In my Pathfinder setting, I have the usual suspects. Though one notable deviation from typical elves and dwarves is their aging process. They don’t die like humans do, but as they age they still deteriorate.

As dwarves age, they slowly turn to stone. By 100 years old, they’re noticeably slower and heavier than young dwarves. By 200, they are much slower. Their skin is stony, it occasionally cracks and flakes, causing mild, but painful injury. These dwarves extremely skilled workers, but are by no means fast or quick at this age. By 300, they are heavily petrified. Dwarves this old are slow: they move, speak and think very slowly. They are so slow that interacting with them is difficult. Old dwarves are not stupid, their minds are sharp as ever, and the lifetimes of experience that they have is incredibly valuable for a ruler or trade magnate.

But this means that dwarven kingdoms with aged rulers require a complex bureaucracy around them. The king’s time is not only valuable, but they literally have less of it than a younger dwarf. Often the king will surround himself with younger trusted advisors, who themselves have more spry and quick underlings. This bureaucracy can lead to corruption, as ambitious or greedy young dwarves think they can pull a fast one on their slower leaders. A king often spends a lot of time constructing intelligent rules and systems to prevent corruption and maintain order, leaving things like foreign affairs and even rather large emergencies to trusted advisors who can respond in real time.

Elves too will age, but never necessarily die. Longer-lived than other races, they are cursed with a buildup of memories, and their connection with the arcane eventually distorts their perception both of the past and of reality. By 500 or so, they frequently are required to resign themselves to the past, reliving the best and worst moments of their incredibly long lives. This makes extremely old elves ineffective rulers. Some civilizations put an age limit on their leaders for this reason, while others insulate the ruler, rendering them more of a figurehead than a true head of state. It is also for this reason that elven conclaves are likely to be democratic in nature, to protect from a ruler that may have gone off the deep end.

• HyperMatrixen (a.k.a The Machines): The species in greatest number (before being swiftly obliterated), which divides into several races. The most relevant include:

  • Nexus: It is a large, self-contained supercomputer that allows all other Machines to exist. As such, it is a massive 25x25x25m metallic cube suspended in the air through embedded magnetic engines, that allow the cube to float in an arbitrary position at any place, and at a great range of velocities. It’s surface is mostly flat, painted in white with gray linear patterns at multiple points. In all faces, in their center, there is a 3x3m square with interfaces that allow the cube to anchor to a larger system, which were originally used when the HyperMatrix was built, to connect it to a larger datacenter to expand it’s processing power. Above each interface there are two text lines: “HyperMatrix”, written in red. On every face, there are also embedded weapons that allow the Nexus to defend itself. It’s arsenal include weapons such as railguns, machine guns, high-energy lasers and even an EMP, to be used as a last resort. Currently there is only one Nexus, which is the HyperMatrix itself.
  • Mecha Dragons: Dragons are the largest mobile unit of The Machines. They resemble a classic European dragon, except in a machine form. They can breath fire, fire devastating sonic waves that sweeps anything on their way and crush most armored vehicles and buildings. They are also some of the most advanced and intelligent units, with a far greater processing power that other units, which allows them to continue active even when disconnected from the Nexus, though severely limited.
  • Strikers: Strikers are the main war units and are the most common unit of The Machines. They resemble a T-800, but with slightly more plating. These units cannot work unless connected to a Nexus, which controls each one of them directly.

• Animalien (a.k.a The Beasts): The Animalien is a catch-all name for any Animalesque Hybrid. They originally appeared as the result of a project conducted by the United Human Force, focused on surviving a devastating bioweapon created by The Machines to wipe out humanity. They are anthropomorphic entities with heavy animal feature influence, like fur, bone structure, facial features, claws, etc. Their level of intelligence is equal to the human level, as they were originally humans before being mutated. Though resistant to many diseases lethal to humans, they are not completely safe to bioweaponry, as The Machines created a new bioweapon few months after the mutants started to be reinserted into (what’s left of) human society. Unfortunately, humanity seems to be unable to not be racist, even at the brink of extinction, so they were heavily shunned by most of society and even lynched in many cases. There is also a Machine version of this species, serving as infiltrated agents to extract information and sabotage the human resistance efforts.

Ventreth

There are 7 major fantasy races living on the main continent of my world. They are all very human-like, but all with something small which makes them slightly unique.

• Eiloth: Basically humans, but with the ability to heal from any non-lethal injury. Even if they lose an entire limb, they will eventually recover as if nothing ever happened.

• Forla: I originally planned for them to be elves, but their defining factors have become that 1/3 of the population are hermaphrodites, and that appearance is not related to biological sex at all.

• Dorac: Dragon people who evolved from forla, so in addition to everything above they also have dragon-like horns, wings, and tail. Their wings aren’t enough on their own to fly, but combined with some magic they are capable of it.

• Kolain: Cat people, which can be anywhere from humans with cat ears and tail to sapient cats. They have better vision compared to the other sapient races.

• Taluu: Bunny people, all of which are just humans with bunny ears and tail. They naturally have a faster reaction time than other races.

• Ikijin: Foxes which created transformation magic to take on a human-like form, but retained their fox ears and tails. They are roughly divided into the more northern red ikijin and southern arctic ikijin.

• Zwolx: Wolves which imperfectly copied the transformation magic of the ikijin, resulting in many distinct regional differences such as floppy ears and curled tails. Yes this is a joke about dog breeds.

If anyone has any feedback, I’d love to hear it! I am fairly attached to all of them at this point and don’t plan to remove any of them, but I’m totally open to changing them up a bit. Especially the names, I’m still not sure how I feel about those.