World Building: Adding Racial Variety

Variant races are something that shows up a lot in various campaign settings and splatbooks. Sometimes they have different stats and special rules like the Drow Elves and Duargar Dwarves. Both of these races are adapted to the Underdark in D&D and more powerful (and evil!) than their surface-dwelling counterparts. Adding racial variety isn't just about making a more powerful variant of an existing race, though. It's also about adding flavour and variety to your world. People of the same race living in different environments thousands of miles apart are quite dissimilar in the real world, why should they be identical in your setting? This post is guidelines for adding variety without necessarily changing stats.

By far the simplest way to make a racial variant is to take an existing race and move it to an environment that's drastically different from what players expect. Elves are typically portrayed as living in woodlands and being in close touch with their homelands. What if instead they're living on arid steppes as nomads? These elves may have never seen a tree. Similarly, Dwarves are generally portrayed as living in elaborate stone fortresses carved underneath mountains, but what if instead they lived in grasslands? Maybe these dwarves have never seen a mountain larger than a small hill. Do they still live underground? Do they still build mighty cities or would they live in shallow underground dwellings more like Hobbit holes from The Lord of the Rings? If they don't live in mines do they still covet gems and precious metals? You probably get the point. This kind of free-form thinking is a great way to evolve a new subrace. Just start with one simple idea "Dwarves without mountains" and jump to whatever idea comes next. Maybe draw out a graph showing all the decision branches. Brainstorming exercises like this often benefit from writing every idea down no matter how poorly it fits.

Subrace Brainstorming Example

What follows was written as it came out of my head, as an example of brainstorming a subrace.

• Dwarf
• Lives underground in stone fortresses
• Often very insular and untrusting of strangers
• Covets gems and precious metals
• Loves beer 
• Speaks with Scottish or Gaelic accent

• Dwarves without mountains
• Do they still have mighty cities?
• More single-dwellings
• Above ground?
• Squat stone houses
• Underground?
• Burrows like Hobbit Holes
• Are they still insular?
• No. They're friendly and trade a lot.
• Do they still build with stone?
• Yeah
• They quarry it in open-pit mines
•  No
• They build from mud brick and timber
• Dwarven lumberjacks!
• Do they still covet gems?
• No
• What motivates a dwarven adventurer if not shiny things?
• They're a culture of storytellers. Young Dwarves are encouraged to see the world and return home with tales and artifacts of different cultures

I'll stop there. From this I can generate a subrace that I'll call Traveler Dwarves

• Traveler Dwarf
• They live in the grassy plains of central Ashdar, but a few scattered members of this race can be found in any city
• Their houses are similar to Human houses, made from mud brick and occasionally wood.
• They have frequent contact with outside races. They probably trade a lot.
• Living in the plains, they farm a lot. Maybe they export wheat to their beer-loving mountain-dwelling counterparts.
• Young Traveler Dwarves often join passing adventure parties to see the world, hoping to return with a wealth of stories and treasure.
• Communities are often protected by seasoned adventurers who have returned home

For this race I'd probably also change the stats to give them more charisma and make their favoured class be Bard. The key thing here is that culture decides stats, not the other way around. If they need no stat modifiers they wouldn't get any.