I've been meaning to do this for a while now.What can I say, I'm a visually-oriented person. I like a good picture; it's worth a thousand words after all. In last week's Wilderlands D&D game, I made the analogy that the setting is like the "Star Wars" of fantasy worlds as it relates to diversity of races/species. I think the Wilderlands boxed set says there's something like 252 sentient races. Minimum.
This sort of diversity can be found even among basic races, with various sub-types and Lesser Races and so forth. Add in the fact that Wilderlands is a proper old school fantasy world, meaning there's more than the standard gamut of earth tones to be found among the major races' skin colors.
In an effort to improve my world building and in-game descriptions, I've been trying to get a handle on this diversity, fixing in my mind who looks like what. I realized at some point that the best way to do this was to create some sort of visual reference. I found my tool for doing this in the form of a nifty little Flash program called FaceMaker over on Deviant Art. The faces thus rendered are in anime style, but that suited my purposes well, as I was looking for something iconic and easily memorable, both sterling qualities of the anime form. Plus the "big eyes" make eye color differences easily distinguishable.
And so, without further ado, I present the "Faces of the Wilderlands" PDF, a tour through the Major Races and selected Lesser Races of the classic fantasy setting.
I really appreciate the effort you put into this document, but why does nobody in the Wilderlands have a nose?
ReplyDeleteI actually had a feeling the first comment to this post would point out the lack of noses.
ReplyDeleteI realize you're just teasing, but it was actually a conscious design decision on my point, so I'll give my rationale here. There were a couple reasons I ended up not including noses. The simplest is that the program I used didn't "do" noses very well. More conceptually, I thought they might detract from the point of the exercise, which was mainly to provide visual information for skin, hair, and eye color.
Really great idea. As DM, I fear settings with large number of races esp "unusual" races overwhelm players. Including this as part of character generation handout seems like it would go a long way towards giving players perspective.
ReplyDeleteThe style and all having the same pose / basic structure really highlights the differences well.
You totally have to add one race that actually doesn't have noses.
But if I added a nose-less race, that would throw off the whole schema! How could I represent the fact that said race has no nose? No, in fact I hereby decree that all (humanoid) races have noses. Those that don't are shunned and hunted into extinction (in which case, maybe the extinct Orichalans were noseless...yeah, that's the ticket...).
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