FANTASY RACES - Terrible Writing Advice

I want to create a fantasy story but with different magical races of humans, each with their own magical abilities and cultures.
Im getting pretty tired of seeing copy paste elves everywhere.

Legolas isn't like that. :(

Only hacks rip off from the greats for a true creative studies and learns from past works in order to find something that he or she can add in that can separate their work from the others.

"Just add more elves" sums up half of Elder Scrolls races

Guys just make either
- Animal Folk
- The Weirdest Shit Possible
For Example
- Catfolk
- ALIEN EUGENICIST POSTHUMAN SPACE ELVES FROM THE MOON

Heh

Of course, demons: They're evil, and we will preferably have to copy everything from the bible... or from anime and pick potential love interests or sold bodypillows.
Bringing us to succubi: Apparently way more frequent than incubi for some reasons (don't ask us), just know that succubi are creatures who are monstrous entities used by the church to explain erotic dreams and to cover up "unexplained" pregnancies... and throw that out of the window because we're only going to remember erotic and try to just make them girls of little virtue who wouldn't mind shoving one inside... and make them unable to eat anything else but that too!

Angels: Just imagine some good lawful person with angel wings and a halo and don't bother doing much else. What's that? There's more angels to that? Don't be silly! What's even a throne?

Wait wait, so you're saying making historical parallels with Germany is wrong? Damn bro, chill pill for you over here.

And one of the sad things is some people do unironically think that deviating from Tolkien's template is inherently bad, so often I've seen people unhappy that an author used elves in their story but actually mixed things up and used different aesthetics and cultures as influences rather than just make them like Tolkien did

"Impossibly Smug," ironically, describes this video perfectly. I don't even disagree with the video's core point, or feel especially invested in Tolkien's influence on the Fantasy genre.

But the level of passive-aggression in the presentation dips past funny and slams head-first into the irritating. Couldn't even get half way through before moving on.

This video needs a general purpose sequel covering fictional races in general, also consider shoving in stuff about anthro's as they are frequently thrown into settings with extreme variety and otherwise treated like humans with no real physical differences/abilities or background lore. Oh, and you might want to mention the trope of "universal impregnation", which appears frequently in furry crap.

Watching all these 6 years later and wow, this is GREAT!

I am working on a story where every country is equal to a fantasy race. But not by genetics. Basically, centuries ago, when witches and wizards were burned, some survivors decided to unite their forces and work to find a way to get revenge agains’t the non magical (normal humans). They figured that since the non magical feared anything that was magic and non human, with their powers combined, they created multiple gems that they hidden in each country. And that each time a new country was created, the gems from the two closest territories of this new country would create a new gem that would be hidden at the center of this new country.

These gems were used to change the morphology and race of any baby that was born on this territory (where the gem was) and make him non human. For example, a baby that was born on a territory where a gem that could turn you into a sort of werewolf was hidden, the baby would be born with the race, abilities, look and genetics of a werewolf, no matter what the parents were.

They did tried to stop this at the beginning (the non magical) by killing every magical baby, thinking it was a disease, like the plague. But soon, they realized it was worthless. Very quickly, almost everyone became magical creatures, depending on where they were from.

Only a hundred years ago, they realized the gems were causing that. A group of what we call « The Augertus » was formed with the goal to find these gems and try to find a way to stop their power. But until now, in 1930, they still haven’t found one. This is where the plot of the story begin.

So for example, people from the UK are what we call « Hysterias ». They were inspired by the fairies. Basically, they have a sort of little white or yellow dust (depending on the gender. White is for female, yellow is for male) under their fingers and toes. This dust is not any dust because it is connected to the gem that allows them to levitate and even fly for the most experimented. It can also help them go very fast or they can (if they concentrate enough energy) by transforming themselves into a ball of energy. They have also a deep connection to any flying creatures such as birds.

However, that makes them more ambitious when it comes to stealing. They are especially attracted by the idea of growing their community. While they don’t kidnap other Hysterias kids, they can try to kidnap kids from other races. That’s why each Hysterias is required to take once a month a special medecine that was created specially for them, that helps calm down their urge for kidnapping. But sometimes it doesn’t work or some Hysterias refuse to take it and it ends up with a child from another race being missing. Nobody knows what they do to them. If your child has gotten kidnapped by a Hysteria, there are almost 0 chances that you find him back. And if you do, his memory will strangely be erased by the Hysteria.

Because of that, Hysterias are often refused to enter into public places where there are children or they are forced to be deeply supervised. Even Hysterias children are being watched when they play with other children.


Anyway, this is one example, there are a ton of magical creatures in each country. And I am still working on some flaws. For example, I am from France and the people from France are what we call « Sinisters ». They were inspired by the Gargoyles. Basically, the Sinisters have the ability to see the deepest desire in any person and with that, they know if someone has bad intention or not. However, they don’t use their ability a lot especially because it doesn’t matter to them what your intentions are, nothing is gonna happen to you. Legend says that they were so used by reading people desires for centuries and trying to prevent the bad ones, that now, they just gave up and preferred to let people do what they want. Reading people deepest desire since childhood without being able to stop this power lead them to seeing or hearing things that traumatized or shocked them and now they have become apathetic around adulthood because of their power.

So don’t worry if you see a Sinister. He might use his power on you (he can’t stop it) and see what your true desire is…but he is usually not going to do anything to stop you. The only one who might do something are children Sinisters because they are still learning their powers and are excited and determined everytime they can do something about someone desire. Also, children are very talkative, curious and trying to put their noses into someone else business. So Sinisters children are more dangerous than adult Sinisters. Usually, the adult Sinisters who use correctly their powers are those working as police, psychiatrists, army etc…the normal civilians don’t do a lot.

The Sinisters also have the ability to turn into stone if they feel frightened by something. This way, they can’t be hurt and the only way for them to turn back to normal, is to either stop being scared or have another emotion be more powerful than fear (usually anger). But being turn to stone means they can’t fight back. Because of their power issues, they are considered some of the weakest race. But some Sinisters sure try to bring back honor to their race.

Almost all the races abilities seems weak and useless…but actually that is not true. I wanted to base that on the fact that humans can do a lot of great things but most of them don’t and make the human race seems bad, inconvenient and useless, when it is actually not true. So that’s why I decided to add some big flaws to these races and make focus on these flaws so they feel like they are useless and bad when actually, their powers are amazing if used correctly. Exactly like us humans only focus on our flaws and not on our qualities. After all, these fantasy races are descendant from humans first so they kept this flaw of thinking only about the bad part.

And it take place in 1930 in a fantasy environment. However, since it’s hard to create 198 races based on 198 countries (I know I will only use half of them but I still want to have the whole world prepared) I just started to create on Wattpad a project where other people could help me give their own ideas to create races for the other countries. But I don’t have any participant yet, I hope it will change 😅

Witcher blood origin everyone?

So our fantasy work must have halflings?

Diggy diggy hole

Racist. 🙃

Just don't write Elves unless they are being badly beaten by Dwarves

Elves: Tall
Orcs: Rapey Self-Insert
Dwarves: Good Weapons And Armor
Human: Perfectly Balanced.

I’ve done numerous experiments on Orcs and half-orcs to create a horde of powerful spell-casters. As well as tinkering around with “Wereboar” lycanthropy to create a new species of Orcs.

That last point is why when world building I don’t use Race except in the context of non-humans not understanding why the humans are in-fighting over seemingly nothing. I instead work off of calling other sentient life forms species.

something that is not seen often but would definitly deserve to be tried would be fantasy races inspired by biology/actual human sub-species. You know, stuff like neanderthals and all that.

I've always been fond of how the Spelljammer setting for D&D takes fantasy race stereotypes and shakes them up a lot. Elves are smug assholes, and this is portrayed as a bad thing, so bad that they will literally destroy all life on your home planet to feed their dying sun. Orcs are warlike, but their outlook is influenced by the fact that they were the victims of a genocide (by the aforementioned elves no less). Their behavior is not just because they're evil, but because everyone they have ever cared about was murdered, and they have very little else left but vengeance. Dwarves don't just stay in their mountain homes planetside, but fly through space in giant citadels powered by the very act of creation. The people with the most advanced weaponry are not dwarves, but talking hippos that have a strong cultural desire to sell their services as mercenaries. The evil brain-eating squid people called illithids (or mind flayers) are significantly more approachable than in other settings, and some of them have even resorted to domesticating their food instead of going about it the usual way. Gnomes are the obligatory mad scientist race, like in a lot of other settings, but their technology isn't steampunk, but *hamster-powered*.

I found it always funny, that dwarf desingn makes no sense. They are small, slow and with short weapons, like axes. would make them lose to every peasent with a fork 😂

This is keeper of the lost cites in a nutshell -

This is keeper of the lost cities in a nutshell.

I guess we should give credit to bethesda that they made elves literally nazis
They took twa’s advice very well

My friend and I cam up with an idea: Originally, there was one type of elf. Then, the floating island they lived on split apart. They were separated into isolated groups. Millions of years passed, and they evolved into entirely different species.

Fantasy races aren't like human races. They're more like species

Honestly this just proves that Terry Pratchett, at least in his later works of Discworld, was an amazing fantasy writer in terms of world building. He’s got everything, from each race actually having different cultural groups, to subversions of stereotypes, but in ways that make sense as a source of that stereotype.

I never liked that dwarves are considered as a fantasy race, when real life little people exist, casting a type of humans as a non-human "race" full of stereotypes is sus imo

My orks just really like fighting.

tropes exist for a reason. putting subversions in your writing won't actually make it interesting.

In a story i've in mind the summery is this:in the world there is "magic" (its actually radiation like the nuclear one) and primitive humans get hit with two ways:the magicians,that learned to manipulate magic for doing things like set fire things, heal people and other people; and the metahumans,animal-like people divided in different species that even if they don't look like each other they saw themself as the same specie


the metahumans species Lycan,wolf (and carnivores) people
Vampires,bat people
Fauns,deer (and herbivores) people
Giants,elephant (and mammoth) people
Fairies,insect people
Goblins,rat people
Harpies,bird people
Argonians,lizard people
Sirenids,fish people

they have orangutan level intelligence

Actually, I think it could work!
Squeeze together narcissistic, nazi elves, technologically advance dwarves lurching underground, evil (really?) orcs and an armoured covered boss whose weakness isn't jewellery, and it might just create a wonderfully chaotic world.

Are orcs inherently evil? Who cares? Do they have treasure? Are their women hot?

My fantasy have orcs elves men and dwars and so more and the orcs were elves but have a different story than lotr

I think my biggest problem with fantasy races in fiction is when they're basically human.
kryptonian & sayians are just humans but better.

A majority of this video basically goes into the mindset behind Rings of Power.

Where have you been all this time, man? That was the perfect Combo of clever and funny. Definitely what I’ve been thinking all this time but haven’t been able to really put into words. (Of course I’m referring to what was Unsaid) somehow that often matters more than what IS said. Don’t you think?

Oh! I was actually going to do that exact same thing with the Dwarves in my story! Looks like I'll have to change some things up with them.

I have bird people and dragon shapeshifters in my fantasy.

ah fantasy racism

Tolkien is certainly one of my inspiration so yes, they're are elves and dwarves in my fantasy world. However, the influence of Tolkien is dwarfed by the influence of Greek and Norse mythology on me. Other staple "races" in my world are satyrs, nymphs, and demigods. I also throw in faeries. I have done a lot of research on all of these including elves and dwarves. And by research I do mean reading about the mythology.
The setting of my story isn't a typical fantasy setting. It's set in modern day around 60 years after the discover of a magical realm. All the different races I mentioned and humans colonize this realm. I have not created any native races for it yet but plan to. Other realms previously existed (the Norse realms) so it is considered a mystery where this one came from. Since this realm is colonized right before WWI, the setting is more modern compared to other fantasy stories but technology is frozen in the past due to how it interacts with magic.

My elves aren't immortal btw. I haven't finalized the magic system yet but I'm considering giving each races different bonuses. Something like Elves are naturally skilled at magic while humans need to study it. Anything one Race can do, the other can learn