bro that’s just a gnoll
(Forgotten Realms 5e’s lore for them is bad+lame)
Hyenas are dog-cats, the doggest cat you can ever get
there’s a cat-dog too but I can’t remember what it is offhand
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tieflings are extremely cool and if you think otherwise you’re stinky poo-poo
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In my world, no half-races exist.
Humans, elves and dwarves share some kinship, if not physical then at least metaphysical in terms of their divine creation (nobody in-universe knows the actual origin of races, but there are different theories). They can interbreed, but the child is always one of the parent races at random, not a hybrid.
Orcs are former empire-builders. The current nations lie on the fringes of the fallen ancient orcish empire, roughly patterned after the Golden Horde, with its heart in the Great Steppe equivalent. “Common” is actually Orcish; the nations that are the focus of the setting are former vassals and tributaries of the orcish empire. Modern orcs use the half-orc racial traits game-mechanically and are fractured into several cultures, some having become steppe nomads and some absorbed into the Obligatory Arabian Nights Land. They also can’t interbreed with anyone else and nobody knows for sure why, though there are theories on that as well.
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I just wish they’d continue to de-draeneify them to the point where they can look superduper weird again.
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Tieflings but not Aasimar or Genasi being core feels very weird, and definitely a ‘marketing’ choice instead of a worldbuilding one.
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Easy explanation: demons/fiends are just thirstier on main
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But tieflings and aasimar come from the same situation (it isn’t by [redacted] a demon/angel, usually).
I made the terrible mistake of trying to detail different creation mythology and religion for each of the races in my homebrew world and dear lord God I don’t know what I’ve done but its more than I bargained for.
Devil, rarely demon - the word infernal is used a lot specifically for them, whereas abyssal is demon stuff
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i only pay attention to pathfinder lore where u can have a demon daddy (or in woljif’s case granddaddy)
4th edition making up the ancient empire once dominating the region before devildealing themselves into a huge tiefling minority as the empire fell. It’s stupid.
Also, Asmodeus “claiming” many tieflings between editions to force the new canon aesthetic.
4th edition aasimar being eternal, reincarnated mortal angels is similarly awkward.
They work better as rare peculiarities like any other planar-blooded beings with their hardcoded quirks.
Tieflings, dhampir, and so on. Anything that has the blood of an [evil] race is my favourite.
That’s how I’ve handled both Tieflings and Aasimar in my homebrew at the moment, with neither the true origin of the Aasimar nor Tieflings actually being known. The dominant, restrictive religion in the world uplifts Aasimar as righteous protectors of the Faith and downcasts Tieflings as nothing more than another type of Devil to be rid from the world so that the Most Holy (perceived by the Faith to be the ultimate creator) will return to the world once more and no longer shun it.
Tieflings in Eberron mostly trace their bloodlines back to a now-destroyed nation that made a bunch of devil pacts in pursuit of arcane knowledge, and got tieflinged by proxy because of those pacts.
The majority of them now reside in the monstrous realm of Droaam, both among the gnolls/harpies/orcs/hags and in their own refuge city.
(This was 5e lore they had to invent when it made tieflings core)
To be fair, in a setting where every basic halfsomething and mixed blood person is partly human it’s following the logic that it’s the humans that will pair up with literally anything.
In a world with assorted demons whose entire job is seduction you’re going to get a frankly obnoxious surplus of tieflings.
gonna make a setting where pureblood humans don’t exist anymore because all of the extraplanar powers kept vying for their beds and eventually they got bred out of existence.
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https://youtu.be/G19B7lTgwCE?si=2J-GrDEm8ChCPI5w&t=10
any excuse to post letterkenny
Humans looking like humans by virtue of being dwarf/halfling/elf hybrids over a thousand generations with no other natural origin.
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I wish I was a linguist so I could design languages for them. In the absence of that, I’ve at least elected to map out distinct phonetics for Elvish, Dwarvish, and the language of the focus human kingdom to ensure their names feel different and you instantly recognize which culture they come from, instead of everything being Forgotten Realms generic-interchangeable-fantasy-nomenclature kind of bland.
(Human place names are flowing with stress on the last syllable, in the French manner but not actually French, rather a shade of Russian. Dwarvish is inspired by Soviet agitprop and Soviet worker aesthetic. Elvish is vaguely Tolkien-y but with shades of Greek.)
I’ve started mapping out the gods, but not much to show yet. My original idea was that there would be a single elven god (with humans adopting the elven pantheon under different names and with different beliefs about them) for every core 5e domain, which I think of under the working name of “extropic forces”: Knowledge, Life, Light, Nature, Tempest, Trickery, and War. These are all dynamic, active forces pushing the world away from a stasis equilibrium state in which nothing happens. But active is not always good, and passive is not always bad. I had temporary epithets for the seven gods mapped out (and the forgotten eighth god of Arcana), but I’ve since gone back to the drawing board.
Overall, my idea is to treat core 5e stuff as common knowledge and extra sourcebooks as exotic knowledge that might not even exist, and if it does, it’s known to only a few to even exist.
For tieflings, I’m not sure if they even exist in my world, because I’m not yet sure if fiends even exist. Maybe eventually I’ll settle on a version of fiends I don’t entirely hate. My cosmology is vastly simpler than default D&D, with only a single “otherworld” that can be crossed into, where all the Weird Stuff resides in a single geographical space that gets progressively weirder the farther away you get from the “normal” world. Fey spaces are the closest to the dimensional rifts that connect the two worlds, and so fey are the most commonly encountered outsiders that have the most folk tales about them.
If fiends do exist, they’re probably something like Rumpelstiltskin, evil fey tricking mortals into deals with a hidden agenda, rather than Christian-esque Hell.
(Afterlife? What afterlife? Nobody knows what happens after death.)
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Humans…the ultimate mongrel.