Pictures and Words

More on the Races of All-That-Is.

Angels and Fairies:

I’ve always wanted to play a character in Dungeons and Dragons who could fly. None of the base races that come with the Rulebooks have the ability to fly – if you want a flying character, you have to get supplementary material, and adjust your levels, and it becomes such an inconvenient mess that you might as well just play a character who can jump really high.

I wanted to make flying characters accessible but not overpowered, and it wasn’t hard to decide on “Angels” and “Fairies” as two flying races to include.

Angels
Angels came from a simple idea – an all-Good race. In Dungeons and Dragons, you choose an “alignment” to describe your character.

There are two scales – Good to Evil, and Chaotic to Lawful, and you choose where your character sits on both. A Chaotic-Good character, for instance, would steal from the rich to give to the poor, while a Lawful Evil creature might be true and loyal to his evil overlord, and gleefully carry out his orders to torture you to death. (there’s also a “neutral” option on both scales)

Throughout fantasy history, there have been examples of “All evil” races. (the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, the Dark Elves in a lot of fantasy.) I wanted to play with the idea of an all-Good race, and since I’d already decided to include Angels in All-That-Is, the choice was obvious.

Originally, they were going to simply be a race of Good people, then I changed them to overly-religious zealots, then a race of fastitidious rule-keepers, and finally I combined various elements of the three – the Angelic people are ruled by a strictly organised Lawful-Good Church, which can be a bit over-zealous at times, but the average Angel citizen is just trying to get on with their life and do the right thing.

It’s a right of passage for every young Angel who wishes to join the Church to go out and see the world as an adventurer for a while. Others are sent by the church to do good around the world, and others (particularly Chaotic-Good Angels) don’t like to live by the church’s strict rules and leave the Angel homeland to seek their fortune elsewhere.

Angels are large and strong, but the entire race suffers a weakness to water. Submersion in water will kill an Angel, and even having a bucket thrown on them can be fatal. They are unaffected by ice or steam however, so most Angels carry an enchanted amulet with them that will either boil or freeze the first batch of water that comes too close to their body. (I feel that this nicely counters the advantage of being able to fly – it’s a huge but manageable weakness, and any player will have to weigh up the advantages of flight against having to be constantly on their guard from water.)

Fairies
I was raised on Enid Blyton books, so fairies were another pretty obvious choice for a flying race.

The Dungeons and Dragons races are all an extremely similar size – half-orcs are slightly larger, halflings (and gnomes and dwarves) are slightly shorter, but if you line all the races up and swing an axe, you’re still going to either behead or miss all of them.

As you can see from the diagram above, I decided to switch things up a bit with the All-That-Is races. Enter: Fairies. They’re one-quarter the size of Humans (one-sixth the size of Angels) and while they can fly, they don’t flit around like the fairies in Fern Gully, they travel at a speed which makes sense for their size. (as do Angels – flying speed, in an attempt to keep it balanced, is the same as walking (not running, walking) speed. The obvious exception is when they’re travelling downwards, and gravity is on their side.)

Their strength is correspondingly reduced as well, but what they lose in size, speed and strength, they more than make up for in intelligence and magical ability. (the magic system is something that I’m completely redoing – there’ll be a post with more detail coming up in the next couple of weeks, but basically your percentage chance of succeeding at a spell is determined by your race. Fairies, straight off the bat, have a 90% chance of succeeding at an average spell.)

Fairy skin comes in various different colours, depending on the colour of the food that they’ve eaten all their life. The colour of the food in the Fairy Homeland, in turn, depends on where it was grown, so a Fairy’s skin colour largely depends on the region that they were raised in. (except for big cities, which has food brought in from all over the country. This can create either Fairies with patchy rainbow skin, or a rather dull brown, depending on the quality of the food.)

Angel wings are big and feathery, pretty much how you’re imagining them right now, while Fairies come in a variety of different flavours – huge butterfly wings, small dragonfly wings, aeroplane wings, a couple of other non-typical designs.

I’ve tried to write a compelling reason for a typical member of each race to go adventuring, but Fairies don’t really have one. Sometimes Fairies just feel like going off and having adventures.

Demons and Ogres:

Demons
I wanted a race to counter the all-Good Angels, but all-Evil races are

a) Overdone,
b) Extremely constraining. Few players want to play an evil character, and even less people want to DM them,
c) Tricky to justify in-universe. Their society would just collapse, or every other race would try to wipe them out, and
d) Not really much fun.

I really liked the idea of a demon race though. When I think “demon”, I don’t think tall and domineering with the red muscly chest, and the glowing black eyes. I think small and mischevious – more like the Gremlin from that Looney Tunes cartoon. More Satan from Bedazzled than Satan from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Demons in All-That-Is are an all-Chaotic race. They’re small and gnobbly (I’m imagining they look somewhat like Dobby from the second Harry Potter movie) and have a reddish-brown, crinkled skin. I haven’t decided whether they should have tiny horns & a tail yet, but I don’t think it will dramatically affect gameplay either way. Demons stand at about half the height of a Human, and have disproportionately large heads, and smaller, pointed teeth. They have huge eyes, long noses, pointed ears, and long, thin fingers.

Demons probably suffer from the most racial prejudice of all the races on All-That-Is. They’re not outlawed from entering other countries, but they’re pretty widely disliked. They don’t like the term “Demon”, preferring to be referred to as “Underlings”. (this came out of a system where every letter of the alphabet described something different about a Player Character, so that a phrase like “AHBN” could sum up your character’s status at any given point. This system has long sice been abandoned (early 2007) but I liked the name “Underlings” and the idea of Demons having a different name for their race.)

Possibly as a consequence of being so widely disliked, Demons are extremely personable, good at making people trust them (another reason that people are so often warned not to) and just generally quite likeable. They’re your best friend, right until they stab you in the back. (this is, of course, a racial stereotype – a number of Demons work particularly hard to be trustworthy, just to prove that they’re not all like that.)

Ogres
The last “invented” race on All-That-Is (the other five are almost directly out of the handbook.) Ogres stand twice as tall as a human (like Fairies, Ogres came from a desire for more varied sizes in All-That-Is), are almost twice as strong, and about one-tenth as intelligent. Big and stupid are the two most commonly used words to describe these creatures. Tough, but…well, stupid.

“Min-maxing” is a technique used by players to create the strongest, most focussed possible character. If you were playing a game where you knew ahead of time that the aim was to break into a tower without being caught, for example, then when creating your character you might sacrifice all combat abilities and social skills in order to focus on wall-climbing, sneaking around, picking locks, etc.

Since the vast majority of pen-and-paper role-playing games focus on combat, players will often take hits anywhere else that they can in order to get more combat advantage. Systems like Dungeons and Dragons (possibly as a result of this) have their character creation process almost entirely based around combat, so that you can’t drop anything else (except maybe your Charisma stat) to get better at combat; you’re just trading off skill in one combat area for skill in a different combat area.

Ogres weren’t deliberately built for min-maxers, but I can see how they could appeal – I’ll be going into specific numbers in a later post, but if you choose to be an Ogre, you gain significant combat benefits in exchange for non-combat losses. Of course, in any combat situation with an Ogre, the enemy is almost exclusively going to focus on them, and their sheer size constrains them from entering normal-sized buildings, so picking an Ogre is a significant trade-off.

As I said, they stand twice the size of Humans, are about one-third larger than Angels, and approximately eight times larger than Fairies. They have soft skin and tend to either grow their hair quite long, or shave it off and keep it shaved. Ogres come in four main flavours – those with two eyes, like all the other races, those with two eyes one on top of the other, those with three eyes, arranged in a pyramid formation, and those with one single eye in the middle of their forehead.

(I’ve actually written different “factions” for all of the races – different states, regions, tribes, city-states etc etc. (Angels, for instance, are split into Chaotic, Neutral and Lawful. They’re not at war with each other or anything, but these are still three distinct groups within the Angel homeland.) Ogres are the only ones who show it in such an obvious physical manner.)

These four different Ogre-clans are constantly warring with each other – outside the Land of Ogres, they don’t leap straight into battle, but they’re more uneasy around Ogres of a different clan than they are around any other race. Ogres are the only race that are legally sold as slaves in all the countries of All-That-Is, even their own home-land. An intelligent Ogre (roughly the equivalent of a slightly stupid Human) is a rare thing, and generally outcast from Ogre society. Intelligent Ogres make up the vast majority of Ogre adventurers.

Tomorrow: The last five races – the ones from the books!

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