Worldbuilding Tutorial #7: Example World A
Introduction This world is going to have three species: humans, elves, and fey. To begin, the map as we last saw it, and a list of which territories are which:
Humans: 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14. Elves: 6, 8. Fey: 1, 2, 5A, 5B, 5C, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14.
Humans Humans in this world are going to be essentially the same as humans in the real world. This is a very intentional choice; generally, when writing something for a world, you don’t want to take something from the real world and change what it means. If I were to make a species called “humans”, except they all had prehensile tails and hooves and green hair, why am I calling them humans? Better to stick to a frame of reference that someone viewing your world will understand.
The couple notes I need to make about humans as a species are in relation to forces that don’t exist in our world - that is to say, magic. Humans in this world have a fairly low propensity for magic. They can do it to some degree, but only with a lot of training and only at a very low efficiency. The best you could really hope for is about as powerful as a hedgewitch, which is about right since most of the magic done by humans is very ingredients-based anyway.
Secondly, there are a couple of tweaks I need to make to human physiology based on the presence of magic in this world. When talking about the environment, I said that because of trophic levels, creatures lower on the food chain would have much higher magical abilities, and creatures higher on the food chain would have less but also have developed extra physical abilities in order to compete with magical creatures. This means that humans are going to be slightly tougher and stronger than they are in the real world. Not significantly so, and not at all outside the range of what we might be able to expect out of someone who spends their life building strength; but that the average person will have the same degree of strength and toughness that someone who does train regularly might have, without having to actually do so.
Fey Physiologically, fey are very different from humans. Previously, I mentioned that they don’t need to eat and sleep the way that humans do. Instead, they get their sustenance by consuming magical energy directly, and can thus feed directly from even the rocks of this world if they wish. Their ability to sustain themselves comes from a constant exposure to magic: it’s less that they feed by putting things in their mouths and chewing, and more that they’re constantly processing energy taken in much the way that plants process sunlight. This in mind, were fey ever to wander into a very low-magic area, they would weaken and die very quickly. More quickly than humans would starve to death - about three to five days or so, and thus more along the lines of how quickly a human would die of thirst. Fey also do not need to sleep or breathe the way that we do. They can enter a waking dreamlike state in order to do all the things that dreaming does for the brain, but only need to from time to time (once a week or so).
Fey also live forever. They are not truly immortal, in that they can still be killed through injury or starvation or sickness; but assuming that none of these occur, a fey does not have a natural end to its lifespan, and does not age physically. This means that reproduction is very difficult, and never happens by accident; any attempt to reproduce takes a great deal of effort and intent on the part of the fey involved. How fey reproduce is fairly nonstandard; there aren’t necessarily just male and female fey, and you don’t necessarily need to have multiple fey involved to make offspring happen. It’s almost more a huge investment of magical energy and time and emotion, and less a physical act (though it can be that as well - and many fey will engage in physical acts for the pleasure from it, even if it doesn’t result in offspring). Because of the difficulty of making children, children are considered very important by the fey and cherished deeply; and fey will sometimes kidnap human children as well if they are unable to make a child on their own.
Fey’s lifespan also impacts how they think. They have a very short attention span, and most of their memory is very short-term. Their long term memory is made up not of actual memories that they can recall for the most part, but rather emotional imprints from important memories that incorporate into fey folk’s generally intuitive decision-making process. Fey tend to do things for reasons that even they don’t understand, and among the many reasons for this is this emotional imprint that is their form of past memories and experiences. Older fey are more powerful because they have deeper emotional imprints, and thus a greater capacity to cast strong magic.
Lastly, notes on magic. Fey are of course able to sense magic - strength, type, and source - since it is their source of nourishment. The form that a fey’s magic takes varies greatly and can change as a fey’s emotional imprints and to some extent environment change, so their senses and other aspects of their perception and thought process are widely variable and can shift as they do.
Elves In this setting, elves are the offspring of humans and fey. This includes not just half-and-half but one quarter/three quarters etc - so long as traits of both species manifest, you are considered an elf. Many hypothetical generations down the line someone may be considered human or fey again, but this is very rare due to cultural reasons which will show up later.
The traits that elves take from humans include their rough size and shape, their unchanging form, and their general cognitive abilities. However they are, in terms of strength, agility, and other physical abilities, they are about on par with real-world humans. From fey, they take the ability to do true magic and a much longer lifespan - 700 years or so at the very oldest. Thus their niche exists not in being very good at one thing but in being versatile.
Elves also take more subtle traits from their forebearers, which make them in many ways alien to either group. To humans, elves seem intensely connected to nature; possessing of extraordinarily deep emotions; mysterious, unfathomable, and timeless; and fragile. To fey, elves seem slow to change; more like children than mature beings in their own right; and in many ways naive and slow to perceive their world.
This begins to drift into the realm of cultural rather than the biology of each species, and that’s a different tutorial - so let’s move on.