Paalketch
(a subrace for Humans in D&D)
Get the PDF version here.
When I released Ore of the Weave I teased that there would be a larger campaign on the way. This is another small piece of it.
Wait, you're dividing humans into races??
No, no no, don't worry. Give me a chance to explain.
I'm listening...
You see, in the real world, a couple hundred thousand years ago, homo sapiens lived alongside neanderthals (and some other hominins). Originally, scientists believed that these were all separate and distinct hominin lines and that homo sapiens eventually squeezed out the others. What became clear not too long ago, however, is that these co-existing species bred with each other to produce the homo sapiens sapiens we have today. You can even measure the amount of neanderthal DNA you have inside you!
Go back even farther and you start running into earlier hominins (for example australopithecus afaransis and australopithecus africanus). Here, we had the same thing where scientists were constantly trying to figure out which hominins were direct ancestors of humans and which weren't. In what seems an obvious turn of events now, they discovered that evolution doesn't really work that way. Instead, at every stage of the game from australopiths on down, all the disparate evolutionary lines were breeding with each other and producing mixed offspring.
The paalketch represent the idea that in some unexplored area of the world, we might run into another line of equally intelligent creatures that evolved from a common ancestor. They'd perhaps be different enough that you might want to reclassify the paalketch and "old-world" humans into two different subraces (though sub-species might be a more accurate word). There's no implication that they would be inferior to traditional humans, just different, perhaps because of an evolutionary history more concentrated in forests rather than in the plains. But standard humans and the paalketch are both still just humans when it really comes down to it, even if their physicality is a little different.
Get the PDF version here.
