In a world of special para-species can you take absolutely standard humanity and make them interesting, specific and imbued with a sense of history?
Possibly not but I gave my best effort below. This is the current-draft entry for 'Somon' with Eldritch Foundry. What you get when you pick a standard human.
"SHORT-LIVED
For such fragile, ferocious and short-lived creatures,
their ambition burns like fire.
Somon are a people always running out of time, always doing, and to the other races of
humanity, even the meditating mystics of the Somon seem a little frantic.
Everything has to be done now, without thinking first.
Living for about eighty years, Somon have just enough
time, in the opinion of the older races, to get really good at one reasonably
complex thing before they die. Maybe two things if some level of genius is
involved.
Unfortunately, they can get very good. The greatest Somon mages can challenge the 'High' Aeth,
though their magic is an insane jerry-rigged mish-mash of concepts and methods
from almost any tradition they can access, and the greatest Somon craftsmen can
match the abilities of the Deoth, though they tend to produce objects and art
of unusual aspect, without natural balance and with aesthetics seemingly pulled
from thin air.
The usual response of Aeth and Deoth to these individuals
is to remain broadly tolerant and simply wait for them to die, which they will
do soon enough in most cases. Usually within three decades.
Very few Somon become truly great at anything, but there
are a lot of Somon, and though the
odds are against any particular one, sheer mathematics suggests that at least one of them will make it to any
particular goal.
And almost ALL Somon believe, intutatively, that they are,
or could be, this particular rare one. No matter how deluded that might seem in
reality. It is a kind of racial imperative towards functional narcissism and
may be the source of their famous refusal to give up, even when they definitely
should.
When your life only lasts 80 years, you might be willing
to bet it on some pretty long odds.
NUMBERS AND
ADAPTABILITY
Their reputation for adaptability, diversity of thought
and form and relentless hyper-focus on singular goals is partly undeserved. It
is simply that there are so many Somon, millions at least, that it isn't hard
to find an exceptional one, and so many that they almost cannot help but be
diverse simply through weight of numbers.
They are adaptable creatures, (as a group, if not as
individuals), and can find ways to live almost any environment, from great hive
cities to agricultural settlements or as nomadic hunter-gatherers. They tend to
be sociable creatures, it's rare to find Somon alone, they look for each other.
PHYSICAL MAKEUP
Somon look like nothing so much as a vertical, bipedal,
nearly-hairless ape, and this is a name used for them amongst some other
people. Ape-Men, or 'Speaking Apes'.
They vary in size from about four and a half feet to
around six and a half feet tall and vary in skin colour along a single axis
with most difference provided by a single biochemical element. Their narrow
hips and vertical stance give them a remarkable persistence in travel. Though a
Deoth will usually out-work a Somon, a Somon will always travel further. They
move with less speed than an Aeth, but greater stamina. They can cover
remarkable distances on very little food.
You are never really entirely safe from them. They can
turn up anywhere, and though not usually exceptionally powerful as individuals,
there are so many that if a group or large social structure becomes riled up,
they can act almost as a tidal wave, a wall of armed and angry flesh which can
tear down mountains and empty seas.
Thankfully for the other races, the main interest, and
primary enemy of Somon, is other Somon.
"They spend nine hours out of every ten climbing
hierarchies, declaring war on each other or trying to breed" - Vosis Fail,
excommunicated sophont of Yga (and a Somon).
Somon can breed a lot, males are fertile from adulthood
until death, females from adulthood into middle age. They remain sexually
active all year round, with no breeding season, and even when breeding is
impossible. Their intense and continual sexual interest in each other, or in
pretty much anything, is a primary driver of Somon society, and also a primary
threat to Somon society.
THE CONSTRUCTION
OF 'HUMANITY'
The idea of 'Humanity' as being made of the conscious,
bipedal and 'dreaming' races, is largely a construction of the Somon. Since they
make up the vast majority of beings with which the other races must deal, and
since this construction of 'Humanity' includes them, they tend to either go
along with it or enthusiastically support the idea.
Somon can breed, occasionally, with Deoth and Aeth, but
they can breed with Orcs as well, and with more reliability. They do dream, but
the idea that 'Monsters' cannot do so is difficult to exhaustively prove. It
certainly seems that some do not, but how exactly can it be tested? Often Somon
cannot even remember if they dreamed at all, and victims of Yggsrathaals
Dream-Thieves absolutely cannot dream, are they to be considered 'monsters'?
Some Aeth prey on Somon in exactly the same way as 'monsters', should they be
considered so? And of course Somon have been known to eat each other, and even
wilder things.
Still, this basic concept of 'Humanity' continues, either
because it is true, because it works or because no-one has had a better idea.
'People' are bipedal, can speak and think, come in physically coherent groups,
are self-aware, generally don't try to eat you, or each other, and, crucially,
they dream. And this means Aeth, Deoth and Somon are "in", and
Monsters, the Children of Yggsrathall and crucially, Orcs, are very much
"out".
DREAMS
Somon dreams are murky, incoherent, inconsistent and flee
the mind upon waking. Though their awareness is coherent from day to day, in
sleep, their minds seem to fly to a myriad of other realms "like glass
breaking" (Usamah McKan, Deoth philosopher and Somon specialist), with no
real consistency as to where they go, or why, before returning home to the
skull.
To the other races of humanity this is deeply curious and
strange.
The strangest element is that, while they are dreaming,
Somon almost never realise that they are in a dream. It may be this veil of
ignorance that allows them such diversity of possible experience.
"Amidst the kinds of Somon dreams, I have failed to
complete even the most general map, plan or list, but even the shortest and most
abstract must include; Prophetic Dreams, Symbolic Dreams, Dreams of Planar
Travel, Dreams of Classical Travel, Scrying Dreams, Nightmares, Social Dreams,
Dreams with Dogs in them, Sexual Dreams, Lucid Dreams, Divinely Inspired
Dreams, Stimulatory Dreams, Dreams of Mental Stress, Ash Dreams, Reasoned
Dreams, Psychopomp Dreams and Magical Dreams. And this is only a cursory look
at the possible range." - Usamah McKan, Deoth philosopher and Somon
specialist.
Those who claim to serve one or more of the Sleeping Gods
of Uud say that they receive communion in dreams; "Sleeping With the
Gods", and they do sometimes awake with specific magical powers.
More sceptical analysts point out that the powers gifted
in sleep often seem inappropriate for the tasks brought to hand the following
day. The faithful reply that this is due to their own failure to comprehend the
Will of the Gods, the actions of evil powers, either monstrous or entropic, or
just possibly the Gods timeless sleeping state which might cause them to deliver
the right thing at an imprecise time.
The dreams of Somon magicians can be catastrophic,
especially if their minds are occupied by high-powered and aggressive
meta-concepts during unguarded sleep. Almost all schools advise that magicians
scrub their minds of these paradigms before bed and re-learn them in the
mornings.
Persistent failure to do this has destroyed a lot of
Thaumaturges, as well as those around them, and sometimes nearby populations
and environments.
BLACKWATER HISTORY
It’s almost certain that Somon were once the dominant
intelligent race of Uud.
Myths, legends, partial histories and semi-successful
chronal scrying, imply an ancient world-system. All of Uud, if not united, then
linked, primarily through vast Kingdoms or Empires of Somon.
All of that has passed away, eaten by Ash and hidden by
mist.
The Blackwater culture must once have been a Refugee
Empire. As the wastes closed in and ate the reminder of Uud, wiping much of it
from through and memory, floods, caravans, crusades and cavalcades of Somon
closed in on Blackwater, on the cities held by the High Aeth Emperors and on
the Mountains of Reality. As they came they brought their food and faith,
clothes and cultures, animals and agriculture, craft and magic, weapons and
technology, with them
Several thousand years later, this semi-stable combination
of feuding city-state and feudal mountain Queendoms is what remains, but
cultural relics of all these can be found somewhere in Blackwater; a marginal
village, forgotten valley, urban ghetto, of people who look different, sound
different, carrying half-understood or
time-changed relics of an ancient culture and perhaps with no clear memory of
exactly where they come from.
Or it may be that they do remember, or claim to, and that
a side-street or lean-to holds a supposed 'Emperor of the World' or King of a
Nation forgotten for millennia, lost in the ash, sustained on the vaguest of
tales and the slenderest of dreams.
It’s a largely unstated assumption amongst the Aeth and
Deoth that the Somon, even if they don’t know it yet, are going to try to take
back Uud. The Somon themselves, with their short memories and rapidly-churning
generations, may not have consciously realised this, but the older races are
convinced that the impulse is definitely brewing.
Whether this will be good or bad, lead to triumph or
disaster, for the Aeth, The Deoth, or the Somon themselves, is yet to be seen."
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