Racial hierarchies

Fantasy gaming has a fairly detailed racial hierarchy, but for this post I will break it down into its most simple. Humanoid races may be grouped by varying criteria, usually by how human-like or pretty they are.

Male Demikind II © Todd Lockwood

For example, the pretty, human-like player character races such as elves, dwarves, gnomes, and halflings may be grouped into demihuman. Demihumans and humans may be grouped into "civilized" humanoids or demikind.

The implicitly uncivilized (and typically ugly) humanoids, such as orcs, goblins and gnolls, may be placed in their own group. This group may be unnamed and known only as humanoids without a qualifier, or by specific terms like subhuman. Those with obvious animal features, like gnolls or bug people, may be called beastmen or beastfolk. Those with ugly green skin like orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, blues, and related races may be called goblinoid. Those with scales, like lizardfolk, kobolds, troglodytes, and serpentfolk, may be called reptilian.

There may additional categories reflecting further distance from human-like appearance, such as monstrous humanoid, heteromorphic, grotesque, inhuman, etc. What qualifies may be largely arbitrary.

And so on and so forth. These categories are often arbitrary (and racist), but alternately they may reflect shared origins in the cosmology. I prefer the latter.

In previous posts I mused about how I could not really accept the concept of inherently evil races. In future posts I will explore fantasy races and fantastic racism in more detail regarding how I would deal with them in my setting.