Worldbuilding Day 6: Fantasy Races

The exercise for day 10 is not very applicable for my purposes. I am supposed to figure out the differences between various ethnic groups around the globe and how they developed and mixed. I am dealing with a small region and also have the additional issue of fantasy races, but I will focus on the various human populations in the region.

Humans in general have a variety of ethnicities and cultures equal to what we had pre-Columbian Exchange. There are three main sources in the region for human populations, and therefore characters. There is an indigenous population of fair-skinned northerners who have been there since before the ice began to recede. This group lived alongside the non-human societies that existed in the region, but there was not much interaction and exchange between these societies. The northern speak a language isolate, unrelated to that spoken by other populations in that part of the world.

In addition to the indigenous northern population, there are old trading settlements from the eastern federation of city-states. These settlements were mostly centered around resource extraction such as fish, furs, and lumber. Some of these people established ascetic religious retreats in the mountains. Eventually there was a discovery of gold in the rivers that sparked a series of gold-rushes, but most of these prospectors eventually returned to the city-states. The people from the city-states have a darker complexion and speak a related group of languages that have varied dialects between the various city-states. Their trade dialect is based upon the city-state which has historically been the strongest (and which I have not named yet).

Recently the region has come under the de facto control of the western empire (which currently does not have a name). They experienced intermittent war with other powers in their part of the world and have just in the last few decades finally become the hegemonic power in that part of the world. They are currently in a pseudo-magical-industrial revolution. The technology itself is not important at this point in developing the setting, but the fuel needed to power this revolution is. Large deposits of unobtanium which is used to power the applied phlebotinum were found in the region (placeholder names) and this has lead to new settlements and large scale mining operations. The people from the western empire are diverse as the territory they control is vast.

When addressing the playable non-human races, examples which were given in my earlier post on player races, all the choices available will be human merged with something else. Either they will be magically created races, like various shape-shifters or constructs created to fight an ancient war, bloodlines like aasimar or tieflings where the unusual nature does not always express, or not actually races per se but individuals that share something in common like the Godlike in Pillars of Eternity. Other non-human races exist in the world but for the setting of the megadungeon these will be non-player races.