Sword-and-sorcery settings like Primeval Thule are generally low-magic, human-centered worlds. So why do we make a place for elves, dwarves, and all the rest of the high fantasy baggage of D&D? The answer is that we think Thule’s untamed wilderness, its rugged terrain, and its essentially unexplored nature make it easy to “hide” unique cultures or populations. Elves in Thule have a specific homeland, it’s hard to reach, and they don’t travel much outside it—you just don’t find elves in every forest like you do in many D&D worlds.

To put it another way, a classic feature of pulp fantasy is the existence of people, places, and things that are unique in their world. Tarzan meets ant-men; Gahan of Gathol meets headless Rykors and Kaldanes, which are disembodied heads; Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser encounter ghouls whose flesh is invisible; Conan meets the guardians of the island of the Pool of the Black One. The demihuman races of Thule each represent a unique situation or culture not widely known in the broader world. When the PCs visit the dwarven city of Kal Zimari, Land of the Iron Masters, they’re visiting the only city of dwarves in the world. And that makes the game session when they do visit Kal Zimari all the more memorable.

With that in mind, here are a few things you should know about demihuman character races in Thule.

Thule is not cosmopolitan. The typical D&D city is assumed to be pretty diverse. Some percentage of the population is demihuman, maybe even as much as 30 or 40 percent when you add all the minority populations together. Thule’s major cities are basically human city-states. There may be minority populations, but those are different human cultures. Dwarves, elves, and other demihumans stick to their own realms and only visit human cities occasionally.

Demihumans are rare in the world but not necessarily rare at your table. Your PCs aren’t proportionally representative of the world population. They’re the characters your players want to play, heroes who often have unique stories and origins. If many of them aren’t human, that’s perfectly fine. Demihumans may be regarded with curiosity, bemusement, fear, or suspicion in many places, but dangerous reputations and hefty bags of gold have a way of opening doors just about anywhere.

Absence of mention is absence altogether. We’re not going to go through each possible character race and tell you “in” or “out.” There’s very little reason to issue blanket statements such as, “There are NO GNOMES in Thule!” Somewhere out there is a DM who has a great idea for how gnomes fit into *his* version of Thule, and we don’t want to tell that guy he’s playing the game wrong. When we see something we want to exclude, we just won’t talk about it.

Unusual Character Races

One of the advantages of this philosophy is that there’s room for just about *any* character race you want to allow at your table, since you don’t have to account for *all* character races jostling for room at the same time. If you’re a fan of the xephs, well, you can have a valley of xephs in your version of Thule. Maybe a small population of the creatures wandered into Thule through a door between the worlds, and they’re minding their own business in a lonely and out of the way place. If you don’t know what a xeph is and you don’t care, well, why worry about where xephs ought to be from in Thule?

There are hundreds of character races available in the various editions of the game, and we aren’t going to be able to come remotely close to telling you how “X” works in Primeval Thule if “X” isn’t something that appears in a core rulebook (and probably a very low-numbered one, and that). It turns out oddball races fit a lot better in a world where you can assume that one small population makes up the only example of race or culture “X” to be found in the world.

Demihumans… or Humans After All?

If that’s still too much demihuman for your humanocentric sword-and-sorcery campaign, here’s one more piece of advice: You could just say the people of Imystrahl or Kal Zimari are humans who possess the social organization, talents, and lifestyles of the elves and dwarves we describe. The rulers of Imystrahl are cruel, decadent, drug-addicted dreamers who indulge in orgiastic behavior to fight the creeping ennui pervading their society. That description works just as well for humans as it would for elves—the Imystrahli don’t need to be elves to be unique. The Primeval Thule campaign setting book dedicates space to further discussion of this option.

-Rich