Human

Basic Information

Humans are the sole known sapient species to populate Earth. All members of the human species together are known as humanity.

Sources

Bibliography

Since humans are for obvious reasons the species best known to players and game masters alike, they are the easiest to role-play convincingly.
Many, if not most science fiction and fantasy settings have non-human species. In settings where this is not the case, game masters have to work harder to distinguish the different cultures, nations, and factions from each other, and explain their nature to the players.
- This can be made easier by basing these societies on real world nations and cultures. However, care should be taken not to stereotype them too much, or else you will end up with a caricature, rather than a believable society.
- This will also make it harder (though not impossible) to present one side as "pure evil" and the other as "pure good" - in general, human morality is too muddled to allow such distinction on a large scale.
  - Slaughtering hordes of orcs or demons will not generally trigger any moral qualms in the player characters. Slaughtering large numbers of humans is generally harder to justify.
  - But if in doubt, Those Wacky Nazis make fairly good mooks for this purpose.
- In some settings, different human cultures can be distinguished further through genetic engineering - see Transhumanism for details.

Page tags: rng_race

page revision: 4, last edited: 10 Jun 2009 23:35