Different Races

[Kevlar]

There are two types of dwarves I've enjoyed seeing in the past few years: Orzammar dwarves ,because they do twist some of the clichés, and Tyrion.

That being said, why not create a race that breaks all of the clichés, save short. It would then fail to be a dwarf, because dwarves are short people. I'll have a go.

With pale skin, grey, pink, or yellowish depending on their enic group, in response to the lack of UV energy in their subterranean homes, dwarves who ever travel to the surface will need to wrap up tight like an albino, sharing the same lack of melanin. Because of the heat underground they have no hair on their bodies, but the fleshy appendages on their chins are commonly mistaken for beards. These appendages actually have a variety of uses. Being more sensitive than the dwarves' strong fingers, and containing sensory organs thrice to four times as powerful as a human nose, they help the dwarves find the minerals and underground water that compose their diet. Dwarves also have eyes that, compared to their smaller bodies, are twice as large as a human's, with huge pupils and rarely excercised irises. The irises of dwarven colonies who use fire regularily, or live close to some other light source, such as lava or fantasy-typical glowing shrooms, have become more developed. This is especially true of smiths, who gaze into hot coal fires every day. Like their skin, their eyes have an almost complete lack of melanin, and so are red or pale blue. They have tapetum lucidum, allowing them to see in extremely low light, and giving them a green eyeshine in the same situations a cat might. While once all dwarves were born with carbon-high, very solid, protruding front teeth, upper and lower. With the advent of a mining tool in some way or another, this feature has shrunk to practically the size of their other teeth, though it remains dark compared to the others. These other teeth are used to chew other subterranean life, such as fantasy-typical subterranean mushrooms, even sometimes the glowing ones that give a tingly feeling, spiders that somehow survive without other bugs to eat, those spiders' giant counterparts, giant burrowing worm-things, and small cattle that live on underground islands.


There you have my non-cliché dwarf. Next up? Elves...

 

[Kaellpae]

Effeminate Dwarves, maybe. Kevlar's Dwarves remind me of mole people, but when I said different that's what I meant. I like how their 'beards' are supersensory organs.
Even if you had a civilization of people who were shorter and burlier on average than everyone else.

To a world of giants, would we be dwarves?

 

[Kevlar]

Who said they were burly?

They could be elegant and agile. They could have Gollum's build. I left that part ambiguous.

And to giants we would be dwarves. And to dwarves we would be giants. Which really begs the question of why we name races by size.
If dwarves call us giants, and giants call us dwarves, it would show how these terms are susceptible to perspective. But what would they call eachother?

 

[Kaellpae]

Super-giants and Toy People?

I just meant in general Dwarves are seen as burly. Probably because of the mining and war mongering. I agree with you though. As most stories are through the eyes of humans or human sized creatures that I have read, then giants and dwarves could be named because of size. It could also be because humans are more populated than Giants and Dwarves, so they are seen as the average size, or a medium size at least.

How about a Dwarf like Dopey? No beard, not burly, but still a Dwarf. Perhaps make a race of Dopeys.

 

[Rowancool]

You could have a tribal race. In my world i'm creating i have a carnivourous forest dwelling species which culture is based around tribalism. Just a thought

 

[Meka]

I tend to use loads of races and have even made up a few myself. I use Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Wizards (which I class as a different race entirely), Goblins, Trolls, Kish (invention), Khraal (invention), Limech (invention.) Each of these have very different attributes, beliefs, homelands, rituals etc. It takes nearly as long inventing the world and the things in it as writing the book itself for me. None of these races get a long too well, elves and dwarves tolerate one another so that they have a chance to defeat the evils, as do Orcs and Goblins etc.

 

[Kevlar]

You could have a tribal race. In my world i'm creating i have a carnivourous forest dwelling species which culture is based around tribalism. Just a thought

Herein lies the problem with this idea: having a race with a single culture is very flat, imho. Same with having a single religion, language or, if you want to go really deep into the subject, race (like black, white, Arabian, asian etc.) of each species. Consider the variation of our own cultures.

Also, while not a deadly mistake, I find categorizing races into good and evil very shallow. First, nobody is the same, so why does your whole race have the same opinion? Good and evil isn't a well defined subject of logic. It's all based on opinion. And culture. Our standardized ideas of good and evil are only that: our ideals. Put yourself in a KKK member's shoes. While the rest of us have no idea where they get their twisted sense that whites are supreme, beyond it being a part of their personal views of Christianity, we know that they think they're in the right. They think they're the good guys. They probably also think that non KKK whites are misguided. We have the same idea about them. We can't look at it logically and say that one party or the other is right or wrong, but we can look at it from our own moral point of view. In our opinion, murdering people over the colour of their skin is apalling, and most of us would kill a KKK member if we got the chance, but for some reason it's righteous by their ideals. And it's not limited to them. Look at the Crusades. The Christian armies slaughtered the infidels wholesale, from the Saracen soldiers, to the Muslim women and children to the neutral Jews. Saladin, on the other hand, protected the Jews, who are infidels to Muslim perspective. Naturally, as far as my own ideals go, I would rather have been fighting for the Saracens, even if I was religious and Christian. But perhaps I'd view that differently if I was Christian, and I would definitely view it differently if I had grown up back then.

Next is this issue: Are all goblins evil? Yes? There you have a racist sentiment.

Hope I wasn't rambling too much, and I hope I didn't offend anyone's views. What I write is purely my opinion, nothing else, and I'll never claim it to be otherwise.

 

[Kaellpae]

For all beliefs to be, at the very least, very similar you would have to have a race so low in numbers that they only in one tribe or a couple tribes in a tight knit area.

It seems like for a few fantasy works though, that any black sheep are very rare.

 

[Rowancool]

What i meant was that humans have different cultures and you could make it a bit different by just having humans who live a bit differently. Same with elves or dwarves

 

[JCFarnham]

What I think is often over look with Fantasy species, is common sense and logic. Tolkienian-style Dwarves make very little sense to me, for one how do they manage to live and still have a culture like that of surface-dwellers? The mining trope is short sighted in the same way racist narrow-mindedness is towards these races.

Why NOT have dwarves like Kevlar suggested? They make far more cultural sense than the traitional kind do, even in the short paragraph. Elves too seem to fall in to the same trap. People seem to forget logical culture building in favour of Tolkienisms. I think it would make a nice change to see traditional high fantasy races with more thought put into them.

I mostly write sci-fi so my races don't particularly fit in this thread, but I think the same ideals can be applied across genres. Don't forget that they should be "people" and not "stereotypes".