Fantasy Races

There is more to a fantasy race than the cardboard stereotypes that have flooded fantasy writing since J.R.R. Tolkien defined his elves, dwarfs, orcs and hobbits. These along with humans are the standard races in a majority of fantasy novels, both medieval and modern.

The problem with the five races of doom, as I call them, is that except for humans, the races differ very little from story to story and often one elf or dwarf can be transposed from one setting to another with little effort.

So how do you do it? How can you make a fantastical race seem real and vibrant although they don’t exists.

How I do it is to use common sense, biology and ecology to make my races as real as possible. For instance, Dwarfs according to tradition are short, squat underground dwellers. Most writers depict them this way. But let’s look at this carefully and with a critical eye.

If they are predominately underground dwelling creatures, they would have much larger eyes if they still had eyes. Many creatures that spend their time underground are functionally blind. Eyesight over hundreds of generations has gone away but other senses have increased in their capacity to compensate.

If Dwarfs reside in vast underground cities, presumably decades if not centuries have passed during the construction of these massive complexes, the need for eye sight would slowly dwindle over time as tactile senses, smell and possible even taste as well as hearing developed to compensate for the loss of sight.

Yet Dwarves are capable of walking around on the surface of the world, exposed to the sun with no apparent discomfort, or even fear of it.

So how do your Dwarfs deal with the sun? Have they kept their sight? How? Are they affected by the sun? These are just the physical changes. I'll leave their psychology to you.

What about their caverns. The very tunnels and cities they reside are in deep underground and few writers deal with that. Caverns usually are depicted as simple places when in reality they have very clear and defined weather patterns based on the outside temperature where the caves are located. 

The caves over time are normalized for the average mean temperature of the surrounding landscape. Presumably the interior your world is a tremendously hot, molten mass, much like Earth’s and you naturally assume that temperature would increase with depth below the surface. This change in temperature with depth is called the geothermal gradient. 

So if your Dwarfs live in an area where the geothermal gradient is low, their cave temperature is influenced mostly by the mean annual surface temperature. However if their cave complex is one with a high geothermal gradients, their cave temperature is influenced by the mean annual surface temperature and by heat from below. Caves in areas such as this tend to be warmer than the mean annual surface temperature.

I know this seems like I am nit-picking, but by understanding the climate that your Dwarfs reside in, you can make them much more than a carbon copy of every other Dwarf race in literature. By doing a little research on actual caves and ecology, you can create a race of creatures that logically would exist in your world. You have given them a reality that most writers avoid for convenience

When I create my races for my Multiversal setting, I approach their creation from a planetary scale and work down the details until I understand their biology and any changes that logically make sense in the environment I place them.

You don’t have to do it for all your races, but if you want to set your elves or dwarfs or giants apart from the standard, central casting races, you might want to try it. Doing a racial development time line, can lead you to story ideas that you may not have thought of.