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.
