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jocarra — Endless Realms advanced playerrace - Yakshi Keeper
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Published: 2017-05-05 13:14:42 +0000 UTC; Views: 7206; Favourites: 203; Downloads: 0
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Description
Player race artwork for Endless Realms , a D&D-like "pen and paper" fantasy RPG I'm working for. These are the so-called advanced races, which are subspecies of the core 9 races to be released in their own separate advanced races books.While the Yakshi, the plantfolk of Lumis, boast an incredible amount of diversity as part of their race, there do have a few apparent subtypes - this one was easiest of the three, since I had actually already previously designed it! The Keepers showed up in a previous image illustrating a Yakshi nursery, and the art director wanted to turn them into their own subrace. I sort of imagine them as the "village elder"/wise shaman/caretaker/lorekeeper of the Yakshi people
... although now I'm imagining it healing you, then saying, "Stay a while and listen."
Concept & Artwork © 2014-2017 Lunar Games Inc.
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Comments: 15
Cool lore facts, bro (actually, sis, to be precise)
Love the design
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No need to lose time searching for medicinal plants when you can cultivate them directly on your "mane", right? xD
That can be a really interesting way to put special herbalist-healer skills "unique to the race" into practice.
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Yeah, that sounds like an awesome idea! I think ER has limited racial stuff so people don't feel shoe-horned into particular race/class combinations, but I'd probably try to convince my DM to homerule something like that :b
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What is the point to create sub-races if not to give tons of ideas about possible skill-set and traits?
(aside of adding interesting lore of course)
More seriously; players using the "main combination" of a race are usually trying to figure out the game at their 1st campaign, or really likes that archetype and would had chosen something similar anyway. Plus, specialisation because of race traits is only natural to create a fictional race's society. I can only guess that, but in lore and official campaigns there may already be a larger amount of a given class or archetype of NPCs per (sub-)races anyway, so having something that vaguely looks like an "optimized class+race set" for a given sub-race isn't really shoe-horning players to use it, it is more like telling them "this is what the normies NPCs of this race look like".
And this is what makes fun deconstructing it for a higher challenge not selecting the "main combination" on later campaigns. (or trying to play a totally normal character while making big "social mistakes" because of lore overlooking, like using a skill usually forbidden in X situation. x3)
Most GMs will implement "custom concepts" or get rid of "unbalanced/complicated cocepts" if things are too complex or not enough for them to handle anyway, and players may even want to intentionally not use a given trait as part of their character's background, but some may only think of it if they ever heard of the said skill/passive.
Secondary books are tools to expend the universe, so, adding more subtilities of race-based gameplay in the race-based book is almost a given as expetation. It can even be higher since they are labeled "advanced" in this project. So as long as it is in the "advanced races book" and not in the "main/core rulebook" those can be seen as optional concepts and may not feel that overhelming at all, while the "main book" skill sets stay overall balanced since beginners are likely to only use the main book anyway. It basically solve most of the problem.
On the other side, I also understand their point of view on the subject, since they limit only their book, not the players who can imagine the said skills and ask their GM to adapt gameplay to it. But not adding "advanced" race-based skills is taking the risk of a "You can't because it is not in the book" backfire from beginners GMs trying to not break the lore, while adding something that will likely be unused at first can benefit to veteran players and GMs trying to create new characters.
I always seen as a way to "meet your character" the fact to question your GM if you can or not have some skills/traits in character creation. Not only for game start but talking about later skill branches too, it is like a child of the chosen race asking an elder "Will I be able to do that when I grow up?". So, it is always good to have more concepts "official to the lore" around for players to knows how far they can go into making their character unique but not lore-breaking, and to give more matter for game-masters to create interesting NPCs if they dare to start a custom campaign. ^^
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Well, they do have racial abilities, but I think they've tried to minimise the effect race has on stats. Instead of D&D/Pathfinder's "+2/+2/-2", races are just +1, with one unique racial talent, and one or two racial traits (eg. darkvision, +1 to sleight of hand, or something like that). They also got rid of alignments for the same reason - they feel like alignments constrain players to tired archetypes, and instead you pick a combination of Vices and Virtues that your character has.
But yeah, don't take anything I say TOO seriously - I don't have access to the working prototype of the corebook (my version is over a year old I think), and am not part of the team building the game. *is just a working grunt*
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Getting rid of alignments is not a bad idea as not knowing wich one a character have can indeed create more possibilities, like pretendig to be of one while having goals that match your true alignment, without the gameplay to give you away even to your game master right from the start if you know how to word your character descriptions. I always seen that concept as evolutive, any character can change depending on what happen (especially in long campaigns) so Vices&Virtues system can be a really good way to allow that in a way that feel less forced in-RP.
Sorry if I sounded too serious on the previous reply, I just like to talk about such concepts with people who have the chance to work on such projects, it is always interesting. ^^
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Nah, it's cool, you're obviously passionate about it
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these Yakshi are quite interesting.^^ more interesting then Dryads. XP
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