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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 9533702" data-attributes="member: 6915329">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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph" target="_blank">chemotrophs</a>. 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.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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals" target="_blank">interbreeding with early modern human populations</a>, natural catastrophes, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_variability_and_change" target="_blank">climate change</a> 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.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.</blockquote>

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