Scars of War - Race and Nationality

Scars of War developer Gareth Fouche backs up yesterday's blog entry with a post on Race and Nationality:

I talked about how most of the race options available to players in SoW are actually just different types of humans, different cultures and bloodlines. And the question I got was “What kind of war calls together such a diverse array of cultures at one time?”

To answer that, I need to clarify one aspect of my design. In SoW I’m doing something a bit different to most fantasy RPGs. In SoW, race is not equivalent to nationality.

In most fantasy, you have the Kingdom of the Humans, the Kingdom of the Elves, the Orc Lands, etc etc. I find this…very boring.

In real life, humanity is rather fond of playing musical chairs, culturally. While sure, there are places where you can find most people being of a certain race and cultural group, much of the time you will find different cultural groups within countries, even if people all look the same. War, religion, emigration…people move around. Sometimes they integrate into the whole but often there are small, tight-knit communities of said cultural groups in amidst the greater society, groups who maintain that culture’s traditions.