do poorly in this area: for various reasons I find it hard to hold details about characters in my mind, resulting in any human-like characters coming off as generic, fit, young, white people. It doesn't help that my best humanoid references are from anime, which is mostly populated by light-skinned beings who tend not to have that much body variance.
And it gets even harder when it's a non-physical feature: gender differences are hard without obvious markers, and I'm such an aromantic myself unless I'm trying to make a dirty joke someone's sexuality kind of feels superfluous.
The only area where I might be doing well is male-female balance: I tend to end up inverting the usual balance and having more females and in prominent roles.

Wevi |

I tend to only mention certain aspects of the NPCs and allow the player's to use their imaginations to fill in the gaps. If being grossly overweight (such as in a bloat mage) is an important fact, I give that information to the players. If ethnicity is important, such as Kellid or Ulfen, I mention that and move on.
Don't need the stress of trying to be PC or overly focused on pushing diverisity in our games.
I leave very little to the imagination because I use pictures for every NPC. If I don't have a picture I will only say one or two sentences explaining the person, usually in a list form. Those are throwaway Npc's any which way.

Wevi |

For my current campaign:
For races my NPCs are dominantly human with human-hybrids (mostly aasimar and tiefling because it makes sense for the setting). That's mostly to reflect the area, though. I will introduce occasional core races (dwarf/elf/gnome/halfling).... other exotic races, I want to keep exotic, so I don't use them except once in a blue moon.
For gender I flip a coin. I think I've ended up with more women than men but that is kind of a coincidence. As far as nonbinary genders go... I have an intersex NPC that hangs out with the PCs. I don't have any nonbinary NPCs, I've been thinking of introducing at least one. I had a Raelis Azata NPC but I wanted to depict him as young and therefore predominantly presented himself as binary male. I also have a transwoman NPC that became a leadership cohort of one of our PCs :)
For skin color, I'm using the Inner Sea races. Because of the setting I have mostly kellids, chelish, and taldane (so basically, white) but I try to make a point of introducing non-white races amongst our NPCs. I think among my "main cast" friendly NPCs I'm at 33% PoC, which I feel is reasonable given the setting.
For body type, it is hard to find cool fantasy art of varied body types. I typically don't describe body types, also, so I think that is something I can work on. I do make a point of trying to have middle-aged women present in the world as competent fighters.
Sexuality-wise I've had gay, bi and lesbian NPCs. And a poly NPC. No asexual NPCs so far, but we have an asexual PC.
I make a conscious effort to have diverse NPCs because that kind of fantasy setting makes me happy when I'm consuming other fantasy media and it makes me happy to have a diverse world that I GM. YMMV, though.
Generally I keep most of my npc's bisexual because I'm just flipping a coin.

Coidzor |
Hmm. Well in one game we're playing in an Adventure Path, so that's restricted things to a certain extent.
So far we've made friends with a Tian, beat up a Half-Tian Half-Elf, met a regular old alien Elf, have heard references to there being a couple of Half-Orcs in town but never actually met or seen any, have murderbucketed a whole bunch of Goblins, made a Bugbear run away from us in fear after we exploited his pyrophobia and fear of being murdered in the face with swords, made friends with a horse after rescuing him from goblins, gotten grandma'd as a party by a bunch of elderly Varisian women which included one of our PC's adoptive grandmothers, met and beat up an Osiriani(Garundi?) woman, got deputized by a Shoanti, and killed a guy who was a Kellid or something as far as we could tell.
Oh, and met some weird people who look like mutated ettercaps. We're still not sure why some of them were wearing clothing while others were completely buck naked, though. They were pretty angry until we helped them with their anger management by stabbing them in the face repeatedly.
I guess we also met a gnome who was all excitable and gnomish and had anime hair and our Paladin was sexually harassed by what I can only guess is supposed to be an Irishwoman translated into Golarion.
I think the general population is largely people who are around 1/2 to 3/4 mixes between Chelaxian and Varisian, but there are sizeable Chelaxian and Varisian minorities then a much smaller Taldan and Kellid minority with a couple of individual Garundis. So humans in various flavors of pale people, tan people, and olive-to-bronze people, as I recall. Given the ethnic makeup of the local population the eye colors run the gamut, but I think most people had had some form of dark hair where it has even come up.
The party itself consist of a human who is such a mutt that he doesn't even count as having an ethnicity beyond being from Absalom, a Taldan-Chelaxian-Varisian mutt who managed to get the right mix to have some atavistic Azlanti features thrown in there, a Half-Elf whose human half is not discernible(but allowed her to be a blonde), a Tengu, and Dwarves in both the very dark brown skin and very light skin varieties of Hill Dwarf (although maybe the darker one was actually a Mountain Dwarf).
In another game I'm in, it's basically all White People with the occasional person of a more East Asian or Arab persuasion, because we're playing in the Forgotten Realms in the Savage North which is largely different types of European.
Then in another game we're in off and on, we started out in a melting pot full of humans and non-humans of basically every color other than a few of the flourescent ones, went through basically France-Germany, stopped over in Russia-Holy Roman Empire-Italy, and are now trapped in a demiplane inhabited by a mixture of a few different types of humans. There's a small family of dark brown people, a large family and a few other small families of white people ranging from Celtic-Germanic to Germanic-Slavic, a group of not-Roma humans with literal magic powers based upon their race and then a whole lot of people who are purple or violet of skin and are otherwise kind of racially ambiguous beyond being either pale purple or dark purple or in a few cases a very light blue around the edges while the center is more of a pure white that is only sort of blue. Also some elves too and a bunch of vampires.
Before this batch of games we were playing Way of the Wicked, so it was basically my Lizardman, a Fetchling, and then a whole bunch of Anglo-Saxons, a Norman, a Half-Norman Half-Anglo-Saxon, some angry Scottish-Irish-Welsh hybrids, and some random Inuit. I guess we also met a Slavic witch, some Norsemen, and an Ifrit whose mom or dad was Persian, and then murderbucketed the crap out of them.

Mykull |

@Mykull: That sounds like a pretty cool setting. Lots of interesting details.
Thank you. I was trying to be brief. I have a spreadsheet with 33 different tabs (Pantheon, Cosmology, Time Line, Weights & Measures, Regional Starting Feats, Affiliations, and, and, and . . . and I'll totally thread-jack this if I don't stop now.
As I said, I was trying to be brief. But thank you.

Dragonchess Player |

When it comes to your games that you run or playing in, how diverse is your NPC's? I'm talking about race, skin, gender, body type for NPC's. I think I do a good job on race, gender. I need to work on skin, but I fell on body type. I looked at my NPC's and say only 001% of my NPC's are heavy, but very little are paper thin too.
For race's I use what ever I think would be good or a race that I have not used in a while.
For gender I flip a coin.
For skin I just need to find a pic that's not white.
For body type I need to work harder to find pic's that are more varied.
Most of this will be based on the concept, which will usually include ethnicity and cultural background. Race, skin, and sometimes gender are influenced by the ethnicity(-ies) and culture(s) of the character.
Body type is often based on ability scores (an 8 Str character is not going to be very muscular, after all), how active/sedentary the character tends to be, personality traits, and whether or not I want the character to have a specific look.

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I have a basic rule when creating a world/setting/campaign - If I have to ask myself "Have I met the quota" for something non-mechanical I'm probably overthinking it or getting weird - People are not pokemon and neither are NPCs, you don't need to have them all for an engaging game. Want to see something new? pick a horizon and start walking.
At the same time if you are on Verces and you can't tell it from Absalom or Osirion then you have a problem.

Doomed Hero |
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Regarding the discussion of what a "fantasy European analogue" culture is in regards to ethnic diversity, what's interesting to me is that in our actual history, european cultures generally hated each other a whole lot more than they hated people of drastically different appearances.
Your average Gaul would likely be cordial to a northern African trader or a Scythian who made his way down out of the northern steppes, but that same Gaul would want to stab a Roman in the face just for existing.
Genetically speaking, there aren't a lot of differences between Romans and Gauls.
The idea of a european collective culture didn't really come around until the crusades, and even then the holy rollers didn't like each other a whole lot. Their religion had just managed to become more important to them than their long histories of mutual loathing between kingdoms.
I think that's why most fantasy worlds have a hard time with realistic diversity. Inventing mono-cultural races or countries is just less work.

Ryan Freire |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Regarding the discussion of what a "fantasy European analogue" culture is in regards to ethnic diversity, what's interesting to me is that in our actual history, european cultures generally hated each other a whole lot more than they hated people of drastically different appearances.
Your average Gaul would likely be cordial to a northern African trader or a Scythian who made his way down out of the northern steppes, but that same Gaul would want to stab a Roman in the face just for existing.
Genetically speaking, there aren't a lot of differences between Romans and Gauls.
The idea of a european collective culture didn't really come around until the crusades, and even then the holy rollers didn't like each other a whole lot. Their religion had just managed to become more important to them than their long histories of mutual loathing between kingdoms.
I think that's why most fantasy worlds have a hard time with realistic diversity. Inventing mono-cultural races or countries is just less work.
And lets be real, we're used to minority races being in the high single digit to low double digit percentages IRL.
That moorish trader or scythian from the steppes is very likely sub 1% and possibly even sub .01% demographically. Exceptions don't make the rule, and honestly given the vastly increased dangers of travel for the common folk I'd think you're even less likely to find that moorish trader or scythian from the steppes outside of large cities or border outposts adjacent to their territory.
I expect most of the ethnic diversity in golarian stems from retired/semi-retired adventurers or exists in places like absalom or other large capital cities.

UnArcaneElection |

{. . .}
(4) Gnomes. They are tiny, not small. There are your Garden Variety Gnomes, Tinker Gnomes, Thinker Gnomes and a few other variants. There are a set number of gnomes alive at any one time. When a gnome dies, spores are left behind, and, back in the Great Grove, a mushroom transforms into a gnome. If the spores are returned to the Great Grove, that gnome continues in the circle of life. First In, Last Out. So, when a gnome dies, the oldest (or earliest) gnome in the Great Grove is born. Each new gnome is unique, with their own personality. But as a gnome ages (every century or so) they begin to acquire memories and skills from previous lives. This explains gnomes' tendency to be a bit flighty.
{. . .}
Well, this gives some insight into the evolution of Lawn Gnomes . . . .

Irontruth |
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Doomed Hero wrote:Regarding the discussion of what a "fantasy European analogue" culture is in regards to ethnic diversity, what's interesting to me is that in our actual history, european cultures generally hated each other a whole lot more than they hated people of drastically different appearances.
Your average Gaul would likely be cordial to a northern African trader or a Scythian who made his way down out of the northern steppes, but that same Gaul would want to stab a Roman in the face just for existing.
Genetically speaking, there aren't a lot of differences between Romans and Gauls.
The idea of a european collective culture didn't really come around until the crusades, and even then the holy rollers didn't like each other a whole lot. Their religion had just managed to become more important to them than their long histories of mutual loathing between kingdoms.
I think that's why most fantasy worlds have a hard time with realistic diversity. Inventing mono-cultural races or countries is just less work.
And lets be real, we're used to minority races being in the high single digit to low double digit percentages IRL.
That moorish trader or scythian from the steppes is very likely sub 1% and possibly even sub .01% demographically. Exceptions don't make the rule, and honestly given the vastly increased dangers of travel for the common folk I'd think you're even less likely to find that moorish trader or scythian from the steppes outside of large cities or border outposts adjacent to their territory.
I expect most of the ethnic diversity in golarian stems from retired/semi-retired adventurers or exists in places like absalom or other large capital cities.
Taken as a whole % of population, yes, non-native ethnicities should be very small, I would wholly agree. Cultures and people mix a lot more than the hard-coded boundaries we are used to seeing on a map. Alsace-Lorraine is an interesting example. In some ways the region is very French, but in other ways it is very German. It's a huge mixture of the two in reality. An interesting demographic for our discussion though, of the roughly 1.7 million people that lived in the region in 1900, 1.1% of them were native Italian speakers, and 0.1% of them were native Polish speakers, even though both of those languages are associated with regions that are multiple large regions away. Both are still European languages, but it gives an idea of how much mixing can happen.
And I agree, in a small hamlet with just a few houses, the population is probably going to be somewhat homogeneous. New "blood" will come in as the result of large events (even if they happen distantly) like a war, famine, or any event that causes migration. Even with the difficulty and dangers of travel, human beings are still pretty mobile creatures. Humans had already arrived in Chile some 14,000 (or more) years ago, and the trip from Morocco to England circa 1000 CE is a much easier journey than going from California to Chile in 12,000 BCE. Does that mean that tons of Moroccans lived in England? No, but seeing a Moroccan sailor on a ship in England would not have been a noteworthy event.
The same would be true for Africa at that time. If you lived in a coastal town that routinely traded with Europeans, seeing a light-skinned man would be no big deal, but if you were from an inland village (even just a few miles), you might never see one your whole life.
As another wonderful example of people traveling further than we think, Barbary pirates raided everywhere in the Mediterranean, and from South Africa, to South America, and as far north as Iceland. There's a reason the US fought two wars against them, because they predated upon shipping between the US and Europe. As European navies strengthened, peace deals were made, but that didn't result in zero contact. A significant purpose to their raiding was to supply the slave trade in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, meaning a small infusion of light-skinned people into those regions.

NeoTiamat |

Very first game I ran, I ended up with about fifteen key NPCs along with the players on an archaeological expedition, of whom two were female and one was non-white. This ended up being a tad embarrassing when it was noted that the party *literally* look the same, and ever since I've paid attention to culture, gender, and ethnicity.
Currently I'm running a Planescape game, which has let me go all out on 'most diverse characters', so the current lineup of allied NPCs is:
- One older white male, English-ish, who is gay and for whom being gay is a vital part of the characterization (he's from a pseudo-Victorian Prime, so he wasn't 'out' till his late 50s or so). The PCs' mentor, so to speak.
- One middle-aged gnoll, who I run as culturally African (defaulting to East African, though I admit I pick and choose cultural markers). Straight. The PCs' boss.
- One female Aztec aasimar, pretty much pansexual.
- A pair of Tiefling sisters, notionally white (though more in the 'corpse pallor sort of sense), but with very slight marks of classical Greek culture. One sister is an enthusiastically straight bard, the other is more introverted and her sexuality has not come up.
- A harbinger archon, so genderless, asexual, and the like, but in life was female and roughly East Asian equivalent.
- A bakezori, also basically genderless and asexual, acts like a preteen boy mostly.
- White female ghoul, Slavic-ish (Ustalavan actually). Asexual but not aromantic.
- Male Crystal Dragon, usually takes on a Middle Eastern human shape. Bisexual but leans towards women.
So overall... gender diversity skews female, with two men, two 'other', and five women. This was intentional to counterbalance PC tendency to play male characters. Culture/ethnicity has four characters coded 'white', two Asian, one African, one Middle Eastern, and one Mesoamerican. Sexuality is the area where I'm most utilitarian -- I tend to leave it undefined or 'prolly straight' until and unless I see a way it might be game-relevant (say, a PC trying to romance a character), whereupon I adjust things towards whatever is most interesting. Body type and age skews towards 'Pathfinder Standard', though we've got an old human, and one of the tiefers is markedly roly-poly -- to be fair, these are all professional mercenaries/adventurers, so I figure they'd skew to, if not fit, then at least able to run away from monsters fast.
Now, mind, this is in Sigil, which is explicitly meant to be the crossroads of the multiverse. When I ran a Ravenloft game, most characters tended to be local to wherever the game was set, with exceptions typically, though not always, found in some version of 'Chinatown' (I had a Hazlani expat community prove quite game-important).

Wevi |

his was intentional to counterbalance PC tendency to play male characters...
To not do the same when I'm playing, every time I start a new character I go to the other gender. I just played a female human bard, now I'm about to play a male ratfolk wizard. When it come I playing a female dwarf druid.

NeoTiamat |
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Wevi wrote:For skin I just need to find a pic that's not white.Way harder in fantasy than it should be. >.>
Paizo's done an admirable job of it. Most others... not so much.
Good god yes. >_> It's not just race either, though that's a big part of it. Try finding fantasy characters who do not fit classical ideals of beauty. Maybe I want a short, fat, female knight!
NeoTiamat wrote:his was intentional to counterbalance PC tendency to play male characters...To not do the same when I'm playing, every time I start a new character I go to the other gender. I just played a female human bard, now I'm about to play a male ratfolk wizard. When it come I playing a female dwarf druid.
I tend to play characters of the opposite gender, for vaguely this reason, yes. Variety!