Playtest Ancestries, and explaining the new nomenclature

[Bricingwolf]

So, the playtest/Core Rules will have a short list of available Ancestries, rather than the full suite of "races" I'd originally planned on working out the rules for.

First, why Ancestries rather than Races, or Species?

There are a few reasons we've made this change.

• "Race" has unfortunate baggage, that the game doesn't benefit from in any way.
• Ancestry is more accurate. A Shifter is also a Human, and Alfar, and arguably Gnomes, are also Vaettr (or their close relatives). Meanwhile, Puca can appear as Goblins, human children, or animals, Selkie are both Shifter and Fey, and when a Dwarf and an Alfar have a baby, it can be mechanically expressed in many ways, so why confuse things by pretending that these things are as distinct and easily defined as the other terms imply? 
• You can play a character of mixed Ancestry, including different sub groups of the core Ancestries, and "Ancestry" works better linguistically for describing that than either of the other terms. (especially species)
• Linguistically, again, Ancestry flows better in the text of the rules. "Next, you figure out your character's Ancestry, either choosing from the options below, using the section at the end of this chapter entitled 'Mixed Ancestry, Variants, and Custom Ancestries" with the guidance of your GM, or choosing from a supplementary source approved by your GM and group members." I tried that with every term I could think of, and Ancestry won the "smell test", for me. 

Now, for the list of Ancestries: 

Alfar, Dwarves, Giants, Gnomes, Goblins, Humans, Pixies, Shifters (Wolf, Bear, Hyena, Jaguar, Fox, Selkie), Trolls, and Vaettr will all be playable in the playtest, and will probably be the list of races in the Core Book. The list of Shifters might shrink by one or two, or we might leave out one of the weirder races like Vaettr or Pixies, for space, but I hope we don't need to.