When designing a fantasy setting, the biology of our home planet can serve as a wonderfully rich source for generating a new world and the creatures that inhabit it. But a world creator should not forget the fantasy aspect, or feel restricted to using Earth’s biosphere as an unyielding template. Several otherwise excellent resources all suffer from the flaw of using real-world ecology in fantasy settings, but without giving any other options. Our "Biology for Fantasy Settings [Revised, Updated & Expanded Edition]" features fresh alternatives, unusual options, and new concepts that you can include in your own world or use to brainstorm ideas for it.
This universal guide will help you to pick and choose from the amazing diversity of actual life, as well as create new laws of biology to make your settings as useful and interesting as possible. The first two sections of this book outline the basic biological needs of all creatures and give some pointers on how habitats can be designed, and are followed by descriptions of both real-world and fantastic biological concepts (and three appendices that examine three of them in greater detail).
