Subraces Should be Cultures

Referring to elves as a ‘race’ makes perfect sense. They’re clearly different from the other humanoids, have their own features, and biological properties and oddities.¹

But ‘sylvan elves’? The elves who live in forests, but generally act like any other elf? They’re clearly just elves living in a different climate. Likewise, gnomes who lives deeper underground may well call themselves ‘deep gnomes’ (or be called that by others), but the D&D stats show no reason to consider them physically distinct. Even Tolkien’s different types of elves, who had plenty of physical differences, gained those differences mostly due to different lived experiences.²

The ‘subrace’ idea sounds like a post-Victorian notion of cultural differences. I don’t want to get high and mighty with Gygax over this. He was born before WWII, to a community of wacky religious nuts. By the standards of his time, I’d say he’s a 12th level Social Justice Paladin. But Wizards of the Cost, in $current_year, could have updated their thinking by now.

I’ve just checked and D&D are still pushing this old shit , and leaning into it hard, by making sure each subrace has its own natural abilities. So we still have all the darker-skinned ‘subraces’, who live deep down in caves, where all the bad-guys live.

Anyway, we have an easy fix. ‘Subraces’ can just be reframed as different cultures. I don’t want to lose svirfneblin gnomes. Just try not to smile when you say it:

Svirfneblins!

It’s a fun word. And they make a perfectly good independent culture. A fantasy world might only have one group of svirfneblins, and one group of ‘grey elves’ who live in the mountains. Or, just as our world has cultural groups spread around an area, perhaps this world has little pockets of svirfneblins all over the world. National borders are a modern invention after all.

And why not give humans the same treatment? Imagine a group of elves approaching the PCs, and addressing a human.

I hear you are one of the ‘hill humans’. Is it true that your race can craft the most enduring swords, daggers, and horse-shoes in the world? And that all of you learn to play pipes?

Anyone who lives on hills will probably have a piping culture - far-travelling wind-instruments are very important for long-range communication. Everyone knows Scotland for the bagpipes, but people in Afghanistan use them too, and the reason is probably the hills in both cases.

I won’t stick a whole bunch of cultures in the BIND RPG rules - that sounds really boring to read about. But the make-your-own-map rules have a random roll to find out what the area is known for.