The Worldbuilder Diaries: Non-Human Peoples
I have a pretty descent array of non-humans featured in my books, though not nearly as many as some authors. I tend to create my non-humans (mostly) from my imagination; I rarely use the typical fantasy races like elves or dwarves (and in the instances I have, those books aren’t published…yet), though I do have a soft spot for dragons. Dragons show up in a number of my books.
How I go about creating these people is more or less two-fold. First, I consider how they came about: Was it evolution? Magic? A combination of both? Then I work on determining individual characteristics of their species—strengths, weaknesses, unique biology, etc.
How They Came About
I like to figure out the origins of a species before I move on to specific characteristics. If they’re the result of evolution, then the environment in which they arose is going to be the single most important factor in determining what characteristics they possess. But if they arose from magic, they might have attributes that would otherwise never have occurred naturally.
There are some non-human species in my Relics of War series that arose due to the use of some very dark magic (the Scorpion Men being the main example.) Similarly, there is a race featured in The Mage War Chronicles (the Sevanni) that arose due to magic of a different nature. I’ll share a little about each group and what made the magic and its use so different.
The Scorpion Men in The Relics of War started out as human prisoners of war. Their captors, needing more soldiers to fight for their cause, chose to alter their biology into new and somewhat terrifying forms as a means of intimidation and with some new attributes that could give them an edge in combat—then forced to fight against those they once stood with. In this instance, the magic that changed them was inherently evil.
In The Mage War Chronicles, the Sevanni were also human generations prior, but they chose to change as a means of escape from a tyrannical leader determined to eradicate all mages. The Sevanni were altered by a mage capable of molding the flesh of others and became an entirely aquatic species, and they fled to the sea. Over time, evolution started to work on them too, and by the time the reader will get to see them, they’re noticeably different than their original founders. Here, I opted for a more noble use of magic in the creation of a non-human species.
But the bulk of my non-humans arose through simple evolutionary means, dictated by their environment and their worlds. This variety of creation doesn’t require a lengthy backstory, so in terms of writing, it’s a bit easier (though I’ll admit I have a lot of fun coming up with the history and lore behind some of my people.)
Determining Characteristics
Using the peoples’ origins as a foundation, I then will move on to their defining characteristics. What do they look like? What features are clearly not human, and how do I describe them? How do their unique features help them survive in their environment? What does the world look like through their eyes? (This last can be a lot of fun…or a major challenge, depending on how different they are.)
I’ll use the Sevanni as the primary example for this part, since they’re the result of both magic and evolution.
Since their ancestors were human, the Sevanni have many of the same features: two arms, two legs, similar facial structure, etc.
So then I ask, what makes them different? Since they’re aquatic, they have gills (this was the original result of the magical manipulation.) Over time, evolution made it so they can no longer breath the surface air, so they are truly an aquatic species. They’ve also developed elongated feet which act as fins to aid in swimming and a tolerance to colder temperatures. (As a scuba diver, I know how much cooler it can be even thirty feet below the surface in what are considered warm waters, so I wanted to account for that.)
As for the last question, the Sevanni character in my series knows the ocean. He’s familiar with the fish, corals, predators, and nuances of the sea. But as a mage—and one with a very unique power—he’s the first of his kind to leave the ocean in thousands of years. This is where it became a little challenging. How do I describe a tree for someone who doesn’t know what it’s called, or what its components are named? I couldn’t use the words “leaf” or “bark,” because he didn’t know those words. And then, how does he adapt to being on land and learning about things like fire, a force he’s never dealt with before?
It was a fun exercise, but one that, at times, wasn’t easy. Yet for the sake of really getting the reader inside this character’s head, I felt it needed to be done.
I had a similar challenge with the Botanaari people in Wraith and the Revolution. They evolved from plants, and while they’ve been around humans long enough to avoid the descriptive challenges I faced with the Sevanni, their diet required a lot of thought. They are photosynthetic, but like some carnivorous plants, they supplement that with consuming protein (insects mostly, though they’ll eat the occasional steak too.) But figuring out what a Botanaari would order at a restaurant was the tough part. They don’t eat anything derived from plants (that would be a form of cannibalism and is taboo in their culture), so I had to get creative. Things like ground cricket flour happened.
So anyway, thanks for reading the latest installment of The Worldbuilder Diaries! There will be more of the series coming soon.