World Building from Scratch: Creature Features

So, you have a sci-fi or fantasy world. You know that the atmosphere is more or less like Earth’s so you are not going to have to do a lot of research into what sort of xeno-biology would be needed. Your fantasy world has the usual dragons, maybe a unicorn or two, exotic birds (or exotic people with otherwise normal birds), horses, oxen, sheep, emus that pull wagons—

Screeech! What the huh? Emus pulling wagons?

Oh, and proto-wombats pulling wagons. Because wombiform mammals are so stinkin’ neat that I decided what the heck, why not? And animals are good for humor, usually at the expense of someone else.

OK, to back up a looooong way. The Cat Among Dragons world of Drakon IV had reptiles. Nothing but reptiles, with a very few exceptions. I was tired of reptiles, and guessed that my readers might want something different. Keep in mind, I’m not that imaginative when it comes to things like creature-building. I need a basic idea or beast to riff off of, just like I do for planets and cultures. You might not have to do this—you lucky son-of-a-biscuit.

Paleo-mammals are always odd, interesting, and offer a starting place for alien species, be they fantasy or science fiction. The Great Haulers of the Merchant books are based on “terror birds” and rheas, with some modifications and reasons for their use (explained further in Noble, Priest, and Empire.) Anyway, I thought I remembered that Australia and South America had once contained a large number of strange variations on “mammal”, so I went looking. Talk about riches for a lazy writer! Mammals, monotremes, marsupials of Unusual Size, you name it, Australia/New Guinea/South America had it. I rubbed my little paws with glee and set to work.

Wombiform is the scientific term for “creatures that look like wombats.” That means four thick legs, a rounded body form, relatively small ears, a large nose, and a minimal tail. These came in all sizes, from “knee high or so” to “large as a Hereford cow,” to “um, round hairy rhino, anyone?” Some grazed, but most browsed, especially the larger ones. I could use those.

Sort of like basing the sapient species on Shikhari on the proto-kangaroos that stood 10′ tall and ate meat. And other things. Predators that could unhinge their jaws and had grasping claws and jumped out of the trees at you, large lizards that waited in ambush and then poisoned you with their bite (see the ancestors of Komodo Dragons), and so on. I borrowed what would work, modified them in some ways, and added in humans who followed a minority religion that was pretty much fine with the idea of other sapeint species. In a society that could be Kipling in Space.

In addition to cart-pulling wombows and their wild ancestors, I developed the Staré. They were based on one of the extinct kangaroos, an omnivorous kangaroo-ish marsupial. Since I was riffing off of Kilping, and the question, “What if the colonized species wanted the colonizers to stay. For reasons that the subaltern-species isn’t telling?”, I made the Staré society caste based. Biologically caste based, not just culturally. This would throw a major monkey-wrench into the dreams of anyone wanting to bring equality and liberation to the lower-caste members of the species. And would enrich the world building, move it farther from “OK, talking kangaroos in space.”

For my fantasy stories, the first thing I did was swear off dragons. Everyone does dragons, so I didn’t want to. No unicorns, no basilisks, none of the traditional fantasy creatures were going to appear in the stories. Which fit a protagonist who had no magic, was a middle-aged businessman, and a world where magic was a tool used by many, not something especially special. [Little did I know . . . ] I didn’t want to exactly duplicate our world, so I started thinking about traction animals. Now, we don’t use birds to pull things, mostly because our birds are too small aside from emus and ostriches, and neither of those are exactly domesticable. But this is fantasy, and so . . . The Great Haulers were created, with all their behaviors, misbehaviors, and so on.

Image by Peace,love,happiness from Pixabay