I've never been much satisfied with the Suel and Baklunish divide.
It always has bugged me that the ethnic group with fair skin, blonde hair and blue eyes hails from the hot south. While the Baklunish to me seem more usefully represented as a Turkic people (like...the Turks..or Persians maybe), representing them as semi-Semitic with an Arabic type of culture seems off the mark given their home geography.
The Aerdy as a Greco-Roman sort of people makes a lot of sense.
Having no ancient Egyptians or Sumerians (as the forgotten realm setting made the Calimshite people) is a drawback to me.
Gary Gygax was deliberately subverting expectations by making his fictional ethnicities different from their obvious real-world parallels in big ways. The Suel come from the south (although the Suel basin is described as relatively cloudy and cool in Roger Moore's writings) so that you know that this kinky-haired people aren't the same as Earth's Scandinavians and aren't intended to be. It might be more useful to think of them as albino blacks, though post-Gygax authors have given them different features. My own thought is that the Suel went through a subterranean stage, perhaps enslaved by illithids or the like in the Underdark, before coming to dominate a surface kingdom. Maldin theorizes they originated on another world (he has them come from the moon Celene before a cataclysm drives them to Oerth).
The Baklunish (except for the Paynim tribes) live in the temperate north (although their lands are warmer than they ought to be at that latitude because of the unnaturally warm Dramidj Ocean), which sets up an obvious reason for them to be culturally different from real-world Persians or Turks.
The point is, Oerth's ethnic groups aren't parallels of anything in the real world, and reversing expectations in this way helps reinforce that. If the blond, blue-eyed people came from the frozen north there'd be no reason not to make them Scandanavian-clones, but as it is, both races are something more interesting - purely fantastic races for a setting which is not a clone of Earth.
However, the ancient Flan kingdoms of Sulm and Itar (where the Bright Desert is now) are similar to Egypt/Sumeria in some ways, including the building of pyramids.
Gary Gygax was deliberately subverting expectations by making his fictional ethnicities different from their obvious real-world parallels in big ways. [...] The point is, Oerth's ethnic groups aren't parallels of anything in the real world, and reversing expectations in this way helps reinforce that. If the blond, blue-eyed people came from the frozen north there'd be no reason not to make them Scandanavian-clones, but as it is, [they] are something more interesting - purely fantastic races for a setting which is not a clone of Earth. .
Rasgon makes a really good point. They *are* different, and while it's intended for them to show their inspirations and display obvious characteristics, they're intended to be very different. THe Scandanavian stereotypes are the exception. There are the Cruski, Fruutzi and Schnai, but they aren't direct parallels, nor are they intended to be. The same is true of all the other races ... there are similarities, but they're intended to be their own cultures, not just mock-ups of real world ones.
One of the ways which I used to further differentiate between the Suel and the Bakluni was to change the way each use magic.
These changes evolved through several iterations of the game (1st Ed was the beginning to its final form in my current PF (Pathfinder with tons of legacy material from d20) Greyhawk game.
For the Bakluni, I replaced wizards with sha'ir (d20 variant). I added a couple of feats so that the sha'ir casters didn't have to wait hours (sometimes) in order to get spells. I figured if a character was willing to burn a feat (or even two in a couple of cases) they should get much quicker (and more accurate) returns on their spell choices.
For the Suel, I decided to use Jim Butler's excellent alternative metamagic system coupled with Monte Cook's visionary Book of Experimental Might Vol 1. 20 level casting system.
The changes each brings to the players perceptions of the cultural differences has been profound.
So much so that on at least 2 occasions non-Suel/Bakluni casters have wanted to 'go native" and try and learn these different approaches to magic.
What everyone else said. As far as why the Suel look the way they do that's up to you; that's the beauty of Greyhawk; we get to fill in all the gaps. Maybe that's just the way the Suel gods wanted them to look; maybe all the Suel are descended from the semi-divine children of Kord and mortal women, bearing the physical traits of their divine ancestor; maybe their appearance did result from natural selection and their ancestors did live in the far north as the inhabitants of an advanced civilization that was destroyed by the advancing glaciers of an ice age, forcing their descendents to flee south where they settled in a fertile land surrounded on all sides by mountains; it's all up to you as the DM to explain it.
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