Again, Paizo puts out a beautiful book, a full color 258 page monster of a tome. I will always say, Paizo is the sports team that spends the big bucks, gets the best talent, and they are just a joy to watch deliver. The book is full of new options for existing races, new core races, new alternate races, and a race builder that is the star of the show - more on that later. Art, layout, and content are all playoff quality, as usual.
It is an impressive addition, and very useful in play. I wouldn't say this is an essential book to play with (like the NPC Codex is), as the races in the core rulebook are great and good enough for most every player. If you are a fan of alternate PC races, this book is for you. It really breaks down on you view of fantasy, and how you see the world.
The Creature Cantina
Some people see fantasy as the intersection of the basic D&D races: Humans, Elves, Halflings, and Dwarves. This is your pretty typical Lord of the Rings model for a fantasy world, and it works well no matter what rules system you follow. There could be other races in the world, but there is a distinct deemphasis on their importance in the world. The rule is, if the world can exist without them, they are a minor race.As an example, compare Dark elves in D&D and Warhammer fantasy. Dark Elves in D&D are a minor race, the world can exist without them. Dark elves in Warhammer are a core part of the world, and they are a major player in everything from battles to Chaos magic. In our D&D world, in most cases, you could do without dark elves a lot easier than you could do without normal elves.The problem with minor races is that they start to feel like those tack-on latex-mask races that appear weekly in shows like Star Trek, or the mess of races in the Star Wars Creature Cantina. Admittedly, Star Wars is doing a better job nowadays integrating and raising the importance of its core races, with the standardization of the big players in games like the new Star Wars MMO. With a plethora of minor races, they begin to feel like 'guest stars' in the game, and they become a bit more difficult to relate to. It is easy to see the problems a dwarf would have traveling through elven lands, but a kenku or a merman?
The Melting Pot
The Forgotten Realms in D&D3.x was notorious for its subraces, and the Advanced Race Guide gives you subraces in spades. In FR, there were a Baskin Robbins amount of elf flavors, moon elves, star elves, sand elves, sea elves, wood elves, and if I looked hard enough you could probably find stone elves and storm elves. The Advanced Race Guide does not go that far with subtypes, they prefer to differentriate with swappable racial traits, a couple new subtypes, favored class options, and new racial archetypes. It is a good balance of making a race different without creating a new ice cream flavor out of them. Paizo chose to go the 'this is an elf, but with this type of background' style of race design. It is a good choice, and keeps elves as a whole able to relate to each other better.In a game design sense, you need to be careful of creating too many racial subtypes. You have to balance the fantasy trope of 'oh, there is a cool new race that lives here' with 'oh boy, another derivative flavor of the week race - enough already.' Too many racial subtypes and all of a sudden they are not special, and the original race becomes plain and boring. In the Forgotten Realms, who wanted to play a normal vanilla elf, when there were so many cool subtypes to choose from? Too much of a good thing is a problem.
The Drow in a Human's World
We bring up the specter of Drizzt Do'Urden here, and a PC choosing a race that obviously has problems even walking in the normal LotR style world. Admittedly, D&D4 does a good job with this, with dragonmen, tieflings, and even minotaurs being normal members of society. This is a reason why D&D4 felt so strange to many people, it adopted the Star Wars mixing pot model, and elevated minor races to major players. Nerrath was a fun mixing pot, where a half-giant could be the king, with a tiefling paladin and dragonman court mage working side by side.With a normal world with the major four races, the drow PC all of a sudden doesn't fit in. This goes the same for aasimars, cat people, goblins, and even half-orcs and the like. I have been in a couple games where choosing a half-orc meant you were ostracized from the group, and you did not get as much play or RP time. It takes a skilled referee to incorporate race choices to a game, or be forward enough to tell players to stick to a subset of races when designing characters. It's okay if you want to do this, and actually helpful - if your vision of the world does not include a player's race choice, you will marginalize that PC subconsciously.
The Far Outs
"But I want to play a gray alien in your 1920's Gangsters game!" Another issue that comes up is the player that wants to play something so far out there it is difficult for them to even relate to the world. Two things can happen: either they become an ignored third wheel in the group, or the entire game centers around them and their wacky misadventures in a world that doesn't accept them. Either way, it's not a good thing. We have had this happen a couple times in our games, and a race guide gives players seeking this sort of attention a lot of ammo to use. I will be frank, I don't like it when race choice becomes a popularity contest. I guess you have to bring it up, since the selection of character race in a carefully crafted world is an important choice, and it can be used to disrupt a game.There are good sides to 'far out' race selections, otherwise, we wouldn't have the Chewbaccas of the world, and everything would be bog-standard. It depends a lot on the group, theme of the game, and the game world. There is no better answer to talk it out beforehand, before anyone gets set on a particular choice. As a player, you need to feel out what is acceptable, bounce character ideas off the referee, and make sure other players in the group are thinking along the same lines. Selecting a far out choice can work, and not everyone in the group can be one as well.
No LotR Races?
Another fascinating use of the book comes with the Race Builder chapter, and creating campaign worlds. Here is a cool exercise, create a game world using five races. None can be one of the standard four (human, dwarf, elf, or halfling), and one race must play the bad guy. Now try to come up with a story for this world. It is a fun exercise, and it gets you out of Golarion for a while. You could come up with a world full of gnolls, kenku, cat-people, and frog-people - with demonic yeti-men as the enemies. This type of world design forces players out of their comfort zones, and can create a memorable short campaign full of new worlds, savage enemies, and plenty of pulp excitement. It is a favorite game of mine, and a model I used for my interpretation of Golarion's Jade Regent expansion.My Jade Regent - Races of the Zodiac
To shake up MY Golarion, I reinterpreted the Jade Regent expansion using the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. I used the Advanced Race Guide to design each race, and thrust the players into a savage land where humans are the deposed rulers of the mighty Empire of the Zodiac (the Empress). The land has the following races:- Ratmen - evil aligned until the tide turned
- Minotaurs (Ox)
- Tigermen - good aligned and used as slaves
- Rabbitkin - neutral
- Dragonmen - initially evil, were turned to good
- Yuan-Ti (snake) - evil
- Horsemen - neutral leaning good
- Goatmen - evil
- Intelligent Monkeys - good, and a fun one to play
- Kenku (rooster) - evil initially
- Wolfmen (dog) - neutral, turned to good
- Pigmen - evil
I admit, it also seemed kind of like furry-friendly roleplaying; but hey, it was and still is cool, even if it seems slightly anthropomorphic. This is a great example of using the Advanced Race guide to create a campaign world, or spruce up a part of it you felt was lacking in variety and excitement. I could have done this with less races, but this is the Zodiac, so it was a cool metaphor to use for the conflict.
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