Cultural Exchange
Speaking broadly your typical elf is a poncy, poetry-loving, tree-hugging pretty boy with a noble disdain for the “lesser races.” He carries a bow, a rapier whit, and the rightful claim to some woodland kingdom or other. Said kingdom is generally waiting for his royal ass to finish adventuring so that it can sit on the throne of Brightbough or whatever the crap and continue the local dynasty for another thousand years. By the same token your typical dwarf is a bearded ball of bad Scottish accents, strong ale, and assorted cutlery. He is the drunken, money-grubbing, horny helmet wearing comic relief of the party, and generally needs to reclaim the lost halls of his ancestors from Dragon #424 or whatever the crap. It also goes without saying that the two of them hate the ever loving crap out of each other.
These are the tropes we’ve got to work with. Your options include using them, subverting them, or ignoring them. The first gets repetitive in a hurry, the second quickly becomes its own cliche (Warning – TV Tropes link), and the last might very well be impossible. There’s no denying that Gimli and Legolas have covered this ground pretty thoroughly, and the pair echo so strongly in our collective geeky consciousness that no two representatives of these staple fantasy races can enter the same scene without “That still only counts as one!” jokes popping up as well.
My solution? Play a grippli. I guarantee you that nobody’s got preconceived notions about a race of sentient frog people. Except of course for those freaky bug-eyed thri-kreen, but everyone knows they’re racist.
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Or just do what I did and combine the two. A dwarf, raised by elves who considers himself and his halfling sister to be elves. Also, he’s a druid.
But what if your sister gets reincarnated as a halfling?
I love thri-kreen. Mostly because they feed my need for “this isn’t basically just a human with a different paint job”.
I would totally play a grippli though.
I do have a bit of a thing about the whole subverting the tropes bit. Currently signed up for a game that’s recruiting and my character is an elven architect and builder and another is an eladrin blacksmith. Thus leaving nothing for any dwarves to do but be the town drunk.
And in the game I’m running one of the major characters is an elf that’s burly to the point of almost being a body builder. Of course I made him that way for more reasons to just invert the trope.
I’m not sure that “my elf is a bodybuilder” succeeds in getting away from the pretty boy stereotype. It just gives it a can of muscle milk… and probably an Austrian accent. 😛
As for cool dwarf subversions, I had a GM invent this group of dwarves that were basically Amish. They were “cursed in the sight of [stereotypical dwarven smith god],” and so didn’t have any stone to quarry or gems to mine. They just had sand and clay pits, and so got to be master glass blowers and potters. Their beards were pretty spectacular too:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/120827-mullet-vsmall.380;380;7;70;0.jpg
You have to be careful with dwarven beard improvements. They’re just a nudge away from becoming intelligent and taking over the dwarf as is. =P
In the dwarven tongue there are no words for “beard improvement.” There are however 73 distinct phrases that all mean, “Touch my beard and I will harm you.”
Of course there are no words for it. The intelligent beards command their host dwarves to silence any who come too close to the hairy truth.
I’ve always wanted to play a Grippli, but I mainly play in Pathfinder Societies and I don’t have the special boon.
It’s a shame. I even had a character planned out. I’d play a Witch, either the class or just the theme, and her backstory is that she used to be a Human who tried to turn a noble into a frog for refusing her advances. The spell backfired and hit her instead.
Her nickname is Princess.
Random side note: I find it hilarious that in Pathfinder, Dwarves make better druids than Elves.
Oh man…if there was ever an excuse to RP as Latrine from “Men in Tights…”
Grippli are tough though. I like to do voices with my characters, and the one time I tried to play a frog-like character I thought it would be a good idea to go for a croaking sound. The only way I found to do this was to speak while inhaling. Trust me here, there’s not enough Robitussin in the world to keep that up.