#what geographic reason fantasy races inhabit

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22:50 5/1/22

Centaur Lore as requested! ty for asking @ernikerr​ (also I prommy I haven’t been ignoring your message I just didn’t get the chance to put this post together until now. I’m just going to give a broad overview of some of my inspirations and motivations in this post, I’ll dive more into it in other posts because this is already going to be long lmaooo

This lore was originally for a player driven ttrpg that @nolandspy​ was dm’ing, but as is the tendency I got up to my neck in ideas and couldn’t stop spinning about horses and also cultural anthropology so here we are

This is the character I played! Her name is An-tessalonika, or just Tessa for short. Her having just a real world ass name was mostly played for laughs, I chose the name very deliberately. I’ve decided the centaur naming system goes like this:

[honorific]-[given name][surname]

So her given name is Tessa, she’s of the herd Lonika, and her honorific is An. I’ll get more into the honorific system when I’ve actually figured out how I want to do it in a later post.

There are 4 herds (Lonika, Trakehn, Abarda, and Marwai; again, more info to come) and each hail from a different part of the highlands. As this isn’t part of any specific world I don’t really have a map to point to where each herd is geographically, but think Asian steppe. A lot a lot a LOT of the visual design is based on western asian cultures (think like Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Southern Siberia that whole area)

I think the anatomy of centaurs alone sort of lets you infer a lot about what their culture would be like. They aren’t going to be able to live in cities, or at least not any that a humanoid would recognize. Just from playing as a centaur, even though most of the campaign was being out on adventures, my character had a really hard time dungeon crawling, walking up stairs, getting supplies from shops etc. With that in mind, I reasoned that centaurs probably live away from other other humanoids just because of differing needs for physical infrastructure. So it made sense to make them nomadic, (which is also why western Asian cultures were such a big influence- the Mongols were known for their horsemanship, and live in a place that horses are specifically adapted to)

I had an idea early on that one of the most notable features of centaur culture was their headwear. This is a take that developed after seeing how gorgeous some of the traditional garments of this area are, and before I realized that they’d also likely cover their hair because they don’t want it whipping around in their face as they run. I also borrowed the idea from many cultures around the world about the sanctity of growing out your hair, and only cutting it symbolically. This way I could sort of incorporate all of these ideas in one, and have an excuse to draw and research beautiful scarves and head pieces.

(Left to right, Armenian, Buryat, and Russian ? I did some quick internet detective work but and google translate tells me that it’s from a collection of photos taken at (what I’m pretty sure is) a Russian ren fair essentially. Link to the original blog post about the fair HERE if anyone can read russian)

All of these ladies are from very different cultures but are all generally from places (geographically) where centaurs would be good at living, which is the main principle guiding me in building out centaur culture

I think there’s not enough hair coverage rep in fantasy generally, and I’m not entirely sure why, (At least in the US, I can’t speak for other places, I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have to do with mounting islamophobia as fantasy started coming to public attention in the 80s/90s/2000s hmmm)  Headwear has been a feature of clothing since society existed and despite the general trend away from it in the modern day, I think that it should still be considered when designing fantasy societies

[d4bbl3zdnd]

Man Power

So far, we’ve covered all of the basic fantasy races that inhabit most worlds, but no world is complete without the humans to set the standard. And let’s be honest, that is exactly the role that humans play in RPGs. They are the race that all other races are compared to. Even when I was building Cambreon, I decided that humans were the perfect creation of all the gods; the homogenous mixing of every element. They procreate faster than any other race, and can adapt to anything the world throws at them which allows them to spread far and wide. Industrious, driven, and willing to take any risks to further their goals.

Endlessly Adaptable

Humans in Cambreon aren’t really any different than humans in other fantasy settings, so one of the big things I decided to do with them was to throw in a lot of real-world historical references. While elves, dwarves, and other races are pretty similar around the world, the humans of Cambreon would be as influenced by their surroundings as the humans of our own world. Because of their shorter lifespans, humans would have empires that rise and fall, countries that grow and absolve, varying physical and social attributes depending on where in the world they live. A human that lives closer to the poles of the world wouldn’t live the same lifestyle as one who lived near the equator, and their societies would differ as well.

Because I didn’t customize the game mechanics of Cambrean humans, I’m going to focus on a couple of the ways that I personalized the humans of Cambreon by adding real-world flavor into some of the regions of the world. Because I want to talk about kingdom-building at a later date, I’m just going to give one example of how I flavored a region of human society with my counterpart to a Roman-style empire.

When in Rome

Let’s face it, Rome was one of the greatest empires to ever grace our world. It lasted for about 500 years until Rome fell to the Visigoths and Vandals. Even then, the eastern part of the empire held until 1453 when it finally fell to the Ottoman Turks. This sort of long-lasting empire that is influential even after its collapse is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to add to my world to bring the legacy of the humans up to that of the longer-lived races, and firmly cement them as the pinnacle of deific creation. To do this I needed a central location of base my empire, which I named Reismort, and a large island continent I had placed in my world was the perfect location.

I decided that, like the real Rome, Reismort would have started on this island continent and eventually built up its technology and prowess to the point where it eventually conquered much of the surrounding mainland. Reismort at its peak would have been a sight to behold. Magic in daily use, wondrous technological advancements, vastly superior military expertise. This empire could be stopped by nothing in the known world. This, of course, was long before the current timeline of any campaign I would run, which begs the question of what stopped the empire.

One of the big reasons I started kicking around ideas about Cambreon in the first place was Wizards of the Coast’s contest for people to create campaign settings in 2002. It wasn’t until many years later that I really started to flesh the world out, but the basics had always been there. One of the things that I really loved about the Eberron setting which eventually won the aforementioned contest was the Warforged race. Here was a race that were effectively sentient golems, and with the Pathfinder rules being compatible with D&D 3.5 I had my reason for the fall of Reismort - Skynet. Yes, that’s right, the Reismort empire was overthrown by Terminators.

It was perfect. Elves tap magic beyond their control, dwarves dig too deep, and humans create technologies that eventually destroy them. The Reismort Empire, from that moment forward, had perfected the creation of golems to do their menial labor to the point of creating sentience that eventually lead to an empire-wide revolt of the creations against their human masters. Cities would be destroyed, casualties would be astronomical, and the empire would never recover. What remained would be rebuilt as individual kingdoms under their own rule; the golems that were their downfall destroyed or hidden and forgotten. This added so much story that could be built upon, from ancient Reismort artifacts of great power to hidden ruins inhabited by warforged and golems still under the banner of “kill all humans”.

Outside of the story points, it gave a unified history to about a third of the world that I had mapped out. All of these new countries would have been influenced by the Reismort Empire, even though they likely do not still follow its tenets. This would also highlight the vast differences between areas of the world that used to be under Reismort rule and those remote locations that never saw imperial control. It gave a large geographical area that would benefit from established roads, walled cities, and stable governments. This area would act as the starting zone of my campaign where the party can build up their confidence and skill before heading off into the truly wild places of the world where real adventure begins.

This is just a glimpse into how the humans of Cambreon shaped their world, which I will go into much more depth at a later date. Next week we get back to the non-human races with a look at the Dragonborn and how I labored over ways to include this new standard race into a world that wasn’t originally built with them in mind.

art by David Revoy, courtesy of Dungeon Masters Guild