I'm just going to be frank. "Race" as a concept in tabletop RPGs (and fantasies of all kinds, medieval and space included) is problematic. Its purpose is unclear. At best, it can be used as a (paper-thin) allegory for real racial questions worth exploring, without being too real or triggering for anyone involved (a height often achieved in Star Trek). At worst, it is an excuse to create a safe space for racism.

Consider traditional D&D. Elves may have pointy ears and strange ways, but unlike virtually all Earthly myths about them, they are good, lawful, civilized folk. Might be a bad egg here or there, just as in humans, and yeah they're a little snooty, but they're basically good people, right? No different than dwarves, halflings, gnomes, and all the friendly sorts.

Oh yeah, except those black-skinned elves. They're uniformly evil. And the black-skinned dwarves, who are also uniformly evil. And (depending on your setting), black-skinned gnomes and black-skinned halflings. Curiously, the black-skinned humans managed to escape the whole "uniformly evil" thing.

Do I need to go on? There's no nuance here. They don't even call it something else like "species", they literally call it "race". If you don't feel safe denigrating dark-skinned people on Earth, well, good news! You can safely do so in this fantasy world. In fact, you can murder them, loot their bodies, and desecrate their corpses...and you'll be hailed as a hero for it!

Um. I'm done. I'm just done with that.

But even when there is a little nuance. Let's take orcs, for example. Tolkien's were basically uniformly evil, but not in a supernatural way, just in the way that all misshapen, dark-skinned humans are: savage, uncivilized, uncultured, rapacious, cannibalistic, etc. You know. Darkies. He was kind of racist.

But then you bring them into a modern world, say Warcraft, and suddenly they have nuance. They aren't uniformly evil. They commune with spirits! They have a certain "noble savage" virtue (which is also HUGELY problematic but I have to fit this discussion into a reasonable space). So that's better, right? Well, no. They're constantly degrading into their savage, warlike ways. For all their virtue, they just can't help sliding into evil time and time and time and time again. For every hero or moral leader they spawn, three villains rise to meet them, constitutionally incapable of learning lessons. And yet, they are set in opposition to "normal" races like humans and dwarves, who despite suffering the worst consequences of these constant moral lapses, continually maintain the moral high ground, no doubt because their skin is so milky white and they don't have any weird tusks.

Look, that "fantasy", with all its "allure", isn't going away. It doesn't need our help. Weird, gross people love that stuff, and they're going to get it one way or the other. But we don't need to feed that beast. We don't need an outlet for those feelings, because we don't have those feelings. We're bored of these tired tropes, that exist to do nothing but prop up traditional, patriarchal, and frankly fascist cultural myths. That is not the purpose of roleplaying games.

This setting does something different with races, and although the above diatribe is not the only reason, it is an important reason, and deserves to be called out openly. I see no reason to be subtle about this. What other settings do with Race is, most charitably, boring and cliche (when it isn't literally helping the cause of fascism). I wanted to do something different, both to make a more interesting setting, but also to draw a line in the sand: fantasy may make use of obsolete technology and mythology, but it does not require and does not benefit from obsolete morality.