The New Old Campaign Design - Part 5 -Races

The baseline for the background is that earth was home to an advanced starfaring civillization then war broke out and the world was hammered with a multitude of weapons, wrecking the whole thing.

About 200 - 500 years after this event is the time of the Gamma World and the Mutant Future.

Around 500 to 1000 years after the war is the Age of Wizards - the wild random mutations have diminished and rudimentary pockets of civilization have emerged only to be threatened by powerful Techno-Wizards who have mastered both mutations and technology and seek to dominate the world. A few brave souls fight against them and they often fight each other, but much of the emerging civil structure is wiped out during these conflicts.

Roughly 1000 - 2000 years after the War of the Gods a few civilized kingdoms are rising and medieval level technology is common.

• The Pure Strain Humans have survived and prospered and are now just "human"
• Elves are an alien race stranded here when the world ended. They are largely unaffected by mutation and have stayed fairly pure. There were never very many of them on earth so they are not especially common now though their population has grown. They are natural psionics. Their affinity with nature is natural to them as their homeworld was terraformed long ago. They have very strong tendencies towards lawful behavior when raised in traditional elven society -think Vulcans with a homeworld that looks more like Endor than Vulcan. They have legends that describe them as being from "across the sea" but they do not realize the true meaning of this or their true origin.
• Dwarves were genetically modified for improved performance on high-gravity worlds - they are shorter, wider, denser, and stronger. Their preference for underground living is a byproduct of the changes made to them long ago though their love of crafting is largely cultural, not genetic. They seem to have less natural psionic ability than pure-strain humans.
• Halflings were created in laboratories as servants for the rich. They were designed to be cute, dextrous, social, and obedient. In some quarters they were thought of more as pets than as full humans. They were an offshoot of android development programs with different labs developing different strains for crossbreeding like breeds of dogs. They can reproduce with other halflings but not with anything else and their artificial genetic background has proven to be fairly resilient to the altered environment and they have grown to be quite numerous, mainly collecting around human communities as they have little culture of their own.
• Gnomes are high-g halflings. They were created for the same purposes to serve on high-g worlds though they are little less craft-focused and a little more entertainment focused as the dwarves were already serious enough.