Palette Swap
Welcome to Part 2 of our ongoing crossover with Dungeons & Doodles: Tales from the Tables. While Angie the paladin is busy pissing off the gods, it looks like the rest of her party are relaxing at the King’s Arms. Unfortunately, it would appear that Highlander rules are in effect. When you’re the specialist snowflake, there can be only one!
I’ll admit that this original-character-do-not-steal business is foreign to me. Like we talked about way back when, I tend not to think about my characters in visual terms. When I roll up a PC I’m more concerned about elements like backstory, character voice, and quest hooks. As a words guy, it takes a special effort for me to pause and consider my appearance. That’s partly due to temperament, but I also think this may have something to do with “official art.”
When tieflings were introduced way back in the day, they were a diverse bunch of weirdos. Just check out the original Tiefling Appearance tables from Planescape. They’re pretty wild, with elements like feathers for hair, Etrigan ears, and extremely long noses. But when you imagine a tiefling, I’m betting that the first thing that springs to mind is “horns + tail.” That’s because those big, bold elements make for visually striking silhouettes. In other words, they look good on a book cover. That’s not necessarily wrong, but that particular style of tiefling appears so frequently that the wonderful weirdness of plane-touched PCs gets reduced to “pick your color.”
We all know that chasing the Questing Beast of originality is a fool’s game. This comic is a testatment to tropes, as dungeon bash fantasy is itself built from some pretty basic building blocks. But if you do have the freedom to invent, why would you limit yourself to such a small palette of the fantastic? I want to see more tieflings that spit acid when they get mad. I want more aasimar with the green skin of planetars. I want fire genasi that wonder wistfully what ice cream tastes like (“It’s always soup by the time I bite down.”).
So for today’s discussion question, what do you say we update those old Planescape tables? Pick a race, then invent an idiosyncratic quirk. With any luck, by the end of today’s comic we’ll have more options than “slightly different lavender.” All clear? Then I’ll see you down in the comments!
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Kender – Have an inherent God complex due to gold-shining skin. Other races play along to avoid their klepto tendencies.
Ratfolk – Can jump absurdly high. Tall and lanky. Exclusive insectivores who hunt or breed giant bugs and insectiod sapients.
Dwarf – Beards never stop growing / grow very fast, and are as durable as rope. They used this fact to colonize a jungle full of tall trees and make elaborate tree houses that require ropes to reach.
Human – a fallen race of Gollum-like wildmen, following an incident that corrupted their entire race. Treated like goblins/apes in most civilized societies, they inhabit ruins of their once great civilization.
Elves – the ‘default human’ race, following the corruption of humanity as a whole. Split into industry and natural elves, who use tech and magic respectively and have droopy or straight-pointing ears.
Half-blooded races – stigmatized due to the corruption of their human halves, much like Tieflings.
Orc – Aquatic mammal herbivores subsisting on algae and coral for nourishment. They can’t breathe underwater but have extremely long lung capacity, like most sea mammals.
Goblins – Nomadic traders who can blink and see the ethereal plane. Collectors and buyers of trash, junk and clutter from other races. Nobody knows where their homeland is, or what they do with the stuff they collect and trade – though they seem capable of turning worthless items into valuable tools and works of art.
The image of a blubbery walrus orcs will haunt me for the rest of my days.
Is any of this from an actual game? It feels like somebody’s homebrew setting.
Nope! All of them I made up in like 5 minutes. They would fit in a homebrew for sure.
Well, except the Ratfolk. Those were inspired by FF9’s design.
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Freya_Crescent_(Opera_Omnia)
What does the color card the red Tiefling is holding say?
Something about lavender… beats me all I see is two purple thieflings arguing.
My head canon is as such: Thief was just drinking when the thiefling coming from Playgirl cover shoot has a standard moment of male pattern comour blindness and feels like there’s enough room for one purple thiefling… What do you mean lavender? purple is purple!
After several rounds of Blade Runner style zoom + enhance, I believe it says “devilish lavender.”
That’s what I said purple.
The comic appears to be missing the alt-text. Has the joke budget run out?
Fixed.
Coincidentally, my tiefling character is also of similar colouring to Thief… though stands out by virtue of having wings instead of horns. And that does limit her options for disguise spells, but she can do a credible impersonation of various Celestial, Infernal or Abyssal denizens, and has occasionally been known to lurk on the rooftops disguised as a gargoyle.
As to thinking about character appearances, I love Hero Forge for that… I (usually) don’t start with a image, but using a tool like that can be useful to play with that side of things. I’ve got one character who ended up with pink hair purely because it ended up looking cool in the rendering… and the character therefore became the kind of person who’d dye their hair bright pink.
I’ve been thinking about doing a Hero Forge contest and asking folks to make models of Handbook characters. We foot the bill for the winner to get theirs printed out.
…
One day.
Better idea. The prize is for one of their own characters to get printed. I’d love to be able to get a mini for Lurog or Alester. There aren’t any orcs with bows or dragonborns with wings.
Dwarves are traditionally found in subterranean citadels, but I had “tundra dwarves” in one of my settings… primal types living in the cold places where few but dwarves could survive. Consequentially, where normal dwarves tend to be hairy, tundra dwarves were outright furry…
So basically the Shovel Knight enemies in Polar Knight’s level?
https://shovelknight.fandom.com/wiki/Tundread
I did the same sort of thing, but with silver dragonborn instead of dwarves. That racial resistance to cold really comes in handy when the sun doesn’t come up for five months at a time.
Wait… Your silver dragonborn were furry? I’m having trouble conceptualizing that.
Might’ve mis-explained that slightly. I meant that they’d colonised the polar regions, not that they’d gained hair.
Might you, reptiles have done it twice-ish already.
And lest we forget, there’s always the fur-bearing trout:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fur-bearing_trout
Allow us to educate you:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4e/5c/75/4e5c7526f41884d11a137790f334277a.jpg
Need to hit that poor dragonborn with some wolfsbane. Either that or a silver stick.
Given how my last campaign had tieflings ranging from “creepy organic bone mask” to “angry crow lady,” I wholly approve of this prompt.
Let’s have an earth genasi who has the Pigpen effect, just constantly covered in dirt and leaving a dust trail. They’re best friends with a gnome with skin that catches the light like ceramic, who specializes in pottery. Sure, the two met when the gnome just wanted quality raw materials, but relationships have started with less.
Oh man… That pigpen mess must be a bitch at formal dining situations. I bet they always get sat next to the out-of-favor courtiers.
I did this for an Earth Aspect, actually. Yet, they couldn’t say much to him, cause he was a high ranking member of House Mnemon. When you’re the grandson of the most powerful sorceress in the Realm, you can get away with being a little dirty. Especially if you wear superheavy plate and hit like a warstrider.
Goblins: Many types are actually artificial and made in special cauldrons. In fact, a surprisingly high proportion of beastfolk, such as kobolds, are actually these goblins. Many like to experiment with different recipes.
Dwarves: Carved from stone and breathed into life by another dwarf. The finest construct-makers in the known world. Their rulers are their great fortresses, who can speak the language of stone to their inhabitants.
Tieflings: Despite what some say, not all are fiend-born. The term also applies to fae-touched, often those fairy babies left behind when a fairy kidnaps a human child. Incredibly varied.
Gnomes: You know those kidnapped human kids? That’s where these guys come from.
I feel like the dwarf example gives us access to a lot of interesting stone-based skin textures and pigmentations.
In some settings, the fields are fey… e.g. in Shadow of the Demon Lord, the lord of Hell was originally one of the great Fey, and the lesser devils his faerie followers. As such, they’ve got a lot of characteristics in common, such as a vulnerability to iron. So I like the idea that tieflings could also be of non-fiend heritage… though it does open the door for them (as a race) to subsume other “planetouched” races like aasimar or genasi. That could be interesting in its own right, if those divisions were to be deliberately blurred.
I like your dwarves, and being wrought of living-stone would explain their resilience to poisons (alcohol included). Colin’s comment about stone-based textures also brings to mind Discworld trolls… particularly some of the later stories where their composition (notably diamond) matters.
My tiefling filidh (a druidic archetype for the Pathfinder bard) in a Wrath of the Righteous table doesn’t even KNOW he’s a tiefling; Arloric Dziergas-Highbough was born to a bloodline of old Sarkoris, tainted with the blood of demons, just awaiting the touch of a true demon to awaken it. That touch came from a beast that attacked his family’s farmstead, slew his parents and would have done the same to him had the local inquisitors and his half-elf druid uncle hadn’t rescued him.
He looks like a normal human apart from his left eye, which in addition to some wicked scarring from that demon’s claw, has a completely black sclera and a golden iris and never, EVER closes, not even to blink. Arloric keeps it covered with an eyepatch most of the time, except when he needs to use it to see in the dark.
He’s going to get QUITE the surprise when the truth of his nature is revealed to him by the GM! >:)
For some reason, I feel like “creepy eyes” is the best tiefling trait. >_>
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/easy_on_the_eyes
There’s a limit to it though – few want slug-like eyes or insectoid faceted orbs. Or the Dunwich look. Or eyes in places that shouldn’t have eyes.
Garbage pail tieflings have a head start on other alchemists.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/strange-brews
I heard that the decrease in tiefling variance was a ploy by Hasbro to make minis easier to mass-produce and sell, which makes a worrying amount of sense
I’d love to see a source on that! Fascinating stuff….
I don’t have any smoking guns from within Hasbro or WotC, but it is ‘weird’ how tieflings were so variable before Hasbro bought WotC and then suddenly got locked down into a single type after the purchase and the release of the Miniatures Game and the Heroes minis. Apparently pre-Hasbro sourcebooks have suggestions on how to improvise minis, where post-Hasbro revisions just say ‘why not buy some of ours?’ as well.
I’ve heard this too.
Note how the Tieflings in chapter 1 of Baldur’s Gate 3 look pretty much standarized…
Devilishly handsome people with fairly standard horns, tails and red, blue or purple skin. Kind of like how myself or the Handbook depict them.
Hey, DoodlePoodle! Welcome to the party. Nice to see our tieflings getting along. 😀
It’s really tough in a visual medium. You want to be able to instantly communicate “this is a member of XYZ race.” In that sense, we fall into the same predicament as official art.
Just look at what happened with Monk here on the Handbook. We were playing with the Pathfinder-style “pastel colored gnome” visuals in the early comics…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/earning-it
…But that lead to confusion. Folks thought they were looking at a hobgoblin or some such. Hence the revision:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/battle-trance
Similar to the 1996 film Michael, your aasimar’s BO (whenever he or she does work up a sweat) is actually quite pleasant, smells different to every person, and frequently evokes baked goods and/or a favorite-but-forgotten childhood memory.
This could be a source of pride or of embarrassment, depending on RP, alignment, or background.
Dudes in the bar just trying to sniff your pits….
The only Teif I’ve ever played* was a 1/2 dwarf. 1/2 kyton Teif (okay more like 1/4, his grandmother was a kyton… though to be honest his immediate parentage was never disclosed as he was an orphan so there’s that).
He had thick spiky hair, like porcupine quills and his beard tended to curl into hooks. His body hair was also annoyingly sharp and spiky which made his wardrobe expensive… until he “unlocked” enough of his Kyton heritage that he just started wearing living chains for clothing.
Skin/hair coloring? Grey skin and multi-hewed hair that was in the ‘hard metallics’ for hues (so dark and light grey steels, iron black, the occasional streaks of verdigris copper and bronze).
.* Like Drow, for a very long time I considered them a “special snowflake” race (I still do but being older I’ve stopped caring) and refused to play them (I’ve also played a few Drow, but never “Good” aligned, I refuse to sully myself like that†). However I’ve never Assimar, now that’s a depth I’ve never sunk too (honestly I have zero beef with Assimar, I just never had a reason to play one).
.† Drow are Evil, with a capital ‘E’ and that’s that. Now if a Player wants to play a Dork Elf and they want to Dritz it up, whateves, like man, play whatever “tired-ass over-played” trope you want as long as you’re not trying to get some cheesy build past me (but even then, clever cheesy builds are sometimes cool).
I kinda wish WotC leaned more into the “race of CG renegades” angle with the drow, so the only explicitly dark-skinned elf race wasn’t also the only evil one.
Inquisitor? Is that you?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/activate-judgment-of-judging
Funny thing is, both times I’ve tried to design a setting that prominently features Drow I made them one of the most predominantly Good races in the setting.
First time was taking a few cues from Demonac’s Tales From My D&D Campaign setting, specifically with the idea of a parallel plane of darkness and undeath ruled by feuding vampire kings. In that setting, the drow are native to the dark plane, and they comprise the majority of the Lantern Bearers (the quasi-Rebel Alliance faction that still resists the Vampire Kings). There’s also a sizeable population of drow that either fled to the “normal” plane or are descended from those who did, and they are an uncommon but normal sight in the Shining Kingdoms.
And then the second idea involves this setting’s iteration of Christianity first arising in the (faux-Chinese) elven lands of the Far West, and then after the pseudo-Christianity grew to the point where it became a nusiance to the ruling powers, those same ruling powers essentially offered the psuedo-Christians exile: the government would sponsor the building of a vast fleet of ships and the Christian elves could take whatever of their property they could transport and leave to build a land of their own. The Christians had been given a divine prophecy telling them to take this offer, so they did and God sent a wind that blew them across the ocean with the speed of a hurricane yet so controlled that they didn’t capsize until they reached the New World, where they made landfall and formed an alliance with some of the local tribes of human barbarians. Thing is, the psuedo-Christianity had gained the most traction among the drow (because they were subject to a certain amount of racial prejudice under the existing elvish religion), and so the majority of the elvish refugees were drow.
I guess I just find it more fun and more natural to make the drow a predominantly Good race rather than an always Evil one.
First off, while giving the “iconic tiefling” horns and a tail is an effective way of communicating the fact that tieflings are diabolic beings (wielding a trident might be a bit much), giving every tiefling horns and a tail is an effective way of making tieflings into the most boring devil-race imaginable.
I try to make my tieflings not fit that mold (giving them tentacle hair or hooves or something), which is hampered by the fact that hardly anyone in my group cares about character appearance and my inability to draw. Which also makes the simic hybrid race hard to play; I love the wild designs it lets you pull off, but for the same reason nobody can ever just imagine what your character looks like.
Anyways, on to the actual prompt, which sounds so fun I’ll do it three times! Using a random character generator and plucking out the race:
1: Warforged. SKSH-037 was designed as disposable light infantry, meant to screen more important troops against war bulettes, cavalry, and the like. Its body is a sphere about the size of a human torso, and it has long spindly legs. Its arms are a bit stubbier than human arms, with simple clasp-like “hands” made to hold a spear and light shield.
2: I’m not doing another warforged.
2: Yuan-ti Pureblood. Most purebloods are able to very easily hide among human society, their only reptilian traits being easy to conceal (like toe-claws or a small tail). Sadume is not so lucky; she has fangs and a forked tongue, as well as yellow eyes. The eyes could be hidden with special eye-lenses, but the fangs and tongue are obvious to anyone who sees her open her mouth. Sadume wears a mask most of the time, eats alone, and rarely talks (in case something in her voice gives away her inhuman mouth anatomy).
3: “Pallid Elf,” who sound like basically drow that aren’t evil (but are white). Great! Anyways, Mani isn’t that. He’s a recluse, living in a cave in the upper levels of the underdark, performing dark necromantic experiments to sustain his life at the cost of others’—kidnapping children and vagrants from both the halfling community on the surface and the drow village underground. He’s emaciated, with prominent nails and thin lips; his hair is pale and thin; and one eye is pale with cataracts. His experiments aren’t going well.
4 (I lied): Hill Dwarf. Dwarves are weird, because most authors make them either straight from the template or just plain bizarre (think Artemis Fowl). Let’s go somewhere in between.
Ewram is a goatherd, moving his goats seasonally from summer pastures near the mountainhomes to winter pastures down in the valley. His flocks were attacked by a werewolf some years ago, and he was bitten; Ewram fought off the infection, but it still left a mark. Ewram’s canines are pronounced, his nose and jaw protrude a bit, and his eyebrows are bushy even for a dwarf. He trims his beard so the goats don’t nibble at it.
I feel like the simic have outs to this though. You just describe yourself looping your coils around a chair, crushing the mug with your pincers, etc. When you’ve got weird body stuff, the key is to make it present in the game.
I quite like the super-hairy hill dwarf. You could extrapolate that as a local legend that a particular community of very-hair hill dwarves tell about their patron ancestor. It’s almost like an “Innsmouth look” for a specific dwarf town.
I’ll confess, both times in my life that I’ve played a tiefling, I’ve gone for the classic hooves-and-horns look. I think that’s because I, too, care about the trope more than I care about appearance. I don’t play a tiefling because I want to look a certain way, but because I want to quickly communicate that I’m playing something of an outsider with nefarious origins.
I think my players feel much the same. The party of my main campaign, which grows all the time as my players swap in new characters, consists of one catfolk, one changeling, two fairies, and more than a dozen humans. Unless their race significantly impacts the way you tell their story, they may as well just be human.
Which isn’t to say appearance isn’t important to us; customizing the way a character dresses, for instance, is great fun. (During a one-shot I once had a player say to me “If you didn’t want us to spend half the session playing Barbie dressup, you shouldn’t have invited us to a clothing store.”) There’s just not much of a connection between race and personalization, if that makes sense.
I feel like that holds true for the classic “tolkien races.” But with tieflings and plane-touched especially, you can get some good “stage business” out of appearance. I’m thinking in particular of the horn jewelry from Critical Role:
https://i.redd.it/n7xm2avvq5x41.jpg
With that kind of character, the jewelry you find in treasure hoards becomes more interesting. Ditto helmets and hats and such. These may be throw-away details, but they can also serve as moments of the uncanny, reminding us that we aren’t just dealing with “might as well be human” characters.
I think you meant to ask “what do you say we…” I felt like I was having a stroke reading “what do you saw we…” because it just almost made sense.
Thanks. I picked out two typos last night on the re-read and another two this morning. Swear to Gygax man, I need to start giving myself more lead time on the blogs. Shit slips through the cracks when I wait for the 11th hour.
On the setting i made for our table the First People got crystal skeleton. Not as in brittle, but as in indestructible crystal that make them unable to break a bone and shield them from certain injuries. Not all, since they got an small hole on their spine. Any blade that enters there kills them slowly and they can’t remove it since it’s between their shoulder blades. One of the few sure ways to kill them since they are quite resistant and long lived 🙂
Reminds me a bit of these guys from Mistborn:
https://coppermind.net/wiki/True_Body
Not exactly since on my case that are their natural skeletons,but something like that. It helps them survive falls in case they need to close their portal on a high place to have their hearth keep running 🙂
In the Rick Riordan Norse trilogy, dark elves aren’t elves at all. They’re dwarf demi-gods, the sons and daughter of Freya. They get called elves because they’re all taller and more classically beautiful than other dwarves. I thought that was a neat touch.
As for myself, I have a homebrew race that’s a hybrid of elf and orc. Some look a bit more like elves while some take more after the orc parent.
I tried once upon a time to trace the lineage of “ogres” and “elves” and “goblins.” It’s an etymological soup. Nice to see some fantasist playing with that.
I still need a species name for them. They lives a lot longer than orcs but a lot shorter than elves. Here’s a google doc if you’d like to look at it. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f9gkr352mEwJBbNhMUtAQ1DtwEFe_rdqt5-y-_N8S3I/edit?usp=sharing
Svartalfar are the common ancestor of both dwarves and drow. Wild.
Okay, hear me out… Tieflings with Ceratopsian horns and frills.
https://slashcomment.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ceratopsia.jpg
Close enough to the classic look to feel similar, wild enough to be unique.
That would make for an amazing caveman tiefling. Of all the suggestions so far, this is the one I most want to see in art.
Did my prior comment make this crossover happen?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/practice
Having skimmed back through your comments on that page… I’m still not seeing the connection. I feel slow. :/
Literally the last one: I may or may not have drawn your attention to the existence of a Dungeons & Doodles comic featuring the HoH party as a background detail.
Weird. Ctrl + f wasn’t picking that one up for some reason. Must have been below the fold.
But naw, I got a bunch of shoutouts after that one. And I think my first introduction to DoodlePoodle was when he tagged me back here:
https://twitter.com/DoodlePoodle_X/status/1439372085864828931?s=20
I think the Pathfinder rules bear some of the responsibility for the prevalence of tails. One of the alternate racial features for tieflings is “prehensile tail”, which does exactly what it says on the tin and is mildly useful. On paper, it’s just an optional ability you can have instead of one of the default racials…but the option it replaces does literally nothing unless you’re a sorcerer, and there’s no other options that replace it without replacing other more useful racials too. So 90% of the time, if you’re making a tiefling in pathfinder it’s optimal to have a tail.
Of course, 4e and 5e destroy the concept of the variable tiefling entirely.
I do like me some gunslinging tiefling tails. Suddenly reloading is a snap!
Aasimar: Like all things related to angels, Aasimar are absolutely terrifying; too many eyes, with more appearing as they age. Also flaming wheels.
Orcs: Skin colour varies by region; you get the more brown orcs in the desert, grey-skinned orcs in stony mountains, and green orcs in jungles. Also bigger tusks; tusks are great.
Elves: Subterranean elves are pale as ghosts; absolutely no sun down there. Hair colour breeds true, like the Alethi from the Stormlight Archives, but with different colours for different families, so a half-elf will have the same hair colour as their non-elf parent, but with streaks of their elf parent’s colour.
Also, on the subject of tieflings and their variance, I think JoCat nailed why a lot of tieflings have very similar looks; devil people are hot, and a lot of people want to play a hot character.
Wondered when we’d see the “biblically accurate angel” aasimar.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/a2urwf/art_oc_a_more_biblical_aasimar_interpretation/
Weirdly close to Thief, no?
Here’s a bit of something I did for a setting a while back.
Elves: Partially plant human-like beings that are just one result of a more broader race category that are born from dryads and their tree counterparts. Have white sap-like blood and a greenish or bark-like pigmentations. Hair and eyes in colors of leaves (so green, red, yellow, brown, etc.) Born in one of two ways. With another elf they produce another elf or with a human they’ll either produce an elf or a human. With a dryad, the dryad’s tree will produce a large acorn/seed that might produce another elf, dryad, pixie, or other related fey creature.
Elemental-kin (previous known as Humans): Loosely divided into various kinds of elemental-kin due to a past man-made magical cataclysmic event which resulted in the magical nature of humans merging with natural elemental energies as a reflexive submission to the resulting influx of such (those who resisted the merging of said energies were destroyed).
A air-kin and air-kin will produce another air-kin, but say a air-kin and storm-kin might produce any other kind of kin at all. (The types of kin are: air, storm, metal, earth, and frost. With fey serving effectively, but certainly not technically, as wood-kin.)
Cabbage dryad was prolific back in the 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_Patch_Kids#:~:text=At%20the%20peak%20of%20their,obtain%20the%20dolls%20for%20children.
Elves absorb ambient magic from their surroundings which induces mutations. Spend enough time in a single environment, an elf will switch subraces. Adventurers tend to move on quickly enough to be unaffected but, say, a group of wood elves colonists moves into the underdark, a year or 2 down the line BAM drow.
You think they just wake up one morning like, “Gah! What the hell!?”
Not a whole racial thing, but I did use a tiefling taking the scales, claws, vestigial wings, prehensile tail, and small size alt racial abilities to make a fiendish little bomb chucking wannabe-dragon “kobold”.
There is a fine line between demon and dragon in some art. Half the time I feel like it comes down to snout shape.
Aasimar: Bodily wastes (sweat, dung, etc) all smell like fine perfumes.
Fire Genasi: Faintly luminous (enough to be clearly visible in the dark, though it’s easy to miss in bright light).
Water Genasi: Constantly coated in a sheen of water as if heavily sweating, even when not working out.
Tiefling: Her presence causes food to spoil more quickly (not anything too ridiculous, stuff like bread going moldy overnight instead of in a few days).
Poor food spoilage tiefling. She always sits by herself at lunch.
Merfolk have millennia of expertise in biological magic, and aren’t shy about using it on themselves. Some merfolk wizards are known to change bodies like others change clothes.
Elves have an instinctive love of heights, which is why they live in trees so often; cliff elves are somewhat less well-known, but are still common. The setting has crude aircraft, most of which are elven inventions.
Humans being the “average” for all of the abilities is because humans are a hybrid of the other races. Occasionally a human family will have a half-whatever child simply because that’s how the genetics worked out this time.
Orcs have a tradition of free inquiry and scholarship said to go back to when the sky was whole. In fact, they’re almost as well-known as academics as for their tendency to both establish and overthrow great empires.
I’ve always had the idea for deep forest dwarves; great at cultivating natural defenses via brambles and thorns, wooden fortifications, and of course lots of high quality alcohol made from assorted hardy crops (gotta wonder where they get their alcohol from in the mountain keep, this is what brought to mind the plant theme). You could go further and give them naturally rough (bark-like) skin and stiff beard hairs (like twigs).
Less goofy gully dwarves? About time those dorks got a rewrite!
I think it’s obvious by now that trolls should be orange
Any race that had/has infravision also has a bunch of extra eyes that don’t look like eyes and instead look like pits or divots in their head
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes
I really dig this one. Could you imagine your dwarf bro lifting up his beard to show off his “eyes?”