Today’s update race for my homebrew setting is the Lupa. Formerly know as the Canis. I have kept the Canis but the are now a subrace of Lupa. Overall this one was a tough one to put together. A lot of thought went into how many subraces I would do. One of the issues with making a Canine race was the concern that there are so many “Breeds” of Canine that it could have gone on forever with a plethora of subraces if I had chosen to go wild.

In the end, I chose to focus on two subraces. The name Lupa replaced Canis because I honestly was not a fan of the name even after all these years. I needed to keep some aspect of the name around so I decided to make Canis one of the two subraces.

I once again had to address the issue I had done years earlier and remove the Canis and Badgen hatred. Where with the Badgen it was a fairly simple task I found that with the former Canis.. It was a tremendous part of their background. Between that and the attachment to the Canis nation that I wanted to pull out as well so they felt more worldly. I pretty much had to start from scratch with this one again.

Just about all I had left at one point was the Canis hate for lycanthropes and gnolls. So I did some research and looked up the “Lupin” from back in 3.5 D&D. They were Featured in the Dragon Mag. I found some interesting parallels’s between the two and I added them here and there into my new write up. Honestly, I normally would not do this.. but It saved me time and it’s not like I am going to post this for money. So I paid homage to some of the write-up and went with it.

So the Canis were the second of my exotic races that I created nearly 20 years ago. I wanted to make a race in the game setting would be more advanced than some of the rest of the world and not be a standard race. So the Canis was born, inspired from the Roman Dog Soldier. They were the backbone of the Canis Empire also a Roman style nation. They were far more advanced then the rest of the world having the beginnings of steam power as well as gunpowder.

They were also kind of my villains. According to my world, they had chased the Badgen from their homes and were at war with them. Many of the Gnome lands had been conquered and the Canis had them cranking out tinker creations for the Canis armies. Halflings as well fled the part of the world to get away from the Canis’s might.

Fun fact…
Before I made my own race and named them Canis. I nearly did not make a unique race and just went with Gnolls. Hobgoblins likely would have worked well also. Instead, I decided to make my own race and have them hate both Gnolls for being Primitive Savages. As well as Lycanthropes because they were easily confused for them.