Hrothgar Appreciation and Lore

[Cilia]

Ahem.

As you all should know by this point, Viera males were not introduced in favor of adding the new Hrothgar race for various reasons. However, there's been little discussion about them, so I figured I'd get the ball rolling and try to draw some positive attention to them.

There is a lot about the Hrothgar we don't know. Aside from a bug in the French client, we weren't even made aware they existed until the Tokyo FanFest.

So, what do we know?

I have many questions.

Where do they hail from? What is their society like? What lore reason are the women not available / seen? We have three different subspecies of Hrothgar - lion, leopard, and wolf. How do they interact?

Most interestingly, "Hrothgar" is the name of a king from Beowulf and is used as a near catch-all term to denote Norse influence. Is there anything there? It got my hopes up for Viking class.

Maybe I'll switch to one for some representation, since they seem to be dead on arrival thanks to the controversy...

[Anonymoose]

The short form of Hrothgar is "hroar" or "roar" and that was the closest I got to figuring out a meaning (though I guess I could study the Beowulf history a bit better). I actually was a fan of Kimahri back in FFX, but it was a tad low-key considering all the furry jokes, lol.

I wasn't even aware there was a large demand for races that were even farther from human, though.

[Nalien]

I hope we get some lore on them soon, right now I'm kind of worried we're going to have a repeat of Au Ra, although the way Shadowbringers is shaping up that seems likely anyway, to an extent...

Where do they hail from?

Probably the icy heartlands of Garlemald...

Add the race in the side adventure romp expansion, just as an introduction, then visit their homeland/lore in the next expansion where we actually get back to tackling Garlemald. Hope I'm wrong with that, but well... We'll probably cross a Hrothgar version of Azim Steppe before reaching Garlemald-proper in 6.0, which is straight up Mt. Gagazet to Zanarkand...

Pure speculation of course, but with the Norse link and obvious Ronso inspiration, "somewhere cold" is the only idea I have, and there's only one cold region I can think of that we'll be visiting in the future...

[Theodric]

Maybe I'll switch to one for some representation, since they seem to be dead on arrival thanks to the controversy...[/size]

They've been overshadowed by the outrage, though you need to remember that the number of people posting on the forum to begin with is a very small portion of the overall player population and not at all easily representative of the community as a whole. Furthermore, there have been quite a few requests for a 'bestial' playable race over the years and all of FFXIV's main rival MMO's in the West have at least one as an option. Namely WoW, ESO and GW2.

So I don't doubt that there will be a decent amount of people interested in playing a Hrothgar. It likely won't be the most popular playable race, though I'd wager the population numbers will be higher than the current rarest race/gender combination.

[SicariusSeven]

I am curious as to what their naming convention will be like. I sorta want to fantasia into one. I was suspicious of Viera not showing males during their first reveal. The Au Ra reveal back in Heavensward at least showed you both.

[MrThinker]

I am curious as to what their naming convention will be like. I sorta want to fantasia into one. I was suspicious of Viera not showing males during their first reveal. The Au Ra reveal back in Heavensward at least showed you both.

You could speculate that they use the Ronso's naming convention from FFX if they had one.

Did they have one? I can't remember

[Fenral]

Most FF games don't have a document for naming conventions. It's why TV Tropes has a page called "Aerith and Bob."

[SpiritTamer]

Wolf? I didn't see any Hrothgar that looked wolf-like. They all look like different cats to me.

[myahele]

Wolf? I didn't see any Hrothgar that looked wolf-like. They all look like different cats to me.

It was mentioned in an interview

As mentioned before, the face parts are special and Hrothgar has big differences between its faces, like a lion face, wolf face, leopard face. It became a fixed model relatively recently.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...w_with_yoship/

Assuming the wolf face doesn't get scrapped, I am guessing that the 2 Hrothgar clans could be Felines and the other Lupine? They really only showed the cat faces with different markings.

As for the naming convention, if they're inspired by FFX's Ronso then maybe they have similar lore? They use their race name as their last name. So it might be First Name Hrothgar

[DamianFatale]

Wolf? I didn't see any Hrothgar that looked wolf-like. They all look like different cats to me.

Yoshi P confirmed a wolf face. It is also possibly seen in the official artwork of the Hrothgar.