Can you give some examples of settings where humans are physically the smallest race?
Pic related and Dark Souls 1 are the only ones that come in mind
Also,
1. What's your favorite setting as far as it's fantasy races go?
2. What's your favorite fantasy race and why?
>>43867972
>Can you give some examples of settings where humans are physically the smallest race?
I'm actually playing around with pretty much just that idea in my own worldbuilding. There are basically just two non-human races besides people, and both are considerably larger than humans.
>1. What's your favorite setting as far as it's fantasy races go?
I really fucking love Tolkien and I fucking love the way he handles the races, but I very much HATE them being transplanted to other fantasy settings. I love Middle Earth's elves, dwarves orcs and hobbits, but I am sick of them in Forgotten Realms and all other similar derivates.
That is why I eventually opted out to create my own settings, and world-building became one of my biggest "hobbies".
I do have to give credit to TES lore though, especially Morrowind's. They did manage to make non-human races feel interesting there and deviate them enough from the standard Tolkien clichés.
>2. What's your favorite fantasy race and why?
I rarely have one favorite race. I generally either like the settings - in which case I like all it's races equally, or I dislike the settings and then I hate all the races equally. I also don't think there should be such thing as cannon "fantasy races" - the idea of fantasy is that it should be imaginative, not a collection of transusable tropes.
>>43868023
>There are basically just two non-human races besides people
Sounds pretty fun, that's actually exactly the kind of settings I really like (again, I loved the Banner Saga and Dark Souls)
Care to tell more about them?
>>43867972
>1. What's your favorite setting as far as it's fantasy races go?
Glorantha, because plant-elves that are convinced plants should eat plants and meat should eat meat and the entire universe started going downhill with the invention of herbivores, and trolls that can eat anything including air although they prefer not to because of the flatulance, and lizarddragondudes that do things like insist you take their money because they borrowed it off a past life of yours sixhundred years ago and then you promptly died like an asshole and they've been trying to track down your reincarnations ever since and this debt has put their spiritual evolution on a serious holdup
>2. What's your favorite fantasy race and why?
the aforementioned trolls, because the troll god of being nice to non-trolls stole the volcano god's penis and thats why his followers can use spears, and also invented sunglasses to make it less unpleasant for trolls to be aboveground during the day, and also their ancestral homeland is hell before that asshole the sun died and made it all hot and bright and hell-y
That's funny, I actually had the opposite idea. In one of my settings, the humans were the biggest and most physically powerful race of all.
>>43868074
>Care to tell more about them?
I usually don't divulge that much into my own settings here, generally because
>Walls of text, nobody wants to read that.
But I'll happily tell you a little bit and you can tell me if you want to know more.
So, the core idea was based on pic releated and Naushicaa the manga, so it's a soft-sci-fi that feels more like a fantasy. It's heavily based on the kind of "old, tired, worn-out world" sentiment and I try to draw most inspiration from cultures of central Asia, steppe or high-altitude, Himalaya-esque societies.
Following the idea of a worn-out world, there is very little agriculture in the world. There is a historical reason for it: the whole era I focus on is about 2k years after a fall of a fairly advanced society that made some breakthroughs in bio-engineering, and eventually ended up creating bio-weapon that was supposed to starve opposing faction into submission by targeting crops specifically. It got out of hands and big cultural plants, like local equivalents of wheat, rice, potatoes mostly died out as species completely. Naturally, the society fell into pieces shortly after. Not that anyone really remembers that shit in the "present", though.
So, most of the societies (about 90% of all inhabitants of the settings are humans, though of many different etnicities) are small, tribal, semi-nomadic, often animal herders. Few live of the few remaining cultural plants and barely make due with them. Finally, the last few are slavers.
Slavery is a big deal in the world. The reason is first of the other non-human races, generally refered to as "Celestials". They, like all seemingly supernatural elements of the world, are remnants of some of the older civilizations. They are very much like Shuna's "God people" - strange, silent, nature-bound giants coming from somewhere across the sea. In their elusive homeland, they grow edible plants. And they trade food with people.
For human slaves.
Still interested?
>>43868097
Man, fuck the Elves.
Fuckers keep shooting my woodsmen.
>>43868162
yep, I'm curious about the second one
What do Celestials look like btw?
>>43868317
>What do Celestials look like btw?
This is the core image on which I based them, but I imagine them paler, with skin sickly white rather than green, and thinner, more muscles and ligaments. They should have eerily human faces but with perfectly blank, almost tranquil expression - virtually no mimics except when enraged, no body hair, no genitals, very human-like hands and feet. They are around 3-3.5 m tall, no visible gender differentiation (they actually are gender-less, as they don't procreate as normal organisms do). They are usually accompanied by rather distinct, sweet smell, and are surprisingly nimble and agile. They are also very silent and don't communicate by words between themselves. Their logic, motivations, "psychology" is almost entirely incomprehensible to humans, and they seem to have "control" over nature around them - animals seem to go tame frequently flock towards them, plants seem to often grow and thrive unnaturally.
As for the other non-human race, they are called simple "Tall Ones", and look very much like humans suffering from gigantism, if you've ever seen one. Which is what they basically are: a strain of humans that just grow very tall. They are around 2.7 m average.
They are a rather tragic race in the context of the settings. Their size is compensated for by slower metabolism and greater fragility of their bodies. The slow metabolism makes their reflexes, motions, everything seem slowed down and lazy. They are in fact commonly considered to be idiots (mostly due uncanny physical appearance and slow way of speaking), looked down on by humans. In some cultures, they are regarded as human-shaped cattle and treated basically as animals.
In reality though, Tall Ones are on average smarter than humans. While slow to comprehend, they tend to be extremely precise and thorough. Their kingdom, before it was ransacked, was home to one of the most sophisticated cultures of my world, home of greatest mathematicians and great scholars.
>>43868460
cool cool
Sounds pretty fun, good luck with that
>>43868636
Yeah, it's pretty much an endless source of fun to play around with this setting. I've only got myself completely stumped on creation of a proper map for it. I'm seriously considering finding someone to commission one at this point...
