It happens. I was being stupid and frustrated by that old "damnit, I know what I mean, why aren't they reading my mind!" shit that idiots like me fall prey to occasionally.OgreBattle wrote:Ah sorry about that, had a brain fart on your previous Midgard threads.
Ok, starting fresh, spitballing fluff first, seeing what people think, and then going into mechanics after that's figured-
Lets start with humans as a base point- I really like the idea, talked about off and on, of humans being hard core death monsters. We kill stuff by following it until it drops. We rely on a gas which essentially causes cell death to live. We recreationally poison ourselves and can handle things that are toxic to most other animals with no problem (chocolate, caffeine, etc). We get giant holes ripped in us and can recover with little difficulty. etc.
Granted, a game system is usually not going to have the granularity to represent things like humans recovering from giant holes ripped in them with little lasting effect because that means that other races have to interact with the damage system in a very different way. I suppose humans could basically be easier to heal- like they have better chances of recovering naturally once they've been stabilized and any magical healing has a lower dc when used on them. That's very limited, but could be flavourful.
So the humans of Midgard, Manligr (lit. human from old norse, though that has two 'n's), are supposed to be strong and tough and resilient. They were the race which invented mead, and they shared it with the Alfar and Dvergar. They're somewhat influenced by Tolkien men, in that they have more freedom to determine their fates than elves and dwarves.
Alfar are inhabitants of Alfheim, and are basically kindly nature spirits. They protect the wilds, and may offer artistic inspiration. While they may not be "bound to one specific tree" they are fatebound to "protect the wilds." I suppose there are two ways I can go with this- actual alfar can be programmed nature spirits who don't leave Alfheim much and are not an appropriate player race, and thus people play the spawn of Alfar/Manligr mixing with some nature spirit/art patron flavor, or I can use actual Alfar, say "adventurers are unusual, who gives a fuck" and give them a "cannot intentionally harm wilderness or cause or allow wilderness to come to harm" thing. Either way, I like Orion's suggestion of making the elf race the "we don't go into that forest, X live there and no man comes out alive" race who are fast and agile and giving them some spookiness. I can still play up the connection to Sidhe that people will inevitably make by playing on the ideas of elves hunting people. They could keep their alluring quality too, but I'm not married to it if something better comes along.
Come to that- Races could have a trait called Fatebound, which describes the way they are hardwired to act or not act in the world. So Alfar have Fatebound (cannot harm wildlands other than for survival).
Dvergar are the inhabitants of Nidavelir, and are from them come the standard fantasy dwarf stereotype- they're natural craftsmen and love minerals. Like Alfar, I had decided that Dvergar were too programmed to be adventurers, but there is some basis in the myths for it. If I go with the idea of allowing people to play actual dvergar, then they could be Fatebound to hoard gold, and maybe they rest by crafting. Like, instead of sleeping, dvergar actually have to make things to rest. Considerate dwarves take up quieter crafts when they adventure with the other races.
This also gives me the idea to have the races do different things to rest. Manligr need actual sleep, but Alfar could rest by maintaining contact with wilderness- like they perch in a tree for six+ hours and they are as refreshed as a human with six+ hours of sleep, and this comes from the fact that they're nature guardians and this allows them to essentially protect forests and be fully rested at all times. They would need some caveat about needing an uneventful, uninterrupted span of time to refresh expendable stuff, but since most races can't sleep just by being in the forest, the party should be clamoring for camp anyway. Clearly this would need hard definitions of what counts as wilderness.
I had originally intended to have a giant-kin race fill the orc niche called Durskin. They were orcs. But lets pitch that and work with the idea of Giant-kin specifically. Norse myth gives three specific sorts of giant- the frost giants of Niflheim, the fire giants of Muspelheim and the normal giants of Jotunheim. Apparently Jotunn may have been, essentially, clay giants. The point is that there are three kinds of being people talk about in Norse myth when they say giant. Loki is specifically Jotunn, but the most popular and recognized form of Loki in pop culture makes him a frost giant, which makes this difficult. But, fuck it. For recognition sake, we'll say that the giant kin race is specifically born of Loki, or at least his children, and has blue skin and hair like icicles. Loki is commonly called on in Norse myth to trick people for the Aesir, or to get around fate. Odin wants a way to survive Ragnarok, but it's Loki who starts the wheels turning and Loki the gods always turn to pull their collective dicks from the fire. Loki is also Norse myth's most propagative god, fathering a giant wolf, a half-dead woman, a giant serpent, a man who was later turned into a wolf, and a man who was killed by that wolf-man, and giving birth to an eight-legged horse (because chaos). Loki was also the only god in Asgard who could change shape without the aid of a magic item. So Loki's blue-skinned kin are the master manipulators and may have some shapechanging ability.
The last of my original five races was Lagrkin (lit. small-kin, if I had put in the diacritical) a shortarse race that I put in to fill out the Five Fantasy Race set up, and take the role of halflings/hobbits in Midgard's attempt to be a D&D descendant and Peter Jackson Hobbit based game. Setting aside the "short and scrappy" niche, the real niche is "the stealthy race." Alfar could take this niche to differentiate them from standard asian vulcan elves, and it would fit well with "spooky forest protectors." In fact, I do like the idea of giving medium races a Slight Build power that lets them get the benefits of being small. So this scraps the idea of "short stealthy people" and I can now look at filling out the "one from each world" thing. The idea was for Lagrkin to be the Vanaheim descended race. Vanaheim is commonly depicted as a generic forest world because the Vanir are a traditional "old guard gods" group who warred with the upstart new gods, the Aesir. As a race of gods they're associated with "fertility, wisdom, nature, magic, and the ability to see the future" and so they overlap somewhat with Alfar. Vanaheim doesn't really have much in the way of inhabitants we know about, the only Vanaheim inhabitants we know of are the Vanir, of which we really only know those who joined the Aesir (this game really needs a "defeat means friendship" theme given how, strangely, frequently the Aesir pulled it).
So, if we give Alfar the "spooky forest people" thing, then the next logical things for the Vanaheim race to be are- 1) the master sorcerers, 2) godlings, 3) related to the attendants of Vanir, or 4) representative/tied to natural phenomena rather than being "guardians of wilderness." Njord is a sea and wind god, Freya is a goddess of love, Freyr is a god of fertility and Nerthus is an earth mother. It occurs to me that if Lokin are are "blue and spiky haired" this allows the Vanaheim race to be the varied appearance race, where some are sort of Genasi, and some have touches of animal to them, and so on. So lets say this race is the Vanakin, and their thing is that they represent a specific part of nature, some represent the wind, some represent stone, some represent water, some are Innsmouthian, some are raptorial, etc. This is your special snowflake race for furries and weeaboos.
So we have races tied to Midgard, Alfheim, Nidavelir, Jotunnheim/Niflheim, and Vanaheim. This leaves Asgard, Svartalfheim, Muspelheim and whichever of Jotunnheim/Niflheim we don't explicitly tie the Lokin to.
The Asgard race is actually pretty easy. You're a Valkyrie on leave/gone AWOL/whatever. You can influence battles by making near misses actual hits and actual hits into glancing blows because you are the Chooser Of The Slain, not the Mopper Up Of Battles. You can also keep an eye on how everyone is doing by watching their fates. You probably also get a kick-ass mount that is maybe a giant wolf, the translations weren't great.
Svartalfheim is the home of the dark elves who were more about fucking with humans than protecting forests. They can torment humans and animals, inflicting nightmares and such, so you get to be a cool dark-skinned elf type and trade your nature powers for fear effects. Spider imagery need not apply, if anything you're probably more into wolves and snakes (it's norse myth, it's wolves all the way down).
Muspelheim is the world of fire, and actually gives something other than fire giants for us to work with- fire demons (which of course are occasionally conflated with fire giants, because Norse myth. Because the shit going on in the north that occasionally raided the temples of a 2000 year old religion that still exists and has dominated western civilization was apparently too fucking hard to document). But, this gives us something to work with that isn't "more giants," and it's why I didn't mention fire genasi in the Vanakin bit. So, one of the terms for the denizens of Muspelheim is Rjúfendr, which means, basically, destroyers of doomsday. So when you play the Muspelheim race, you are basically a fire demon powered by sheer Metalness. You have fire and chaos powers that are all about destroying shit rather than boning shit (that's the chaos power of Lokin, mind).
Given my preference, I'd rather hew to Norse myth and keep Loki Jotunn rather than Frost Giant. But, I can talk about how Thor is red-headed and dim and Loki is a common giant, not a frost giant, all I want, Marvel has created very iconic associations for them. That isn't to say I can't make a race more specifically tied to Niflheim, though. Niflheim is also the location of Helheim, the land of the dead. So the Niflheim race is basically something like white walker frost zombies. Except you're intelligent because they need to be an actual playable race. Lokin get to be blue with spiky icicle hair, but their powers are about trickery and manipulation. The actual ice powers should probably go to these guys, and draugr actually means ghost in old norse (and tree trunk. shut up) so these guys can just be called Draugr. Maybe their shtick is the ability to animate any corpse and use it like a suit/puppet. This speaks to them being natural necromancers who are actually spirits. If starting level is closer to level 5, a playable ghost might almost be doable, but I don't think too many people are going to be too angry if the ghost race needs a flesh suit to actually do things with corporeal objects. They can scout ahead in ghost form, and lets go ahead and let them be icy wind that deals some minor cold damage, but they need to actually find a corpse to ride to do anything more than that.
So that's nine races, one to represent each world in Norse myth. The rabbit folk are... something you can do with the Vanaheim race if you want, and there isn't really a small race, but maybe elves get the mechanical benefits of being small. As far as descriptions, what do people think of those ideas?
