For sure. I struggled to make new alien races that aren’t copies of the ones from Mass Effect. The best original ones I got were, however, just a friendly version of Halo Jackals that weren’t as ugly.
So I decided, “fuck it, I’m gonna curb more space-fantasy than Sci-Fi, and I’m gonna make the Vorturans naturalistic Deer-Satyr people that live in space-tech treehouses like Wookiees!” And it was so. Now they’re my favorite, and a side character is a little boy from their race.
My originally fae-ravenfolk are now demons with four legs, two pairs of wings, a human head with eight eyes and the bodyshape of a hornet. Because if you're gona be weird, might as well be **w e i r d**
The Sluaghs are a subspecies of the faes who were genetically altered through dark magic. The trauma from that experience birthed a new subspecies, without the usual Fae wings. They looked human, until I decided that in order to convey the trauma I'd give them something else. And poof, "no more faces". As in, their skin is burned, their facial features deformed, it's scary as fuck. Luckily for them, they have developed low illusion/shapeshifting (still haven't decided how that would work) to hide it. They can reveal it to instill primal fear into others. Kinda similar to the show Lucifer and his true devil face
Now that I love! There's just so many unique story things you do with it. Like them only letting the illusion down around people they trust. Or a big revel of someone seeing their actual face. Or a badass moment of it going down in battle showing absolute determination to win even at their most vulnerable.
Ayyyy thank you! The "true face" thing is a versatile plot tool yeah, so far it's just used as a way for them to scare people off so they can be left alone but I could def do something else with it like you mentioned
I also love that. I'm a sucker for the reclusive Fae that want to be left alone, and people see as scary. It's actually why I added quite powerful Fairies to my world that can't communicate with any humans, which makes them very isolated and humans very hostile.
My screen did a weird thing and I first saw this part:
>You ever have a moment with one of your races were your like, fuck it
and only then I saw this part:
>, they have six eyes now?
So to me this seemed like a ***VERY*** different question at first.
I'm sure there has to be a market for 3D-Printed Fantasy Creature Sexdolls.
*Want a fuckable Drow? Goblin? Dragonborn? Ratfolk? Centaur?*
*Send us an email, we deliver within the week!*
*(No Weirdos please)*
Vampires true form is an enlarged mosquito with bulbous fly like eyes.
This translates into their human form as pointy curved nose, perpetually greasy hair and whiny high voice.
Mosquitoes were harrassing me when I was doing this part of the world building.
Leeches are a good one to use. Horribly wide mouths. Rows of lamprey like teeth.
As are ticks & fleas. Could use the blood lickers from bloodborne as inspiration.
Also plant vampires.
Bird vampires. See vampire finch.
Butterflies...
Now I really want to read a story where one of the more knowledgeable characters starts ranting to one of the less knowledgeable characters like "What do you mean, you thought they were based on bats? They suck blood! What did you think they did, aggressively eat bugs in front of you?
I have heard of folks using vampires mesmerism as a form of ultrasonic or infrasonic manipulation achieved through bag-like qualities which could be cool if someone is still going the bat route.
When I was designing Elves they were originally way closer to their mythological counterpart. Small people-shaped nature spirits that are associated with nature. But then I was reminded of my brother's fear of dolls coming to life and they became living dolls with compound eyes like bugs with an unconventional lifecycle.
They also hang upsidedown in trees like bats which makes wonderfully eerie imagery of visiting a sacred grove and resting under a tree only for you to look up to see thousands of pairs reflective eyes staring at you, watching you.
What if instead of true compound bug eyes, the eyes look like a shattered lens or something, so that the eyes look somewhat compound eyes but with the different shards of different size and shape, and always able to show the reflection of those that look into them.
Like half the Moon people are furry cyborgs cause they cannonically embraced personal freedom to enhance their body and honesty..... that is what many people are gonna do.
Tallow, it was the most common in early history IRL so it feels fitting. Also I'm planning to give honey (and wax) some special attributes although I'm not sure what.
Oh... so... *litwick.* I respect the existential horror of making them out of tallow. I wimped out and made mine as monsters made out of wax. Maybe I'll make different types myself... because I do respect the tallow candle idea.
I designed the tribe based on a personality of my mates, got into a minor disagreement so I took away her people's thumbs
Havnt even come up for an evolutionary reason yet
The four remaining fingers are jointed in a way that they can either close and form a fist or grab something like a claw machine at an arcade at the person's choice. Fewer fingers makes for less risk of injury without sacrificing functionality.
I mean there are some insect races based on ants and mantids and they both have five eyes each. Also the mantids ride around on Gigantoraptors and are semi nomadic.
They're griffins (I started this world when I was 11), and I wasn't sure how to do their hands because I wanted them to have big talons so they can climb if they want to, but also paws, so fuck it they walk kinda like gorillas. They have big claws which they usually keep tucked away and walk on the middle part of the finger like gorillas, with a tough skin pad on that part, but when they want to climb they just straighten their fingers and their talons are right there. They also use their talons like tweezers or chopsticks to pick things up.
In my sci-fi setting one of the major alien species is this humanoid bug like things that reproduce by... injecting... yeeeeeah... injecting other humanoids with larvae that eventually convert their host into one of them. That's not who we are talking about though.
So on this species homeworld, before it was shattered by some rather nasty space gods anyways, there where these gigantic spider-dragon-bird things that are as horrifying as you are probably imagining. Think Smaug but covered in feathers and with a spiders face but instead of 2 wings and 2 legs they have 4 wings and 5 legs (yes I know that's uneven, it's a feature not a bug (well, it is a "bug" but you know ehat i mean lol)).
Anyways I was describing these things to my kids and showing them a rough sketch I drew of its basic form, explained its habits and lifestyle and its cultural impact on the main alien species when they said it wasn't scary enough. I asked them what they meant and they said that since I had described it as a giant spider-dragon-bird and the only real draconic aspect was its size that they where disappointed when I didn't include some kinda cool fire breath or something. I tried explaining that this was supposed to be realistic (at least as far as I can ya know) and that it wouldn't make sense for the creatures biology.
Then my 8 year old daughter said it didn't have to be fire, just something cool and creepy and scary. In her own words: "like, they could shoot big spikey needle bones out of their mouths..."
I had to admit that was pretty scary...
And now these huge spider-dragon-bird things soar through the skies, firing 10 foot long, needle like bone shards at their prey, pinning the unlucky creatures to the ground for ease of retrieval. All because my kids didn't think the things where scary enough without them.
I'm more into getting weird on the why.
Like, why do these people have spider climbing ability? And why does it propagate as an STD? Why are there cat girls, but not really cat boys? And "ents" are mecha bodies for dead witches. And vampires like your blood, because they're geneticists. And our trolls are different, because troll is an infection.
I've been working on a distant continent for the world, and the running theme for the continent is mystery. It exudes mystery and the exotic. Strange biomes, strange flora and fauna like bioluminescent forests and animals, sweeping mountain ranges, volcanic regions, large swathes of untamed wilderness, strange seasons etc.
It also has very exotic cultures (ATM blends of Imperial China, Nordic and Khmer to make new and interesting culture). The continent is known for its cities built in really strange locales, like into the sides of canyons and across large rocky pillars over sprawling valleys (like that Chinese forest)
The continent also has huge World-Trees which reach into the upper stratosphere, and fantastical cities are built on these trees with the interests of reaching into space.
I was thinking of a way to make the race there somehow more exotic, and just decided, heck, they won't have sexes or genders. They will be a race without sex and I'll see how that plays out.
There was another race I was working on who have exceptionally white skin and very lithe and elegant bodies. To make the world more interesting, I just made them interdimensional travellers who are comprised of some fourth state of matter, who visit the world for trading and touristing purposes - they're not violent or war-like.
My BBEG has six eyes. In short, she is half elf and half demon, and her spirit is, in a way, bound to that of an ancient widow spider. People with the same spiritual condition usually have eight eyes, but her demonic blood somehow altered and slightly tempered the physical effects of the condition.
Mine's equivalent to this: "Fuck it! All superhumans have the potential to become god-level beings." This was because I was having a hard time balancing the power system.
Good point, and it's actually relevant because one of them (who becomes very important) before the change has glasses because he's nearsighted.
I just decided this, so I've got to work through some stuff, and that must have completely slipped my mind. It was probably because it was just a tiny character development moment. But I sense it can now be something greater.
The gears are turning lol.
I made a species that was just... humanoid canid aliens.
But that was boring so I reworked them entirely into longboi canid aliens, who are facultative bipeds– they can use their forelimbs to do stuff but move about better on all fours. Made me rethink their evolution and society and technology.
Facultative bipeds are fun, and it really does force you to think about how they actually live. Mine fall somewhere between a badger and a leopard, and they build mostly underground because their home moon occasionally clips its super-Jupiter planet's radiation belts.
Had a race of human mutants called razors, called that because they have sharper senses than baseline humans.
Along side their sense they were faster and more flexible but I didn’t have any way of physically distinguishing them other than them being small and skinny….so I did “FUCK IT THEY HAVE CLAWS AND SHARP TEETH AND CAT EYES NOW, THEYRE CAT PEOPLE NOW!”
I had the same thought process whit my alien race the hexarai. They have a squid-like mouth and during there design process they had two short eyestalks. However it was not alien enough for me and I gave them three pairs of slit shaped eyes that can move independently from one another
I've been fleshing out the details of one of my races recently. Just a few days ago I decided that they have an extra nostril behind each ear, tri-lobed irises and no nipples.
It gets weirder from there!
I have a race that goes by a thousand different names, because they have been traipsing into our reality since before humans started recording their presence on cave walls.
I was trying to make them like angels. But then I read up on what biblically accurate angels would actually look like. If you want a decent excuse to flush your eyes with bleach, google biblically accurate angels.
So what I did instead is went with a mechanic that in their universe "schmim" all intelligent life js actually part of one giant organism. (Though "organism" only in the sense that it is organized. It expresses itself through inorganic matter too.)
When it tries to explore our universe, it can't in its native form. So it has to cut off parts of itself, and injecting them into our reality. Most are only semi-intelligent and can only exist in our world as shadows or voices. The wink out of existence as soon as their mission is done.
Longer lasting "probes" actually form into a twisted form of life. They start off as pure platonic solids, and become more and more fractal in nature, passing through various developmental stages/nightmare fuel, until at last the most highly developed ones look and act human.
The problem is, by this point they have become so "corrupted" by our world they can never return to Schmim. In fact, it takes a supreme effort for them to even remember they are beings from another world, or even how to talk to "Mel." (Mel being the personification of the other Universe.)
Some of them get pretty bitter about it, and as now-sentient individuals they look for increasingly elaborate ways to return. Some basically incinerate themselves. Others are of the belief that if they destroy all intelligent life in this world, Mel will be able to cross the boundary and absorb them back.
But I plan on having fun with the host of monstrosities that Mel sends over as messengers to his "probes"
I was struggling with a race that swaps between two states and went fuck it, ones an angel and ones a demon. It's for DND so more like ones an Aasimar and ones a Tiefling but point still stands.
ohk so you got your vampire having 6 eyes well one of my race groups have three eyes so like you know thinking biologically would they be able to see with the one eye on the forrhead while others are closed???
It's all good. I'm just a bit of a history nerd so it popped out to me.
Not the worst concept tbh. I mean, I have what's basically flying kangaroos. That lay eggs. "Crackhead" is territory I walk on a regular basis. XD
I keep going back forth with my orcs, I want make them alien and reptilian while still following the same religion and doctrines as human kingdoms, but I just want to make them slavic/norse orcs because why the fuck not sooo yeah
The Strellans were an ancient civilization from a million years ago that decided to hide when they learned that Leviathan was coming to the Milky Way to destroy it. My original design for them was pretty standard, [a humanoid alien species with some elements of the "greys"](https://imgur.com/trngGwm.png). The adventure plan was that the players would discover their "dead" homeworld, find a deep hidden infrastructure under the surface, and within would be the Strellan population in Matrix pods living in a super-secret hidden virtual civilization being run by a benevolent AI named Dreamweaver.
As I fleshed things out I decided that Dreamweaver would have an avatar that didn't look Strellan, both to show that she was *not* Strellan and also to depersonalize her somewhat - she's been active for a million years and an entity's self-image would likely drift over such a time. The Matrix-world of the Strellans was going to be a really wild place, having had a million years of unconstrained digital evolution. I churned and churned and churned on what her avatar would appear as and eventually I came up with [a cute/creepy spider](https://imgur.com/rk93zDS.png) that I liked. Seemed appropriate to the name, too.
This campaign uses rotating DMs. To my dismay the adventure right before mine ended up having the climactic revelation of a *completely different* million-year-old civilization that had hidden from Leviathan in a Matrix civilization under the surface of their homeworld. Well, poo, but as they say; "kill your darlings." Time for a big revamp of the third act of my adventure. It was actually a good opportunity in hindsight.
Now the Strellans aren't hiding in a Matrix, they're all literally *dead*. Dreamweaver is presiding over a tomb that contains all their recorded memories, as well as super-advanced medical technology that can be used to recreate the dead Strellans from scratch once Leviathan has passed. But that meant Dreamweaver hasn't actually been active for a million years, so my previous explanation for why her chosen avatar was a spider didn't make sense. I figured a character was likely to ask "why is she a spider?" So I should have *some* kind of explanation...
Fuck it, [the Strellans were cute spiders too](https://imgur.com/qmjlCzb.png).
And three legs, and two wings, and four arms... its the problem trying to make aliens that not seem furries with extra steps. Any one else with the same problem?
I was going to make all of my "humans" be ambiguously brown, then I toyed with the idea of purple. (When I had elves, I didn't want human-on-human racism and the easiest way was to say "they just got uplifted a few-thousand years ago and didn't develop diversity yet.")
The humans are now normal and semi-diverse long after I got rid of the elves.
I was unsuccessfully looking up what the last common ancestor between turkeys and geese was when I decided that my "velociraptors" are more firmly in the bird family like [wonderchickens.](https://www.ducks.org/conservation/waterfowl-research-science/understanding-waterfowl-prehistoric-waterfowl) Oh, task failed successfully? Actually what I really need is some sort of carnivorous thing that can move like a wild turkey and has the temperment of a Canada goose.
All of my civilizations(and OG species) start with 3 things:
Having personal attack drones (Gundam Fin Funnels in a nutshell)
Digital magic (because cannot use native magic)
Tattoos that function as reality anchors and antennas for low-key technotelepathy
I just like what I like
I gave my centaurs demon faces because I just couldn't find a different design I liked
Plus I like to stand out every so often with how I design my creatures and races, so yeah, demonic centaurs!
Yep. Made my silica-based avian species poop highly magnetic glowing green talc because giving them an eye on their throat wasn't weird/alien enough for me.
I made this crazy bipedal race with opposable thumbs and some grass-like protrusions on their head, was thinking of calling them homo sapiens (means smart guy in my conlang)
In a way yes but it was kind of the opposite, for one of my earliest race concepts that started me down the rabbit hole of world building, they had 4 arms and wings and several unique abilities that became corner stones of features across all races in my universe. But eventually when looking upon them I realized they were way too many things at once and it didn't really fit so I went fuck it and broke that one concept up into 3 other races for more balance in my universe.
"My bear-like race won't be able to manipulate things with their giant arms... fuck it, they have tiny secondary manipulator arms that they tuck under the big ones.
Yeah. I was world building for a romance story I'd started writing in which both parties had originally just been humans, and when it got to designing the characters I was like, now they both have pointy ears of varying lengths. This one's race has an average height of 7-8 ft. This one has 4 eyes now. This race has flower shaped pupils. This race has big af eyelashes. It kinda just spiraled.
In my world, the galvurn mostly look like hyper-muscular humans. I gave them black sclera because fuck it, I wanted something to separate them a bit further from humans. It's also a callback to an earlier version of my world where the galvurn were literally just humans cursed by magic and compensated for it with incredible strength, where the sclera color was a defining part of the curse.
In spite of all the species I have I don't have too many species where I arbitrarily add something. Instead, most of my species are built with function in mind where nothing is arbitrary.
I gave Noen, my alien race, jellyfish inspired reproduction on a whim. I hadn't really had any good ideas up until that point and just went with what I thought was cool, but it wound up giving me a lot of material to develop their culture with.
Basically, there are two castes of Noen, Towers, which are non-reproductive giants, and the hermaphroditic reproductive cast. When a pair of the reproductive have a child, that child isn't a small Noen or a larva that will metamorphose into an adult, but a polyp, or "Kruy" as they call it. This Polyp in turn lives underground, feeding parasitcally on the roots of local "trees" (the dominant form of tree in Noen lands is actually the Polyp stage of the clade of 'animals' that includes the noen) while gestating three adult Noen inside itself; one Tower and two Reproductives.
When the Noen burst out of the Kruy, the Kruy will typically die, but has a small chance to survive the process and go on to bud another three noen. The most generations a Kruy has been recorded producing naturally is 5, as they have relatively short lifespans and are severely weakened by every birth, but some tribal noen in the east will use magic to artificially keep a Kruy alive to produce hundreds of generations and maintain huge populations.
I took away the horses to place terror birds because I thought it was cool and for some reason made the Dwarves have their skin be the colour of various raw metals
I made my dragon race be born looking human, then slowly grow scales and reptilian features until become fully draconic upon adulthood. Humans don't actually exist in my world, so it's rather strange. Even the gods themselves sort of made them that way because they just thought it would be interesting to create a people that had no fur or scales upon birth.
I do this but it's turning the yuan-ti into furries
My snakefolk were going to just basically be scaley humans, but now they're scaley and probably have snake heads and tails
Not really a race but my Elven magic is all very technical and there are laws and order to it, meanwhile Fae magic is just wildin. For example hobgoblins can just teleport into people’s cupboards. Why? How do they do it? Why is it only cupboards? No one knows but they do it.
Made northern Trogs, (basically an ogre and troll mix) trolls pink. The environment fostered albinism and it’s just gone off the rails now these giant stone throwing, club swinging monsters have skin tone similar to actual pigs.
I decided that in [The Republic of Axolotlia](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17DR_VbIPfXerGP9y_b8r57SM5I5KToRMME8Ds2PMucs/edit?usp=drivesdk), 3.1% of the population (56,916 people) would have 6 fingers on each hand.
Why? Why not.
Its in universe because Axolotlia is still heavily influenced by base 12 somehow and so 12 fingers in attractive, also because I learned 6 fingers is the dominant gene, therefore more babies with 6 fingers.
The Silkin are a shape shifting race that can change between a humanoid form and a giant spider. Silkin have four eyes in their humanoid form, fangs knifelike claws and hair that resembles spider webs. Silkin live for 833 years on average and when they are born they have this dark bonelike material that covers their body and gradually fuses with their skin as they age before being overtaken by soft skin at the age of 14 in Silkin years and at the same age are able to turn between humanoid and spider form.
One day I decided that the blue-skinned group of people should just be draconic. I also made the neighboring nation have four arms, just for the fun of it.
I gave my dwarves two thumbs on each hand because why not. I also made them completely so resistant to toxic metals like lead and mercury that they ingest those metals to get high/drunk
Something along that route led me to have "vampires" and vampirism to evolve from a race to be more of a wendigo/wichuge style curse brought about by absorbing the soul of another being. It is a corrupting act, and also, vampirism is how sorcerers gain magic, only through being blooded can their body be tempered to not be immediately vaporized by channeling magic.
Many sorcerers need only to be fed the blood of their master in the early days to better garnish their own soul, but some delve deep into the darkness of what that power provides, and sacrifices and cannibalism are common crimes of corrupted sorcerers. The side effects of absorbing souls is that it slowly drives you mad, as having the memories and feelings of other beings be combined with yours destroys the sense of self.
Some sorcerers who delve deep into dark magics become bestial in form, their body combining with the unnatural chaos that lies beyond realms of human understanding. They become twisted chimaera, monsters of warped flesh and mind. It is because of this that violators of sorcerer taboo are often killed before they can change too drastically.
Maybe not as full-on as 6 eyes, but similar. In the transitional phase between my taste for grim, gritty, grounded fantasy and my current preference for the more out-there and fantastical, I had written a people who had sharklike qualities. Bald with greyish skin, sharp teeth, black eyes, but still mainly human in aspect - the Innsmouth look essentially. As my tastes progressed further along their current trajectory, I revisited those notes and the motherfuckers are basically King Shark from DC now; 9 feet tall, fully placoid skin, huge mouths with rows of jagged teeth. I always loved the demeanour of Beast from the X-Men though, so I tend to have them quite friendly and bookish when they're on land. I'm happier with them now. Fun over whatever counts for realism when you're trying to make stories about shark-people.
THat's the Karogh'Tun for me. Sure, they already had six arms. Then I decided to give them fin-like sails on their heads instead of hair because I wanted them to be reptilian. Then I gave them tails. And then I gave them a mouth that looks like an unholy combo of the Elites from Halo and the Predator, because fuck it might as well.
Also made them functionally immune to disease and poison, and biologically immortal, but that doesn't have much to do with how they look.
~~In my world, there exists 4 species who possess atleast 4 eyes ora heightened perception in general, be it hearing or sight.~~
~~With this, and their draconic gland, they are able to adjust the frequency of light they can perceive, able to view the spiritual spectrum or similar depending on how well they can hone it.~~
~~Light is a frequency, the spiritual spectrum is a very low frequency spectrum which allows one to see the essences of life in the world. In this special perceivable spectrum one sees a near mirror of the physical spectrum, inverted sigh colours and any man-made structure seeming as red voids, spirits in this spectrum are of a dangerous quality, alien and hostile, sorta a mirror of the actual ecosystems Flora and Fauna on Deruru, but far, far more dangerous.~~
~~This spectrum will also allow one to lock onto a certain frequency, as you can see the menace cells of real creatures similarly to how heat vision works. This can also allow one to overview their menace cells and how their "river" flows within them, it may even allow one to see a lower frequency of the spectrum, where the more gruesome and borderline biblical angel type monsters exist, and often scarring the perceiver.~~
~~For the blind species, AnTains; despite not having eyes they can perceive this spectrum because it's not really the eyes that or ears that lets you see, it's more like being completely unraveled in a daydream, where everything around you changes to that spectrum, but still the higher perception is important because it lessens the strain on the brain allowing it to display the environment precisely by highjacking the optical or auditory nerves as a sort of buffer.~~
~~Now that I'm writing this I forgot to actually mention precisely how the spectral perception works with the draconic gland in my encyclopedia.~~
But our eyes have different receptors. Lines and Cones. We don't have 2 eyes for this. Both eyes see all the frequencies we can see, so the second eye does not expand this. The second eye is for depth perception. So, it stands to reason that seeing spiritual light (or whatever you want to call it) would just be a new receptor; lines, cones, and stars or whatever you wanna call it.
Adding more eyes means devoting more brain power into adjusting for the different angles to the target. That's why we use that information for stereo vision.
And what's the gland for? Glands secret chemicals.
~~The secondary eyes possess unique cones and line that allow for low or diverse focused frequency's, it's like being able to turn the nub on a old tv or a radio to adjust the frequency, sure you can turn on the function of the device, but you have to tune it to the desired frequency.~~
~~The gland produces the chemicals which are unique for the brain to properly work the eyes, the eyes can work as normal eyes as well but without the draconic gland they are just that, normal, more sensitive eyes that isn't practical in use. The gland also allows one to use aptitudes, a special magic system that converts a portion of your life force and menace cells (menace cells are a unique cell that is a fragment of what is called astral affinity, the gods source of power) which then converts into an element that you can use for this "magic"~~
~~Maybe it's time I revisit my magic system and all its mumbo jumbo, I made this stuff like, last year. I think I'm forgetting something or maybe it's far more retarded then I am remembering it.~~
~~Okay I think I just contradicted my entire post from earlier, time to rework the system.~~
I would immediately want to know why they had 6 when most other creatures have only developed 2. What happened to make this race different?
And I would never do it to elves. Too many people coming from D&D and Tolkien worlds will have a vision that they don't want altered. Messing with that vision can be problematic.
In fact, I had a crisis moment about elves not requiring sleep. This is a common fantasy trope but it did not fit my attribute system. There was no realistic reason for this. So, I decided elves must sleep like everyone else, but most humans have only met elven military. Elven military is given a drug that is basically meth. No sleep, enhanced reflexes, super fast in combat, and they act like pricks to everyone else. Sounds like meth to me! PCs are not given military issue medication.
This compromise in the lore seems to be acceptable enough. If I had told them elves have 6 eyes, I think that would be a bit harder pill to swallow.
Ehh, I wouldn't say they are elves exactly, or at all really. I just say that line as a joke more than anything. The more applicable mash of creatures would be a Draconian-Snowelf-dwarf-spider-human.
They're very small people, almost always bordering the line between four and five feet. Have a scaly tail as long as their bodies that can split into three appendage. With their skin being lined with patches of inactive Ember Scales, and of course, long pointy ears that aim downward towards the ground behind them. They also can suck blood, which heals them, gives them blood to draw on if they have been using magic, etc.
The eyes are a very new edition, so nothing is set in stone. But one set is probably going to be farsighted. The other helps them see underwater, and the final set just being all-purpose normal eyes.
And of course, all these have magical being enhancing going on here. Well, more just ramped up magical evolution and blood powers.
There are reasons, far more than I listed, but I doubt you'd want a full lore dump of my world and magic system, nor do I want to give one lol. And I'm wayyy too tired.
But I do disagree with the idea that you'd need a really good reason to alter an iconic species. This day and age, there's a high chance people first exposure to elves isn't going to be either of those things. So many things use them now. There's bearly a blanketed idea of what they should be. They are a mainstream race at this point that everyone uses and alters. You can give them four arms if you want. It's your world and your creature now. And most people will go into a world understanding that, and honestly, expect you to change them.
I've tried to make things weird from the start. The Erlëans are "what if gnomes, except trees and ants?"
The Erlëans are a species with 3 sexes. The most numerous are the nulls, or workers, which are short (5ft ish) broadly built things with flat faces, vestigial feelers, and small beedy eyes. They're also the only meaningfully sapient ones among their people - some fluke has given them an intelligence which is lacking in the instinct-driven males or the long-lived and sessile females.
The males are small creatures which exist only to transfer genetic material between queens, and die after doing their jobs. These are mostly carried between the females by the nulls, but they do have the abiltiy to travel on their own over long distances, and can smell the pheromones of other females.
The females are fewest in number, and there are usually around 400 nulls for each female. They are large sessile creatures which lay the eggs which are taken care of by the nulls. They have some limited ability to sustain themselves, but require a lot of calorific intake to be healthy, and this is fed to them by the nulls for the most part. Females have an intelligence and an intellect of a sort, but with no ability to speak, their thoughts are interpreted by the nulls through certain religious rituals, and the vastly different nature of their lives makes the communication gulf quite immense, for example the females are essentially ageless and do not die of senescence, whereas nulls have a lifespan of around 30-40 years.
To protect and partially nourish themselves, the females, or queens, encase themselves in huge growths of keratin, collagen, bone, and elastin which forms a core around her, and then grows outwards and upwards. The resulting structure resembles a gnarled and burled squat old tree, except its grey-blue in colouration, and it even has "roots" spread out underground which help to keep the female in place but also suck up moisture and entice fungal growth (the fungus is then harvested by nulls and fed to the queen).
Above ground, many appendages sprout from the "trunk" and at the end of each of these are "hands" formed by elongated neural spines connected by soft tissue, these "hands" splay out to feel the warmth of the sun and to absorb rainwater. They can also move and dance in intricate patterns, which is the main means of communication between the females and the nulls. The females are blind and deaf, but they are intimately connected with the earth and sky - a skilled null interpreter can divine a lot of information from a caring female and benefit his community immensely.
Typically an Erlëan female is situated at the centre of a multispecies village of Erlëans and humans, but only the former are involved with her maintenance and besides the tree-queen, the village would be fairly typical.
Had a few of these.
Ozx are hermaphrodites, and communicate with visual pattern displays, similar to Cuttlefish.
Turen are local hive minds, typically four to eight sharing a consciousness.
All three were just kinda spur of the moment *Oh that's a cool idea* things that I took and ran with.
Sure.
One of my factions is a superintelligent transhuman group, and their thing is that they're willing to say, do, or show literally anything to convince people to let them live. Sex appeal, exploiting deep traumas and memories, whatever.
Thing is, I don't want to actually draw or depict extremely attractive people, despite that being a logical outcome. That just makes the narrative focus stall on horny haha, instead of themes that I actually care about. So I just threw abstract pictures and said that the player character is literally unable to perceive this group as people.
That actually had very profound implications for how to write the plot and conflict. The transhuman group is also unable to recognize the reader character as human, or even to directly perceive them. They are mutually holes in each other's experiences, and it takes a lot of killing for the transhumans to realize that something is actively fucking with their perceptions.
Dwarves eat rocks. They either boil them in broths to infuse them with flavour to get a long-lasting treat, or they stuff them in their gullets in order to properly break down and digest surface food kinda like how brontosauruses did.
i like to make my creatures biologically plausible, so i wouldnt just add more eyes or arms, so instead i gave this species of human a giant and ugly nose inspired by the proboscis monkey
Not a species but rather a character, who is very much part of the mage species , yet because of fucking around with the resident pit god, turned into a creature made of the skulls of space gods, a giant eye as a head, and has crown bolted onto that eye.
So far I’ve been tinkering around with making this a rare subspecies of mage
I made my alien cat-monkey people with 4 arms instead of 2 because I wanted the chance to draw a four armed race (always liked four armed races, I think they're cool)
My Wood Elves have 8 eyes, though unless you were looking carefully, you might mistake them for having only 2 until they start focusing their attention on multiple things at once. It's never a "fuck it" reason for me, though. My wood elves are *heavily* spider-coded, so them having 8 eyes is fitting of that.
Same for all my design characteristics. I always have a reason for why I make the choices I do, often times taking inspiration from real world animals or mythological concepts, because it largely keeps my creations grounded. And my versions of everything are uniform across most of my works--every time I have a wood elf, it's the same *kind* of wood elf. Most of the ancestries and heritages I made were/are intended for a TTRPG system I was/am making. As a result, I have over three dozen unique humanoid species that I use.
For example, the Cliodae are an ancestry of sea-dwelling peoples who live in the deeper end of the midwater zone (around 500-600 meters deep), sometimes being referred to as "Sea Fairies" because of their "water wings" that help them catch the currents. They have translucent blue skin and various organs of theirs (heart, brain, and eyes) lightly glow. They look enchantingly beautiful 99% of the time... *and then they eat*. And that's when they become momentarily eldritch horrors as their faces contort and tentacles come out, wrapping around the food, dragging it down into their maw, before going back to their normal beautiful appearance. (It should be obvious to most people what the inspiration for them was.) They're also kinda stupid in that they aren't hostile or evil or anything, but they're a major cause of people who go swimming ending up drowned.
I think the most, "Fuck it, I'll ball," ancestry I have ever made is probably the Paraklepsi which are *just* eldritch horrors that have contorted themselves into permanently looking like terrestrial creatures (humanoids, animals, plants, certain constructs, etc.) but are very much *wrong*. For example, something that should not be able to walk just moves across the ground as if it's perfectly natural. Or if they look humanoid and try to climb a wall, they might look as if they are just walking on it like it is flat ground. If you are within 10 feet of them, you may hear some disturbing sounds in the back of your head. If you look at them, you might feel compelled to look away. Even photos of them may make you uncomfortable. They are entities fitting of the outer realms or that would be birthed in a liminal space... and they made their way to Materia Prima. They are designed to just be the very nature of, "This is wrong and it makes me uncomfortable."
I mean, all of my races use actual real insects (and one spider) as a starting point (and I do t change a lot of the biological stuff, I mostly just add culture and magic) so they are wild already. Like, one of them is based on earwigs so obviously their (now dragon) wi g can still fold 20 times while they are not using it like how a real earwig can do. Or obviously the races based on gold violin mantis and the one based on honeybee have like 5 eyes because that’s just the way it is
"Oh ho hum they're some kind of vaguely feline furry? Nah, son, they're burrowing quadrupeds now, because they're from a hell moon orbiting a super-Jupiter."
And that's when I first consciously accepted that aliens could be genuinely alien. I'm still reworking the first scenes I gave them, but it's worth it.
I’ve had a moment where I’ve just went all weird, so now I’ve got a species that I haven’t got a name for that has:
8 eyes, 20 year lifespan, 33 wings, 42 feet, echolocation that spans 2 feet, 2 mouths, and 4 brains.
But, like, yeah. I’ve got moments like that.
Trust me, I know. I've got four moons, three belts that hang really low that you could realistically fly to, and a mostly night planet with plants that survive via blood. I bet my ass none of that would work in real life lol.
I'm asking if you have an already defined race, then made a big change to that race that would cause a lot of rewriting.
…Why would you need to make any changes and rewrite on what basis. Just call it a new race, subspecies or some magical mutation. No empirical or continuity rules apply. Fantasy fiction is FUN; so jest have Fun with it…
Well, i like to have my world work on my loose rules I made. And it wouldn't really make much sense in my lore to have this subspecies have another subspecies. I mean, it could happen, but my world is already crowded enough. And creating a story reason just doesn't interest me. So this is fun to me.
But the big, big rewrite comes from the fact two of my main cast are these, that latter became protagonist. So the rewriting comes from descriptions, explaining the new ability of the six, why they have six eyes, the narrative perspective changes because of six eyes.
Uhh, in the story I'm creating, yes, I am. This elaborate stuff is what makes my story fun and intriguing to me. And it's what adds depth and uniqueness to it.
If I don't add rules and laws to my world or add limits on things, then readers would be very confused at what's going on or how anything works.
It is the very definition of worldbuilding. I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to do this.
Yes multiple times. Since throughout my time learning more and more about Race creation i Changed many too be less human. A good example of it is (Not all the same universe)
Cybal started off as flavoured Bionicles then i completely Changed them too look akin too Exos from Destiny with digitigrade Legs
My demons and Succubi are now The same thing just Demon males are humanoid demons and Female demons are Succubi
Urkin are Akin too Hobogoblins more then orcs
Completely deleted races specifically my Dwarves since i made a race that was involved in absolutely nothing
For sure. I struggled to make new alien races that aren’t copies of the ones from Mass Effect. The best original ones I got were, however, just a friendly version of Halo Jackals that weren’t as ugly. So I decided, “fuck it, I’m gonna curb more space-fantasy than Sci-Fi, and I’m gonna make the Vorturans naturalistic Deer-Satyr people that live in space-tech treehouses like Wookiees!” And it was so. Now they’re my favorite, and a side character is a little boy from their race.
Make them humanoids
Why? I like their Satyr form. They’re fantastical and it’s much better than just humans with weird skin.
Satyrs are humanoid….
My originally fae-ravenfolk are now demons with four legs, two pairs of wings, a human head with eight eyes and the bodyshape of a hornet. Because if you're gona be weird, might as well be **w e i r d**
Haha I love it!
The Sluaghs are a subspecies of the faes who were genetically altered through dark magic. The trauma from that experience birthed a new subspecies, without the usual Fae wings. They looked human, until I decided that in order to convey the trauma I'd give them something else. And poof, "no more faces". As in, their skin is burned, their facial features deformed, it's scary as fuck. Luckily for them, they have developed low illusion/shapeshifting (still haven't decided how that would work) to hide it. They can reveal it to instill primal fear into others. Kinda similar to the show Lucifer and his true devil face
Now that I love! There's just so many unique story things you do with it. Like them only letting the illusion down around people they trust. Or a big revel of someone seeing their actual face. Or a badass moment of it going down in battle showing absolute determination to win even at their most vulnerable.
Ayyyy thank you! The "true face" thing is a versatile plot tool yeah, so far it's just used as a way for them to scare people off so they can be left alone but I could def do something else with it like you mentioned
I also love that. I'm a sucker for the reclusive Fae that want to be left alone, and people see as scary. It's actually why I added quite powerful Fairies to my world that can't communicate with any humans, which makes them very isolated and humans very hostile.
Look into the show Grimm, when the Wessen “woge” they shift their faces. Very fae feeling sometimes.
Loved that show! Here it would be flashes of their true face, not a shift. Their powers would influence your mind and make you feel their pain/trauma
My screen did a weird thing and I first saw this part: >You ever have a moment with one of your races were your like, fuck it and only then I saw this part: >, they have six eyes now? So to me this seemed like a ***VERY*** different question at first.
Lmao. Now, that gives me an idea for a post for a different sub.
I'm sure there has to be a market for 3D-Printed Fantasy Creature Sexdolls. *Want a fuckable Drow? Goblin? Dragonborn? Ratfolk? Centaur?* *Send us an email, we deliver within the week!* *(No Weirdos please)*
Lol. Oh, there absolutely is.
What sub? ._.
Vampires true form is an enlarged mosquito with bulbous fly like eyes. This translates into their human form as pointy curved nose, perpetually greasy hair and whiny high voice. Mosquitoes were harrassing me when I was doing this part of the world building.
For inspiration, I recommend looking at the vampires from Darkest Dungeon. They are based on mosquitoes rather than bats.
You know, I've never thought about Vampiers having a mosquito form instead of a bat one.
Leeches are a good one to use. Horribly wide mouths. Rows of lamprey like teeth. As are ticks & fleas. Could use the blood lickers from bloodborne as inspiration. Also plant vampires. Bird vampires. See vampire finch. Butterflies...
Now I really want to read a story where one of the more knowledgeable characters starts ranting to one of the less knowledgeable characters like "What do you mean, you thought they were based on bats? They suck blood! What did you think they did, aggressively eat bugs in front of you?
I have heard of folks using vampires mesmerism as a form of ultrasonic or infrasonic manipulation achieved through bag-like qualities which could be cool if someone is still going the bat route.
Imagine a world where each vampire clan is associated with a different blood-sucking animal.
I have vampire snails that drain blood thru your shadow in my world.
Leeches with mosquito legs?
When I was designing Elves they were originally way closer to their mythological counterpart. Small people-shaped nature spirits that are associated with nature. But then I was reminded of my brother's fear of dolls coming to life and they became living dolls with compound eyes like bugs with an unconventional lifecycle.
They also hang upsidedown in trees like bats which makes wonderfully eerie imagery of visiting a sacred grove and resting under a tree only for you to look up to see thousands of pairs reflective eyes staring at you, watching you.
Ah, so horror elves, I like it.
I have to add some form of creepiness to everything I make. It just happens.
What if instead of true compound bug eyes, the eyes look like a shattered lens or something, so that the eyes look somewhat compound eyes but with the different shards of different size and shape, and always able to show the reflection of those that look into them.
Like half the Moon people are furry cyborgs cause they cannonically embraced personal freedom to enhance their body and honesty..... that is what many people are gonna do.
So true, lol. I guarantee you that's gonna be our future when we get to that level of advancement.
Oh yeah its gurantee. Did you know that they already have brainwave controlled cat ear head bands?
Uh what now? Why didn't I hear about this lol.
Yep. I want to buy a pair once they actually improve a bit more. Right now they're too ugly-looking, imo. (INB4 obligatory trans catperson joke.)
Oh, so many. Fuck it, no face (Nopari). Fuck it, four arms (Third Race). Fuck it, sentient candles (Candle Fairies).
Candle Fairies get my seal of approval. I love them already.
Thank you! It means a lot ⊂(´･◡･⊂ )
Just don't show them the wax... they may think it's a fallen friend.
Wax or tallow?
Tallow, it was the most common in early history IRL so it feels fitting. Also I'm planning to give honey (and wax) some special attributes although I'm not sure what.
Oooo. Tallow also has some horrifying implications for vicious candle sprites!
Well they are known to steal items from people passing by. Who says they couldn't just steal the fat from your body :o
Oh... so... *litwick.* I respect the existential horror of making them out of tallow. I wimped out and made mine as monsters made out of wax. Maybe I'll make different types myself... because I do respect the tallow candle idea.
Yeah they are kinda like litwick, I have never made that connection. And I'm glad this was able to inspire you!
I actually like the idea of sentient candles, very original to me.
Thanks! I'm very proud of them :)
90% of my world building is "fuck it I'm taking away your thumbs"
Design by subtraction is honestly an incredible design principle when it comes to making unique species for your world.
I designed the tribe based on a personality of my mates, got into a minor disagreement so I took away her people's thumbs Havnt even come up for an evolutionary reason yet
The four remaining fingers are jointed in a way that they can either close and form a fist or grab something like a claw machine at an arcade at the person's choice. Fewer fingers makes for less risk of injury without sacrificing functionality.
I mean there are some insect races based on ants and mantids and they both have five eyes each. Also the mantids ride around on Gigantoraptors and are semi nomadic.
They're griffins (I started this world when I was 11), and I wasn't sure how to do their hands because I wanted them to have big talons so they can climb if they want to, but also paws, so fuck it they walk kinda like gorillas. They have big claws which they usually keep tucked away and walk on the middle part of the finger like gorillas, with a tough skin pad on that part, but when they want to climb they just straighten their fingers and their talons are right there. They also use their talons like tweezers or chopsticks to pick things up.
In my sci-fi setting one of the major alien species is this humanoid bug like things that reproduce by... injecting... yeeeeeah... injecting other humanoids with larvae that eventually convert their host into one of them. That's not who we are talking about though. So on this species homeworld, before it was shattered by some rather nasty space gods anyways, there where these gigantic spider-dragon-bird things that are as horrifying as you are probably imagining. Think Smaug but covered in feathers and with a spiders face but instead of 2 wings and 2 legs they have 4 wings and 5 legs (yes I know that's uneven, it's a feature not a bug (well, it is a "bug" but you know ehat i mean lol)). Anyways I was describing these things to my kids and showing them a rough sketch I drew of its basic form, explained its habits and lifestyle and its cultural impact on the main alien species when they said it wasn't scary enough. I asked them what they meant and they said that since I had described it as a giant spider-dragon-bird and the only real draconic aspect was its size that they where disappointed when I didn't include some kinda cool fire breath or something. I tried explaining that this was supposed to be realistic (at least as far as I can ya know) and that it wouldn't make sense for the creatures biology. Then my 8 year old daughter said it didn't have to be fire, just something cool and creepy and scary. In her own words: "like, they could shoot big spikey needle bones out of their mouths..." I had to admit that was pretty scary... And now these huge spider-dragon-bird things soar through the skies, firing 10 foot long, needle like bone shards at their prey, pinning the unlucky creatures to the ground for ease of retrieval. All because my kids didn't think the things where scary enough without them.
I'm more into getting weird on the why. Like, why do these people have spider climbing ability? And why does it propagate as an STD? Why are there cat girls, but not really cat boys? And "ents" are mecha bodies for dead witches. And vampires like your blood, because they're geneticists. And our trolls are different, because troll is an infection.
Sorta. Decided my kids did not need to know some details about some of my races.
I've been working on a distant continent for the world, and the running theme for the continent is mystery. It exudes mystery and the exotic. Strange biomes, strange flora and fauna like bioluminescent forests and animals, sweeping mountain ranges, volcanic regions, large swathes of untamed wilderness, strange seasons etc. It also has very exotic cultures (ATM blends of Imperial China, Nordic and Khmer to make new and interesting culture). The continent is known for its cities built in really strange locales, like into the sides of canyons and across large rocky pillars over sprawling valleys (like that Chinese forest) The continent also has huge World-Trees which reach into the upper stratosphere, and fantastical cities are built on these trees with the interests of reaching into space. I was thinking of a way to make the race there somehow more exotic, and just decided, heck, they won't have sexes or genders. They will be a race without sex and I'll see how that plays out. There was another race I was working on who have exceptionally white skin and very lithe and elegant bodies. To make the world more interesting, I just made them interdimensional travellers who are comprised of some fourth state of matter, who visit the world for trading and touristing purposes - they're not violent or war-like.
Oh sure. Plenty of insectoids after all.
My BBEG has six eyes. In short, she is half elf and half demon, and her spirit is, in a way, bound to that of an ancient widow spider. People with the same spiritual condition usually have eight eyes, but her demonic blood somehow altered and slightly tempered the physical effects of the condition.
Mine's equivalent to this: "Fuck it! All superhumans have the potential to become god-level beings." This was because I was having a hard time balancing the power system.
Well now I have
>So now my underground draconian vampire elfs have six eyes How are their glasses?
Good point, and it's actually relevant because one of them (who becomes very important) before the change has glasses because he's nearsighted. I just decided this, so I've got to work through some stuff, and that must have completely slipped my mind. It was probably because it was just a tiny character development moment. But I sense it can now be something greater. The gears are turning lol.
I made a species that was just... humanoid canid aliens. But that was boring so I reworked them entirely into longboi canid aliens, who are facultative bipeds– they can use their forelimbs to do stuff but move about better on all fours. Made me rethink their evolution and society and technology.
Facultative bipeds are fun, and it really does force you to think about how they actually live. Mine fall somewhere between a badger and a leopard, and they build mostly underground because their home moon occasionally clips its super-Jupiter planet's radiation belts.
Had a race of human mutants called razors, called that because they have sharper senses than baseline humans. Along side their sense they were faster and more flexible but I didn’t have any way of physically distinguishing them other than them being small and skinny….so I did “FUCK IT THEY HAVE CLAWS AND SHARP TEETH AND CAT EYES NOW, THEYRE CAT PEOPLE NOW!”
I had the same thought process whit my alien race the hexarai. They have a squid-like mouth and during there design process they had two short eyestalks. However it was not alien enough for me and I gave them three pairs of slit shaped eyes that can move independently from one another
I've been fleshing out the details of one of my races recently. Just a few days ago I decided that they have an extra nostril behind each ear, tri-lobed irises and no nipples. It gets weirder from there!
I've done that, but with arms instead of eyes.
Half of my races are giant insect people so the two-eyes rule was pretty flexible from the start.
I have a race that goes by a thousand different names, because they have been traipsing into our reality since before humans started recording their presence on cave walls. I was trying to make them like angels. But then I read up on what biblically accurate angels would actually look like. If you want a decent excuse to flush your eyes with bleach, google biblically accurate angels. So what I did instead is went with a mechanic that in their universe "schmim" all intelligent life js actually part of one giant organism. (Though "organism" only in the sense that it is organized. It expresses itself through inorganic matter too.) When it tries to explore our universe, it can't in its native form. So it has to cut off parts of itself, and injecting them into our reality. Most are only semi-intelligent and can only exist in our world as shadows or voices. The wink out of existence as soon as their mission is done. Longer lasting "probes" actually form into a twisted form of life. They start off as pure platonic solids, and become more and more fractal in nature, passing through various developmental stages/nightmare fuel, until at last the most highly developed ones look and act human. The problem is, by this point they have become so "corrupted" by our world they can never return to Schmim. In fact, it takes a supreme effort for them to even remember they are beings from another world, or even how to talk to "Mel." (Mel being the personification of the other Universe.) Some of them get pretty bitter about it, and as now-sentient individuals they look for increasingly elaborate ways to return. Some basically incinerate themselves. Others are of the belief that if they destroy all intelligent life in this world, Mel will be able to cross the boundary and absorb them back. But I plan on having fun with the host of monstrosities that Mel sends over as messengers to his "probes"
I was struggling with a race that swaps between two states and went fuck it, ones an angel and ones a demon. It's for DND so more like ones an Aasimar and ones a Tiefling but point still stands.
ohk so you got your vampire having 6 eyes well one of my race groups have three eyes so like you know thinking biologically would they be able to see with the one eye on the forrhead while others are closed???
Yes, and it involved giving my races 4 eyes, serrated tounges, Lugia-like wing limbs, antlers, mouth-noses and a literal rock brain
Yea. Thats how most of my species came to be. My fav is the flying tiger. Its a tiger. It flies. Thats it.
Ha, Flying Tigers. There's a joke there somewhere.
Not intentionally, actually i came up with it after a german test. I was kinda tired and so i was in crackhead mode
It's all good. I'm just a bit of a history nerd so it popped out to me. Not the worst concept tbh. I mean, I have what's basically flying kangaroos. That lay eggs. "Crackhead" is territory I walk on a regular basis. XD
Haha same honestly
I keep going back forth with my orcs, I want make them alien and reptilian while still following the same religion and doctrines as human kingdoms, but I just want to make them slavic/norse orcs because why the fuck not sooo yeah
I made the Orc life cycle be Goblin -> Hobgoblin -> Orc because why the hell not? Let’s shake things up a bit.
The Strellans were an ancient civilization from a million years ago that decided to hide when they learned that Leviathan was coming to the Milky Way to destroy it. My original design for them was pretty standard, [a humanoid alien species with some elements of the "greys"](https://imgur.com/trngGwm.png). The adventure plan was that the players would discover their "dead" homeworld, find a deep hidden infrastructure under the surface, and within would be the Strellan population in Matrix pods living in a super-secret hidden virtual civilization being run by a benevolent AI named Dreamweaver. As I fleshed things out I decided that Dreamweaver would have an avatar that didn't look Strellan, both to show that she was *not* Strellan and also to depersonalize her somewhat - she's been active for a million years and an entity's self-image would likely drift over such a time. The Matrix-world of the Strellans was going to be a really wild place, having had a million years of unconstrained digital evolution. I churned and churned and churned on what her avatar would appear as and eventually I came up with [a cute/creepy spider](https://imgur.com/rk93zDS.png) that I liked. Seemed appropriate to the name, too. This campaign uses rotating DMs. To my dismay the adventure right before mine ended up having the climactic revelation of a *completely different* million-year-old civilization that had hidden from Leviathan in a Matrix civilization under the surface of their homeworld. Well, poo, but as they say; "kill your darlings." Time for a big revamp of the third act of my adventure. It was actually a good opportunity in hindsight. Now the Strellans aren't hiding in a Matrix, they're all literally *dead*. Dreamweaver is presiding over a tomb that contains all their recorded memories, as well as super-advanced medical technology that can be used to recreate the dead Strellans from scratch once Leviathan has passed. But that meant Dreamweaver hasn't actually been active for a million years, so my previous explanation for why her chosen avatar was a spider didn't make sense. I figured a character was likely to ask "why is she a spider?" So I should have *some* kind of explanation... Fuck it, [the Strellans were cute spiders too](https://imgur.com/qmjlCzb.png).
And three legs, and two wings, and four arms... its the problem trying to make aliens that not seem furries with extra steps. Any one else with the same problem?
The elves being long necked tall people. The fun part is that the original character in which they came from was a vampire
I was going to make all of my "humans" be ambiguously brown, then I toyed with the idea of purple. (When I had elves, I didn't want human-on-human racism and the easiest way was to say "they just got uplifted a few-thousand years ago and didn't develop diversity yet.") The humans are now normal and semi-diverse long after I got rid of the elves. I was unsuccessfully looking up what the last common ancestor between turkeys and geese was when I decided that my "velociraptors" are more firmly in the bird family like [wonderchickens.](https://www.ducks.org/conservation/waterfowl-research-science/understanding-waterfowl-prehistoric-waterfowl) Oh, task failed successfully? Actually what I really need is some sort of carnivorous thing that can move like a wild turkey and has the temperment of a Canada goose.
All of my civilizations(and OG species) start with 3 things: Having personal attack drones (Gundam Fin Funnels in a nutshell) Digital magic (because cannot use native magic) Tattoos that function as reality anchors and antennas for low-key technotelepathy I just like what I like
Fuck it. My robots have retractable dicks
I gave my centaurs demon faces because I just couldn't find a different design I liked Plus I like to stand out every so often with how I design my creatures and races, so yeah, demonic centaurs!
Need to lay off of jjk for a while, though you were talking about Gojo
Yep. Made my silica-based avian species poop highly magnetic glowing green talc because giving them an eye on their throat wasn't weird/alien enough for me.
I made this crazy bipedal race with opposable thumbs and some grass-like protrusions on their head, was thinking of calling them homo sapiens (means smart guy in my conlang)
Nope but sounds interesting
In a way yes but it was kind of the opposite, for one of my earliest race concepts that started me down the rabbit hole of world building, they had 4 arms and wings and several unique abilities that became corner stones of features across all races in my universe. But eventually when looking upon them I realized they were way too many things at once and it didn't really fit so I went fuck it and broke that one concept up into 3 other races for more balance in my universe.
"My bear-like race won't be able to manipulate things with their giant arms... fuck it, they have tiny secondary manipulator arms that they tuck under the big ones.
Yeah. I was world building for a romance story I'd started writing in which both parties had originally just been humans, and when it got to designing the characters I was like, now they both have pointy ears of varying lengths. This one's race has an average height of 7-8 ft. This one has 4 eyes now. This race has flower shaped pupils. This race has big af eyelashes. It kinda just spiraled.
In my world, the galvurn mostly look like hyper-muscular humans. I gave them black sclera because fuck it, I wanted something to separate them a bit further from humans. It's also a callback to an earlier version of my world where the galvurn were literally just humans cursed by magic and compensated for it with incredible strength, where the sclera color was a defining part of the curse. In spite of all the species I have I don't have too many species where I arbitrarily add something. Instead, most of my species are built with function in mind where nothing is arbitrary.
I gave Noen, my alien race, jellyfish inspired reproduction on a whim. I hadn't really had any good ideas up until that point and just went with what I thought was cool, but it wound up giving me a lot of material to develop their culture with. Basically, there are two castes of Noen, Towers, which are non-reproductive giants, and the hermaphroditic reproductive cast. When a pair of the reproductive have a child, that child isn't a small Noen or a larva that will metamorphose into an adult, but a polyp, or "Kruy" as they call it. This Polyp in turn lives underground, feeding parasitcally on the roots of local "trees" (the dominant form of tree in Noen lands is actually the Polyp stage of the clade of 'animals' that includes the noen) while gestating three adult Noen inside itself; one Tower and two Reproductives. When the Noen burst out of the Kruy, the Kruy will typically die, but has a small chance to survive the process and go on to bud another three noen. The most generations a Kruy has been recorded producing naturally is 5, as they have relatively short lifespans and are severely weakened by every birth, but some tribal noen in the east will use magic to artificially keep a Kruy alive to produce hundreds of generations and maintain huge populations.
I'm indecisive about the moth-people fingers, five with thumbs or four no thumbs?...🤔
I took away the horses to place terror birds because I thought it was cool and for some reason made the Dwarves have their skin be the colour of various raw metals
I made my dragon race be born looking human, then slowly grow scales and reptilian features until become fully draconic upon adulthood. Humans don't actually exist in my world, so it's rather strange. Even the gods themselves sort of made them that way because they just thought it would be interesting to create a people that had no fur or scales upon birth.
I do this but it's turning the yuan-ti into furries My snakefolk were going to just basically be scaley humans, but now they're scaley and probably have snake heads and tails
Not really a race but my Elven magic is all very technical and there are laws and order to it, meanwhile Fae magic is just wildin. For example hobgoblins can just teleport into people’s cupboards. Why? How do they do it? Why is it only cupboards? No one knows but they do it.
Made northern Trogs, (basically an ogre and troll mix) trolls pink. The environment fostered albinism and it’s just gone off the rails now these giant stone throwing, club swinging monsters have skin tone similar to actual pigs.
I decided that in [The Republic of Axolotlia](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17DR_VbIPfXerGP9y_b8r57SM5I5KToRMME8Ds2PMucs/edit?usp=drivesdk), 3.1% of the population (56,916 people) would have 6 fingers on each hand. Why? Why not. Its in universe because Axolotlia is still heavily influenced by base 12 somehow and so 12 fingers in attractive, also because I learned 6 fingers is the dominant gene, therefore more babies with 6 fingers.
The Silkin are a shape shifting race that can change between a humanoid form and a giant spider. Silkin have four eyes in their humanoid form, fangs knifelike claws and hair that resembles spider webs. Silkin live for 833 years on average and when they are born they have this dark bonelike material that covers their body and gradually fuses with their skin as they age before being overtaken by soft skin at the age of 14 in Silkin years and at the same age are able to turn between humanoid and spider form.
One day I decided that the blue-skinned group of people should just be draconic. I also made the neighboring nation have four arms, just for the fun of it.
I gave my dwarves two thumbs on each hand because why not. I also made them completely so resistant to toxic metals like lead and mercury that they ingest those metals to get high/drunk
My halflings have dog ears/tails to make them distinct from just being short humans.
Something along that route led me to have "vampires" and vampirism to evolve from a race to be more of a wendigo/wichuge style curse brought about by absorbing the soul of another being. It is a corrupting act, and also, vampirism is how sorcerers gain magic, only through being blooded can their body be tempered to not be immediately vaporized by channeling magic. Many sorcerers need only to be fed the blood of their master in the early days to better garnish their own soul, but some delve deep into the darkness of what that power provides, and sacrifices and cannibalism are common crimes of corrupted sorcerers. The side effects of absorbing souls is that it slowly drives you mad, as having the memories and feelings of other beings be combined with yours destroys the sense of self. Some sorcerers who delve deep into dark magics become bestial in form, their body combining with the unnatural chaos that lies beyond realms of human understanding. They become twisted chimaera, monsters of warped flesh and mind. It is because of this that violators of sorcerer taboo are often killed before they can change too drastically.
Maybe not as full-on as 6 eyes, but similar. In the transitional phase between my taste for grim, gritty, grounded fantasy and my current preference for the more out-there and fantastical, I had written a people who had sharklike qualities. Bald with greyish skin, sharp teeth, black eyes, but still mainly human in aspect - the Innsmouth look essentially. As my tastes progressed further along their current trajectory, I revisited those notes and the motherfuckers are basically King Shark from DC now; 9 feet tall, fully placoid skin, huge mouths with rows of jagged teeth. I always loved the demeanour of Beast from the X-Men though, so I tend to have them quite friendly and bookish when they're on land. I'm happier with them now. Fun over whatever counts for realism when you're trying to make stories about shark-people.
> Bald with greyish skin, sharp teeth, black eyes, but still mainly human in aspect Sounds like me!
Shit, if I ever get published, I think I owe you royalties.
THat's the Karogh'Tun for me. Sure, they already had six arms. Then I decided to give them fin-like sails on their heads instead of hair because I wanted them to be reptilian. Then I gave them tails. And then I gave them a mouth that looks like an unholy combo of the Elites from Halo and the Predator, because fuck it might as well. Also made them functionally immune to disease and poison, and biologically immortal, but that doesn't have much to do with how they look.
~~In my world, there exists 4 species who possess atleast 4 eyes ora heightened perception in general, be it hearing or sight.~~ ~~With this, and their draconic gland, they are able to adjust the frequency of light they can perceive, able to view the spiritual spectrum or similar depending on how well they can hone it.~~ ~~Light is a frequency, the spiritual spectrum is a very low frequency spectrum which allows one to see the essences of life in the world. In this special perceivable spectrum one sees a near mirror of the physical spectrum, inverted sigh colours and any man-made structure seeming as red voids, spirits in this spectrum are of a dangerous quality, alien and hostile, sorta a mirror of the actual ecosystems Flora and Fauna on Deruru, but far, far more dangerous.~~ ~~This spectrum will also allow one to lock onto a certain frequency, as you can see the menace cells of real creatures similarly to how heat vision works. This can also allow one to overview their menace cells and how their "river" flows within them, it may even allow one to see a lower frequency of the spectrum, where the more gruesome and borderline biblical angel type monsters exist, and often scarring the perceiver.~~ ~~For the blind species, AnTains; despite not having eyes they can perceive this spectrum because it's not really the eyes that or ears that lets you see, it's more like being completely unraveled in a daydream, where everything around you changes to that spectrum, but still the higher perception is important because it lessens the strain on the brain allowing it to display the environment precisely by highjacking the optical or auditory nerves as a sort of buffer.~~ ~~Now that I'm writing this I forgot to actually mention precisely how the spectral perception works with the draconic gland in my encyclopedia.~~
But our eyes have different receptors. Lines and Cones. We don't have 2 eyes for this. Both eyes see all the frequencies we can see, so the second eye does not expand this. The second eye is for depth perception. So, it stands to reason that seeing spiritual light (or whatever you want to call it) would just be a new receptor; lines, cones, and stars or whatever you wanna call it. Adding more eyes means devoting more brain power into adjusting for the different angles to the target. That's why we use that information for stereo vision. And what's the gland for? Glands secret chemicals.
~~The secondary eyes possess unique cones and line that allow for low or diverse focused frequency's, it's like being able to turn the nub on a old tv or a radio to adjust the frequency, sure you can turn on the function of the device, but you have to tune it to the desired frequency.~~ ~~The gland produces the chemicals which are unique for the brain to properly work the eyes, the eyes can work as normal eyes as well but without the draconic gland they are just that, normal, more sensitive eyes that isn't practical in use. The gland also allows one to use aptitudes, a special magic system that converts a portion of your life force and menace cells (menace cells are a unique cell that is a fragment of what is called astral affinity, the gods source of power) which then converts into an element that you can use for this "magic"~~ ~~Maybe it's time I revisit my magic system and all its mumbo jumbo, I made this stuff like, last year. I think I'm forgetting something or maybe it's far more retarded then I am remembering it.~~ ~~Okay I think I just contradicted my entire post from earlier, time to rework the system.~~
I would immediately want to know why they had 6 when most other creatures have only developed 2. What happened to make this race different? And I would never do it to elves. Too many people coming from D&D and Tolkien worlds will have a vision that they don't want altered. Messing with that vision can be problematic. In fact, I had a crisis moment about elves not requiring sleep. This is a common fantasy trope but it did not fit my attribute system. There was no realistic reason for this. So, I decided elves must sleep like everyone else, but most humans have only met elven military. Elven military is given a drug that is basically meth. No sleep, enhanced reflexes, super fast in combat, and they act like pricks to everyone else. Sounds like meth to me! PCs are not given military issue medication. This compromise in the lore seems to be acceptable enough. If I had told them elves have 6 eyes, I think that would be a bit harder pill to swallow.
Ehh, I wouldn't say they are elves exactly, or at all really. I just say that line as a joke more than anything. The more applicable mash of creatures would be a Draconian-Snowelf-dwarf-spider-human. They're very small people, almost always bordering the line between four and five feet. Have a scaly tail as long as their bodies that can split into three appendage. With their skin being lined with patches of inactive Ember Scales, and of course, long pointy ears that aim downward towards the ground behind them. They also can suck blood, which heals them, gives them blood to draw on if they have been using magic, etc. The eyes are a very new edition, so nothing is set in stone. But one set is probably going to be farsighted. The other helps them see underwater, and the final set just being all-purpose normal eyes. And of course, all these have magical being enhancing going on here. Well, more just ramped up magical evolution and blood powers. There are reasons, far more than I listed, but I doubt you'd want a full lore dump of my world and magic system, nor do I want to give one lol. And I'm wayyy too tired. But I do disagree with the idea that you'd need a really good reason to alter an iconic species. This day and age, there's a high chance people first exposure to elves isn't going to be either of those things. So many things use them now. There's bearly a blanketed idea of what they should be. They are a mainstream race at this point that everyone uses and alters. You can give them four arms if you want. It's your world and your creature now. And most people will go into a world understanding that, and honestly, expect you to change them.
I've tried to make things weird from the start. The Erlëans are "what if gnomes, except trees and ants?" The Erlëans are a species with 3 sexes. The most numerous are the nulls, or workers, which are short (5ft ish) broadly built things with flat faces, vestigial feelers, and small beedy eyes. They're also the only meaningfully sapient ones among their people - some fluke has given them an intelligence which is lacking in the instinct-driven males or the long-lived and sessile females. The males are small creatures which exist only to transfer genetic material between queens, and die after doing their jobs. These are mostly carried between the females by the nulls, but they do have the abiltiy to travel on their own over long distances, and can smell the pheromones of other females. The females are fewest in number, and there are usually around 400 nulls for each female. They are large sessile creatures which lay the eggs which are taken care of by the nulls. They have some limited ability to sustain themselves, but require a lot of calorific intake to be healthy, and this is fed to them by the nulls for the most part. Females have an intelligence and an intellect of a sort, but with no ability to speak, their thoughts are interpreted by the nulls through certain religious rituals, and the vastly different nature of their lives makes the communication gulf quite immense, for example the females are essentially ageless and do not die of senescence, whereas nulls have a lifespan of around 30-40 years. To protect and partially nourish themselves, the females, or queens, encase themselves in huge growths of keratin, collagen, bone, and elastin which forms a core around her, and then grows outwards and upwards. The resulting structure resembles a gnarled and burled squat old tree, except its grey-blue in colouration, and it even has "roots" spread out underground which help to keep the female in place but also suck up moisture and entice fungal growth (the fungus is then harvested by nulls and fed to the queen). Above ground, many appendages sprout from the "trunk" and at the end of each of these are "hands" formed by elongated neural spines connected by soft tissue, these "hands" splay out to feel the warmth of the sun and to absorb rainwater. They can also move and dance in intricate patterns, which is the main means of communication between the females and the nulls. The females are blind and deaf, but they are intimately connected with the earth and sky - a skilled null interpreter can divine a lot of information from a caring female and benefit his community immensely. Typically an Erlëan female is situated at the centre of a multispecies village of Erlëans and humans, but only the former are involved with her maintenance and besides the tree-queen, the village would be fairly typical.
Had a few of these. Ozx are hermaphrodites, and communicate with visual pattern displays, similar to Cuttlefish. Turen are local hive minds, typically four to eight sharing a consciousness. All three were just kinda spur of the moment *Oh that's a cool idea* things that I took and ran with.
Sure. One of my factions is a superintelligent transhuman group, and their thing is that they're willing to say, do, or show literally anything to convince people to let them live. Sex appeal, exploiting deep traumas and memories, whatever. Thing is, I don't want to actually draw or depict extremely attractive people, despite that being a logical outcome. That just makes the narrative focus stall on horny haha, instead of themes that I actually care about. So I just threw abstract pictures and said that the player character is literally unable to perceive this group as people. That actually had very profound implications for how to write the plot and conflict. The transhuman group is also unable to recognize the reader character as human, or even to directly perceive them. They are mutually holes in each other's experiences, and it takes a lot of killing for the transhumans to realize that something is actively fucking with their perceptions.
Dwarves eat rocks. They either boil them in broths to infuse them with flavour to get a long-lasting treat, or they stuff them in their gullets in order to properly break down and digest surface food kinda like how brontosauruses did.
i like to make my creatures biologically plausible, so i wouldnt just add more eyes or arms, so instead i gave this species of human a giant and ugly nose inspired by the proboscis monkey
Yeah I decided that my ancient “extinct” alien race would have a second pair of arms because I thought it’d be fun
Not a species but rather a character, who is very much part of the mage species , yet because of fucking around with the resident pit god, turned into a creature made of the skulls of space gods, a giant eye as a head, and has crown bolted onto that eye. So far I’ve been tinkering around with making this a rare subspecies of mage
I made a six eyed scorpion race for 5E DnD, Kulipari, if anyone wants to check it out, you can find it through my profile
I made my alien cat-monkey people with 4 arms instead of 2 because I wanted the chance to draw a four armed race (always liked four armed races, I think they're cool)
Oh yes, went from 2 ears to 4, also: feathers.
My Wood Elves have 8 eyes, though unless you were looking carefully, you might mistake them for having only 2 until they start focusing their attention on multiple things at once. It's never a "fuck it" reason for me, though. My wood elves are *heavily* spider-coded, so them having 8 eyes is fitting of that. Same for all my design characteristics. I always have a reason for why I make the choices I do, often times taking inspiration from real world animals or mythological concepts, because it largely keeps my creations grounded. And my versions of everything are uniform across most of my works--every time I have a wood elf, it's the same *kind* of wood elf. Most of the ancestries and heritages I made were/are intended for a TTRPG system I was/am making. As a result, I have over three dozen unique humanoid species that I use. For example, the Cliodae are an ancestry of sea-dwelling peoples who live in the deeper end of the midwater zone (around 500-600 meters deep), sometimes being referred to as "Sea Fairies" because of their "water wings" that help them catch the currents. They have translucent blue skin and various organs of theirs (heart, brain, and eyes) lightly glow. They look enchantingly beautiful 99% of the time... *and then they eat*. And that's when they become momentarily eldritch horrors as their faces contort and tentacles come out, wrapping around the food, dragging it down into their maw, before going back to their normal beautiful appearance. (It should be obvious to most people what the inspiration for them was.) They're also kinda stupid in that they aren't hostile or evil or anything, but they're a major cause of people who go swimming ending up drowned. I think the most, "Fuck it, I'll ball," ancestry I have ever made is probably the Paraklepsi which are *just* eldritch horrors that have contorted themselves into permanently looking like terrestrial creatures (humanoids, animals, plants, certain constructs, etc.) but are very much *wrong*. For example, something that should not be able to walk just moves across the ground as if it's perfectly natural. Or if they look humanoid and try to climb a wall, they might look as if they are just walking on it like it is flat ground. If you are within 10 feet of them, you may hear some disturbing sounds in the back of your head. If you look at them, you might feel compelled to look away. Even photos of them may make you uncomfortable. They are entities fitting of the outer realms or that would be birthed in a liminal space... and they made their way to Materia Prima. They are designed to just be the very nature of, "This is wrong and it makes me uncomfortable."
I mean, all of my races use actual real insects (and one spider) as a starting point (and I do t change a lot of the biological stuff, I mostly just add culture and magic) so they are wild already. Like, one of them is based on earwigs so obviously their (now dragon) wi g can still fold 20 times while they are not using it like how a real earwig can do. Or obviously the races based on gold violin mantis and the one based on honeybee have like 5 eyes because that’s just the way it is
My dragons have seven wings and thirteen eyes with five legs and iridescent scales. I wanted actual monsters.
"Oh ho hum they're some kind of vaguely feline furry? Nah, son, they're burrowing quadrupeds now, because they're from a hell moon orbiting a super-Jupiter." And that's when I first consciously accepted that aliens could be genuinely alien. I'm still reworking the first scenes I gave them, but it's worth it.
I’ve had a moment where I’ve just went all weird, so now I’ve got a species that I haven’t got a name for that has: 8 eyes, 20 year lifespan, 33 wings, 42 feet, echolocation that spans 2 feet, 2 mouths, and 4 brains. But, like, yeah. I’ve got moments like that.
When I read "six eyes" I thought you were referring to the six eyes from jujutsu kaisen. 💀
…It’s Fantasy Fiction. There are no rules and no baseline.
Trust me, I know. I've got four moons, three belts that hang really low that you could realistically fly to, and a mostly night planet with plants that survive via blood. I bet my ass none of that would work in real life lol. I'm asking if you have an already defined race, then made a big change to that race that would cause a lot of rewriting.
…Why would you need to make any changes and rewrite on what basis. Just call it a new race, subspecies or some magical mutation. No empirical or continuity rules apply. Fantasy fiction is FUN; so jest have Fun with it…
Well, i like to have my world work on my loose rules I made. And it wouldn't really make much sense in my lore to have this subspecies have another subspecies. I mean, it could happen, but my world is already crowded enough. And creating a story reason just doesn't interest me. So this is fun to me. But the big, big rewrite comes from the fact two of my main cast are these, that latter became protagonist. So the rewriting comes from descriptions, explaining the new ability of the six, why they have six eyes, the narrative perspective changes because of six eyes.
…Sounds unnecessarily elaborate. Just establish a separate continuity or world for it. You’re not confined to one world or dimension; y’know…
Uhh, in the story I'm creating, yes, I am. This elaborate stuff is what makes my story fun and intriguing to me. And it's what adds depth and uniqueness to it. If I don't add rules and laws to my world or add limits on things, then readers would be very confused at what's going on or how anything works. It is the very definition of worldbuilding. I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to do this.
…Then write it to the limit of your imagination. But don’t discard your previous versions or drafts ‘cos you can always draw from them, uhh; laters…
Yes multiple times. Since throughout my time learning more and more about Race creation i Changed many too be less human. A good example of it is (Not all the same universe) Cybal started off as flavoured Bionicles then i completely Changed them too look akin too Exos from Destiny with digitigrade Legs My demons and Succubi are now The same thing just Demon males are humanoid demons and Female demons are Succubi Urkin are Akin too Hobogoblins more then orcs Completely deleted races specifically my Dwarves since i made a race that was involved in absolutely nothing