Impossible anthropologies

• The elves hoard their secret magicks like dragons hoard their gold. Those heretics and dissidents who find themselves banished to the brutal and uncivilised earth are regarded as dangerous and unsympathetic demi-gods. Cast out from their technologically advanced lunar homeland, they will never truly belong to our lesser world.
• ‘Goblin’ is a slur not a species. The term is an epithet bestowed on those radiation-mutated unfortunates who are exposed at birth or banished from society once their affliction becomes known. Pitied and despised in equal measure, they eke out an unenviable existence on the margins of civilisation.
• The pacifist orcs dwell in secret mountain fortresses. Occasionally, rare individuals are given writs of violence and sent out into the wider world.
• The dwarves descend from human prisoners, incarcerated millennia ago in vaults deep beneath the earth. Over the centuries, they have slowly tunnelled their way back to the surface, their natures and physiognomies utterly changed by their long centuries of subterranean exile. Many vaults remain buried, their inhabitants still hacking their way towards the lost world of sunlight.
• Gnomes? They are shadow-things, malicious spirits of fen and forest. Many doubt their existence, for they are creatures of a younger and crueller world.
• Fear the centaur! Fear the horde! Fear the clattering of hooves! Fear the darkening of the sky by a thousand arrows fired from a thousand bows! Fear the voraciousness of the hooved khans who turn cities to ashes and proud kings into wretched slaves!