Quote from: Chris24601;1083001I both split off and combined some of these in my world's lore. Kobolds are beastmen; one of many species created by the biomancers of the First Empire as slave labor. Kobolds were engineered to scurry through small places and fix things. During the Beastman Rebellion that brought the First Empire to an end they served as sappers and saboteurs and became the chosen people of the Forge God. They've lived in the nooks and crannies of human civilizations for thousands of years now and are available as PCs.

Goblins were another species of beastmen created from bats who acted as messengers. After the Rebellion they formed an advanced highly social society that endured right up to the Cataclysm. In the aftermath of the Cataclysm they were enslaved en masse by the newly created Orcs who proceeded to breed them over the course of a hundred generations (because beastmen are capable of reproduction by age two) into virtually mindless slave soldiers and cannon-fodder (so degenerate that fewer than one-in-a-hundred are born with still functional wings) for the Orcish Empire.

There do exist small colonies of goblins who were never enslaved, remain highly social and capable of flight. They are available as PCs. They hate having to fight their own kind, but most believe that the orc's slaves are beyond rescue and that killing them is a mercy.

Orcs are humans mutated by the Cataclysm into super-predators. They are as intelligent and cunning as Men, but also stronger, faster and with sharper senses (including night vision and bloodhound level smell), ugly as sin and exceptionally aggressive. They have formed an Empire devoted to conquest to keep them from turning their bloodlust on each other (though presently the death of their Great Kahn without a chosen successor has led to a four way civil war between his children which has bought the neighboring realms some breathing room). As true-breeding mutant humans, they can and do breed with ordinary humans and their traits can persist for generations thereafter.

As if that weren't bad enough about 10% of the orcs just don't stop growing and become ten to twenty foot tall monstrosities called ogres who rule over the orcs (and their goblin slaves) with an iron fist.

And we can't forget trolls; another type of human mutation that, in addition to warping their bodies, turned their healing up to 12, but only through the creation of hideous scar tissue. Other types of mutants include cyclops, troglodytes and spikers.

I'm considering though removing the term Mutant (even if the pre-cataclysm world was essentially a magi-tech utopia where science and magic were essentially the same thing and the concept of mutation would have been known) and just calling the entire category Trolls; with Orcs/Ogres, Cyclops, Hulks (what I'd call the D&D troll classic), Trogs, etc. as different subtypes of Troll.

Quote from: DickFeynman;1083290Link to your blog?