Three-Hundred-Thousand Fantasy Races (A record?)
When I began working on the Warsim: the Realm of Aslona, my procedurally generated kingdom management simulation game currently on steam and itch. There were only two races, Humans, which made up some kingdoms, bandit groups and a rebellion, and Goblins, who made up some kingdoms and little tribes. As of the Beta 0.7.4 of Warsim, the game’s race count now sits at 325'142.
That’s right that’s over three hundred thousand fantasy races in the game, but what does all that mean? What do these races look like and how are they unique and different?
To show what kind of stuff to expect, Here’s a list of 10 completely random races I plucked from the game while writing this article.
- Forest Shades
- Lesser Half-Giants
- Demonic Protofolk
- Shore Ghouls
- Warrior Were-Turkeys
- Coast Goblins
- Hill Wizards
- Mini Ogres
- Northern Antelopelings
- Gold Orclings
Yikes, better watch out for those Warrior Were-Turkeys. Now as it stands those are just names, but you’re probably wondering what separates these races, how are they unique and different.
To answer that I must explain the race generation system first. The system works by pulling a race from a list of 86 current standard races. This list includes many fantasy classics such as Orcs and Elves, but also some Warsim originals such as Centaars (like Centaurs but half-elf instead of half-man) and Protofolk (Cavemen).
Once it has one of those, it will apply a race prefix, this system was inspired in part by the creative way that the board game Small World dealt with races.
Slotting a race and a random prefix together to get a specific race with mixed and matched abilities. With this system in mind I tried to create a huge variance of possible prefixes that could go along with the system. I came up with a list of 262 prefixes and counting.
Each of these prefixes has wildly different effects and stat changes, Hermit Elves for example will be poor in game and not worth raiding, Bandit Gnomes however, will rob people (you included), Invincible Centaurs will be a foe to be reckoned with, Doomed Wizards will at some point suffer a prophecised collapse, and Two-Headed Mermen will have… well, two heads.
Almost all prefixes have a variety of effects following a pattern, usually prefixes that significantly increase a race’s strength in combat, will decrease it’s population levels, this is to prevent there being unstoppable races with huge populations, however it’s still possible for some races to bypass this. Expect the inhabitants of little Goblin kingdoms to be vast in number, and kingdoms of Giants to contain only small handfuls of people.
On top of that, race prefixes have further effects, they can effect how civilised the group are. An uncivil group will not be contactable through the games diplomacy, so Savage Dwarves will be a lost cause for your poor old diplomat.
Some racial prefixes can also effect the colour of the race faces, so Arctic Hobgoblins will have blue skin, Lava Halflings red, Purple Ogres will be purple, and so on.
There are also some additional facial alterations, for example Childlike Orcs will have baby faces, How cute!
Another unique race prefix is eyeless, Eyeless Necromancers for example… quite a terrifying concept. Below I forced the same race to be generated three times in one game world, and these three separate kingdoms of Eyeless Necromancers all had vastly different looking people (thanks to the random skin colour system that applies to humanoid races)
And there are others like Ungovernable, which means the leader of the race will be replaced often, Primitive will make them savage and impossible to talk to and Deatheater will make them stronger the more they kill (and a seriously dangerous foe towards endgame).
Pacifist Ents will not attack, Invisible Halflings will not be visible at all (unlesss you find an artifact that makes them visible). Psychotic Orcs will attack you one turn and could be your friend the next, you never know.
So you get it, there are tons of effects. Every single race has it’s own unique combination of strength, civility, population and their own look, and this will only grow with time (sidenote: if you can think of anything cool, I’m always up for adding new stuff so hit me up).
Breakdown of the 325'142 different races
The breakdown of what makes up the 300k figure is interesting, to demonstrate this I’ve broken up the data into three categories, Beast races, Non-beast races, and Orcs (who are a non-beast race, but split off to demonstrate the divide)
The first data point (red) are procedurally generated beast races, these are your Anteaterfolk, your Spiderlings, your Half-Rats and so on. The system works by taking 194 different animals and converting each into either Half-Creature, Evolved Creature, Were-Creature, Creaturelings, Creaturemen, or Creature Folk. This allows for a huge and diverse number of obscure creature races, and as you can imagine makes up the majority of the 300k figure.
The second data point (purple) represent everything that isn’t proc-gen animal races, ogres, dwarves, elves, men, and so on. Orcs have been excluded from this category to show them off seperately.
There are 786 different Orcish races, that is because of three different default Orc races (Orcs, Orks and Orclings). Each of these mixing with the 262 prefixes gives us 786 total orc types.
And that is more or less it, over 300k fantasy races in the game, mostly Animal-based. Is this a record? how many more races will be squeezed into the game before the heat-death of the universe? these questions I cannot answer!
Here’s a recent image showing the base races in warsim, each face is a procedurally generated one for that respective race.
The game in question is ‘Warsim: the Realm of Aslona’ which is available on Steam and Itch.io, at $4.99 and it’s been developed intensely for years.
This article is a little outdated now, check out my latest article exploring the race generators 75 million fantasy races!
If you have any suggestions for new races or prefixes, share them on the subreddit or via a message www.reddit.com/r/warsimrpg
You can also add your own races into the game using the in-game modders toolbox (extras menu).
Thank you for reading!
