Shadowfirelance
Scribe
How exactly do Humans survive in Fantasy worlds? They're not the smartest, nor the longest lived, nor are they the most powerful, How can they survive?
Any Opinions?
Any Opinions?
Whenever I imagine a world that has multiple species like elves, orcs, and so forth, I too assign each race a preferred habitat. Typically I place humans in the tropical regions while giving the temperate and polar latitudes to the other races. Considering that the hominin lineage that led to Homo sapiens stayed the longest in Africa before dispersing elsewhere (as opposed to the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus whose ancestors left earlier), it makes the most sense to me that humans would start out as tropical creatures.Also its useful to think about this in the context of where the races live. Elves by nature live in forests for me. That grants them certain strengths and weaknesses. On the strength side it means that their natural soldier will be a ranger of some sort. Fast moving, agile, and skilled with a long bow (pretty much the trope). But also only lightly armoured and not into formation attacks nor using heavy weapons. It also limits their population since there is only limited food production possible in a forest. Dwarves live in mountains - or under them - which gives them lots of natural rocky protectiveness. It gives them minerals to build powerful armour and weapons which with their strength they can use. But again there are no open land formation attacks, no horseback riding, and they're relatively slow over ground. Which means that archers and cannon would pick them off easily long before they could attack. And again they have limited food production in these regions limiting their population growth.
Humans are out in the middle, often literally as their lands divide the elves from the dwarves - which is good since they naturally hate one another - and they have both magic and technology, heavy armour and weapons and light, build walled cities if they need to, and have armies and tactics. If they wanderedinto a forest an fought the elves they'd lose. If they wandered into the mountains to fight the dwarves they'd lose. But out in their own lands they have home field advantage and would always win. And they have farms and orchards, harbours etc, in short plenty of food, meaning that they can grow more quickly as a population.
Whenever I imagine a world that has multiple species like elves, orcs, and so forth, I too assign each race a preferred habitat. Typically I place humans in the tropical regions while giving the temperate and polar latitudes to the other races. Considering that the hominin lineage that led to Homo sapiens stayed the longest in Africa before dispersing elsewhere (as opposed to the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus whose ancestors left earlier), it makes the most sense to me that humans would start out as tropical creatures.