Worlds of Design: Consistent Fantasy Ecologies

earth-5486511_1280.jpg

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of the Little Prince, poet, journalist, and aviator.​

Every world has an ecology; if you want your fantasy world to be believable, you’ll need to pay attention to how it works: how does each living group fit with all the others and with the world? What might your world design goals be in general?

What’s an Ecology?​

Broadly defined, an ecology is the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. If the ecology doesn't make sense in your world, you risk breaking immersion for the player (or reader). The more interested you are in making up a world rather than a setting or just an area to play in, the more likely you are to care about consistency and immersion. Perhaps ecology and self-consistency are more important for novels than games, but they are important in games for many people.

Fantasy author Glen Cook (The Black Company series) once said he didn’t like maps, because they constrained his authorial freedom of action. And to some extent, creating an ecology means creating consistency in which the game master (or designer or author) cannot easily break their own rules without it being noticeable. This necessarily limits some creative freedom, although I would argue the tradeoffs are worth it for immersion and consistency.

Monster Basics​

In world building you can look at this as a matter of survival. If there is a very powerful monster, or numerous and prolific species, or long-lived or aggressive species, how do other species exist, how do they survive contact with those species?

An obvious example would be a world with thousands of dragons. Food chains are important. What do dragons eat and how do other creatures survive? Won’t the dragons eat all the other creatures? Relative power, ability to cast spells, ability to rise in levels, all come into play as well. For an example of how this can get rapidly out of control, see Raph Koster's commentary on Ultima Online's resource system-- an ecology that was massively disrupted when players murdered everything in sight.

Don't just throw together a bunch of statistics, try to fit the monster into the world. Monsters can be merely monsters or they can be monstrosities. What is a monstrosity? (see my article, "Make Monsters, Not Monstrosities,” in Dragon Magazine #59) A monstrosity doesn't seem to fit together or make sense, or strikes one as extraordinarily gross. It's a strange combination. I prefer to design monsters that seem more believable (see my Monster Workshop Part 1 and Part 2).

Species Basics​

Typically, a fantasy world has more than one intelligent species and often many more. It also has some very powerful monsters, so an immediate question should be “how have humans survived in this environment?” Why haven't they been wiped out? There is evidence for this in our modern world – genetic data suggests that our human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,00 years ago, down to a group of only 1,280 individuals.

You can ask the same question about other intelligent humanoids and other species, of course. In my world humans survive because they are more versatile than other creatures, and reproduce fairly fast. They depend on magic use and also on their ability to rise in level, which other species can rarely do. Further, few species can make magic items or use magic items. For an example of how this might work between species, see the research around how Neanderthals went extinct.

Differentiation​

In your world design try to avoid duplication. Make sure to practice differentiation deliberately as much as possible; these are also game design goals of course, not just world design.

In game design, whatever you think about differences between species, it's important to avoid treating them as a monoculture. This is bad for fiction and is a common problem with sci-fi settings, in which entire worlds are reduced to one population with one culture; our own planet is host to a dizzying variety. This is also bad for game design, where you want differentiation to provide variety, and if differentiation is not there you probably should eliminate the duplication to simplify the game. In some rulesets or campaigns humans are the only intelligent humanoid species. If all the humanoid species are practically identical, why have anything but humans in the game?

In the end, it’s really about what your design goals are for your world. If you use your world as a playground for ideas (and in some cases for new game masters, their games lack internal consistency to start but form more solid ecologies as they play in their world), then have at it. Many people have enjoyed RPGs that make little common sense, in favor of just having a good time. But if you want your world to have continuity, an ecology that makes sense will pay dividends in believability and consistency later.

Your Turn: How do you plan out ecologies for your world?
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Lewis Pulsipher

Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio
Your Turn: How do you plan out ecologies for your world?
Start with something earth-natural, and make small or local changes from there.

Why haven't they been wiped out? There is evidence for this in our modern world – genetic data suggests that our human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,00 years ago, down to a group of only 1,280 individuals.
Yeah, the dark ages were rough.

In game design, whatever you think about differences between species, it's important to avoid treating them as a monoculture. This is bad for fiction and is a common problem with sci-fi settings, in which entire worlds are reduced to one population with one culture; our own planet is host to a dizzying variety.
Medieval fantasy? Yeah, monocultures sound bad. Sci-fi? Why wouldn't there be monocultures? Global communication (TV), faster-than-sound travel, monotheism, and authoritarian governments are great for assimilating people. Bombs take care of the rest. But if you're talking more fi than sci, or pre-interplanetary species, then many cultures and one surviving intelligent species sound about right.

I absolutely refuse to invest my time in that. To keep a general level of verisimilitude/plausibility is easy enough that it requires no plan, just a minimum of common sense. Beyond that IMXP few people care
See my forum avatar for what I look like when I find out that the GM doesn't care about setting ecology.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

For most normal games, the world ecology doesn't really matter to the average PC party. They can't really have any meaningful effect on the world ecology. Even if they go on a wild rabbit killing spree, eventually they either run out of rabbits and quit, flood the local economy with so many rabbit pelts and meat chunks that the value goes to near zero and they quit, or some rabbit lover hires a more powerful band to squish the rabbit killing PCs. But in any case, the rabbits two shires over don't really notice or care and the local short fall is soon made good by rabbits on the edges making more rabbits.

Where you might want to do a bit of ecological thinking is on things like dungeon ecology. Most dungeon critters tend to be meat eaters and there is normally a severe shortage of meat bags to eat. A normal thing to happen would most of the dungeon monsters would attack each other until only a very few were left. By the time the PCs arrive to loot the place, it should be mostly empty except for a few rotting carcasses and picked over bones.
 

I'm big on ecologies and tend to use ecological principles to define my monster palette - including things like having Giant have extremely slow metabolisms requiring them to sleep for a week in order to digest, this both reduces their environmental impact to one large meal (as opposed to daily feasts) and also explains all the fairytales of giants being slain in their sleep.

Dragons tend to be extra-planar visitors, thus they are an irregular event in the ecosystem rather than apex predators.

Its also why I like unique monsters (ie there is only 1 Hydra, and 1 Gorgon etc).

Still when the ecosystem includes Griffons and Harpies and Purple Worms, explaining it all can be a challenge. Luckily the underdark means that the world already has many more biomes to explore and magic keeps things much more abundant
 

I think this misunderstands what makes people suspend their disbelief in a fictional world.

I suspect the size of the audience for whom a realistic ecology matters is vanishingly small.
I think it might be more accurate to say that the size of the audience who care so much about a realistic ecology that not having it would wreck the game is vanishingly small. There are probably a lot of people who care about at least the verisimilitude of a functioning ecology, just like there are a lot of people who care about the verisimilitude of a functioning game economy. It's that most people aren't going to take what @kigmatzomat wrote that (about the gazelles) seriously.
 

See my forum avatar for what I look like when I find out that the GM doesn't care about setting ecology.
You do what suits you, of course.

Among other things, I don't run anymore campaigns than span many years of characters lives, so nobody lasts long enough in my games to be even able to notice whether there is an underlying ecology or not.
 

In world building you can look at this as a matter of survival. If there is a very powerful monster, or numerous and prolific species, or long-lived or aggressive species, how do other species exist, how do they survive contact with those species?​

An obvious example would be a world with thousands of dragons. Food chains are important. What do dragons eat and how do other creatures survive? Won’t the dragons eat all the other creatures? Relative power, ability to cast spells, ability to rise in levels, all come into play as well. For an example of how this can get rapidly out of control, see Raph Koster's commentary on Ultima Online's resource system-- an ecology that was massively disrupted when players murdered everything in sight.

Don't just throw together a bunch of statistics, try to fit the monster into the world. Monsters can be merely monsters or they can be monstrosities. What is a monstrosity? (see my article, "Make Monsters, Not Monstrosities,” in Dragon Magazine #59) A monstrosity doesn't seem to fit together or make sense, or strikes one as extraordinarily gross. It's a strange combination. I prefer to design monsters that seem more believable (see my Monster Workshop Part 1 and Part 2).
Assuming you want this to be Earth-realistic... well, don't. Dragons are ginormous, can fly, and breathe fire. Realism is already out the window. Dragons are partly magical. They don't need to eat nearly as much as a real animal of that size would need to, because magic. In the Discworld novel Guards! Guards!, for example, the dragon only eats once per month, as a ceremonial thing, to cement the relationship between it and the humans it has cowed.

Honestly, it's safe to say that in D&D-like fantasy settings that have lots of of monsters that live in areas that would normally have very sparse ecosystems (deserts, underground/dungeon areas), that old standby of background magic helps to keep them alive, and actual food is just bonus calories.

Or, you go the other way, and make lots of very large prey animals. Big herbivorous dinos are a good fit for that niche, but you could also go with giant versions of normal animals. So your dragons aren't eating herds of sheep; they're eating a brachiosaur. This may also mean that humans herd dinosaurs instead of sheep as well (or in addition to, since you can't get wool from a sheep). They would have a very egg-rich diet.

And the plants? That's where all those nature-loving fae come in (or elves, druids, whatever). Plants grow bigger, lusher, and produce fruit more often because of fae. That feeds the prey animals who in turn feed the big predators.

Heck, in a magic-rich environment, it may be logical to have a lot more creatures be super-sized, because of magic, with humanoids being the relatively tiny creatures trying to keep from being underfoot. They may not have to fear dragons in the same way that mice don't really have to fear tigers--they're simply too small to be seen as prey.

Back to background magic, if you want something more realistic, you can assume that "thaumatrophs" are like real-world chemotrophs. They cluster around areas of high magical energy, which would be akin to those deep ocean floor boiling vents. The vents could be anything--literal vents to the magic-rich center of the world, portals to another plane, god-corpses. Anything. It could be that away from those vents, it's a magical desert. Or it could be that away from them, creatures get their magical energy from another source, like how most creatures ultimately get their energy from the sun.

Species Basics​

Typically, a fantasy world has more than one intelligent species and often many more. It also has some very powerful monsters, so an immediate question should be “how have humans survived in this environment?” Why haven't they been wiped out? There is evidence for this in our modern world – genetic data suggests that our human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,00 years ago, down to a group of only 1,280 individuals.

You can ask the same question about other intelligent humanoids and other species, of course. In my world humans survive because they are more versatile than other creatures, and reproduce fairly fast. They depend on magic use and also on their ability to rise in level, which other species can rarely do. Further, few species can make magic items or use magic items. For an example of how this might work between species, see the research around how Neanderthals went extinct.
In the real world, people wipe each other out for a rather set number of reasons. Two of them are religion and technological "superiority," because people believe "we have shiny armor and weapons and the right gods, so we're better than those naked people with stone spears and their false idols."

In a fantasy world, especially one where the gods grant divine magic or sometimes decide to show up (or send powerful minions) if their followers are getting mass-murdered, you can throw religion out the window. At the very least, they have something on their side that's real and powerful. And magic, whether divine, arcane, or something else, is a great equalizer. Those people may be "primitive savages," but they can still toss fireballs around like a university-trained wizard can.

Of course, people can still kill each other off because of greed, and you can still have holy wars, or more vicious ideas of racial purity, but that's not likely to occur on such a level as to cause extinction events. Unless you make one or more of those things a trait of an "always evil" race.

You can always say that these things happened in the past, hundreds or thousands of years ago, and everyone has gotten these sort of genocidal urges out of the way.

Anyway, looking at the linked page: Hypotheses on the causes of the extinction include violence, transmission of diseases from modern humans which Neanderthals had no immunity to, competitive replacement, extinction by interbreeding with early modern human populations, natural catastrophes, climate change and inbreeding depression. It is likely that multiple factors caused the demise of an already low population.

Even without healing magic (or convenient gods), fantasy worlds often have fantasy cures, whether unusually potent herbs or unicorn horns. Or if your humanoids are distinct species, then diseases may not be able to jump from one species to the next, or be weakened if they do so.

Catastrophes and climate change... well, to be honest, if this is a world with a lot of creatures that can cause those things, like from innate magic (take a look at how many D&D monsters can cast spells that affect terrain or the weather) or some sort of kinship with the elements (or that are even outright elemental in nature), or simply because they're big (dragons or kaiju), then very likely other creatures have adapted to weather such things. Humanoids would likely have a very different type of society. Maybe they all live in caves or underground or in heavy-duty fortresses, or have extremely nomadic lifestyles with generalist diets, because they they can't trust the environment. Or a combo. Maybe your underground dwellers are the only ones who develop metallurgy, but they have to trade with the surface nomads for food and leather and similar goods.

In a world where there is fantastic catastrophes and climate changes, in order to be "realistic," it might be best to step away from the standard "medieval fantasy" idea with little villages and big cities.

As for interbreeding, maybe half-whatevers are extremely common. Or maybe there's only one species, but because of centuries of interbreeding, they are incredibly dimorphic. So sure, Alice and Bob are both human, but Alice has pointy ears and orange freckles and tusks while Bob has feathers for hair and a bird's tail. In a world like this, "pure" humans or elves or orcs may simply not exist. Or be vanishingly rare and/or be nasty, inbred, racial purists. It would be like a humans-only SF setting where genetic engineering is both common and can be used for cosmetic purposes.

Your Turn: How do you plan out ecologies for your world?
I tend to go at least semi-realistic. I have two recent worlds I designed, one for a Victorian/Edwardian-ish style fantasy game for Level Up. I seriously limited the number of sentient humanoids (there are really on four in this area, with the idea that there are a few others in distant countries). They get along OK, because any racial fighting happened ages ago. It's a mostly city-based game, so there's a limit to the number of monsters anyway, but I have actually decided that some have gone extinct because of humanoid hunting.

The other world I have is for a Monster of the Week game, so it takes place in a fictional county in our home state. I also have a fairly tight monstrous ecosystem. Some of my monsters are from one of two different dimensions: an "afterlife" dimension (I have a rather different cosmology than the typical one) and a Giger-esque biotech/meat dimension that exists behind mirrors. But some of my monsters are naturally evolved, so to speak. One is the Homo monstramimus, which did not die out like the Neanderthals, because they used their natural psychic abilities to be cuckoos among humans. The other are vampires, which are actually highly intelligent, land-adapted, hemovoric cephalopods. Werewolves are purely magical creations, however.
 

There are probably a lot of people who care about at least the verisimilitude of a functioning ecology, just like there are a lot of people who care about the verisimilitude of a functioning game economy. It's that most people aren't going to take what @kigmatzomat wrote that (about the gazelles) seriously.
You may not take it seriously, but the 10th level party that cast Thunderwave on a lion near to a water hole at night and wound up with a herd of gazelle plowing into the party and nearly resulting in a TPK takes it REAL seriously.

Turns out 60ft darkvision on a cloudy night doesn't provide a useful amount of warning when speed 50 creatures are taking double moves.

"Is that thunder? I Didn't see a lightning flash....."

Then there was that Cape Buffalo that was hunting the rogue after they got too close to the herd. Good times.

I love when 5 minutes of web browsing for background color results in two memorable stories plus the lesson "̀herbivorous' is not the same as ̀harmless ̀"
 

I disagree. The world stands on its own, and the players get to explore, interact with ot and change through the actions of their PCs. If they don't, the world spins on. I hate the idea of setting existing mostly as a backdrop for PC action.
While I'd like to give the appearance of the world turning without the presence of the PCs, in truth I don't bother filling in all the blanks because focusing on things that don't matter to the players is not the best use of my time. Instead I tend to focus on the things that might matter to the player characters. Does it matter how this particular kingdom makes its money? Not really. Not unless it matters for a particular scenario or campaign.

The concept of "ecological consistency" just never made sense when you toss in the existence of Magic.
If magic were real, we'd see some sort of equilibrium eventually. Additionally, it would depend on how magic works in the game. In some settings, magic is difficult, not wholly predictable, and may incur some serious cost of the caster based on how power the effect is. You could also use magic to justify some oddball stuff. In Prachett's Discworld series, some rats become intelligent and gain the ability to speak and use tools because of their proximity to magic at Unseelie University. In Dark Sun, the use of certain types of magic is what led to the desolation of the setting. i.e. The very act of casting those spells damaged the environment.

For a game like D&D, I don't take such concerns too seriously. As Harrison Ford once said, "It's not that kind of movie, kid." I can happily play The Keep on the Borderland and not be overly concerned that the Caves of Chaos don't make a lot of sense. From an ecological perspective, there are some powerful spells that can, uh, spell ruin for entire cities. Control Weather is an 8th level spell and you can take a calm, sunny day and turn it into a torrential rainstorm within two hours and let that rain fall for up to six hours. Do this during the wet season and you could flood a city or a village.
 

When it comes to sentient species there a couple of things I think people gloss over due to assuming that the fantasy worlds develop in the same way as our own, but what if they didnt?

The first is that we think of populations in the millions, rather than the historic reality of much smaller populations of a few thousand in Empires and ac province having a few hundred.
Which is important when we consider species distribution - fantasy worlds tend to have Humans in coastal River Valleys (where Halflings are tolerated as a type of half-sized human), Elf live in the Deep Forests, Dwarf under the Mountains, Orc/Goblin in the Borderland (where they conflict with Dwarfs) and then more specialised Swamp = Lizardfolk, Steepe = Gnolls etc.

Its a truism that humans have tended to favour coastal river valleys only expanding to less favourable habitats when they needed space or resources (though still tending to avoid Swamp, High Mountains and Steepe/Tundra), but what if the blessings of druids means that humans etc dont need to expand to secure abundant food and resources? Is there a need for the same levels of conflict?

Sure goblins and orcs are still rivals on the borderlands, but dwarfs live underground and dont tend to bother humans except when they want to trade iron for potatoes, the Lizardfolk stick to the stinkin swamp and as long as you dont veer off the the path, the elfs tend to leave you alone.

Maybe there are no big armies and conflicts are settled by sending in small bands of wandering mercenaries to clear out bandits and orcs raiders and occasionally Dark Lords or awakened Dragons.
 
Last edited:

We went to town on the ecology of our planet of Barnaynia, creating a whole new kingdom of Creatures called Thaumovores, those that totally or partially derived their energy from the Moon (the source of all Magic). The bottom of the food webs everywhere was accompanied by Thaumofunghi, which were organisms resembling the flowering parts of Funghi and harvesting energy from the magical fields through Thaumosynthesis. The more advanced members of these areas evolved from other species or independently and then become Thaumovores by growing a Thaumic Orb. The best know of these are the Dragons who derive most of their energy by Thaumosynthesis while they are sleeping but still need protein to grow. As they get older they need less and less Protein and sleep more and more, sometimes long enough for the Geology and other species around them to permanently seal them into cavern complexes. Most other species that are "magical" in nature are Thaumovores, which allows proliferation of life underground, independent of Photosynthesis-based bases to the food web, such as grass and plants, or even phytoplankton. It is explained in SM05 The World Guide to Barnaynia or in our blog here: Blog - Feeding the beasties deep down in the depths... - 15 May, 2020 - The Fabulous City of Dunromin
Barnaynia World Maps 2 Profile on trans.png
 

Trending content

Related Articles

Remove ads

Trending content

Remove ads

Top