New SubmissionsFull Description
Fristles are cat-like bipedal humanoids, with long tails, rudimentary (retractable) claws and feline pelts. They have a wide range of coloration, and various subraces resemble various great cat-types, although all can interbreed. By temperament they are much like the cats they so strongly resemble; touchy, arrogant, lovers of pleasure and luxury, but fierce both in attack and defense. Most humans find them very attractive and sensual.
Compared to humans, they are slightly faster and slightly weaker. Their fur gives them some extended tolerance for temperature extremes.
Additional Information
They are a prolific race, and have adapted well from their ancestral desert homeland to every human culture and every clime. Fristles are noteworthy for being gregarious, flocking to cities, communities and all manner of social structures. There are rumors that Fristles and elves have produced progeny together, but such are unproven; no other race is known to have successfully interbred with them. They have a normal aptitude for magic, but unusually enough, few Fristles become priests.
The Fristle homeland is the vast Ochre Limits, the great and immeasurable desert to the west of the known lands, but they have spread all over the world. There is no Fristle kingdom, per se, and many scholars believe that like the Khibils and the Chuliks, they are not native to this plane of existence.
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2009-05-21 06:07 PM
2009-05-21 06:31 PM
2009-05-21 07:09 PM
2009-05-22 08:36 AM
They are from the desert.
Pretty sparse on the details and follows the basic perception of what people think of cats. I have 3 cats, all of them have widely different temperaments and attitudes.
2009-05-24 06:49 PM
I think the choice not to have specific cultural differences is a mistake for these races. Humanity alone has huge differences, a different species should have even more, no matter how well assimilated.
2009-05-24 07:23 PM
What are the religious practices of humanity? What are the dining customs? How do humans treat one another socially? Their mating customs? Child rearing habits? What political constructions do they put together? Are they warlike or peaceable? How do they do conflict resolution? Any particulars to mention about human language? What are the folk customs, holidays and traditions?
We could all come up with a great deal of info on each of those, and a great deal to directly contradict everything that's said. That's the problem here: people expect non-human races to be monolithically lockstepped into rigid traditions, customs and practices that humans in no particular whatsoever follow as one.
Now I accept that's the way of it in most RPG words: that ALL elves act like this, that ALL orcs act like that, that ALL dwarves are wondrous craftsmen, that ALL halflings are natural thieves. I just don't presume that a race *which explicitly assimilates into human cultures* will have a raft of distinctive cultural practices anyway, just because we've come to expect that RPG races must have them.
2009-05-24 08:47 PM
2009-05-25 04:42 PM
I am going to have to object to this sentiment. I think you have presented an invalid argument to cover the fact that your cat-people have no defining characteristics. Your Fristles as presented are Cat people who have an aptitude for magic and are not priests. You have given no insights into their culture, their lifestyle, just a cardboard cut out of Fritz the Cat dressed for the Renaissance Fair.
I hear constantly that Stereotypes and generalizations are inacurate and unfair. To that I say bologna, because if there wasnt a grain of truth in a stereotype or generalization it wouldn't hold up and therefore wouldnt exist. If you say your catfolk are elitist epicurians, that doesnt confine all of them to that mode, it just gives a basic to measure them against. Not all of them are going to be Model X citizens.
Your arguement is reflexive in response to criticism, and unfortunately not admissable
2009-05-27 03:47 AM
But if you're claiming that there aren't a lot of defining characteristics separating this race from humans ... well, yes. You're right. There aren't.
What I'm doing here is presenting elements from my gameworld, as they exist within it; I'm quite literally cutting-and-pasting. I gather it would suit the amour propre of some for my world's races to have a lot of quirky, distinctive cultural practices that the vast majority of members embody. For most of them, there aren't and they don't, any more than humans do: humans don't follow the same religion, don't speak the same language, don't have the same festivals or holidays, don't have uniform marriage or mating practices, don't raise their children the same way, don't have uniform dining customs, don't maintain identical political structures, etc etc etc.
If it suits you to borrow any of the races, you can graft on whatever elements suit your own preferences or that of your campaign. If not, it's a moot point. I just don't believe in dressing things up with elements I neither use nor believe in just because people think they ought to be there.
2009-05-25 08:51 PM
The description you've given suggests little beyond 'This is a cat that someone taught to be bipedal, but to make it special it's EXTRAPLANAR!'
Please, more details. I'd honestly consider this much more of a stub than a full submission as it currently stands. It has potential glimmers - but as it stands it's almost a cardboard cutout of Anime Catperson, to me.
2009-05-27 09:39 AM
As a stand alone sub, it is a bit incomplete, but as a scroll entry for say, the Minor Races of your world, or as a stub in a codex of the same it would be fine.
Main submissions are given a greater level of scrutinty then the above options, and so that is where I was coming from with my comments. I was a assuming a level of knowlage inapproproate for a brand new user.
So thats my suggestion - make a codex or a scroll to contain those races you don't want to work up in full, and promote them to full subs in the future should you wish to do that.
2009-05-27 12:08 PM
There's still a conceptual thing I think's being missed. It's not that this submission is "incomplete" or that I "don't want to work up in full" - this is all there is to say on this race. It's as complete as it's going to be, short of the ability to post artwork. Fristles, Chuliks and Khibils are not minor races on my gameworld; no races other than humans and orcs outnumber them, and a "minor races" scroll would be misleading. (I don't get to designate stubs yet, as a new user, but that's a quibble.)
I'm sorry if they're not worthy of submission - especially given MoonHunter's inviting me to join the site stems from seeing those three posted in a RPG.net thread about ideas for non-classic fantasy races. But if it's the case that race submissions to this site have to have a minimum page length, with at least five (or ten, or ...) quirky customs or traits that their every member shares above and beyond the ones I've already included, the only way these will ever pass muster is if I pick a half-dozen of the same out of a sociology or folklore text at random and bolt them on. My energies are better devoted to posting writeups people prefer to see, which already are of the proper length.
2009-05-27 01:27 PM
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