Fantasy Races

In this post we’ll discuss fantasy races, their expected traits, how they evolve, and what the most important factor is for turning their intelligence into civilisations of their own.

Hey everyone, my name is Matthew, at least that’s what MY species calls me, and this post is part of a series where I will be going through a science-adjacent worldbuilding process step-by-step. Last time we finished up with designing and placing our climate zones for earth-like planets, finalising the world map that we’ll be using for our worldbuilding moving forward.

For today’s discussion, we’ll be looking at intelligent life and how intelligent creatures take their first steps towards developing civilisations. We’ll also be lining up the more intelligent creatures we’ve designed so far across this series and building them into fully fledged fantasy races.

Intelligence has many different definitions, though while non-human animals and even some plants may be capable of discriminating between positive and negative experiences, which clearly shows some degree of learning, this isn’t the kind of intelligence that will go on to have plants founding the internet, voting in parliament, and building rocket ships to colonise the solar system.

What we’re talking about for civilisation building creatures is a concept called ‘sapience’, which refers to the ability for advanced thought and by extension, wisdom. Creatures that are sapient are able to use their knowledge to influence their actions, learn and therefore build upon their experience, make inferences using their knowledge, which can be separated into quick inferences which we refer to as ‘common sense’, as well as complex inferences that fall into the realm of abstract concepts and research, and have a degree of insight of the world around them, as well as of themselves.

Importantly, sapience should be distinguished from sentience, which refers to a creature’s ability to experience feelings. While there are many creatures on earth that are capable of emotions, and are therefore sentient, humans are the only creatures on earth that can be considered unambiguously sapient, and here we will discuss the factors that led us to this point. A contentious topic among the speculative evolution community is that of intelligent life that is ‘humanoid’, with many arguing that species do not need to look ‘human’ in order to be candidates for sapience. There are however some reasonably well accepted biological traits that are exceptionally likely to be present within any sapient species.

Perhaps most basically, a sapient creature requires a head. Heads as we know them are the result of a process called cephalisation, where the mouth and sensory organs are concentrated within a single area, which leads to the development of a dedicated neurological centre that we call the brain. This brain then requires a certain amount of neurological power for learning and problem solving.

In order to attain this level of neurological power, it’s expected that sapient creatures will have a brain size of at least 450 cubic centimetres, which puts it on par with that of Australopithecus, one of the earliest known ancestors to modern humans. For perspective, this is about on par with modern chimpanzees, and around a third of the size of our brains as homo sapiens. While this minimum brain size is required, and while our brain size has continued to increase as we’ve evolved towards homo sapiens, bigger brains don’t automatically mean greater intelligence, nor do body-to-brain size ratios. Instead, a more important factor is body and brain layout.

Cephalisation is extremely strongly correlated with bilateral symmetry, which is the body plan that divides an organism into two halves that are roughly mirror imaged. Overwhelmingly, complex life is bilateral, and bilaterians account for 99% of all animals. The biomechanics for bilaterians differ depending on if a creature walks, climbs, or swims. For climbing and swimming creatures, limb number is less strict, and we see climbing and swimming creatures on earth with lots of variation in the number of limbs they have. For creatures that walk and live on the ground however, biomechanics heavily favour an even number of limbs for speed and dexterity, which is why on earth we usually see creatures that walk with two, four, six, or eight legs. In fact, among non-tree-dwelling land animals, there are no naturally occurring three-legged or tripedal animals on earth, and there is only a single five-legged or pentapedal animal; the kangaroo, which use their tails as another limb. Trust Australia once again to have the weird outlier animals.

There is also the expectation for at least one prehensile appendage, with prehensile simply meaning that it is adapted for seizing and grasping, in order to interact with and manipulate the creature’s environment. In humans, these are our hands which obviously form at the end of our arms, which are limbs. Importantly, while many appendages can become prehensile, such as a monkey’s tail and an elephant’s trunk, it is much more likely for extremities like our fingers to form at the end of limbs rather than at the end of other appendages. Biology tends to not place extremities on top of other extremities, and so while the idea of a hand forming at the end of a tail or trunk is cool, it’s incomparably more likely for finger-like appendages to form at the end of limbs. Therefore, because walking bilaterians are likely to have an even number of limbs, it’s also likely for them to develop an even number of prehensile appendages that function similarly to our arms.

It’s also extremely uncommon for the number of limbs a creature has to change, in fact this is SO uncommon that we can trace back our four limbed body plan back to our tetrapod ancestors that made landfall 350 million years ago, over 100 million years before the first dinosaurs. Instead, what is far more likely is that limbs will be repurposed, which we see happen regularly, such as our arms becoming manipulators, birds’ wings used for flight, and sea lions’ fins used for swimming. We are all still technically tetrapods though, with four limbs. For our sapient creatures, if a creature has four limbs, it may repurpose two of those four limbs as manipulators, becoming bipedal with two arms. If a creature has six limbs, it may become quadrupedal with two arms, and so on. In this way, we can reasonably deduce what a creature’s body structure will be based on its existing number of limbs.

Finally, it is reasonably well expected that sapient creatures will need to evolve on land rather than within the oceans in order to reach milestones like rapid complex spoken language and harnessing fire, and that they’re likely to be predatory. Creatures that are exclusively herbivorous tend to have less pressure to establish advanced cognition for problem-solving than creatures that hunt for prey, so we can expect our sapient creatures to be predators of at least some kind, at least in their pre-sapient stage.

With all of this together, we now have an outline of what our intelligent creatures are likely to be like; land dwelling predatory bilaterians that have a head and a brain of at least 450 cubic centimetres, and at least one limb (but likely two limbs) specialised for environmental manipulation with opposable digits. So, according to this set of rules, on earth we’ve basically narrowed things down to just primates.

There is however a non-scientific worldbuilding element to keeping the biology of intelligent creatures similar to primates: as humans, we connect more strongly with fictional species that we recognise, even more so with those that look humanoid. There is a reason that the most successful and widespread fictional races are those like elves and dwarves. We as humans form stronger connections with creatures that are similar to ourselves, and so a creature with a humanoid body plan is going to be easier for viewers, readers, and players to relate to than an eight-legged spider-monster with mandibles adapted as hands. At the end of the day, as human worldbuilders, we are creating for human audiences, and this is an important point to keep in mind.

Also importantly, the biology of a creature can only take it so far, and the biological factors we’ve discussed are not so much what creates sapience, but rather are the baseline requirements for it. Instead, what drives a creature towards sapience is a concept called cultural evolution. Culture in terms of cultural evolution is “any information able to affect an individual’s behaviour that they acquire from other members of their species through social transmission, such as teaching and imitation”. Cultural evolution therefore refers to the development of this culture over time, wherein the amount of information passed down from one generation to the next exceeds the amount of information lost. This progressive increase in information from generation to generation through culture leads to a snowball effect, which rapidly expands the amount of collective knowledge present among a species.

While how this knowledge is passed down can vary, the earliest and easiest method is language. We’ll go more into language in our next episode, but it’s important here to understand that language is a critical driver for cultural evolution. Using language, rather than simply teaching their offspring how to survive, parents can pass on more abstract information like knowledge about the seasons, locations, dangers, resources, and even strategies. Where this process becomes truly exponential however is when language is shared across multiple members of a species, and an individual can learn not only from their parent, but from others as well. This means the net knowledge an individual can gain through communication begins to far outweigh what they could have otherwise learnt through exposure. In short, this means our sapient species will need to live in social communities to maximise their capacity for learning.  

In previous episodes, we’ve created several creatures across Locus, the fictional world that we’re designing across this series. Some of these creatures have been established as more intelligent than others, so let’s create a quick line-up of the most intelligent few. Firstly, we have the Nota, the rainforest dwelling analogy for primate-like creatures. They share the rainforest with the semi-aquatic Magnamaw, one of the largest and most successful predators on the planet. Also within the tropics are the colour-changing Perilux, and the plains-running pack-hunting Callidus. The temperate zones are home to the Visomnis, octopus-like creatures with 360-degree vision, as well as the Inumbra, semi-aquatic ambush predators with advanced vocalisations that mimic prey. Velatrox are the subarctic dwellers with varied diets that live in communities along rivers. And finally, the Leonix are one of the largest land-dwelling predators that are adapted for life among the frigid ice caps.

With our list of requirements for sapience handy, we can first go through and eliminate some of these creatures from the running. The Magnamaw have body structures highly specialised for their hunting strategy and changing away from their existing layouts to develop manipulating limbs is likely to hinder their ability to survive. The Perilux also communicate visually rather than audibly, which greatly reduces their capacity to develop complex language. They are also quite small creatures, likely to fall below the threshold of brain size required for complex intelligence. The Inumbra and Leonix are predominantly solitary creatures, with hunting strategies that encourage them to live alone. Though the Inumbra are capable of mimicking their prey, without the communities required for proper language to develop, they are unlikely to establish sapience. And the Leonix, in addition to being mostly solitary, live in environments with extremely scarce resources, and so are likely to lack the opportunity to develop any advancements of their own.

Which leaves us with four families of creatures that fit our criteria for developing sapience: the Callidus, the Visomnis, the Velatrox, and the Nota.

The Callidus are the savanna dwelling plains-runners of Locus, which environmentally puts them on a similar path to the ancestors of humans, though with different physiology. As endurance runners, there would be a strong selection towards traits that maximise efficiency while running. Their legs are digitigrade, meaning that they walk and run on their toes. This joint here that looks like a backwards knee is actually an ankle, and digitigrade creatures tend to move more quickly and quietly than plantigrades or unguligrades; animals that walk flat on their feet or on hooves. Their iconic rounded talons would become opposable on their upper limbs, further establishing them as prehensile manipulators. As bipedal creatures, biomechanically they will expend far less energy in an upright stance, and so as their upper limbs become adapted for manipulation, their overall posture is likely to adjust to become very similar to that of modern humans. In this upright stance, their tails are less required for balance and so would become vestigial, only remaining present due to sexual selection. Callidus also fall under the umbrella of Frigidi, which are the analogues to reptiles on Locus. As reptilian egg-laying creatures, the physiological differences between males and females won’t follow the same patterns to that of us as mammals. Reptiles have no mammary glands, and therefore there’s no need for females to have breasts. They are also oviparous, meaning that they lay eggs which take time to hatch rather than give birth to live young. Females may have slightly wider hips than males due to needing to lay eggs, though the disparity would be nowhere near as pronounced as in humans who need to give birth. What this means in short is that males and females won’t have too many physical differences, besides their ancestral coloured feathers which are sexually selected for. The feathered manes of males especially would be selected to be far denser and thicker, with vibrant colours that are attractive to females. Much of their pre-existing social behaviour is likely to remain and be expanded upon, eventually leading to the development of complex language and settled communities. In their early language, this species will refer to themselves as the Silarin.

The Velatrox are one of the two creatures on our list that are analogous to mammals, with dense fur that helps them to survive the cold temperatures of the subarctic. It is expected as humans, our ancestors lost their fur when they began to use fire to keep themselves warm. Fur is often host to parasites and losing our fur once we had another means of keeping ourselves warm meant we were under less threat from parasitic organisms. Velatrox however live within such cold environments that not only would losing their fur be potentially dangerous, but less parasitic organisms like insects tend to live within colder climates, meaning that it’s probable they would keep their fur. As creatures based on real-life bears, there is precedent for them to stand upright and use their upper limbs as manipulators. Their body sizes are likely to stay reasonably large due to their cold environments and priority for strength and skill in hunting rather than speed or endurance, though the introduction of tool usage in hunting will allow for more energy to be devoted to cognitive development than excessive size, and so this sapient species is likely to be physically smaller than their evolutionary cousins. As mammal-like creatures, females of the species will produce milk to feed their young, and there is a strong trend towards litter sizes affecting the number of mammary glands a species has, with most species following the ‘one-half rule’, having litter sizes one half of the number of mammary glands present. As particularly large creatures, our sapient bears are likely to have very small litter sizes, and developing intelligence comes with a greater requirement for parental involvement, which in turn is associated with even smaller litter sizes. To this end, it’s exceptionally likely that only single offspring would be produced, and that females therefore would have two mammary glands. They are also viviparous, meaning that they give birth to live young, the opposite of oviparous. Biomechanically, giving birth to live young can be a dangerous process, and females of viviparous species strongly trend towards traits that assist with the birthing process. In upright creatures, this means that the development of wide hips to both support offspring before they are born, as well as to provide a wider area for the birthing process itself, is inevitable. Much to the chagrin of some speculative biologists, as mammalian creatures, these sapient bears are likely to have many similar sexual features to humans, not because it’s unimaginative, but because it makes the most biological sense. In a worldbuilding sense, these creatures are almost an expansion on our own sexual dimorphism as humans, with their males and females turning up their biological differences to a more extreme level. In their early language, this species would refer to themselves as the Urakan.

The Visomnis are perhaps the most distant from any humanoid traits we can imagine, and so we can take more fictional liberties when designing them. Importantly, as invertebrate creatures, they are unlikely to be able to grow much larger than they are already while they are on land. Functionally, this makes Visomnis a brain with tentacles attached, and this presents a huge problem when it comes to developing civilisations, as while they’re perfectly capable of establishing language and going through cultural evolution, their lack of strength and ability to manipulate their environment means their physical function on land is likely to be limited. However, their lack of more complex bodies also allows greater allotment of resources towards cognitive development, and in terms of raw neurological power, they are likely to outcompete the other sapient species we’ve discussed. This advanced neurological development within one species of the Visomnis is going to take a darker path, with them becoming neurological parasites, effectively hijacking other creatures and interfacing themselves with other creatures’ nervous systems to take control. One of the creature’s limbs will become repurposed for penetrating into the brain of other creatures and establishing a neural connection. The host brain then is progressively taken over, to the point the original creatures’ brain dies and all neural connections are replaced. Notably, they do not use the creature they are parasitising as food and even often continue to provide their host with necessary sustenance to keep the body alive. If complete neural interface has taken place however, when the two creatures become disconnected, the host will immediately die due to being braindead. While their cultural evolution is able to progress independently of their hosts, they will eventually use their hosts as tools to assist them with establishing civilisations of their own and give these creatures a very different view on their development of agriculture. In their early language, this species would refer to themselves as the Naqwuil.

Finally, we have the Nota, our primate analogues, which very simply are going to follow the exact progression towards sapience that we as humans have. This isn’t something that is being done out of convenience or laziness, but rather is a very important, very deliberate worldbuilding technique. By having a ‘default’ option present, it makes the world feel infinitely more real than it otherwise would, as well as making it easier to connect with. Overwhelmingly in fantasy games, both tabletop and digital, the most selected race is human, and in many fictional novels, the primary protagonist is also human. It also allows the world to be viewed almost as a ‘tourist’, wherein a reader or player can connect with a familiar entity that is experiencing an otherwise fictional fantasy world. To this end, the sapient species that will develop within the Nota will be… human! We’ll even refer to them as such for simplicity. To differentiate them with real-life humans, we can expect many of the early humans on Locus to establish settlements within the forests, as the plains will be more heavily dominated by the Silarin.

And there we have it, four unique fantasy races fresh out of the evolutionary oven and ready for worldbuilding. From the moment these creatures develop language and art of their own, their rate of cultural evolution will skyrocket them into establishing civilisations in a short period of time, at least in terms of biological evolution. While there may be minor changes to their physiology, what you see here are the final physical forms that these species will have throughout our worldbuilding project.

So, to recap, there are a number of physiological requirements for an intelligent species to have in order to take the next step towards cultural evolution. We looked at all the primary candidates for sapience on Locus and ended up with four unique races that we’ll be able to take to the worldbuilding stage and design our own civilisations for.

Join me next time when we’ll look at worldbuilding language, which is more commonly called ‘Conlang’, and give each of our four races proto languages of their own. You can find all the information for this video as well as other resources for worldbuilding in general over at worldbuildingcorner.com, and if you enjoyed this video don’t forget to like and subscribe to follow the worldbuilding journey. And until next time, stay awesome!