Fleshing out Races

This will be various suggestions and points when making or refining not a character, but the species they come from. A character's background is a symptom of their nurturing or the society they're in such as a tribe of people or a small family living by themselves.

When making a character its important to include abilities that are useful in the field, for example a proficiency in potions, melee, ranged, hand to hand, or magic to accomplish whatever goals are required, and those aspects can generally be good with a race as well - showing the preferred method of what the species likes to use to defend themselves. This isn't about character creation though - its about Races. Often family life is somewhat vague, for example just explaining that the character had a father, a mother, no siblings, they were taught at home how to defend themselves but were stranded at a young age. Most Characters follow a similar pattern of abandonment, or vagueness in the area of social and family life because the race that they belong to doesn't explain very well what sort of social culture they have - it only explains hunting and combat aspects.

Often pred characters are lost or abandoned, a lot are raised by humans, or a race that we know the culture of better.

This list does not take into account combat abilities or hunting habits.

Anyway - when thinking of creating a race, or fleshing one out there are things to consider socially just like with a character:

--------
Religion: monotheistic, polytheistic, maybe have a god used as an example for a well known trait

Birth: Are they important to the race, a celebration of some kind, ritual, place of birth maybe, done in a temple or at home traditionally, do births represent anything other than just the creation of new life?

Education: Are children educated by their parents, an adult if in a big community, a parent in a big community, or left to figure things out on their own, etc?

Child Raising: Is it gender associated, or can anyone do it? How do they celebrate the coming of age? Do they stop raising kids at a young age or not?

Duties: Hunting, Home life/care are done by either the man woman or either traditionally?

Groups/Tribes: Does the species tend to live in large/small groups, or by themselves or just as a family?

community projects: do they have community projects, build buildings, architecture of some kind at all? Are they built with a certain inspiration in mind? Does the man build a house for them both, do they do it together, does she do it instead (amazonian woman? XD), does it represent a proposal or something else or not?

Ideals: are they prone to be aggressive, peaceful, manipulative, competitive, sensual, etc? (for example, humans are by nature a very competitive species), do they honor elders, seasoned warriors?

Pros and Cons to their Ideals: What benefits result from the way they live, what downsides are there?

Media: are they practiced in poetry, literature, music, painting and/or oral poems/songs/stories? Do these tell real stories, or fake ones?


--------
As you can see there's tons and tons of things to explain that many species on the Wiki do not in fact have in their respective entries. You shouldn't feel the need to disclose all of these, but it'd be a good idea to talk about enough of them so that people wont need to do guesswork on making a character - so that when time comes their entry is fully fleshed out, their character needs to be rewritten.

If there is anything that you think of that I do not have included let me know, and I will make a place for it in the list.

Shouldn't this be in the Change Discussion forum, as this is merely changing stuff that already exists, and not something entirely new from the ground up?

Yeah I was confused about it, whether to put it in Change Suggestions, General, New Ideas, etc, but I guess this is the best place for it. o-o

Also, you're making a mistake with that thread. You're putting every member of those species in the same basket. What is to say that all species have religions, birth rituals, ideals and whatever? These are tribe mentalities. Lest you forget, a huge chunk of the species in the wiki, mostly the giants, are solitary. If you want to flesh out the races with all that you described, just make up tribes.

That's why I said you don't have to use all of them. Just some will suffice - hence the "groups" part. Though you can always use one tribe as an example.