The first thing I had to do was work out what races the players are allowed to play. Zendikar doesn't have many of the fantasy staples - no dwarves, gnomes, halflings or orcs. This cuts out over half of the core Pathfinder races. Fortunately the original Zendikar had a bit of tribal theme to it, making the selection of player races pretty obvious - kor, merfolk, vampire, goblin, elf and human. Elf and human were the only core races on this list.
Though not a core race, Pathfinder has really cool rules for player goblins, so they slotted in perfectly, more than making up for the removal of the traditional small races (halfling and gnome). The other races were slightly harder.
Merfolk also have rules, but they are a bit unbalanced - they are siginificantly more powerful than most player races, but have the severe weakness of a 5ft land speed, due to a lack of legs. Magic's merfolk had a related problem for meany years - it was hard for the stories to include a race that did so badly on land. The original Zendikar included a solution to the problem - merfolk were given legs instead of a tail, and have been depicted like this ever since. Which meant I had to come up with a custom-built merfolk race. This was not as hard as it sounds, as the Advance Race Guide has a pretty detailed guide to building races, allowing me to make a merfolk race that did well on land and sea, but was not too powerful. In fact, I initially went too far in the other direction, and later added in a few neat boosts to the race, like a bonus to stealth in water.
Pathfinder vampires are way too powerful to be player characters. But something I have always suspected, from references in the original Zendikar guides, is that the vampires of Zendikar were not truly undead, but something more akin to vampire bats. This allowed me to use the dhampir rules for player vampires. Dhampir are half-vampires, not undead, but having a lot of vampiric qualities. The recent Plane Shift: Zendikar has vindicated this choice by explicitly stating that the vampires of Zendikar are not undead - rather, they suffer from an eldrich disease which slows the heart rate and creates a craving for blood.
This just left kor, which was the hardest race to create, which went through a number of iterations, including some advice from friends, before I was happy with them. What has made me even happier is how similar my kor are to the ones later provided in the D&D supplement Plane Shift: Zendikar. Both have bonuses to dexterity and wisdom, and both include a climbing speed.
That left the decision of whether to include half-elves or not. They are a rare breed in magic - the only known half-elves are Freyalise and Radha. They are, however, a fantasy staple, and being that there are both elves and humans on Zendikar, including them made sense. Of course, humans being humans, I decided that there were probably half-kor on Zendikar as well.
I thought a bit about allowing ogres as a player race, as Zendikar has a bit of a tradition of allowing races usually considered evil to join up. I even made rules for them, but eventually decided against it, as large-sized races get significant advantages over medium and small ones. Surrakar, a primitive amphibious race, were also an option, but so little is known about them that I wouldn't know where to start on making them a race, and it would be hard to play one lacking knowledge of the race's backstory.
No matter how many cool things you give them, some players will always push for something more. I eventually decided to allow drow, specifying that they were the Mul Daya elf tribe, which are known for worshiping the dead and living in the darkness. I also recently added a few 'planetouched' races - humans mixed up with a little bit of outsider. In Magic, planes work slightly differently than Pathfinder, so 'outsiders' don't really come from another plane. They are instead manifestations of pure mana. The races are the angelic aasimir, demonic tieflings, and sylphs, who I flavoured as sphinx-related. Ganzi also fitted in neatly as humans twisted by the presence of the eldrazi (right down to them both ending with 'zi'). Though, I'm not very happy with sylphs as sphinx relatives, however. I will probably try to make a playable maftet race instead. Also, I'm pretty sure there's a way to include fetchlings, as the kor have ties to the plane of Rath, and the shadow mechanic. Yeah. I just can't stop tinkering with things.
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| Maftet from Second Darkness: The Armageddon Echo |
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