Spare You The Details

One of my prime playtesters (Zanna) made a very astute point concerning the process of designing the non-human races. There is no point in leading anyone who might read this blog down any 'rabbit holes' where I expound on the virtues of choosing one set or another of evolutionary factors.
In fact, world creation in this sense is a creative process of the gamemaster, but it has to stand up to a very simple set of qualifiers.

1. Every race (regardless of intelligence) competes with other races and creatures for survival.
2. Survival depends on resources.
3. Every intelligent race has a variety of cultures within it that compete for dominance.
4. All races and cultures must have variation to support evolutionary advancement.
5. These advancements help improve the efficiency of resource usage.
6. Magic is a resource that is also a tool in the more intelligent races and cultures.

Largely, D&D has failed to show enough variation in its races until it released world-based supplements. Even these fall short due to other shortcomings of D&D, and not the imagination of the many contributors. It should be noted that these variations were very popular and added significantly to the game.

Also, there are no half-elves. Elves and humans are distinct species and their DNA would not produce a viable off-spring. Of course, humans and elves on your world COULD be of the same species, but that would not really follow the logic of the evolutionary theory standard we are working with here. If you do have mixing of the races, please be sure to have traits thought out for those who have less than 1/2 blood of a race. What is being a 1/4 elf like? 1/8? 1/16?  How much percentage does one need to be accepted? How much to use race-specific items? Thanks again to Zanna for posing the 1/16 blood quandry.


So, rather than plot out all the advancements over time of the races, which might not be pertinent to these core rules that others might use, I'll forego describing the variety of races.

Instead, I will try to explore the different possible elemental magics and their logical development regardless of race. In this way, the gamemaster decides what 'technologies' or levels of advancement for magic the races of their world have obtained.